A former top EPA official now with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is vowing to strengthen his agency’s regulation of chemicals in food, warning that failure to act at the federal level could give rise to a patchwork as citizens and state legislators have sought limits on several toxic chemicals -- particularly those EPA is targeting under TSCA.
Jim Jones, who previously led EPA’s chemicals office during the Obama administration and now serves as FDA’s first-ever deputy commissioner for human foods, described his plans for food-chemical policy during June 4 remarks to the Institute for the Advancement of Food and Nutrition Sciences’ annual summer science symposium in Washington, D.C.
“Food safety is not only protecting food from contaminants, but also ensuring that the chemicals that have been authorized for use in and with foods continue to be safe,” Jones said, according to prepared remarks provided by FDA.
“We can see that Americans expect the FDA to be doing more in this area, both in bills introduced and passed, there is significant movement to ban certain food additives and to establish limits of environmental contaminants in foods. But a strong national food safety system is not built state by state. Clearly, having states issue these types of bans, while within their rights under our current regulatory system, is not ideal.”
In recent months, environmental and health groups have sought new restrictions on several toxic chemicals in food, repeatedly citing EPA’s Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) reviews to support their claims.
Perhaps most prominently, several environmental groups petitioned FDA in 2023 to revoke past approvals of four chemicals in food, including three that EPA has designated as “high priority” for evaluation and regulation under TSCA -- ethylene dichloride, methylene chloride and trichloroethylene (TCE) -- as well as benzene, which EPA last year identified as a possible candidate for the prioritization process.
The petition extensively cites EPA’s TSCA findings and regulatory proposals in support of their call for FDA to ban all three high-priority chemicals as both food additives and coloring agents, and benzene as a food additive.
FDA has not formally acted on their petition, and as of press time an FDA spokesperson had not responded to a request for comment on the status of its decision. statutory provision the groups invoked gives FDA up to 180 days to act on regulatory petitions, meaning the deadline expired in May, but an attorney for the petitioners said they have received no response from the agency.
Meanwhile, at the state level, a bill before the California legislature would require the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment to “study the health impacts of the consumption of methylene chloride,” which is used to decaffeinate coffee, and “update its no significant risk level and its maximum allowable level of methylene chloride by January 1, 2026.”
That is a step back from the original February version, of the bill, AB 2066, which sought to ban methylene chloride for decaffeination altogether.
‘Confusing For Customers’
Jones did not specifically reference that bill or any other state measure on food chemicals in his remarks, but his argument for avoiding patchwork regulations echoed the debate over state and local regulations on industrial chemicals controlled by TSCA that ultimately helped drive the 2016 reform of that law.
“States play a crucial role as our partners in regulating the food supply and coordinating our efforts is integral to our success. But the FDA must lead the way on food chemical safety,” Jones said. “Not only because it is confusing for consumers for there to be different standards and impractical for industry, but because the determination of safety should be based entirely on science, and not on where you live in the U.S. This is one of the reasons we have prioritized enhancing food chemical safety as part of our new Human Foods Program.”
He touted FDA’s release of a list of chemicals under the program’s review and its creation of a group of five staffers “dedicated to post-market reassessment” which he said are part of the food office’s “re-energized approach to enhancing food chemical safety.” Jones added that the reassessment group is slated to become a new office as part of the reorganization.
The list does not include any of the four chemicals environmental groups targeted in their 2023 petition.
Jones also noted plans to launch in the coming year a pair of “science-based consumer education campaigns to address public concern that we are not doing enough to protect children from chemicals that occur in foods,” one of which he said “will provide information on chemicals used during food production, processing, and in food packaging, and how we regulate intentionally added chemicals in the food supply.”
Speaking more broadly about the planned reorganization of FDA’s Food Program, Jones said the changes are set to take effect on Oct. 1 after they were approved by Congress. “[W]e are strengthening our risk management approach across our programs and have identified three key priorities for the foods program,” he said, one of which is “enhancing food chemical safety.”
Jones said the three “priorities will be advanced through three new risk management offices, our Office of Microbiological Food Safety, our Office of Food Chemical Safety, Dietary Supplements, and Innovation, and our Nutrition Center of Excellence.
“As risk signals and trends across the food system are identified, these offices will coordinate with other offices in the program to develop strategies to manage risks, implement actions in alignment with the priorities of the program, and measure the impact of initiated mitigation and response activities,” Jones said. “We are, of course, doing a lot of this already. But what we have lacked is a consistent, systematic, and intentional risk management approach with clear overarching strategic goals and priorities.”
He added that the changes are needed in part because of the program’s broad scope and limited resources -- which also parallels an ongoing problem for EPA’s TSCA program.
“With the extraordinary scope of work for the foods program and limited resources, these changes are needed for us to focus on those issues that represent the greatest risk to public health and where intervention has the greatest opportunity for prevention of disease and illness,” he said.
Jones, who was an early proponent of using new alternate methods (NAMs) of chemical testing for regulatory purposes during his tenure at EPA, nodded to such approaches as a way to advance FDA risk analyses in his June 4 remarks.
Such tools, which have emerged as alternatives to live-animal testing for some chemicals and effects, have the promise of vastly reducing the time and cost of toxicology reviews, though confidence in the tools and regulators’ understanding of how to use the information in risk analyses remain hurdles to their use in rules.
“Leveraging modern computational, analytical, toxicology and research methods and tools will further improve our oversight of chemicals in food. We are evaluating how to better incorporate modern methods and tools into our safety assessments,” Jones said.
“Modern methods and tools can also help the FDA prioritize our post-market safety review efforts in a science-based, more systematic way that will focus on the chemicals that present the greatest public health concerns.” -- Maria Hegstad (mhegstad@iwpnews.com)
