Kennedy Is Right About the Chemicals in Our Food

Opinion|Kennedy Is Right About the Chemicals in Our Food

The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., believes toxic chemicals in food are behind the U.S. explosion in rates of obesity and a range of other chronic illnesses. “A facade of normalcy has masked this meteoric rise in chronic disease, and we can no longer ignore it,” he said recently. He intends to rid the U.S. food supply of nine chemicals — all petroleum-based, synthetic food dyes — in as soon as 18 months.

Mr. Kennedy has deservedly earned a reputation for embracing pseudoscience and making hyperbolic claims about public health — autism, vaccines, fluoride. But when it comes to the chemicals in our food, the situation may be even worse than he describes. It’s certainly more mysterious than many of us appreciate when we sit down to dinner.

In the United States, an estimated 10,000 additives are allowed in the food we eat — including flavors, emulsifiers, pesticides, preservatives, ingredients in packaging and, yes, dyes. These chemicals are used in many of the ultraprocessed foods that now comprise most of the calories Americans consume.

In Europe, new food additives are generally presumed unsafe until proved otherwise through scientific review. But the United States allows food companies to self-certify the safety of many chemicals without prior Food and Drug Administration approval. This is because of a regulatory pathway known as GRAS, or “generally recognized as safe.” Under GRAS, companies are expected, but not required, to notify the F.D.A. when they introduce a new chemical that experts they’ve hired deemed OK to use. As a result, the food industry is often vetting the safety of the ingredients in our food, not federal regulators. Researchers estimate that there are roughly 1,000 chemicals in the food supply whose identities are unknown to regulators. (Mr. Kennedy announced that he’s working to close the GRAS loophole.)

Research on chemicals that have been vetted by the F.D.A. tends to be extremely narrow in focus, looking mostly for cancer, genetic mutations or organ damage in animal or laboratory studies. This means the ingredients in our coffee creamer, cereal, ketchup and frozen pizza aren’t tested for more subtle effects on long-term health, or whether they may increase the risk of the other common chronic diseases, such as obesity, cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes. What’s more, most safety studies examine single chemicals in isolation, not how the hundreds or thousands of chemicals we consume might interact with one another or affect our long-term health.

Regulators also don’t routinely re-examine chemicals already on the market — checking if new science has emerged suggesting they might be dangerous — something European regulators do. “F.D.A. is stuck on decades-old science and making decisions based on scientific principles that in many cases are irrelevant,” said Maricel Maffini, a researcher who has studied GRAS for over a decade.