What the Science Says About Food Additives
By By Charles Schmidt
(This feature was originally published on Undark.org on April 21, 2025)
In a video posted to YouTube in September, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took aim at US health agencies that he said have allowed for the mass poisoning of American children. Standing behind packages of Cheez-Its, Doritos, and Cap’n Crunch cereal displayed on a kitchen counter, the future head of the Department of Health and Human Services warned that chronic disease rates in the United States have soared. “How in the world did this happen?” Kennedy asked. Many of our chronic ailments, he asserted, can be blamed on chemical additives in processed foods. “If we took all these chemicals out,” he said, “our nation would get healthier immediately.”
During his Senate confirmation hearings in January, Kennedy singled out a Food and Drug Administration standard by which companies can introduce new additives to foods without notifying regulators or the public. The standard, called “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, was adopted in 1958 and geared initially towards benign substances such as vinegar and baking powder. However, most of the chemical additives introduced in recent decades passed through the so-called GRAS loophole: The FDA requires manufacturers to affirm GRAS additives are safe, but the companies don’t have to release the data, and they are in effect self-regulating. In 2013, the Pew Charitable Trusts estimated that more than 10,000 additives were in processed foods and that 3,000 of them had never been reviewed by the FDA. Out of that group, Pew estimated that 1,000 were self-affirmed as GRAS by additive manufacturers.
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