Courting Disaster?

Adulterated products have already scarred the pet food industry. How real is the threat to the nutritional supplement industry?

By
Joanna Cosgrove
Online Editor

When Menu Foods announced the recall of some of its pet food products due to contamination in March, no one could have guessed that the resulting ripple effect would grow to such menacing proportions. In reaction to the public outcry about the lapse in food safety measures, the U.S. government is not only more carefully scrutinizing the safety of imported animal food ingredients, but also proactively preparing in the event that tainted foods pose a risk to the human food supply as well.

In fact, on May first, the Commissioner of Food and Drugs, Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach, announced the appointment of David Acheson, M.D., F.R.C.P as assistant commissioner for food protection—a new position created in light of the adulterated ingredient scandal to oversee “food safety and food defense matters.” Dr. Acheson originally served as chief medical officer and director of the Office of Food Defense, Communication and Emergency Response at the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) and in his new position he will serve as the link between individual FDA product centers and the Office of Regulatory Affairs. He will also be the direct liaison to the Department of Health and Human Services and to other U.S. departments and agencies on food safety and food defense related inter-agency initiatives.

At the time of Dr. Acheson’s appointment, Dr. von Eschenbach expressed concern about the protection of America’s food supply and subsequent safety of food sourced both domestically and internationally, and said “We’ve seen a rapid transformation of the food safety system due to advances in production technology, rapid methods of distribution, and the globalization of food sources.”

One of Dr. Acheson’s first projects will be the development of an agency-wide, strategy for food safety and defense. The strategy will “identify and characterize changes in the global food safety and defense system, and identify current and future challenges and opportunities.”

This strategy will also endeavor to identify potential barriers, gaps and the most critical needs in a food safety and defense system. According to the FDA, this strategy will serve as the “framework in helping the agency prioritize and address food safety and defense challenges.”

The creation of this new position is certainly a step in the right direction, but until the government mends all of the obvious and not so obvious holes in its current food policies, nutritional supplement industry insiders like Loren Israelsen, executive director of the United Natural Products Alliance (UNPA), Salt Lake City, UT, are encouraging those in the supplement industry to take a hard look at the nutritional supplement ingredient supply chain in order to stave off a catastrophe similar to the one that’s so adversely affected the pet food industry.

“Unfortunately, the supplement industry, like the human food and pet food industries, must work on the assumption that adulterated ingredients are in the supply chain,” said Mr. Israelsen, citing the supplement industry’s ongoing problem of “spiking,” which is done to make otherwise expensive ingredients cheaper. “Protecting the integrity of products has been discussed ad nauseum, but unfortunately the economic incentives are great enough that incidents of intentional or accidental adulteration are happening. We know how to address these problems. So far, the will to truly fix these problems has not been adequate.”

The root issues regarding the U.S. food supply, according to Mr. Israelsen, are rapid globalization of the food supply, the lack of resources to inspect, police and enforce existing food safety laws, and the confusion and jurisdictional overlaps created by multiple agencies, all of whom have a slice of food safety responsibility. “This includes FDA, USDA, FSIS, state government, etc.,” he said. “Also, the increasing sophistication of technology that enables deception, either by using fake ingredients that mimic a lab test, using fake colors, flavors or materials to texturize food products all contribute to the problem.”

Because the government, including Congress, the Administration and various agencies, moved quickly to investigate and deal with the pet food poisonings, Mr. Israelsen said many valuable lessons have been learned. “FDA inspectors found it extraordinarily difficult to get to the truth when they were in China investigating how melamine got into food ingredients. Congress has introduced legislation to create much stronger authority for FDA to recall food products, beef up import inspections, etc.,” he said. “More action is no doubt on the way. Many of these steps are overdue and needed.”

But Mr. Israelsen advocated that the most fundamental solution remains self-regulation. “It is not possible for FDA to inspect foreign food facilities,” he said. “They have enough trouble trying to inspect domestic ones.

“The obvious and urgent problem is a catastrophe among supplements or conventional foods, which would shake consumer confidence and hence usage of such products,” he added. “The true solution remains resetting the economic equation so that the disincentive to cheat becomes great enough that this kind of behavior becomes a rare exception rather than a tolerated common practice.”