The way standard food additives enter the food supply are different from how these “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) ingredients do. “The former requires public notice and review of safety data by the FDA, and the latter does not,” says Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, the director of the Food Is Medicine Institute at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston. Companies are allowed to determine whether new chemicals are considered food additives or GRAS ingredients.
Dr. Mozaffarian referenced a 2022 report by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a nonprofit that advocates for safer agricultural practices and chemicals, which suggested nearly 99 percent of new chemicals that entered the food supply since 2000 did so via the GRAS pathway. “Industry is choosing for themselves what to do, what’s safe, and when to report it, which in practice means almost never,” Mozaffarian says.
The term GRAS stems from a 1958 law that required companies to show the ingredients in their foods were safe and established an exception for common ingredients. “The original intent of GRAS was to exempt common cooking ingredients that were used before 1958 — like salt, vinegar, or baking soda — from lengthy approval processes,” Thiel says. Now it allows companies to bypass FDA oversight when introducing new ingredients, she says. Mozaffarian says the GRAS pathway was initially intended to be the exception (and used only for common ingredients), but now the food additive pathway has become the exception instead.
Examples of GRAS Ingredients
- Baking soda, to help baked goods rise
- Salt, to add flavor and act as a preservative
- Gelatin, to gel, emulsify, and thicken
- Cornstarch, to thicken
- Lactic acid, to add flavor and act as a preservative
- Soy sauce, for extra flavor
- Vitamin A, to fortify foods
Some critics argue that the way GRAS ingredients are tested is insufficient to prove their safety. Namely, most of the GRAS testing involves animals and uses one additive at a time, Dr. Melanson says. “These days, with all the ultra-processed foods and beverages on the market, large combinations of food additives are being consumed,” she says. “Some products have more than eight artificial additives just on their own, and consumers may be eating them with other products that contain yet another combination.” She says that research should address that and determine whether it’s safe. “That being said, innumerable combinations are possible, so it is not feasible to test them all,” Melanson says. “This is another reason why minimizing the number of different ultra-processed foods in people’s diets is advisable.”
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