Common diseases like cancer and mental retardation may be caused by chronic food additive poisoning -but it will take years to find out. (Continued from Page 4) Canadian experiment wasn't good enough and promised FDA it would carry'out its own studies. So FDA asks the public to hold its breath and' con- tinue swigging brominated vegetable' oils until the Flavor Association fin- ishes its lab tests - hopefully by the end of 1973. To fend off any public ruckus over potentially dangerous food additives, the FDA is beginning to review some, not all, of the chemicalson the sacred GRAS list - only the ones' which in- dustry surveys indicate are used most and which current research suggests are suspicious. That means more ob- scure additives which haven't already been thrashed around and questioned in food circles will continue to be ac- cepted and untested. FDA doesn't have the facilities or staff to conduct many laboratory tests itself, so it will farm out some of them to industry. According to the 1958 Food Amend- ment's famous Delaney Clause, FDA must ban outright any, additive which induces cancer in laboratory animals. But as Dr. Lederberg points out, FDA tests geared toward detecting cancer (and p e r h a p s mutations) won't catch m o r e subtle chronic damage ike brain retardation, allergies, or respiratory difficulties. That's, p r e- cisely the kind of hard to trace pois- oning we might have to worry about most. In .any case, GRAS list test results won't, be ready for several years. You'd better, look out for: SODIUM NITRITE and SODIUM NITRATE, the all purpose meat color fixatives. Americans can't s t a n d brown hot dogs and bologna and breakfast sausage, says the industry, so it keeps them blood red with ni- trite and nitrate, which k e e p the hemoglobin in the blood from turn- ing brown when exposed to air. So- dium nitrite and nitrate hold a firm' place in toxicological literature as po- tent human poisons, and as labora- tory carcinogens and mutagens. This poor fellow, for example, "A forty-eight year old factory worker was admitted to the hos- pital with intense cyanosis . Twenty minutes earlier he com- plained of increasing nausea, be- came vertiginous, vomited three times, collapsed to the pavement and turned a bluish color" (re- port from the New England Jour- nal of Medicine). Only one hour before, he had eaten a pound of New York Polish sausage - a typical market sausage made of pork, coarse cereal filler, beef blood, artificial flavor and color and sodium nitrite and nitrate. His doctors figure the sausage had poorly distributed nitrite clusters. It had nothing to do with the Polish brand; it could hap- pen to any sausage. Scientists worry particularly about sodium nitrate fertilizer residues in spinach and other; leafy vegetables. Intestinal bacteria change t h e ni- trates into nitrites, which then react with hemoglobin and turn children and babies blie in fits of methemo- globinemia, an acute blood poisoning. Medical journals are f u 11 of these cases. (California faces possible mass poisonings because it has an extra- ordinary nitrate level in drinking wa- ter, due to fertilizer runoffs'). Nitrites, which are used to preserve smoked fish like herring and salmon and tu- na, also react with certain substanc- es (secondary amines)' in the fish and at stomach acidic levels form nitro- samines, which are powerful cancer agents. Or, warns Dr. Lederberg, if nitrite gets to the DNA in human cells like it!does in laboratory }tests with microorganisms, it will mutate the genes. "Sodium nitrite is going to have to come out of our food sooner or later," says genticist Ames - even Germany, home of wurst, eats its sausages with- out nitrite. "If nitrite were coming up now as a new additive, FDA probably wouldn't let it on the market. But it's been around so long it will be hard to get it off. PRESERVATIVES: American kids eat BHT and BHA - the most widely used antioxidants - every d a y in their Wheaties and, Frosted Flakes, every breakfast cereal, and in every slice of bread, snack, and countless other packaged fatty foods on the market. FDA doesn't seem concerned - although Britain has heavily re- stricted them, even completely ban- ned them from all foods intended for babies and children. Rats fed BHT ofteh show increased liver enlargement, and British scien- tists have found BHA induces tumors. BHT ;poses a peculiar problem, be- cause although 75 per cent of it is ex- creted from the body within 24 hours after you eat it, the rest lingers and accumulates in body fats. None of the damaging evidence is conclusive -- numerous tests have not found harm- ful effects - so FDA takes-the easy way out and carte blanche leaves the additives on the market. Sodium benzoate and benzoic acid, the most popular rpreservatives in maragarine, fish, fruit juices, confec- tions, jams and jellies and soft drinks, have worried biochemists for years -ever since the days of Teddy Roose- velt. The FAO/WHO committee on food additives reports that benzoates killed all the rats in one experiment -they died with convulsions, hyper- excitability, u r i n a r y incontinence and loss of body weight. Benzoic acid, report Food and Cosmetic Toxicology, the respected science journal pub- lished by the University of Albany, is "markedly toxic" to mice, reducing their survival rates, body weights, and possibly contributing to cancer. That was enough evidence for the state of Wisconsin which has banned sodium benzoate and zenzoic acid from all its foods.. From the FDA and food in- dustry-not a murmur. SYNTHETIC COLORS account for the color in 95 per cent of the food on the market. Since Congress passed the Color Additive Amendment in 1960, a large number of colors have dropped. from use because they are strongly, suspected carcinogens.. The last color to go, sort of; was FD&C Red No. 2, which c a u s e s cancer in labora- tory mice. You'll still eat it on every rparaschino cherry (but nothing else) because the maraschino lobbyists con- vinced FDA that no one would pos- sibly want to eat more than one or two at a time. But the handful of synthetic colors left are making plenty of scientists uneasy - especially the coal tar dyes. "Artificial colors are very suspicious," warns Dr. Lederberg, who says their molecular structures look like potent carcinogens. Laboratory tests by FDA's own researchers show colors form skin tumors and ulcers on rats, and the Kaiser hospitals in California have documented numerous artificial color-caused asthmatic and other al- lergic attacks in children and adults. An FDA spokesman insists that "all artificial colors are continually under review". Meanwhile, almost e v e r y orange in the nation is dyed, w i t h sunshiny Citrus Red No. 2 which the FAO/WHO additive experts have flat- ly denounced as a potential danger. FDA doubts that anyone would want to eat the peel. FLOUR CONDITIONERS a n d BLEACHERS: Virtually every loaf of bread or cookie or cake or doughnut you buy in the market has been made with flour bleached and conditioned by poisons like hydrogen acetone and benzoyl peroxides, chlorine dioxide, nitrogen oxides, nitrosyl chloride - and they all end up in your stomach. If you s w a l lo w any one of them straight, you will likely die. In trace amounts in the markets, "they might have a chronic mutagenic effect," warns Lederberg. "If bleach is go- ing to change the color of flour, it's certainly going to produce other chemical alterations." Chlorine, another potent poison, is also used in flour manufacturing - "it gets into the food abundantly," says Lederberg. "It's clear that chlor- ine reacts badly with DNA in micro- organisms - the question is how it reacts in the body. "These may be longshots," says Lederberg, if only because no one has done substantial research. "But there may be some bad surprises. I just don't want any surprises diacovered late in the game." Some surprises have already pop- ped up, like in South Africa, where flour with potassium bromate - a common ingredient in many Ameri- can flours - caused poisoning out- breaks. The FAO additive committee has reported that potassium and am- monium persulfates, common flour strengtheners, give bakers dermatitis. And it warns that nitrogen oxides can form - nitrites again! in the pro- ducts. So far as anyone knows, Amer- icans have been lucky with their bak- ery goods - up to 14 pounds worth each week in every American home. But it's conceivable that our Wonder Bread, baked in the kitchens of Con- tinental Bakery of IT&T, is poisoning us-if not in 12 ways, at least in more than one. An American dilemma! We're eat- ing more than 3,000 additives, most of them badly tested or unsuspected, and we scarcely know where to begin. Chemical and radical journals give a tiny hint of the problem, a glimpse of what could be going on inside our bodies: Think about the 1610 artifi- cial flavors, "one of the areas of great- est toxicological uncertainty at pre- sent," according to Harvard nutri- tionist Jean Mayer. In FDA's own tests several years ago, half of the flavorings tested caused retarded growth in rats, many of them in- creases mortality rates, degenerated the heart muscle, decayed the liver tissue. It's true the victims were only animals - as for humans, the Kaiser hospitals have treated over 100 in- dividuals for allergies caused by ar- tificial flavorings. Take ethylcellu- lose: this all purpose thickener in im- itation jellies and jams and beverages and desserts and toppings and low- calorie diet foods produces arterial le- sions in rabbits, hardens and thick- ens their arteries and paves the way for heart attacks. Propylene glycol, which keeps all ice cream, candies, toppings and ic- ings, baked goods, shredded coconut, even meats, moist - this propylene glycol which we eat every day causes a high rate of limb malformations in chicken embryos (says Food and Cos- metic Toxicology). Or consider modi- fied food starch, which thickens p i e fillings and gravies: the FAO warns it "may harm the very young, the old, and patients with gastrointestinal troubles." The moral is not that all of these additives will poison you - it's that they will poison rats, and consequent- ly, we can assume they don't do much good for humans who eat them every day in every food, without pause. One big area which biochemists worry about: how all of these different chemicals react in combinations in the normal diet. They're always tested separately. Emulsifiers, the m o s t widely used additives on the entire market, probably increase the chanc- es that many additives which would voluntary additives," thinks nutrition- ist Jean Mayer. When a New Mexico farmer f e d some juicy, home-grown pork to' his family last year, his children suffered irreversible brain damage. The hog had eaten some mercury-treated seeds. Almost every food on the table con- tains residues of pesticides - pestici- des sprayed on growing crops, spray- ed on animal food, even, sprayed as a fumigant on vegetables, fruits and grains on their way to markets. FDA, investigators have found that three per "cent of tested samples from the markets contain more pesticide than the laws allow. It doesn't m a t t e r whether you're in Los Angeles, pans- as City or Boston - the pesticides you eat are the same. The FDA tolerance lists, which pre- scribe just how much of each chemi- cal can remain or market goods, reads like a dictionary of poisons: 187 pest- icides (they're called "economic poi- tem and body metabolism. Tetracy- clines, as FAO additive experts warn, bind to teeth and calcium-and inhibit skeletal growth in children, Or, as numerous medical journals point out, antibiotics will cause allergies. Some researchers speculate that the nag- ging allergies which so many kids suffer come from' the same milk, meat and fish which their school health textbooks promise will make them strong. * * * In a fitting ironic twist, a per- verse salute to the best that technol- ogy has to offer, food gets contam- inated by the same polyethelyne bag- gies, the same cans, paper bags and cardboard boxes, the same anesthiz- ed sterile twentieth century wrappings which smother them in .order to keep out 'the dirt. Meats, crackers, soups, cereals, vegetables, fruits, crisp -snacks - they all suck up several thousan additives used in the pack- aging, more bits of BHT and BHA, ""Many additives 1haven't even been test- ed," says Richard Hughes at Little Labs. "What do we do in the meantime? Not eat them? Not eat anything? How are we go- ing tolive?" sons"), including parathion (killed a boy last summer in North Carolina when he breathed the stuff on a to- bacco field), chlordane (gave a Phil- adelphia man bone cancer, from its use in household termite spray), hept- achlor, aldrin and dieldrin (they've caused innumerable wildlife dye-offs throughout the country) and of course, the ubiquitous DDT. Pesticides pose a nasty h e a 1 t h problem because they destroy body enzymes and derange metabolism in the organs, and affect the body in other ways that biochemists don't yet understand. Scientific literature does have disturbing cases of pesticides destroying the body's cholinesterase enzyme, which normally detoxifies certain toxins at nerve endings and synapses. The result: headaches, cramps, nausea, diarrhea, twitching, vomiting, maybe death. Scientists speculate that common chronic dis- orders, usually untraceable, are really due to chronic pesticide poisoning - and not the 24 'hour virus. So don't take aspirin: it won't help.. The grocery's plump chickens and steaks didn't get fat from corn meal -they've been primed with antibio- tics and synthetic growth hormones. You eat them, too. DES (diethylstilbestrol), the super growth hormone, fattens 75 per cent of the beef cattle in the United States. Poultry used to get it, but that was outlawed. They get arsenic to make hens lay eggs faster. FDA requires that all cattle be taken off the hor- mones, which are implanted below their ears, 48 hours before slaughter; therefore, meat should end up on your table without any residues. But in 1969, a random study found .6 per cent of all beef livers still contained some DES residue - a small percent- age, but in human terms it means .12,000 people at any given time are. munching beef hormones. Antibiotics, lots of them, are mixed with all kinds of animal feeds and drugs like chlortetracycline, penicillin, streptomycin, plus a little amprol- ium and arsenilic acid. By flooding the animals s y s t e m s with potent drugs, meat producers can crowd them into. filthy pens, get them fat quick, and send them to market be- fore they succumb to profit-hurting more sodium nitrate, methylcellulose and potassium hydroxide - all fin the wrappings this time - and lime, zinc, chloride, soap, animal glue, shellac, peroxides - every additive that's also put directly into the .food, and more.. Rest assured by FDA that the pack- age-to-food migration is very small. Also remember that you get the addi- tives from every package, from every wrapper, from every food. The levels add up. In one last hysterical effort to shield yourself from - synthetic dirt! - you can forget all packaged food and spend the rest of your life munch- ing fruits and vegetables which haven't touched a paper'or polyethe- lyene bag. A warning!. They've all been rinsed with soaps and detergents to clean off the field dirt (which you could rinse in. your kitchen sink), and in a last compulsive act to seal them for market, 75 per cent have been soaked with mixtures of carcinogenic coal tar waxes, paraffin, and petro- leum naptha - the prime ingredient of napalm. Caveat emptor. Let the buyer be- ware. Playing with your life "If we didn't eat anything we'd be a hundred per cent safe, wouldn't we'?" laughs one FDA official, whose stamp brings. new additives on the market or keeps them off. In the food business, additives stand or fall on the risk/benefit doc- trine, industry's philosophy that since s c i e n c e can't ever guarantee that anything is absolutely safe, it's not fair to criticize an additive's poten- tial dangers without emphasizing its market virtues. Food corporations see the risk of food additives, says Trauberman at Food Engineering, the same way General Motors sees the safety of its cars: "Fifty-thousand people will be, killed this year in automobiles," he says soberly. "I tcarf produce a risk/benefit ratio and assure you that the public is willing to accept it." The whole issue of food safety, argues Richard Hughes of Arthur D. Little labs - whose clients include the nation's top chemical and food. producers - comes to this: "How do you define wlat is safe? Safety is relative. Water is dangerous in large Your local supermarket tells you where the profits are-synthetic foods pum:ed with artifical flavors, artificial colors, and artificial textures. Eden organic foods provides some healthy alternatives-but they cost. I ... .. .. _. , .ter :::.:,: «:<:> .::..: t.