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The FDA is confused about the definition of ‘milk,’ so we talked to a dictionary expert
As a young kiddo, you probably looked up from the book you were reading to ask some version of the following question: “Mommy, what does ‘obnoxious’ mean?”
More likely than not, a lazy adult advised you to look it up in the dictionary. That advice, while annoying, was instructive.
Perhaps the U.S. Food and Drug Administration should take a page from the dictionary, too. The agency has expressed some confusion over the word “milk,” and whether plant-based beverages like almond milk should be labeled as such.
“You know, an almond doesn’t lactate, I will confess,” FDA’s commissioner Scott Gottlieb said at a policy summit earlier this month.
The dairy industry has been begging the agency to address this topic of concern for nearly 20 years in the hopes of getting “milk” banished from the labels of non-dairy, climate-friendlier alternatives like soy, almond, coconut, and oat milk.
Big Lactose’s dreams might finally come true. The FDA released an official statement Thursday saying it was reviewing the question of what’s milk, and what’s not.
“All the lexicographers I know groaned and said, ‘Oh boy, here we go,” says Kory Stamper, lexicographer and author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries.
“The FDA can decide whatever they want, but in terms of common usage, that use of [plant] milk is not going anywhere,” Stamper tells me. “It’s 600 years old.”
That’s right — almond milk actually dates back to the 1400s, according to Stamper.
Milk generally refers to the “fluid secreted by the mammary glands of females for the nourishment of their young,” as Merriam-Webster dictates, as well as milk from an animal “used as food by people.” The next definition, however, says that milk is also “a food product produced from seeds or fruit that resembles and is used similarly to cow’s milk,” as well as “a liquid resembling milk in appearance.”
Earlier this year, France decided to ban vegan foods from borrowing terminology from animal products (that means no more soy milk or vegan bacon). The justification? That consumers might confuse soy milk with dairy milk, for instance. There doesn’t seem to be much real confusion about whether plant-based milks are really milk milk, Stamper tells me.
The FDA seems to be taking a different tack than the French. Echoing the dairy industry, the agency’s statement suggests that when people hear “almond milk,” they might somehow think that it’s nutritionally equivalent to dairy milk. The nutritional comparison is another question in itself.
And the same discussion may soon turn to “meat.” As the debate heats up over what to call cell-cultured meat and meat alternatives, know this: While meat has referred to animal flesh since the 1300s, it was used for the flesh of a fruit or a nut (like the meat of a walnut) just a century later, Stamper tells me.
“It gets tricky when you start dealing with these general vocabulary terms that are really foundational,” Stamper says. “We think they have one clear meaning, but if you look at the history, their meanings are just not that clear. Their use goes back way further than we think.”
Gottlieb, the FDA commissioner, knows he’s up against a challenge. If the FDA decides to take the milk out of almond milk, it could end up embroiled in a legal battle over commercial free speech rights.
“If you open our Standards of Identity, it talks about a lactating animal,” Gottlieb said at the policy summit, “but you open up a dictionary, it talks about milk coming from a lactating animal or a nut.”
The dairy industry’s hope seems to be that if these increasingly popular plant-based milks can no longer be billed as milk, their sales might dip. Whatever ends up on the label, at least one person is likely to keep buying almond milk anyway.
“I’m lactose intolerant, so I can’t drink dairy,” Stamper says. “I mostly drink nut milks.”
And she’ll probably keep calling it almond milk, just like the rest of us: “Trying to change general usage once it’s well established is pretty impossible, so good luck with that.”
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The FDA is confused about the definition of ‘milk,’ so we talked to a dictionary expert
The FDA Has Revolutionized Drug Approvals Over the Past Decade
Mother Jones
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I was reading something yesterday about President Trump’s desire to speed up FDA approvals for new drugs, so I decided to check: how long does FDA approval take these days? Here are the numbers over the past decade:
I’ve used a 3-year rolling average to smooth out the spikes, but the trend is pretty obvious. In the past ten years, the time to approve new drugs has been cut in half and the approval rate has tripled. Note that this is only for “standard” drugs, not “priority” drugs, so it’s not contaminated by special treatment given for certain lifesaving compounds.
I’m sympathetic to arguments that our narrow escape from the thalidomide disaster traumatized FDA scientists, and they overreacted by making approvals too hard. The problem is that the lesson of thalidomide approval in Europe isn’t that approvals were done too quickly, it’s that approvals shouldn’t be based on handwaving from pharmaceutical companies. As long as the testing regimen is rigorous enough, there’s no reason that approvals shouldn’t be done in a timely way.
That said, how much faster does Trump want approvals to go? A recent study suggests that the average FDA approval time is now considerably faster than Europe’s, and that “the vast majority” of new drugs were first approved for use in the United States:
If anything, the FDA may have become too aggressive. They’ve made some far-reaching reforms in only a decade. Ten years from now, the chart to look at will be a comparison of drug catastrophes before and after this change.1
1I don’t mean this in a snarky way. There’s no cosmic “right answer” for how fast new drugs should be approved. It’s all a matter of how much risk we’re willing to take vs. how long we’re willing to delay potentially effective therapies. A decade from now, we’ll need to look back and see just how much extra risk, if any, the FDA has introduced into the system.
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The FDA Has Revolutionized Drug Approvals Over the Past Decade
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Of Course Trump’s Health Secretary Is a Friend of Big Tobacco
Mother Jones
The man Donald Trump has chosen to direct health policy for the federal government has close ties to the tobacco industry he will soon be charged with regulating. Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), who will likely be confirmed as health and human services secretary by the end of the week, has repeatedly voted against bills that could harm big tobacco. At the same time, he’s received thousands of dollars in political contributions from the industry and held investments in tobacco companies—investments he says he didn’t know about.
Early in Barack Obama’s presidency, Congress renewed the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. In order to pay for the program, lawmakers raised cigarette taxes by 62 cents per pack and cigar taxes by 40 cents per cigar. Price blasted the new fees. “Today’s tax hike serves as a useful reminder that the president is comfortable raising taxes on hard-working Americans to feed his reckless agenda,” Price said in an April 2009 statement. “President Obama has done nothing to demonstrate that he is a responsible steward of taxpayer money. Yet, he is forcing the American people to burn through even more of their income in the name of more government.”
A few months later, Congress passed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which empowered the Food and Drug Administration regulate tobacco products. (The Supreme Court had ruled in 2000 that the FDA did not have that authority under existing law.) The legislation has enabled the agency to ban certain flavored cigarettes that might entice young people to begin smoking. It also allows the FDA to require additional warnings on packages.
Price joined most Republicans in voting against the FDA legislation. But thanks to that bill, as health secretary, he will now have immense influence over how the tobacco industry operates. (The FDA is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.) In 2011, the Obama administration proposed adding graphic warning labels—including images of diseased mouths and lungs—to the top half of cigarette packs. That regulation was tied up in legal challenges but was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court in 2013. After several years of inaction by the administration, a collection of medical and public health groups, including the American Cancer Society, sued the government last fall in an attempt to force it to finalize the new label requirements. Once he’s in place at HHS, Price can ask the FDA to move forward with the new rules, weaken them, or abandon them altogether.
The conservative website Hot Air celebrated the latter possibility when Price’s nomination was announced in November. “Fortunately for all of us, most of the sore spots on the HHS and FDA regulatory front don’t require cooperation from Congress or the courts,” the site said, pointing to regulations on cigars and electronic cigarettes. “These are things which can essentially be tidied up with a stroke of the pen once Trump and Price are in office.”
Price has benefited from numerous tobacco industry donations during his political career. Back when he was a state legislator in Georgia in 1998, Philip Morris gave Price’s campaign $300. More recently, the PAC for Altria Group, parent company to Philip Morris, donated $18,000 to Price’s congressional campaigns. From 2008 to 2012, Price also received $19,000 from the PAC of RJ Reynolds, the company behind Camel and other cigarette brands.
Price’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn) raised concerns about Price’s personal investments in tobacco companies during his confirmation hearing last month. According to Price’s financial disclosure forms, he sold off 768 shares in Altria and Philip Morris International for $37,000 in 2012. (Altria owns the American Phillip Morris brand. Phillip Morris International has been a separate company since 2008.) Franken started by asking Price to identify the “leading cause of preventable death” and then informed him that it was smoking.
“That hits home,” Price replied. “I lost my dad, who was a Lucky Strike smoker from World War II, to emphysema. He prided himself on the fact that he never smoked a cigarette with a filter for years and years.”
Franken expressed surprise that Price, a physician, would invest in products that lead to the deaths of about 480,000 people in the country each year. “Congressman Price, you’re a physician, which means you took the Hippocratic oath, a pledge to do no harm,” Franken said. “How do you square reaping personal financial gain from the sales of an addictive product that kills millions of Americans every decade with also voting against measures to reduce the death toll inflicted by tobacco?”
“It’s a curious observation,” Price responded, claiming that he had “no idea” about the stocks he owned; he suggested that they were purchased by a mutual fund or pension plan he had invested in. The tobacco investments were publicly disclosed in his financial report, and at other points in his hearing he acknowledged that he had the ability to direct his stock broker on other investments he held.
“I find it very hard to believe that you did not know that you had tobacco stocks,” Franken responded.
Watch the full exchange above.
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Of Course Trump’s Health Secretary Is a Friend of Big Tobacco
This Ohio Abortion Law Was Supposed to Protect Women. A New Study Says It Caused Physical Harm.
Mother Jones
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Under the guise of protecting women, anti-abortion legislation in six states required physicians to administer medication abortion—mifepristone—using outdated dosage recommendations from the Food and Drug Administration. The sad irony is that the laws have actually harmed women who were forced to comply.
Researchers at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California-San Francisco examined Ohio, where the medication abortion regulation requiring the higher dosage was passed in 2011, and found that women who had medication abortions after the law was passed were three times more likely to require at least one additional medical treatment related to the procedure than women who had medication abortions before the law passed.
Arizona, Arkansas, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas all previously passed legislation requiring abortion providers to adhere to the outdated dosage when administering medication abortion. (Only three of those laws in Ohio, North Dakota, and Texas remain. The rest have been struck down by court order.) Typically, doctors prescribe 200 milligrams of Mifeprex (or mifepristone) and 800 micrograms of misoprostol for a medication abortion. That’s different from the amounts the FDA originally approved when RU-486 first appeared on the market in 2000. It’s important to note that adjustments are common in medicine as clinical trials progress that tell physicians more about how a drug interacts with the human body. These laws left no room for such tweaking.
“As clinical research and clinical trials continue, women in Ohio and Texas and North Dakota won’t be able to avail of the latest research,” said lead study author Ushma D. Upadhyay, associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at UCSF and ANSIRH. “I’m really excited about the future of medication abortion, and it worries me that women in these states will be left behind.”
In March, as Mother Jones previously reported, the FDA approved updated information for mifepristone that changed the dosage from 600 milligrams to 200 milligrams. The lower dosage is less expensive for patients and comes with fewer side effects. The FDA also adjusted its requirements for when the pill can be taken—up to 70 days after a woman’s last period, as opposed to the original 49 days.
The ANSIRH researchers analyzed charts from four different Ohio abortion clinics for eight months to see if the state’s law had affected the number of women receiving medication abortion and whether the outdated dosage caused negative health effects. It did: Ohio saw an 80 percent decline in medication abortion between 2010 and 2014, and the overall proportion of medication abortion compared with other methods also fell from 22 percent before the law to 5 percent in 2014. In comparison, most states that did not have such legislation saw a rise in medication abortion.
Ohio women also were more likely to have to revisit their physician after the restrictions were in place: After a patient took the post-law dosage, she required additional treatment, either another dose of mifepristone or an aspiration abortion. The percentage of women who received a medication abortion and needed an extra dose or an aspiration rose from 4.9 percent to 14.3 percent after the law went into effect. The rate of incomplete or possibly incomplete abortions also increased from 1.1 percent before the law to 3.2 percent after it. After the law, there was also a 48 percent increase in women who also required two or more follow-up visits after taking the pill.
“Laws like Ohio’s limit physicians from practicing medicine based on the latest evidence and providing the highest quality of reproductive health care to women,” said study co-author Lisa Keder, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Ohio State University.
The new FDA regulations may help Ohio women because the law allows practitioners to use the new, updated FDA regulations, but it prohibits them from making adjustments based on new clinical research. Medication must be dispensed according to FDA recommendation, period, so should additional research about medication abortion come to light, Ohio doctors will not be able to change their practices. Ohio does currently follow the updated dispensing recommendations from the FDA, but with more clinical trials, doctors tend to learn more about what dosage is most effective. The FDA can’t move fast enough to keep up with that research, so it’s common for doctors to administer medication based on more current research.
“This is a perfect example that shows what can happen when legislation is not based in evidence, when scientific data aren’t used to inform health care policy,” said Upadhyay. “When that happens, there’s a potential for outcomes to be worse for women’s health.”
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This Ohio Abortion Law Was Supposed to Protect Women. A New Study Says It Caused Physical Harm.
The FDA Is Giving New Cancer Treatments a Break
Mother Jones
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For a variety of reasons, I’ve never spent much time on the internet reading or conversing about multiple myeloma. A few days ago, however, I had reason to think I should educate myself a bit more. Among other things, I discovered that within the space of two weeks in the second half of November, the FDA had approved no fewer than three new treatments. I suppose this can’t be anything but coincidence, but then another coincidence piled on top of that: a New York Times piece about Richard Pazdur, the oncology chief at the FDA. Three years ago, his wife was diagnosed with ovarian cancer:
In her struggle with cancer and ultimately her death in November, Ms. Pazdur had a part, her husband and a number of cancer specialists now say, in a profound change at the F.D.A.: a speeding up of the drug approval process. Ms. Pazdur’s three-year battle with cancer was a factor, they say, in Dr. Pazdur’s willingness to swiftly approve risky new treatments and passion to fight the disease that patient advocates thought he lacked.
….Since Ms. Pazdur learned she had ovarian cancer in 2012…the average decision time on drugs by Dr. Pazdur’s oncology group has come down to five months from six months….“I have a much greater sense of urgency these days,” Dr. Pazdur, 63, said in an interview. “I have been on a jihad to streamline the review process and get things out the door faster. I have evolved from regulator to regulator-advocate.”
Many factors are driving him, he continued. “Was Mary’s illness one of them? Yes,” he said. But in 2012, he added, Congress also passed a law that gave the F.D.A. more money and a new pathway to work more closely with drug makers when a medicine may save lives. Another important change in the same period, he said, was a surge in advances in genetic research that made some medications more effective and easier to test.
“The drugs simply got better,” Dr. Pazdur said.
Again, I suppose this is mostly coincidence. But I still wonder if Mary Pazdur’s cancer played a role in all these multiple myeloma treatments getting approved recently? If so, her death may eventually play a role in saving—or extending—my life. A butterfly flaps its wings….
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You Can’t Go To Prison For Destroying The Economy, But Bad Peanut Butter Is Another Story
Mother Jones
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Food company executives who play a role in outbreaks that sicken and kill consumers now face the prospect of decades in prison because of a recent precedent-setting case and a crackdown by federal prosecutors.
Stewart Parnell, an executive from Peanut Corporation of America, a now-defunct company behind one of the worst Salmonella outbreaks to hit the US, was sentenced Monday to 28 years in prison. He sold contaminated food products that claimed nine lives and sickened more than 700 people in 46 states.
It is by far the most severe punishment ever given for criminal food safety violations. His brother, Michael Parnell, also a top official at PCA was sentenced to 20 years and quality assurance manager, Mary Wilkerson was sentenced to five.
The hefty sentences signal that the feds are stepping up prosecutions against high-ranking officials and underscores some of the challenges agencies face when they want to hold companies accountable. Still, the crimes committed by the Parnells could have led to much stiffer sentences. Stewart Parnell was convicted of 47 offenses, which qualified him for a sentence of up to 803 years—and he was facing life behind bars.
“Honestly, I think the fact that he was prosecuted at all is a victory for consumers,” says Bill Marler, a foodborne illness lawyer who represents more than 50 victims of the outbreak. “Although his sentence is less than the maximum, it is the longest sentence ever in a food poisoning case. This sentence is going to send a stiff, cold wind through board rooms across the U.S.”
The massive 2008 Salmonella outbreak prompted officials to strip 4,000 products made by 361 companies from store shelves, resulting in roughly $200 million in losses. Ultimately, the tainted food was traced back to PCA—a manufacturer that sells peanut-based-products to companies like Kellogg, Sara Lee, and Little Debbie, as well as government programs that produce food for poor children and the military. According to a federal investigation, company officials spent years covering up unsanitary production conditions, faking test results, and lying to customers and consumers when salmonella was detected in their facilities.
Salmonella victim Jacob Hurley with his father Peter J. Scott Applewhite/ AP
Jacob Hurley was one of the victims infected with salmonella in 2008 after eating one of his favorite snacks—peanut butter crackers. At the time, he was only 3-years-old. Hurley, now 10, survived and traveled with his father to the sentencing on Monday. “I think its OK for him to spent the rest of his life in prison,” he told the judge.
Nine victims, such as Clifford Tousignant, a Korean War hero with three Purple Hearts who became ill after eating a peanut butter sandwich died from their infections caused by contaminated food.
The indictment against Parnell, which relied on uncovered emails and investigations, revealed that between 2003 and 2009 PCA shipped products before the results of tests were complete. Parnell green-lighted the use of faked and fabricated certificates of analysis, documents that certify food has been properly tested. Even after Salmonella had been detected numerous times, the company continued to claim that their products were safe and sell them to customers.
In several emails Parnell instructs his employees to violate standards. After being told in 2007 that salmonella testing results would take longer than expected and shipping would be delayed, he responded, “Shit, just ship it.” Soon after an employee sent an email saying that some peanut totes were “covered in dust and rat crap,” to which Parnell responded “Clean em all up and ship them.”
After the outbreak, PCA was liquidated through bankruptcy proceedings.
“Our prosecution is just one more example of the forceful actions that the Department of Justice, with its agency partners, takes against any individual or company who compromises the safety of America’s food supply for financial gain,” said Acting Associate Attorney General Stuart Delery in statement after the sentence was announced.
While victims and advocates are pleased that the case is finally coming to a close and the Parnells are on their way to prison, Marler says he hopes more will be done to stop shoddy business practices that could lead to future infections.
Largely because of the outbreak linked to Peanut Corporation of America the FDA has introduced new rules, along with the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA)—a bill signed into law in 2011 intended to crack down on contamination before it reaches consumers. However, so far the agency has lacked the resources to fully implement them. Congress has appropriated less than half of what the Congressional Budget Office recommended was necessary to fund implementation of FSMA.
To make up for investigations into potential risks, Marler says the FDA has beefed up its prosecution of law-breakers.
And, in some cases, like Parnell’s it’s warranted, he added.
“I am not a huge fan of criminalization of things but I think there are instances where it’s necessary,” he says. “This is one of those necessary cases—the facts are so horrific and the clear knowledge that they had that they were shipping contaminated product.” But, he adds, “We would all be better served if we spent more money to have more FDA inspectors—and just avoided these problems to begin with.”
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You Can’t Go To Prison For Destroying The Economy, But Bad Peanut Butter Is Another Story
Chipotle Says It Dropped GMOs. Now a Court Will Decide If That’s Bullshit.
Mother Jones
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What should have been an easy public-relations win for Chipotle is turning into a major headache—but one that could have interesting repercussions in the public debate about genetically modified organisms.
Back in April, the fast-casual burrito chain announced that it would stop serving food prepared with genetically engineered ingredients. At the time it didn’t seem like a huge change, since only a few ingredients—notably the soybean oil used for frying—contained GMOs. (More than 90 percent of the soy grown in the United States is genetically engineered.) But as critics in the media were quick to point out, there was an obvious hole in Chipotle’s messaging: The pigs, chickens, and cows that produce the restaurant’s meat and dairy offerings are raised on feed made with GMO corn. (In fact, 70-90 percent of all GMO crops are used to feed livestock.) And don’t forget the soda fountain, serving up GMO corn syrup by the cup.
Last week, Chipotle got officially called out, when a California woman filed a class-action lawsuit against the company for allegedly misleading consumers about its much-publicized campaign to cut genetically modified organisms from its menu.
“As Chipotle told consumers it was G-M-Over it, the opposite was true,” the complaint reads. “In fact, Chipotle’s menu has never been at any time free of GMOs.”
Chipotle has never denied that its soda, meat, and dairy contain, or are produced with, GMOs. A spokesman, Chris Arnold, said the suit “has no merit and we plan to contest it.” Still, the case raises an unprecedented set of questions about how food companies market products at a time when fewer than 40 percent of Americans think GMOs are safe to eat (they are) and a majority of them think foods made with GMOs should be labeled.
The California statute applied in the lawsuit deals with false advertising: Allegedly, the “Defendant knowingly misrepresented the character, ingredients, uses, and benefits of the ingredients in its Food Products.” The suit then provides a cornucopia of Chipotle marketing materials, such as the image to the left, which implies that that taco has no GMOs in it—even though, if it contains meat, cheese, or sour cream, then GMOs were almost certainly used at some stage of the process. The suit goes on to detail how Chipotle stands to gain financially from this anti-GMO messaging. The upshot is that, according to the complaint, Chipotle knew its stuff was made from GMOs, lied about it, and duped unsuspecting, GMO-averse customers like Colleen Gallagher (the plaintiff) into eating there. (Gallagher is being represented by Kaplan Fox, a law firm that specializes in consumer protection suits. The firm didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
It will be up to the court to decide whether Gallagher’s claims have any merit. But there’s a big stumbling block right at the beginning: There’s no agreed-upon legal standard for what qualifies a food as being “non-GMO,” and thus no obvious legal test for whether Chipotle’s ad campaign is legit. In fact, several food lawyers I spoke to said this is the first suit to legally challenge the veracity of that specific claim, which means it could set a precedent (in California, at least) for how other companies deal with the issue in the future. That sets it apart from deceptive marketing suits related to use of the word “organic,” for example, for which there is a lengthy legal standard enforced by the US Department of Agriculture. (Organic food, by the way, is not allowed to contain GMOs.)
“There are many definitions of what constitutes non-GMO that are marketing-based definitions,” said Greg Jaffe, biotechnology director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “But nothing like the federal standard for organic labeling exists for GMOs at the moment.”
In the context of this lawsuit, that lack of clarity may work to Chipotle’s advantage, said Laurie Beyranevand, a food and ag law professor at Vermont Law School. Without specific guidelines to adhere to, Chipotle could basically be free to make “non-GMO” mean whatever the company wants it to mean (more on that in a minute). The question before the court is about the gap, such as it exists, between Chipotle’s understanding of that term and its customers’ understanding of it, when it comes to the meat, dairy, and soda at the heart of the suit.
Beyranevand said the soda could be a weak point for Chipotle. Even though the company’s website is clear that its soda is made with GMO corn syrup, customers could still be misled by the advertising into thinking it isn’t.
Meat and dairy are a different story, and there’s a bit of existing law that makes Chipotle’s rhetoric seem more defensible. In Vermont, the only state to have passed mandatory GMO labeling laws, meat and dairy products are exempted. And that makes some sense: Even if a chicken has been stuffed full of genetically modified corn its whole life, it’s no more a GMO than I would be if I ate the same corn.
“Chipotle is just sort of riding on the coattails of that state legislation,” Beyranevand said. In other words, Chipotle could have pretty good grounds to argue that a reasonable person wouldn’t confuse its advertising with the notion that livestock aren’t fed GMOs.
Of course, not everyone agrees with Vermont’s approach. That includes the Non-GMO Project, an independent nonprofit that has endorsed nearly 30,000 food products as being non-GMO over the past five years. The group won’t give its stamp of approval to meat products that have been fed GMOs. According to Arnold, Chipotle “would love to source meat and dairy from animals that are raised without GMO feed, but that simply isn’t possible today.”
a GMO by any other name…
Let’s zoom out to the broader issue: Why isn’t there a standard definition for what makes a food product count as “non-GMO”?
The closest thing is a bit of draft language the Food and Drug Administration published in 2001 that was meant as a nonbinding blueprint for companies that want to voluntarily label their foods as non-GMO. Turns out, that simple-sounding phrase is loaded with pitfalls. As “GMO” has gone from a specialized term used by biochemists to describe seeds, to broadly used slang for the products of commercial agriculture, its meaning has gotten pretty garbled. That makes it hard to come up with a legal definition that is both scientifically accurate and makes sense to consumers, and it leaves companies like Chipotle with considerable linguistic latitude.
First of all, there’s the “O” in GMO. A burrito, no matter what’s in it, isn’t really an “organism,” the FDA points out: “It would likely be misleading to suggest that a food that ordinarily would not contain entire ‘organisms’ is ‘organism-free.'” Then there’s the “GM”: Essentially all food crops are genetically modified from their original version, either through conventional breeding or through biotechnology. Even if most consumers use “GMO” as a synonym for biotech, the FDA says, it may not be truly accurate to call an intensively bred corn variety “not genetically modified.”
Finally, there’s the “non”: It might not actually be possible to say with certainty that a product contains zero traces of genetically engineered ingredients, given the factory conditions under which items such as soy oil are produced. Moreover, chemists have found that vegetables get so mangled when they’re turned into oil that it’s incredibly difficult to extract any recognizable DNA from the end product that could be used to test for genetic modification. So it would be hard, if not impossible, for an agency like the FDA to snag your tacos and deliver a verdict on whether they are really GMO-free.
The point is that Chipotle likely isn’t bound to any particular definition of the non-GMO label, and that we just have to take their word that the ingredients they say are non-GMO are, in fact, non-GMO. Lawmakers are attempting to clear up some of this ambiguity: House Republicans, led by Mike Pompeo (Kan.), succeeded in July in passing a bill that would block states from passing mandatory GMO labeling laws similar to Vermont’s. The bill is now stalled in the Senate, but it contains a provision that would require the USDA to come up with a voluntary certification for companies like Chipotle that want to flaunt their GMO-less-ness.
Until then, another solution would is to seek non-GMO certification from the Non-GMO Project, though the group would likely reject Chipotle’s meat products. In any case, Arnold said, neither Chipotle nor its suppliers are certified through the project, and they don’t intend to pursue that option.
“We are dealing with relatively niche suppliers for many of the ingredients we use,” Arnold said. “By adhering to a single certification standard, we can really cut into available supply of ingredients that are, in some cases, already in short supply.”
With all this in mind, here’s a final caveat: When Chipotle has its day in court, how we actually define what is or isn’t a GMO product might not matter too much, explained Emily Leib, deputy director of Harvard’s Center for Health Law. That’s because the California laws in question here are as much about what customers think a term means, as what it actually does mean.
“The court will ask, ‘Is there a definition of non-GMO or not?” Leib said. “They’ll say, ‘No,’ and then they’ll ask, ‘Is this misleading?’ How does this use compare to what people think it means?”
That’s what makes this case interesting, since the truth is that most of the burrito-eating public knows very little about GMOs. Does that make it illegal for Chipotle to leverage peoples’ ambiguous (and mostly unfounded) fears to sell more barbacoa? We’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, probably don’t eat too much Chipotle, anyway.
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Chipotle Says It Dropped GMOs. Now a Court Will Decide If That’s Bullshit.
Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, organic, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta
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Farmed fish are breaking out of their pens at an alarming rate
Farmed fish are breaking out of their pens at an alarming rate
By Suzanne Jacobson 25 Jun 2015commentsShare
If you’re a child of the 90s, you might feel something like this when it comes to sea creatures escaping from captivity. But it’s now 2015, and we farm fish on the reg, so it’s time to grow up. Wired explains why:
Aquaculture is fast becoming the main way that humans get their seafood fix. But fish aren’t cattle; they don’t turn passive when cooped up. Every year, hundreds of thousands of salmon, cod, and rainbow trout wriggle through damaged or defective cages and flee into the open seas, never to be recaptured. In addition to costing farmers millions in lost revenue, these escapees can wreak havoc on their wild brethren by polluting gene pools and spreading pathogens.
Trine Thorvaldsen, a researcher in Norway, where it’s a criminal offense to let farmed fish out of captivity, has been studying how these fish escape. Turns out, it often comes down to human error:
“There was one instance in which fish were being pumped from one cage to another, but the workers didn’t realize there was no net to keep them,” says Thorvaldsen, who is a cultural anthropologist by training; by the time anyone noticed the silly mistake, 13,000 salmon had swum away. Most of the fateful miscues that lead to mass “fishbreaks,” however, are less spectacular in nature. Workers sometimes have difficulty operating equipment, for example, and brush the vessels’ destructive propellers against the containment nets. Or they inadvertently tear those nets while using cranes to adjust the weighted tubes that maingtain the shape of underwater cages. Farmers are often unaware of these small fissures until hours later, at which point it’s often too late to dispatch recovery teams to the site.
Scroll down to the end of that Wired article if you want to read about a few of the more “spectacular fishbreaks of recent vintage” — like the time 30,000 rainbow trout escaped captivity in Scotland after otters ate through their net.
Fish escapes are an especially big concern when it comes to farming genetically modified salmon, like those that Massachusetts-based company AquaBounty Technologies designed to grow faster and bigger than normal Atlantic salmon. AquaBounty has been trying to get FDA approval to sell its fish for more than two decades, NPR reports, but many are concerned about what would happen if the modified salmon make their way into the wild:
Robert H. Devlin, a scientist at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, led a team that reviewed more than 80 studies analyzing growth, behavior and other trait differences between genetically modified and unaltered fish. The scientists used this to predict what might happen if fish with modified traits were unleashed in nature.
Genetically modified salmon contain the growth hormone gene from one fish, combined with the promoter of an antifreeze gene from another. This combination both increases and speeds up growth, so the salmon reach a larger size faster.
Altering a fish’s genes also changes other traits, the review found. Genetically modified salmon eat more food, spend more time near the surface of the water, and don’t tend to associate in groups. They develop at a dramatically faster rate, and their immune function is reduced.
It seems like a fat, immunocompromised, anti-social fish wouldn’t last a day in the wild, but as one of Devlin’s colleagues told NPR, that’s not a given — there are plenty of examples of invasive species thriving where they weren’t supposed to. Fortunately, AquaBounty farms on land in tanks, and according to the FDA, the company has screens, filters, and nets blocking off the drains and pipes that might otherwise offer an escape route.
Still, humans are so good at messing things up, so maybe we should just move all this fish farming to — I don’t know — Nebraska? Better yet, let’s just make these giant salmon so fat that they couldn’t fit through those pipes even if they tried!
Source:
KEEPING FARM FISH LOCKED UP KEEPS ECOSYSTEM CALAMITY AT BAY
, Wired.
Genetically Modified Salmon: Coming To A River Near You?
, NPR.
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Farmed fish are breaking out of their pens at an alarming rate
Posted in Anchor, aquaculture, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Vintage
Tagged anchor, business & technology, devlin, fda, fish, gmo salmon, invasive species, king, npr, river
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Should Pregnant Women Eat Zero Tuna?
Mother Jones
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Food-safety experts at Consumer Reports crunched the numbers on mercury levels in seafood—and they have a new recommendation for pregnant women: Don’t eat tuna at all.
The FDA recommends that pregnant and nursing women consume between 8 and 12 ounces of fish per week to provide proper nutrition for a baby’s brain development and overall health. But some fish are very high in mercury, a neurotoxin that can lead to serious cognitive problems and birth defects in children and babies. And the mercury levels in oceans are rising—humans have tripled the mercury content in oceans since the Industrial Revolution—leading to further mercury absorption by predators like tuna.
Consumer Reports provides charts to help curb mercury levels during fish consumption. Courtesy of Consumer Reports
A team at the Consumer Reports National Research Center analyzed data from the Food and Drug Administration’s chart on mercury levels in seafood and determined that consuming 6 ounces of albacore tuna in a week—the level recommended as safe by the FDA for pregnant women—would put a 125-pound woman over the Environmental Protection Agency’s “safe” mercury threshold by more than two ounces.
Canned light tuna is thought to offer a lower mercury tuna option, but 20 percent of the FDA’s samples of it contained almost double the average level of mercury that it’s supposed to. Some samples had more mercury than the king mackerel—one of the FDA’s top four high-in-mercury fish—which the agency advises pregnant women and children to avoid. Canned tuna constitutes the second most frequently consumed seafood product in the United States.
Some experts like Deborah Rice, a former senior risk assessor for the EPA, think that research since 2001 suggests that there is “no question” that the FDA and EPA’s current limit for mercury consumption is “too high,” she told Consumer Reports. The magazine is urging the FDA and EPA to recommend that pregnant women avoid eating any tuna—and to provide more safety information concerning tuna for pregnant women, children and people who eat a lot of fish (24 ounces of fish, around seven servings, or more per week).
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