Food safety

Regulators are troubled by processes that add caffeine to food, a growing trend over which they currently have little oversight.

The Center for Food Safety on Wednesday named Elizabeth Kucinich as the group’s policy director, a position that places her in the center of key battles over food and beverage regulation.

The wife of two-time presidential hopeful and former Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), Elizabeth Kucinich has years of experience working on food-related and government affairs issues, according to the national nonprofit group.

Her new role comes as the Obama administration is embarking on the biggest overhaul of the nation’s food safety rules in more than 70 years. At the same time, the Food and Drug Administration, the Agriculture Department and Congress are grappling with several food safety issues, from genetically engineered salmon to labels on artificially sweetened milk.

The political arm of the product review magazine Consumer Reports on Tuesday urged lawmakers and federal regulators to take steps to eliminate antibiotic use in healthy animals.

The group, Consumers Union, says the overuse contributes to antibiotic drug-resistant “superbugs” in humans.

“The declining effectiveness of antibiotics has become a national health crisis,” said Ami Gadhia, the nonprofit organization’s senior policy counsel, said in a statement. “Approximately 80 percent of antibiotics sold in the United States are used in livestock production, often times on healthy animals. The use of antibiotics in livestock needs to be curbed so that consumers aren’t threatened by these superbugs that can’t be treated.”

The public will have even longer to give feedback to the Food and Drug Administration about three food safety rules proposed at the beginning of the year.

The Obama administration said the 120-day delay is a result of receiving requests to extend the comment period, which was originally set to end May 16.

All three proposals were released on Jan. 16 as part of the administration’s implementation of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s food safety system that was passed by Congress in 2011.

Produce and other food trade groups say they’re having trouble sifting through all the new regulations, which came out six months after the deadline set by the legislation.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) asked the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ensure that generic painkillers are tamper-proof to prevent abuse.

“I believe more can be done to prevent an influx of generic opiates from coming to market that fail to incorporate technologies to reduce the likelihood of misuse and abuse,” McConnell wrote in a letter to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg on Wednesday.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) urged the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to require security features on generic versions of the addictive painkiller, Oxycodone.

Next month, Oxycodone will lose its patent protection, but the FDA has not required generic drug manufactures to include security measures used in Oxycodone to make it more difficult to abuse the drug through crushing and snorting the medication.

Outbreaks from food-borne pathogens have markedly decreased in the last decade, possibly thanks to tighter food safety measures, advocates said Monday.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) reported that the instance of food-borne illness outbreaks went down more than 40 percent between 2001 and 2010, with the sharpest declines seen among seafood, poultry and beef products.

The group warned that food-borne illnesses remain vastly under-reported and under investigated, however, and that budget cuts will strain an already incomplete system. 

A member of Senate Democratic leadership on Wednesday said he is courting Republican support for a bill that would mandate strict guidelines for energy drinks and dietary supplements.

Energy drinks are marketed as dietary supplements instead of beverages, leading them to be regulated more laxly, Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.) said.

“Go into that gas station and take a look at some of these energy drinks, and then look at the bottle of Gatorade or soda next to it in the case,” Durbin said. “One often regulated as a beverage, the other — the dietary supplement — is not.”

A consumer watchdog is challenging the dairy industry’s push to relax labeling requirements for milk products that contain aspartame and other “hyper-sweeteners” it says are linked to the nation’s childhood obesity epidemic.

New rules dictating what foods can be labeled “gluten free” have arrived at the White House for final review, according to federal records.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been working on the labeling requirements for gluten-free foods since 2005. The regulation has been named “economically significant,” meaning it has an impact on the economy of $100 million or more.

On Monday, the rule headed to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which it will need to pass through before being enacted.