There is growing concern about the U.S. food supply and its contribution to a range of health risks and diet-related diseases. This includes growing concern about the health impacts of high consumption of ultra-processed foods as well as increasing studies showing risks attributed to specific additives and substances in food.
In recent years, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has come under scrutiny for its lax oversight of ingredients and additives in the food supply. This includes both its pre-market oversight of additives (including because of its “generally recognized as safe” or “GRAS” exemption from the additive definition, which allows food businesses to self-designate a substance as safe and use it in food without any oversight) and its slow and cumbersome post-market response to unsafe or risky additives and GRAS substances (which has taken years and sometimes decades to ban risky substances from food). At the same time, the rising concerns about ultra-processed foods have coalesced around the need for a national definition for the term.
Many states have stepped in, enacting laws banning certain additives and ingredients in food or requiring warning labels on food with such additives, as well as proposing state definitions or regulations of ultra-processed foods. This has spurred action at the federal level as well, including an FDA effort to improve its post-market review of additives, a joint FDA/USDA regulatory effort to define “ultra-processed,” and discussions at both FDA and within Congress about reform to the GRAS process. All of these approaches and proposals have raised new legal and policy questions.
Our Approach
FLPC has worked to analyze the regulatory system for additives and ingredients in food through a variety of white papers, reports, and articles. FLPC also has conducted research for non-profit public and environmental health organizations, analyzed and responded to federal legislative and regulatory proposals, supported state legislators and advocates with legal research and analysis, and provided advocacy organizations with answers to legal and policy questions regarding federal and state regulation of food additives and ultra-processed food.
