industryterm:food additive

Opinion | The Law© ? - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/opinion/copyright-law.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/06/25/opinion/25copyright/25copyright-facebookJumbo.jpg

Très drôle. J’avais écrit un papier sur un cas similaire en France, quand la loi se retrouvait appartenir à Reuters, quand le concessionnaire exclusif de la diffusion sur internet s’était fait racheter par Reuters. Heureusement, la concession s’est éteinte et n’a par chance pas été renouvelée.

In the last century, a number of lower courts issued lofty proclamations on how the law belongs to the people and the people alone. Meanwhile, copyright laws passed in 1909 and 1976 explicitly excluded any “work of the United States government.” But that exclusion applies only to the federal government.

So when the nonprofit organization Public.Resource.Org purchased, scanned and uploaded all 186 volumes of the annotated Georgia state code to its website, the state sued to take it down. The code was already available free online through the state’s partnership with LexisNexis. As part of the deal, Georgia gave LexisNexis exclusive rights to official “annotations” that elaborate on the law but aren’t legally binding. LexisNexis allowed users to read the law free and it sold the annotated code for $404 per copy.

Public.Resource.Org is no stranger to litigation. For years, it has been embroiled in lawsuits over its publication of fire and electrical safety standards, air duct leakage standards, nonprofit tax returns and European Union baby pacifier regulations. The founder of Public.Resource.Org was once labeled a “rogue archivist.” But if publishing building safety standards online is an act of roguery, it is time for the courts to take a hard look at what copyright is for.

Much of the litigation against Public.Resource.Org falls into an ever-expanding gray zone of the law, created by government outsourcing bits and pieces of its regulatory function to the private sector. Regulations for everything from student loan eligibility to food additives can use standards written by trade groups.

#Copyright_madness #droit #Loi

Consumption of ultra-processed foods and #cancer risk: results from NutriNet-Santé prospective cohort | The BMJ
▻https://www.bmj.com/content/360/bmj.k322

Firstly, ultra-processed foods often have a higher content of total fat, saturated fat, and added sugar and salt, along with a lower fibre and vitamin density.101112131415161719 Beyond nutritional composition, neoformed #contaminants, some of which have carcinogenic properties (such as #acrylamide, heterocyclic amines, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), are present in heat treated processed food products as a result of the Maillard reaction.20 Secondly, the packaging of ultra-processed foods may contain some materials in contact with food for which carcinogenic and endocrine disruptor properties have been postulated, such as #bisphenol A.21 Finally, ultra-processed foods contain authorised,22 but controversial, food additives such as sodium #nitrite in processed meat or #titanium_dioxide (#TiO2, white food pigment), for which carcinogenicity has been suggested in animal or cellular models.2324

In this large prospective study, a 10% increase in the proportion of ultra-processed foods in the diet was associated with a significant increase of greater than 10% in risks of overall and breast cancer. Further studies are needed to better understand the relative effect of the various dimensions of processing (nutritional composition, food additives, contact materials, and neoformed contaminants) in these associations.

#agro_industrie #aliments_transformés #additifs #santé #cancer

Via 60 millions de consommateurs

Playing God in the Garden - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/25/magazine/playing-god-in-the-garden.html?pagewanted=5

Un article de 1998 : la #FDA compte sur la bonne volonté des Monsanto pour évaluer l’innocuité des #OGM, alors que les #Monsanto affirment que leur boulot à eux est de faire du #profit et seulement de faire du profit.

At the F.D.A., I was referred to James Maryanski, who oversees biotech food at the agency. I began by asking him why the F.D.A. didn’t consider Bt a food additive. Under F.D.A. law, any novel substance added to a food must — unless it is ’’generally regarded as safe’’ (’’GRAS,’’ in F.D.A. parlance) — be thoroughly tested and if it changes the product in any way, must be labeled.

’’That’s easy,’’ Maryanski said. ’’Bt is a pesticide, so it’s exempt’’ from F.D.A. regulation. That is, even though a Bt potato is plainly a food, for the purposes of Federal regulation it is not a food but a pesticide and therefore falls under the jurisdiction of the E.P.A.

Yet even in the case of those biotech crops over which the F.D.A. does have jurisdiction, I learned that F.D.A. regulation of biotech food has been largely voluntary since 1992 , when Vice President Dan Quayle issued regulatory guidelines for the industry as part of the Bush Administration’s campaign for ’’regulatory relief.’’

(...)

I thought about Maryanski’s candid and wondrous explanations the next time I met Phil Angell [Monsanto’s director of corporate communications], who again cited the critical role of the F.D.A. in assuring Americans that biotech food is safe. But this time he went even further. ’’Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food,’’ he said. ’’Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the F.D.A.’s job.’ ’

The Sad Truth About Who Determines if Your Food is Safe
▻http://www.care2.com/greenliving/who-says-food-additives-are-safe.html

Currently, a “generally recognized as safe” determination is made when the manufacturer of a food substance evaluates the safety of the substance themselves and concludes that the use of the substance is safe. In other words, the company that manufactures the substance gets to determine if it is safe or not. This approach is commonly referred to as ”GRAS self-determination.” To make matters worse, not only do companies not have to inform the public, they don’t even have to inform the #FDA. A company may voluntarily tell the FDA they just came up with a new food additive that they’ve decided is safe, but are not required to do so.

The cumulative result is that there are an estimated 6,000 current affirmative safety decisions which allow for more than an estimated 10,000 substances to be used in food. In addition, an estimated 1,000 manufacturer safety decisions are never reported to FDA or the public. “Manufacturers and a trade association made the remaining decisions without FDA review by concluding on their own that the substances that they themselves were selling were safe.”

While manufacturers are not required to notify the FDA of a “safe determination,” sometimes they do voluntarily notify the agency. From these notifications, researchers have been able to see which individuals companies select to make these determinations—and many may have financial conflicts of interest.

Of the 451 GRAS notifications voluntarily submitted to the FDA, 22.4% were made by someone directly employed by the company; 13.3% were made by someone directly employed by a firm hand-picked by the company; and 64.3% were made by a panel hand-picked by the corporation or the firm the corporation hired. Are you doing the math? Yes, that means 0% of safety decisions were made independently.

An astonishing 100% of the members of expert panels worked directly or indirectly for the companies that manufactured the food additive in question. And those are just the ones the food companies let the FDA know about. The companies also used the same in-the-pocket rent-a-scientist “experts” over and over, leading food industry watchdog Marion Nestle to ask “How is it possible that the FDA permits manufacturers to decide for themselves whether their food additives are safe?” It may be because many of the companies providing our daily food are corporate giants with “political muscles that national governments would envy.” PepsiCo alone spent more than $9 million in a single year to lobby Congress. The fact that food additives like trans fats have been allowed to kill thousands of Americans year after year comes as less of a surprise to those who realize that “three of Washington’s largest #lobbying firms reportedly now work for the food industry.”

#aliments #sécurité_alimentaire #Etats-Unis

Food lobby fights labelling of nano ingredients | Corporate Europe Observatory
▻http://corporateeurope.org/agribusiness/2014/03/food-lobby-fights-labelling-nano-ingredients
▻http://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/labelling_of_nano_in_food.jpg?itok=8T_RlMbk

A discreet but important lobbying battle is currently being fought in Brussels over the labelling of nano ingredients in food products. Nano food ingredients are made from materials at a scale so small that this gives them very interesting properties for a wide range of applications, but also raises largely unanswered questions about their health and environmental impacts, making consumer information a key parameter at this stage of the technology’s development. Some in the European Parliament are mobilising to reject a technical text by the Commission complementing a 2011 food regulation, because this text would exclude all existing food additives used in their nano form from being labelled. The food additives industry is lobbying MEPs with scare tactics, claiming that the Commission’s text is required to avoid labelling of foods that have been produced for decades with conventional processes such as mayonnaise or instant coffee. Yet in fact, this is misleading as the 2011 regulation already clearly states it only covers nano materials manufactured with the intention to obtain effects specific to the nano scale. The final vote in the Parliament will take place next Wednesday 12 March.

Nanomaterials are by definition materials whose size is in the nanometer scale (1-100 nm typically), the scale of most known viruses. Nanomaterials are increasingly attracting attention and research for a large range of applications – medical, military, industrial... – because the nanoscale often confers different properties to materials than they have in their bulk form. This difference however is also the source of great uncertainties about these compounds’s health and environmental impacts. Since many nanomaterials are already used in commercial products including food, labelling is seen as a way of giving a choice to consumers pending more research is done.

The EU’s 2011 Regulation on Food Information to Consumers (1169/2011, “FIC”) states that “All ingredients present in the form of engineered nanomaterials shall be clearly indicated in the list of ingredients. The names of such ingredients shall be followed by the word ’nano’ in brackets.” A rule that seems clear enough, yet the European Commission was delegated the power to define “engineered nanomaterials” more precisely. The Commission published its criteria, in a delegated act, in December 2013 to “amend and clarify” the 2011 Food Information Regulation.

The problem is that these new Commission criteria seem uniquely restrictive. The Commission’s Directorate General for Health and Consumers (SANCO), in charge of the file, came up with criteria so narrow that only new additives will be labeled, arguing that “indicating such food additives [ed: already approved in the EU] in the list of ingredients followed by the word ‘nano’ in brackets may confuse the consumers as it may suggest that those additives are new while in reality they have been used in foods in that form for decades”. This is in line with the lobbying of the food additives industry, which disingenously argues (see below) that unintentionally produced or naturally occurring nanoparticles will lead to unnecessary labelling of foods whose recipe hasn’t changed for decades.

#Food-lobby
#Lobbying
#nano
#labelling
#food
#scaremongering

Deux organisations non gouvernementales, le Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) de Belgique et le Réseau Santé Environnement (RES) ont révélé aujourd’hui par un communiqué de presse les liens de deux experts de l’Autorité Européenne de Sécurité des Aliments (AESA) avec l’industrie agroalimentaire.

NGOs demand dismissal of two EFSA experts who failed to declare food industry links | Corporate Europe Observatory
►http://www.corporateeurope.org/pressreleases/ngos-demand-dismissal-two-efsa-experts-who-failed-declare-food-indu

New research has today revealed further conflicts of interest among experts advising the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) about the safety of food additives, including aspartame [1].
Research by Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) and Réseau Environnement Santé/French Network on Health and Environment (RES) found that two of the new experts appointed by EFSA to the panel responsible for looking at food additives have failed to declare consulting activities for the food industry-funded think tank and lobby group International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI).

CEO and RES have written to EFSA to demand the dismissal of the two experts. They have also written to EU Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič to urge tighter new rules governing conflicts of interest within the EU’s agencies [2].

According to the new research, Riccardo Crebelli, a research director at the Italian Institute of Health, and Ursula Gundert-Remy, a former medical expert at the German Institute for Risk Assessment, have both acted as advisers for ILSI in the past five years. Gundert-Remy was appointed a scientific adviser at the ILSI Research Foundation in Washington in 2005, and Crebelli was a member of a scientific committee on the safety of food packaging set up by ILSI in 2008.

#sécurité-alimentaire #conflit-d-intérêts