My assumption is that when the FDA was created there were already a large number of foods and food additives and testing all of those would have been impossible (and would have struck the public as absurd).
You also have to deal with the fact that food processors are fairly powerful and that the number of new foods/additives created a year would swamp the agency and be virtually untestable.
That's a reasonable guess, and on the more benign end of the spectrum for reasons it works the way ths title does. We really just have to guess at intent though, the best we can do is look at their output and see if we're okay with the quality of regulation they put in place.
I mean it appears the explicit answer is due to the 1938 FDC act. Whereby congress explicitly empowered the FDA to enforce the fact that new drugs must be shown safe before selling and advertising can begin. However no such rule was passed for food or supplements as such the regulatory authority in that space is oriented towards preventing "adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious food, drugs, medications, and liquor"
Having the legislative mandate definitely helps. Interestingly, the Chevron case would have left the FDA well within their rights to decide that a similar rule was important for food and supplements, they chose not to do that.
Our food supply was totally different in 1938, I can understand why the original legislation didn't include this. Processed foods weren't common, seed oils were even less common, and I assume supplements like we gave today didn't exist though I'm less sure about that one.
Well two of the major reasons for the original act were because of highly unsanitary conditions at slaughter houses (Upton Sinclair's The Jungle) and the use of known unsafe preservatives (e.g formaldehyde, spurred on heavily by Harvey Washington Wiley).
While I do think some oversight of food additives is warranted, given the way the FDA currently operates, having them have oversight over them would essentially be tantamount to banning new additives. If the cost was even 1/100th as high as it is to get drug approved it seems likely that there would be no economic payoff worth the hassle.
>If I wasn't generally opposed to an ever-growing scope of federal powers, I'd probably support an effective ban or extremely high bar on new additives. If food companies aren't willing to test it they shouldn't bother trying to sell it.
I think you are underestimating the cost of testing a new additive. It's also the case that the risk on additives is not nearly as high as with a drug, which paradoxically both makes the testing less important and also vastly more expensive (since the effect size is smaller). Something like xylitol for instance seems completely safe and we didn't have a huge obvious reason for thinking it was likely to be problematic. In fact previous studies were unable to pick up on the signal of increased stroke risk because they were confounded by the fact that sugar free consumers were vastly more likely to have those anyway.
As an additional point I'll just note that regulating this stuff would then have to deal with the fact that many things (like red meat) are already associated with known health risks. Putting principles aside, even if you want to only ban "additives", you'll start running into issues like we see with nitrates/nitrites, where organic manufacturers add celery juice (extremely high in nitrates), to avoid the label of added nitrates.
The vast majority of the cost to get a new drug approved is a Phase 3 clinical trial, which is all about proving efficacy. Just running phase 1 & 2 trials would be expensive, probably still prohibitively so, but it's no where near the cost of a full drug approval with phase 3 trials.
Yep that's a totally fair point. I was actually just talking to my father-in-law about that earlier today. We were processing a couple roosters and he was mentioning stories from his mother about how bad meat processing plants used to be.
If I wasn't generally opposed to an ever-growing scope of federal powers, I'd probably support an effective ban or extremely high bar on new additives. If food companies aren't willing to test it they shouldn't bother trying to sell it.
The same rationale for the Chevron defense (attacking the root of its power) - there's a large base of republicans who don't want to increase regulation on much of anything, and especially big business.
Mel Gibson even famously was part of an ad campaign to make sure that nobody COULD regulate supplements and to this day there's basically just about anything in those things you can buy at any convenience store.
This isn't a party problem, executive agencies have run the same way for decades regardless of who is in charge of the White House or Congress.
Republicans aren't against regulation more than Democrats, each side just wants a different set of regulations. Both parties want some level of restrictions on abortion for example, they just disagree on what the regulation should be.
Try to explain it any way you want, the last republican presidents have all made it part of their platform to slash regulation and let big business do what it wants, and the democrats have not made that part of their platform.
What regulations are you thinking about that were so one sided? I may very well just be misremembering here, or have a blind spot as I try not to pay too much attention to politics unless something big is happening.
It has seemed to me thst both parties cut regulations selectively. The Democrats, for example, fully embrace big pharma and is happy to let them effectively buy the NIH and FDA. This may fit for the Republicans as well, but that woulf be another item on my list of how the parties seem way to similar in my opinion.
Both parties also attempted to ban TikTok, whether that pans out or not.
Republicans aren’t republicans anymore, they are populist right wingers. The business dudes who just want to make money are in the back seat. It’s fanatics and reactionaries now.
“Starve the beast” in the context of chevron means that regulatory adjudication moves from administrative law judges in agencies to Federal courts. Supposedly this is to align with constitutional principles, but the reality is the except for the richest companies and individuals, litigation in federal court is prohibitively expensive.
Party platforms change over time. They're Republicans because that's the name of the party.
Its totally fair to say they aren't conservative anymore though, much like the Democratic party isn't liberal (at least classic liberal, I'm not a fan of the term having been co-opted and redefined).
More importantly to me, I just don't see much light between the base goals of the Republican and Democratic parties. They have done a hell of pushing voters into diametrically opposed corners, but I don't see the same with the parties. They debate details of most topics, but at the end of the day they both seem to be focused on growing the federal government, locking down our borders, and completely ignoring the concept of a budget.
If anything, both parties appear more to be run by neocons putting on a show of division to keep people distracted from what they're actually doing.
Here's a simple one, one party has attempted to enshrine voters rights and the other has done its damndest to make sure the smallest number of people vote in elections.
This idea that "they are all the same" is just an entirely bogus farce, the last republican tried to remain a king of america less than four years ago, this argument has no weight anymore.
What policies specifically do you consider the Democrats having tried to enshrine voter rights? Or do you mean access to voting, rather than the right to vote itself?
For Trump, do you actually think he attempted to make himself a king? Or is that embellishment when your actual view is that he attempted to vircumvent the electoral process and "win" a second term? I can't stand the man personally and would vote for an empty chair before him, but I also didn't read his attempt to flip the electoral result as an attempted annointment or coup.
I view them as effectively the same due to the huge overlap in policy. Both parties are pro-war, both parties want to lock down our borders, both parties want some kind of gun control, both want to limit access to abortion at some level, and both view the supreme court as a place that needs political appointees rather than the most qualified judges.
They absolutely debate the details, but neither party is for a balanced budget. Neither party supports real privacy laws. Neither party values individual freedoms over federal power. Neither party wants to limit federal powers in favor of state-level powers, though both are happy to make that claim only when it suits their specific law they can't get through at the federal level.
I think it's the US beloved default of non-regulation. While it can have its positives, it also creates monstrosity such as the FDA.
I'd personally rather go to the store and assume that most (if not all) the products available are proven to be safe rather than one which can sell anything that no one has yet proven to be unsafe.
I'd personally rather go to a farmers market or local store and buy food that was all grown and produced locally.
Where the US really got off the rails, in my opinion, was holding onto our distaste for regulation while simultaneously providing legal cover for corporstions to become massive and centralize industry so massively.
The FDA shouldn't be necessary at all. I don't need an organization to tell me raw milk from a local dairy is safe. The FDA is only needed for milk because we have a handful of massive, industrial dairies raising animals in terrible conditions and selling their product to everyone through national infrastructure balanced like a house of cards.
Eh, I wish that was always the case but it really depends on the individual farmer: I know many small and medium-scale farmers which use pesticides and chemicals. Even many people in their own small allotment don't shy away from using them willy nilly.
And raw milk is one of those things that it's all good and dandy until it's not. I still prefer buying raw milk and doing a LTLT pasteurisation to have the best of both worlds.
Totally agree on both counts. The benefit of local is that you can know the farmer at all. You'll just never get that with industrial ag. You'll never know how the animals were raised, how they were processed, or who all was involved as the animal likely was shipped all over the country or even overseas before you ate it.
I definitely get people's apprehension with raw milk. I very much need to know where it came from, and have a good idea for the health of the animal. We hand milk when our cows are lactating, and occasionallu buy from a local family dairy that we've worked with for years.
Additives and supplements grew into the loophole between food processing and drugs. Those lobbies grew as the US developed a political movement against regulation.
A lot of people make a lot of money selling ground up bark and food flavoring.
This seems like an insane default. What’s the rationale?