Kennedy Announces Plans to Reverse GRAS Standard

Move Aims to Reduce Flow of Chemicals into the U.S. Food Supply

By Jennifer Galardi, Contributing Writer, The Kennedy Beacon

As a reporter, it has been difficult to keep up with the pace of the new administration. With large budget cuts under DOGE and sweeping immigration reform, some big wins by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), under the direction of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have flown under the radar. Case in point: policy reform for the GRAS standard for verifying ingredients in food.

Photo by FDA/ Getty Images

GRAS, an acronym employed by the FDA to mean Generally Recognized As Safe, was established by the Food Additives Amendment in 1958 to reduce the red tape necessary for the FDA to approve food ingredients. This included foods whose safety had either “been established by a long history of use in food” or “by virtue of the nature of the substances, their conditions of use, and the information generally available to scientists,” was considered safe. Back then such ingredients included salt, baking soda, and a long list of spices.

However, no one could predict the explosion of highly processed foods and the chemical substances used in them. While GRAS standards began with stringent approval processes in the late 60s, those standards had grown lax by the early 2000s, with hundreds of new ingredients allowed into the marketplace via a process that has been characterized as “innocent until proven guilty.”

But early last week, HHS Secretary Kennedy said he would stop that harmful method of approving ingredients in food – a system, he said, that had allowed the flow of some 10,000 chemicals into our bodies.

Kennedy announced that he is reversing the GRAS standard for food additives to “guilty until proven innocent.” In a recent video on Instagram, Kennedy called the abuse of GRAS a “mass experiment on the American people” and a “catastrophe.”

The move has been widely applauded, with even the FDA commenting that it needs to do a better job. “GRAS has been abused, and it’s ripe for reform,” said Stephen Ostroff, former acting FDA commissioner and deputy commissioner for foods, according to one report. Scott Faber, a senior vice president of the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, called it “low hanging fruit,” but admitted it’s one no other administration has been willing to tackle.

A Brief History of GRAS

In 1969, President Nixon directed the FDA to make a critical evaluation of the safety of GRAS food substances. An independent body of scientists convened for comprehensive reviews of all foods under GRAS and offered their findings on over 400 substances. These experts became gatekeepers for ingredients for the next decade or so. In the 70s and 80s, gums, dextrans, and various salts (sodium, potassium, calcium and iron salts) were included for review under the Select Committee on GRAS Substances, or SCOGS.

From 1973 - 1997, the GRAS “Affirmation Petition Process” took effect, whereby industry could “petition the FDA to review the GRAS status of substances not being considered as part of the agency’s GRAS review.” Rather than undergoing rigorous review, the FDA merely would request and consider comments and then issue a final rule affirming GRAS status. Canola oil, enzyme preparations, whey, and cocoa butter substitute were all introduced within this time frame and approved for use under the new process.

Beginning in 1997, the FDA moved from the petition process to what it calls “GRAS Notification,” which essentially allowed food manufacturers to “self certify” new additives and claim they were safe and ready for FDA approval without much opposition. During this period, the FDA approved such products as phytosterols,the compounds found in vegetable oils that are purported to lower cholesterol; DAG (diacylglycerol) oils, which includes partially hydrogenated oils ; and certain enzyme preparations.

Under the affirmation petition process from 1974 through August 1990, approvals took over 72 months. From 1998 - 2005, the mean time to get food substances approved was just 162 days, which may explain why 170 new additives passed muster.

The more lax GRAS process changed the standard for food additives, making new ingredients “innocent until proven guilty.” This shift made it easy for highly processed ingredients to enter the food supply, and our bodies. No doubt large food manufacturers saw an opening to include highly addictive but less nourishing ingredients into their products; it increased their bottom line.

In fact, with the sharp decline in cigarette sales due to strong anti-smoking campaigns that began in the 1980s, tobacco companies searched for alternative profit centers. Processed foods offered the opportunity they needed. In 1985, Philip Morris Companies Inc. agreed to buy General Foods Corporation for $5.8 billion. Just three years later, the old cigarette manufacturer gobbled up Kraft Foods for $12.9 billion. Next came Nabisco. Phillip Morris acquired the popular snack food brand for $14.9 billion in June, 2000. There have been many reports, including this one in the Washington Post, outlining big tobacco’s plan to make snack food hyperpalatable, turning them into new cigarettes.

In the official press release from HHS, Kennedy commented on the alteration to the GRAS standard: “Eliminating this loophole will provide transparency to consumers, help get our nation’s food supply back on track by ensuring that ingredients being introduced into foods are safe, and ultimately Make America Healthy Again.”

Like a lot of legislation, what may have once been useful is now either unnecessary or, in the case of GRAS, insufficient. The food safety example makes a strong argument for a quick and expedient legislative review process. Kennedy and Trump see this new tack as an outright declaration of the end of a system that was not working – and the beginning of one that can help them both make good on their promise.