Regulating Carcinogens in Food: A Legislator\u27s Guide to the Food Safety Provisions of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act

On March 9, 1977, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that a study in laboratory rats conducted by the Canadian government confirmed that saccharin is an animal carcinogen. For this reason, the agency stated, the sweetener must be banned from human food. The studies which Congress mandated, to be accompanied by the recommendations of the Secretary of HEW, are likely to generate a fundamental reexamination of the nation\u27s current food safety policies. This Article attempts to aid this inquiry by explaining the requirements of the present law. The Article describes the several statutory provisions that govern the regulation of food constituents and analyzes the FDA\u27s implementation of them. Its primary objective is to provide a common starting place for discussion of the contours of future policy. A subsequent article will examine in detail various approaches to regulating risks posed by food and recommend specific reforms of the present law

Reducing Diet-Induced Cancer Through Federal Regulation: Opportunities and Obstacles

For more than a decade, federal health regulatory agencies have devoted major attention to controlling human exposure to substances believed capable of causing cancer. These efforts have evoked a broad spectrum of criticism; government has been accused of both indolence in the face of an incipient epidemic\u27 and reckless distortion of science to support restrictions on substances that present only trivial risks. A central object of regulatory concern has been the safety of the food supply. At least since the 1958 Food Additives Amendment to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act),\u27with its famous Delaney Clause, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has sought, with mixed success, to identify food constituents that pose cancer risks and to eliminate them from food. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is responsible for setting permissible pesticide levels in food, has displayed similar concern for the elimination of carcinogenic residues in foods that comprise important parts of the American diet. I do not propose here to evaluate the success of the FDA\u27s and the EPA\u27s efforts to prevent the addition of hazardous chemicals to the food supply. While that is certainly an important issue, this Article explores the potentially greater challenges to regulation presented by recent assessments suggesting highly significant associations be-tween traditional foods and cancer incidence. This Article does not identify all the relevant issues or exhaust analysis of those it does address; the objective is to sketch the broad contours of future debate

FDA\u27s Implementation of the Delaney Clause: Repudiation of Congressional Choice or Reasoned Adaptation to Scientific Progress?

The Delaney Clause, the most famous federal health statute, bars Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of any carcinogenic food additive. In an era when scholars and politicians are again voicing concern about the propensity of legislatures to delegate broad power to administrators, the Delaney Clause is an exceptional illustration of Congress\u27s capacity to enact specific laws. The Clause seems to express the unequivocal judgment that consumers should not be exposed to food ingredients shown to cause cancer, regardless of the benefits the ingredients might provide or the magnitude of the risk that they might present. Like many extreme policies, the Delaney Clause has proved increasingly difficult to administer

Reconnection-Driven Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence in a Simulated Coronal-Hole Jet

Extreme-ultraviolet and X-ray jets occur frequently in magnetically open coronal holes on the Sun, especially at high solar latitudes. Some of these jets are observed by white-light coronagraphs as they propagate through the outer corona toward the inner heliosphere, and it has been proposed that they give rise to microstreams and torsional Alfven waves detected in situ in the solar wind. To predict and understand the signatures of coronal-hole jets, we have performed a detailed statistical analysis of such a jet simulated with an adaptively refined magnetohydrodynamics model. The results confirm the generation and persistence of three-dimensional, reconnection-driven magnetic turbulence in the simulation. We calculate the spatial correlations of magnetic fluctuations within the jet and find that they agree best with the Meuller - Biskamp scaling model including intermittent current sheets of various sizes coupled via hydrodynamic turbulent cascade. The anisotropy of the magnetic fluctuations and the spatial orientation of the current sheets are consistent with an ensemble of nonlinear Alfven waves. These properties also reflect the overall collimated jet structure imposed by the geometry of the reconnecting magnetic field. A comparison with Ulysses observations shows that turbulence in the jet wake is in quantitative agreement with that in the fast solar wind