GRAS Reform and Food Safety Regulations

Yeah, so what, what happened today, GRAS reform is widely regarded by the left

and right as the most important food regulatory effort of the past thirty

years.

This is what everyone has been clamoring for. We got it done today.

The real issue here is that the FDA commissioner,

as we sit here today, does not

know what's in our food. Most Americans, most moms would assume that the

ingredients in our food have been subjected to safety studies. That

is not true.

For the past forty years, the food industry's taken advantage of a

loophole

where they can generally recognize a food as safe, GRAS,

and ninety-five percent of food ingredients now in our food supply

have been self-identified as safe with no safety studies.

Once you designate that loophole, you do not have to submit the ingredient

or

safety studies to the FDA, and that,

uh, loophole use has led to the FDA not

knowing what's in our

food. It could be two thousand ingredients,

it could be ten thousand.

We don't know. There is not safety study on our food.

So what this does today is it mand-- it mandates

that the food industry for new ingredients, radical concept,

needs to notify the

FDA, and the FDA will now be able to conduct

safety, uh, studies on that

food. Additionally, for the ingredients in our food supply,

and we have ten

thousand more ingredients than Europe in our food supply.

This new ruling with closing the GRAS loophole is huge.

I have literally been making posts about this loophole for years.

They have been self-approving thousands of chemicals with no safety

studies. I have a video here that I'm gonna wa--

I'm gonna have you watch.

It's really good. It kind of goes over what this GRAS

loophole is with the FDA, how

it's been exploited, and I mean, you have no idea.

We have been literally eating just chemical poison, and it's been

allowed. It is wild.

The FDA has been deceiving Americans with the safety of chemical additives in

food for close to seven decades. Over a thousand chemical additives

currently used in processed food were neither safety reviewed nor tested by

the

FDA, which includes natural flavors.

According to a longstanding FDA ruling from the nineteen fifties, food companies

can conclude on their own that new chemical additives

are generally recognized as

safe for their intended use, and then use that additive in food without

notifying

the FDA. If companies voluntarily choose to submit

the GRAS notice to the

FDA, the FDA will issue a no-questions-asked

approval.

Once the chemical is designated as GRAS and used in food, the FDA does not

regulate it or reevaluate it. As a result, ninety-eight point seven percent of

all food chemicals that entered the marketplace since two

thousand were only

reviewed and tested by the food and chemical companies that created them.

As the fourth most common ingredient on food labels, natural flavors are

permitted to be eighty to ninety percent synthetic.

Companies don't have to disclose food additives used as carriers in their

natural

flavors on the ingredient labels.

The most common synthetic additives in natural flavors for beverages and food

are propylene glycol, polyglycerol esters of fatty acids,

maltodextrin, benzoic acid, polysorbate eighty, BHT,

BHA, and triacetin. The GRAS loophole is what allowed food

companies to use brominated vegetable oil for sixty-four years before the

FDA finally banned it this year due to concerns surrounding its effect on our

thyroid glands. Last year, Senator Cory Booker and Senator Ed

Markey introduced the Safe and Toxic-Free Food Act.

Of course, nothing was ever really done until now.

The Trump administration finally got it done, and you read that right.

You know, he says right here, "Ninety-eight point seven percent of all

food

chemicals that entered the marketplace since two thousand were

only reviewed and tested by the food and chemical companies that created them."

That is wild. We have literally been a hostage to

big food, and finally, the Trump administration has

closed that loophole. I mean, this is such a big deal.