Food safety scientists have ties to Big Tobacco

Chris Young

Updated 15 April 2015 at 5:00 am

Joseph Borzelleca has been evaluating the safety of food additives longer than pretty much anyone else in the business. The 84-year-old toxicologist, who credits his career to Italian parents who taught him to love food, has helped companies bring hundreds of new ingredients to market.

“Food to me was always very important,” said Borzelleca, a long-time professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has been reviewing the safety of food additives since the 1960s. “I had an interest in food, not just from a nutritional perspective but from a historical and safety” perspective.

Related: Phillip Morris contract

A Center for Public Integrity analysis of publicly available data found that Borzelleca is the most active of a small group of scientists — including several with ties to Big Tobacco — that the food industry turns to over and over again to determine whether additives can be deemed “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, and avoid a rigorous pre-market government safety review.

Of the 379 panels convened to review the safety of new ingredients in the last 17 years, the Center for Public Integrity found, three-quarters included at least one of these 10 scientists. But none has even come close to serving on as many as Borzelleca, who has appeared on 41 percent of them.

Despite his decades of experience and praise heaped upon him by colleagues — one called him a “wonder” — critics of the GRAS system say Borzelleca is emblematic of a system that is rife with conflicts of interest. If scientists depend on the food industry for income, they may be less likely to contest the safety of ingredients companies hope to market, critics say.

“These are standing panels of industry hired guns,” said Laura MacCleery, an attorney for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “It is funding bias on steroids.”

Related: The 'GRAS' process, explained

Borzelleca and many of his colleagues who work with the food industry have done similar work for another well-known industry: Big Tobacco.

The Center for Public Integrity found that at least four of the top 10 GRAS panel experts, including Borzelleca, had also served as scientific consultants for cigarette makers.

Related: Gras impartial

Final word

The expert panels that review a new food additive to determine if it’s “generally recognized as safe” have great power because they can have the final word on that ingredient and its use. Once the group deems a new additive GRAS, it can go into an array of foods that end up on supermarket shelves, with no notice to or review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

That gives food companies an incentive to turn to experts they believe will look kindly upon their ingredients, and gives scientists incentive to do so, critics say.

“If I know that my paycheck is coming from a specific source, and I’ve been doing that for years and years, and that is what feeds me and my family, it becomes really difficult for me to be totally independent of the hand that is feeding me,” said Erik Olson, senior strategic director for health and food at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

There’s more to this story. Click here to read the rest at the Center for Public Integrity.

This story is part of The Misinformation Industry. Illuminating the sometimes-misleading methods used by special interest groups to gain support for their agendas. Click here to read more stories in this blog.

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