Debunked: 8 Foods We Eat In The U.S. That Are Banned In Other Countries

Dan Wilson

Senior Member.
Recently, Buzzfeed posted an article claiming that ingredients used in particular foods are linked to severe health defects. Now I know Buzzfeed doesn't exactly promise quality information, but I have seen this article passed around on social media sites quite a bit. The article is filled with bunk and misunderstandings of chemistry and toxicology. A chemist named Derek Lowe wrote a blog voicing his frustration at misunderstood science being spread so easily and explains how the claims concerning each of the 8 foods listed in the article are a result of what he calls "chemophobia."

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/06/21/eight_toxic_foods_a_little_chemical_education.php
This brings me to the grand wrap-up, and some of the language in that last item is a good starting point for it. I'm talking about the "POISON, which will kill you if you ingest enough" part. This whole article is soaking in several assumptions about food, about chemistry, and about toxicology, and that's one of the big ones. In my experience, people who write things like this have divided the world into two categories: wholesome, natural, healthy stuff and toxic chemical poisons. But this is grievously simple-minded. As I've emphasized in passing above, there are plenty of natural substances, made by healthy creatures in beautiful, unpolluted environments, that will nonetheless kill you in agony. Plants, fungi, bacteria, and animals produce poisons, wide varieties of intricate poisons, and they're not doing it for fun.
And on the other side of the imaginary fence, there are plenty of man-made substances that really won't do much of anything to people at all. You cannot assume anything about the effects of a chemical compound based on whether it came from a lovely rainforest orchid or out of a crusty Erlenmeyer flask. The world is not set up that way. Here's a corollary to this: if I isolate a beneficial chemical compound from some natural source (vitamin C from oranges, for example, although sauerkraut would be a good source, too), that molecule is identical to a copy of it I make in my lab. There is no essence, no vital spirit. A compound is what it is, no matter where it came from.

Misunderstandings of these topics bleed into similar issues that have been discussed heavily in other threads on this site like GMOs and water fluoridation, the blog post is a great read.

As for the Buzzfeed article's claims on the foods being banned in other countries, the legitimacy and reasons for the bans varies with which food and country we are talking about. For example, SOME food colorings are banned everywhere while others have been tested and approved, also Norway's ban on food dyes was lifted in 2001. Regardless of where it may banned for whatever reason, the science concerning each chemical is sound.
 
I love reading his "Things I won't work with" posts, but have a few comments on this story. It's ok to debunk false arguments, but he is implicitly saying that scientists in Europe and elsewhere who favored these bans are incompetent. A blogger in Nigeria or Bangladesh could argue likewise regarding US regulations on food additives, clean air, pollution etc..

Now that we've detoured around that mess, on to brominated vegetable oil. It's found in citrus-flavored sodas and sports drinks, at about 8 parts per million. The BuzzFeed article claims that it's linked to "major organ system damage, birth defects, growth problems, schizophrenia, and hearing loss", and sends readers to this WebMD article. But if you go there, you'll find that the only medical problems known from BVO come from two cases of people who had been consuming, over a long period, 4 to 8 liters of BVO-containing soda per day, and did indeed have reactions to all the excess bromine-containing compounds in their system. At 8 ppm, it's not easy to get to that point, but a determined lunatic will overcome such obstacles. Overall, drinking several liters of Mountain Dew per day is probably a bad idea, and not just because of the BVO content.
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The man who lost the ability to walk drank 2 to 4 litres soda a day, I'm guessing that's not exceptional. What would be the effects if it was used in all soda drinks and at the maximum allowed level?
And this is an additive that was allowed on an interim basis pending additional study more than 30 years ago. The latest revision dated april 1 2012 of CFR title 21 still states:
The additive is used on an interim basis as a stabilizer for flavoring oils used in fruit-flavored beverages, for which any applicable standards of identity do not preclude such use, in an amount not to exceed 15 parts per million in the finished beverage, pending the outcome of additional toxicological studies on which periodic reports at 6-month intervals are to be furnished and final results submitted to the Food and Drug Administration promptly after completion of the studies.
[42 FR 14636, Mar. 15, 1977, as amended at 49 FR 5610, Feb. 14, 1984]
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http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfCFR/CFRSearch.cfm?fr=180.30
We're still waiting for those studies.


Potassium bromate was found (in a two-year rat study) to have a variety of bad effects. This occurred at the two highest doses, and the lowest observed adverse effect level (LOAEL) was 6.1 mg of bromate per kilo body weight per day. It's worth noting that a study in male mice took them up to nearly ten times that amount, though, with little or no effect, which gives you some idea of how hard it is to be a toxicologist. Whether humans are more like mice or more like rats in this situation is unknown.
I'm not going to do the whole allometric scaling thing here, because no matter how you do it, the numbers come out crazy. Bromate is used in some (but not all) bread flour at 15 to 30 parts per million, and if the bread is actually baked properly, there's none left in the finished product. But for illustration, let's have someone eating uncooked bread dough at the highest level, just to get the full bromate experience. A 75-kilo human (and many of us are more than that) would have to take in 457 mg of bromate per day to get to the first adverse level seen in rats, which would be. . .15 kilos (about 33 pounds) of bread dough per day, a level I can safely say is unlikely to be reached. Hell, eating 33 pounds of anything isn't going to work out, much as my fourteen-year-old son tries to prove me wrong. You'd need to keep that up for decades, too, since that two year study represents a significant amount of a rat's lifespan.
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Although it's not banned in the US, the FDA has urged bakers to voluntarily stop using it since 1991.
His 15 kg of bread dough gives the 1-to-1 human equivalent for the LOAEL observed in rats. But such a calculation is never used in toxicology. LOAEL and NOAEL in animals are used (when no better data is available) to determine the acceptable daily intake (ADI) for humans. For LOAEL data, the factor most often applied is 1/1000 (1/10 because you start with an adverse effects level, 1/10 for uncertainties due to the animal model, 1/10 for individual differences). So a more sensible calculation is the acceptable daily intake for uncooked bread dough containing potassium bromate, which would be 15 g or 0.5 oz.

When a NOAEL-A (the -A means animal) is known (no adverse effects), the usual factor is 1/100.
Some examples of real ADIs:
- Acibenzolar-S-methyl: 12-month chronic oral toxicity study in dogs; based on haematological changes associated with anaemia seen at a LOEL of 5 mg/kg bw/d. ADI set at 1/1000 of LOAEL-A
- Acrolein: 24-month study in rats, mortality and serum biochemical effects NOAEL-A of 0.05 based upon next highest dose of 0.5 mg/kg bw/d. ADI set at 1/100 of NOAEL-A
- Abamectin: 3-week rabbit developmental study; NOAEL-A of 0.5 based on teratogenicity at the next highest dose of 1 mg/kg bw/d. ADI set at 1/1000 of NOAEL-A because foetus abnormalities may represent acute toxic effect

Bovine growth hormone (BGH) is given to dairy cattle to increase milk production. OK, so what about drinking milk? Here you go: for one, BGH levels in the milk of treated cows are not higher than in untreated ones. Secondly, BGH is not active as a growth hormone in humans - it's selective for the cow receptor, not the human one. The controversy in this area comes from the way that growth hormone treatment in cows tends to increase levels of another hormone, IGF-1, in the milk.
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In fact, the use is banned in Canada and the EU on the basis of the health and welfare of the animals, not the consumers.

Finally, I want to return to something I was saying way back at the beginning of this piece. The author of the BuzzFeed article knows painfully little about chemistry and biology. But that apparently wasn't a barrier: righteous conviction (and the worldview mentioned in the above three paragraphs) are enough, right? Wrong. Ten minutes of unbiased reading would have served to poke holes all through most of the article's main points. I've spent more than ten minutes (as you can probably tell), and there's hardly one stone left standing on another. As a scientist, I find sloppiness at this level not only stupid, not only time-wasting, but downright offensive. Couldn't anyone be bothered to look anything up? There are facts in this world, you know. Learn a few.
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The problem is, you could argue for increasing most ADIs with a factor 10 or 100 using the same arguments, or ridicule all the health scares and import bans we've seen the last decade, like imports from China that exceed the limits for pesticides, lead, diethylene glycol, formaldehyde.

In a recent case, the F.D.A. said "diethylene glycol in any amount was not suitable for use in toothpaste." Then why do they allow up to 0.2% DEG as impurity of polyethylene glycol when the latter is used in toothpaste, or as a food additive?

When DEG was found in European wine, some with levels below 10 ppm that could not be detected by laboratory analysis in Europe, new equipment was installed, and the wine was destroyed. Why not set an ADI of 10 ppm instead? People have been drinking it for years, without any evidence of toxic effects at that level.

Why was the ADI for aspartame set at 50 mg/kg when it's hydrolyzed into methanol (11% by weigth), and the ADI for methanol was already set at 0.5 mg/kg, not 5.5 mg/kg? Are we really to believe that the value of 50 mg/kg/day came purely from toxicology studies, and it's just a happy coincidence that at that ADI it can be used effectively in all foods without exceeding that limit? Or that the result would have been the same if aspartame was 10 times sweeter? I think the ADI would likely have been 5 mg/kg in that case, but maybe that's just me.

Most people would assume that "safe" limits are decided on basis of toxicity alone, and little is done to dispel that myth. The risks, economic benefits and considerations like the health benefits of replacing sugar with a low calorie substitute all play a role (although these usually aren't mentioned). But the public is only told that "studies have shown it to be safe". Only considering the health risks would be a stupid way to decide such issues, but it's hard to explain all the considerations and the factors that influence a decision, and it would provide ammunition to the opposing side. As a result you get two camps, one thinking we're being poisoned by the government, the other using flawed comparisons and faulty reasoning to defend decisions that can't be justified with only a simple risk assessment.
 
From an article on the American Cancer Society's webpage concerning growth hormone use in dairy cows. The fact that it has been banned in several countries plus the fact that "The available evidence shows that the use of rBGH can cause adverse health effects in cows" is enough to make me not want to drink the crap!

http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/othercarcinogens/athome/recombinant-bovine-growth-hormone

Summary
The available evidence shows that the use of rBGH can cause adverse health effects in cows. The evidence for potential harm to humans is inconclusive. It is not clear that drinking milk produced using rBGH significantly increases IGF-1 levels in humans or adds to the risk of developing cancer. More research is needed to help better address these concerns.
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From an article on the American Cancer Society's webpage concerning growth hormone use in dairy cows. The fact that it has been banned in several countries plus the fact that "The available evidence shows that the use of rBGH can cause adverse health effects in cows" is enough to make me not want to drink the crap!

http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/othercarcinogens/athome/recombinant-bovine-growth-hormone

Summary
The available evidence shows that the use of rBGH can cause adverse health effects in cows. The evidence for potential harm to humans is inconclusive. It is not clear that drinking milk produced using rBGH significantly increases IGF-1 levels in humans or adds to the risk of developing cancer. More research is needed to help better address these concerns.
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Then don't drink it.
The only adverse health effects mentioned in cows is a tendency to be more susceptible to mastitis, a bacterial infection in the udder, which leads to an increased use of antibiotics in rBGH treated cows. The increased use of antibiotics is the primary concern of using rBGH in cows. To put it into perspective, cows that are only milked once a day have a higher tendency of developing mastitis than the usual twice a day milking routine, even in a mostly organic pasture raised herd like the small community dairy that I worked in. I say mostly organic because we treated mastitis with antibiotics because the "natural" cures didn't work and not treating cows with mastitis is just plain cruel. Antibiotics aren't allowed to be used in certified organic milk cows so think about all the suffering from mastitis next time you consume organic milk products.
 
The point of the article posted in this thread was human health. If you're saying that negative effects in cows translates to negative effects in humans then thats incorrect.


The available evidence can be summarized as follows:

  • Neither natural nor synthetic BGH has been found to affect human growth hormone receptors.
  • IGF-1 concentrations are slightly higher (to variable degrees, depending on the study) in milk from cows treated with rBGH than in untreated milk. This variability is presumed to be much less than the normal range of variation of IGF-1 in cow's milk due to natural factors, but more research is needed.
  • IGF-1 in milk is not denatured (inactivated) by pasteurization. The extent to which intact, active IGF-1 is absorbed through the human digestive tract remains uncertain.
  • One study estimated that the additional amount of IGF-1 that might be absorbed by humans drinking milk from rBGH treatment, assuming no degradation and complete absorption, represents 0.09% of the normal daily production of IGF-1 in adults.
  • Before approving the use of rBGH in 1993, the FDA calculated a worst case scenario based on an infant drinking 1.5 liters (1.6 quarts) of milk daily, with complete absorption of intact IGF-1 protein and the maximum increase in IGF-1. Under these conditions, milk from rBGH-treated cows would contribute far less than 1% of the infant's normal daily production of IGF-1.
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I love reading his "Things I won't work with" posts, but have a few comments on this story. It's ok to debunk false arguments, but he is implicitly saying that scientists in Europe and elsewhere who favored these bans are incompetent. A blogger in Nigeria or Bangladesh could argue likewise regarding US regulations on food additives, clean air, pollution etc..

Now that we've detoured around that mess, on to brominated vegetable oil. It's found in citrus-flavored sodas and sports drinks, at about 8 parts per million. The BuzzFeed article claims that it's linked to "major organ system damage, birth defects, growth problems, schizophrenia, and hearing loss", and sends readers to this WebMD article. But if you go there, you'll find that the only medical problems known from BVO come from two cases of people who had been consuming, over a long period, 4 to 8 liters of BVO-containing soda per day, and did indeed have reactions to all the excess bromine-containing compounds in their system. At 8 ppm, it's not easy to get to that point, but a determined lunatic will overcome such obstacles. Overall, drinking several liters of Mountain Dew per day is probably a bad idea, and not just because of the BVO content.
Content from External Source
The man who lost the ability to walk drank 2 to 4 litres soda a day, I'm guessing that's not exceptional. What would be the effects if it was used in all soda drinks and at the maximum allowed level?
And this is an additive that was allowed on an interim basis pending additional study more than 30 years ago. The latest revision dated april 1 2012 of CFR title 21 still states:
The additive is used on an interim basis as a stabilizer for flavoring oils used in fruit-flavored beverages, for which any applicable standards of identity do not preclude such use, in an amount not to exceed 15 parts per million in the finished beverage, pending the outcome of additional toxicological studies on which periodic reports at 6-month intervals are to be furnished and final results submitted to the Food and Drug Administration promptly after completion of the studies.
[42 FR 14636, Mar. 15, 1977, as amended at 49 FR 5610, Feb. 14, 1984]
Content from External Source
http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfCFR/CFRSearch.cfm?fr=180.30
We're still waiting for those studies.


Potassium bromate was found (in a two-year rat study) to have a variety of bad effects. This occurred at the two highest doses, and the lowest observed adverse effect level (LOAEL) was 6.1 mg of bromate per kilo body weight per day. It's worth noting that a study in male mice took them up to nearly ten times that amount, though, with little or no effect, which gives you some idea of how hard it is to be a toxicologist. Whether humans are more like mice or more like rats in this situation is unknown.
I'm not going to do the whole allometric scaling thing here, because no matter how you do it, the numbers come out crazy. Bromate is used in some (but not all) bread flour at 15 to 30 parts per million, and if the bread is actually baked properly, there's none left in the finished product. But for illustration, let's have someone eating uncooked bread dough at the highest level, just to get the full bromate experience. A 75-kilo human (and many of us are more than that) would have to take in 457 mg of bromate per day to get to the first adverse level seen in rats, which would be. . .15 kilos (about 33 pounds) of bread dough per day, a level I can safely say is unlikely to be reached. Hell, eating 33 pounds of anything isn't going to work out, much as my fourteen-year-old son tries to prove me wrong. You'd need to keep that up for decades, too, since that two year study represents a significant amount of a rat's lifespan.
Content from External Source
Although it's not banned in the US, the FDA has urged bakers to voluntarily stop using it since 1991.
His 15 kg of bread dough gives the 1-to-1 human equivalent for the LOAEL observed in rats. But such a calculation is never used in toxicology. LOAEL and NOAEL in animals are used (when no better data is available) to determine the acceptable daily intake (ADI) for humans. For LOAEL data, the factor most often applied is 1/1000 (1/10 because you start with an adverse effects level, 1/10 for uncertainties due to the animal model, 1/10 for individual differences). So a more sensible calculation is the acceptable daily intake for uncooked bread dough containing potassium bromate, which would be 15 g or 0.5 oz.

When a NOAEL-A (the -A means animal) is known (no adverse effects), the usual factor is 1/100.
Some examples of real ADIs:
- Acibenzolar-S-methyl: 12-month chronic oral toxicity study in dogs; based on haematological changes associated with anaemia seen at a LOEL of 5 mg/kg bw/d. ADI set at 1/1000 of LOAEL-A
- Acrolein: 24-month study in rats, mortality and serum biochemical effects NOAEL-A of 0.05 based upon next highest dose of 0.5 mg/kg bw/d. ADI set at 1/100 of NOAEL-A
- Abamectin: 3-week rabbit developmental study; NOAEL-A of 0.5 based on teratogenicity at the next highest dose of 1 mg/kg bw/d. ADI set at 1/1000 of NOAEL-A because foetus abnormalities may represent acute toxic effect

Bovine growth hormone (BGH) is given to dairy cattle to increase milk production. OK, so what about drinking milk? Here you go: for one, BGH levels in the milk of treated cows are not higher than in untreated ones. Secondly, BGH is not active as a growth hormone in humans - it's selective for the cow receptor, not the human one. The controversy in this area comes from the way that growth hormone treatment in cows tends to increase levels of another hormone, IGF-1, in the milk.
Content from External Source
In fact, the use is banned in Canada and the EU on the basis of the health and welfare of the animals, not the consumers.

Finally, I want to return to something I was saying way back at the beginning of this piece. The author of the BuzzFeed article knows painfully little about chemistry and biology. But that apparently wasn't a barrier: righteous conviction (and the worldview mentioned in the above three paragraphs) are enough, right? Wrong. Ten minutes of unbiased reading would have served to poke holes all through most of the article's main points. I've spent more than ten minutes (as you can probably tell), and there's hardly one stone left standing on another. As a scientist, I find sloppiness at this level not only stupid, not only time-wasting, but downright offensive. Couldn't anyone be bothered to look anything up? There are facts in this world, you know. Learn a few.
Content from External Source
The problem is, you could argue for increasing most ADIs with a factor 10 or 100 using the same arguments, or ridicule all the health scares and import bans we've seen the last decade, like imports from China that exceed the limits for pesticides, lead, diethylene glycol, formaldehyde.

In a recent case, the F.D.A. said "diethylene glycol in any amount was not suitable for use in toothpaste." Then why do they allow up to 0.2% DEG as impurity of polyethylene glycol when the latter is used in toothpaste, or as a food additive?

When DEG was found in European wine, some with levels below 10 ppm that could not be detected by laboratory analysis in Europe, new equipment was installed, and the wine was destroyed. Why not set an ADI of 10 ppm instead? People have been drinking it for years, without any evidence of toxic effects at that level.

Why was the ADI for aspartame set at 50 mg/kg when it's hydrolyzed into methanol (11% by weigth), and the ADI for methanol was already set at 0.5 mg/kg, not 5.5 mg/kg? Are we really to believe that the value of 50 mg/kg/day came purely from toxicology studies, and it's just a happy coincidence that at that ADI it can be used effectively in all foods without exceeding that limit? Or that the result would have been the same if aspartame was 10 times sweeter? I think the ADI would likely have been 5 mg/kg in that case, but maybe that's just me.

Most people would assume that "safe" limits are decided on basis of toxicity alone, and little is done to dispel that myth. The risks, economic benefits and considerations like the health benefits of replacing sugar with a low calorie substitute all play a role (although these usually aren't mentioned). But the public is only told that "studies have shown it to be safe". Only considering the health risks would be a stupid way to decide such issues, but it's hard to explain all the considerations and the factors that influence a decision, and it would provide ammunition to the opposing side. As a result you get two camps, one thinking we're being poisoned by the government, the other using flawed comparisons and faulty reasoning to defend decisions that can't be justified with only a simple risk assessment.
None of your arguments seem to actually show where the author's arguments and conclusions are wrong.
 
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