OCR Text |
Show by Senator Onin ftoch Updated food safety law needed Kids: you don't have to pout, cry, hold your breath or throw your plate when Mom or Dad serves spinach. Spinach is illegal. It contains elements that, when eaten by the ton for years on end, act as carcinogens, or cancer-causing agents. And even though nobody, not even Popeye, is going to eat as much spinach as it would take to cause cancer, the Food and Drug Administration, by law, must prohibit the sale of any food substance that causes cancer in man or animals, regardless of the quantities involved or the real risk. So kids, are you off the hook? I don't think so. I happen to believe that spinach, in the amounts consumed by normal people, is still good for you, and I also happen to know that the FDA will not make any attempts to ban it. Ever. I also believe that scientists, with the right equipment, can find harmful ingredients in just about everything we eat, and that it's often not our dietary habits that need changing as much as our dietary laws. That's why I've introduced S. 1442, a bill to amend parts of American's food safety code. I have no arguments with the basic purpose of our current code: the laws seek to keep our food supply safe by keeping carcinogens and other harmful elements out of it. That's sound public policy, I support it fully, completely, and without reservation. But the code was last revised in l'jr8, and advancing technological discoveries and capabilities have rendered important parts of it obsolete. Hence my bill. Its first purpose is to modernize the law and align it with the expanding horizons of food science. The Delaney clause, for example, technically requires spinach to be prohibited; it requires any food containing con-taining any sort of carcinogen to be banned; and spinach's natural properties, when consumed in almost impossibly large amounts, act as carcinogens. But when scientists have the capacity, as they do today, to break foodstuffs into a trillion parts, almost everything has something that may have negative side effects. The second purpose of my bill is to add flexibility to simplistic, sometimes overly rigid, food safety laws. Now that properties contained in spinach, potatoes, black pepper, vitamin D, onions and human saliva have been found to be possible carcinogens under the proper circumstances, should we outlaw those substances? I think not, and the FDA, which sensibly ignores the Delaney clause to leave them on the market, agrees with me. Instead, we should be told what levels of risk accompany what amounts of consumption, and we should have varied restrictions regulating varied risks. Rather than two simplistic regulatory options good or bad, permitted or banned we should allow the FDA to use regulatory tools such as limited use, phase-outs, or warning labels. Third, my bill, in certain highly-limited highly-limited and reasonable circumstances, would allow consideration of other factors besid'-s a product's risks. The FDA could look, for example, at whether a product has any workable substitutes before considering its ban. In this regard, saccharin would be more apt to remain on the market, because diabetics and the weight-conscious weight-conscious have no other way to restrict their intake of sugar, and saccarin's cancer risk appears to be infinitally small. A substance's merits could be judged alongside its risks: if the benefits outweight the risks, the product in many cases should be left on the market, perhaps with some suitable restrictions. Those arc the three main purposes of my bill. It is a complicated piece of legislation that runs over 70 pages long, but its basic thrust is to continue the policy of keeping harmful elements out of our food supply, while giving the FDA an updated law it-and all of us-tan us-tan live with. And it won't give my kids an excuse to not eat their spinach. Federal help for veterans and most other categories of citizens is being tightened or reduced by the current administration. admin-istration. But other sources of aid, often overlooked because of their variety and special requirements, re-quirements, remain available. Consult your state or county veterans' office. Virtually every state offers special benefits supplementing federal programs handled by the Veterans Administration. Among the most valuable can be school loans and scholarships scholar-ships often available to the children and spouses of deceased de-ceased or severely disabled veterans and former prisoners of war. Not all are so limited. Some states, like Virginia, exempt war veterans 'from paying tuition at st ale colleges if they nre no longer eligible for OI Bill benefits. Minnesota offers honorably discharged state veU $2.riU toward tuition tui-tion after UI benefits are ex hnusted. |