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By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #160: Food and health failures at the Food and Drug Administration

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It’s well established that Washington is MIA in the battle to prevent obesity, with no coordinated strategy to address diet-related conditions. A Government Accountability report released last year documented this in painstaking detail. One agency that’s emblematic of Washington’s absence is the Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA has had a sprawling mission since its founding in 1906, after Upton Sinclair’s novel, “The Jungle,” revealed unsanitary conditions in the meat processing industry. But for many years, the FDA’s primary focus has approving drugs and other therapeutics. (It was the FDA that approved the vaccines for Covid-19.) The emphasis has been so skewed that its officials joke that the “F” is silent in FDA.

That quip appears in a recent Politico article that skillfully documents the FDA’s food failures. A months-long investigation by the article’s author, ace reporter Helene Bottemiller Evich, revealed that “regulating food is simply not a high priority at the agency, where drugs and other medical products dominate, both in budget and bandwidth – a dynamic that’s only been exacerbated during the pandemic.”

Much of the article is focused on food safety – recalls, and the like. But it also showcases other ways in which the agency is doing very little to address the way in which food – particularly ultra-processed food – has become a leading contributor to disease and death in the United States.

In Washington, as in so many other places, funding levels speak volume about priorities. And at the FDA, nutrition funding accounts for just seven percent of the total budget, totaling $23.5 million. The FDA’s director of its Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, Susan Mayne, has pointed out that the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products has a budget nearly 30 times larger, even though tobacco and food are about equal in contributing to chronic diseases.

“Considering the severity of the problem related to diet-related chronic diseases,” says Mayne, “there is no question that we could do more, much more, to move the needle with a more robust program.”

Funding shortfalls can be traced back to Congress, which is, after all, the source of the FDA’s funding. And the intersection of food and health simply isn’t a priority there. The Politico article points out that when a Senate committee held a hearing last year to query FDA nominee Robert Califf, there was only one question about food – and it came from a Wisconsin senator, Tammy Baldwin, who was agitated about companies selling non-dairy products (like almond milk) being permitted to use terms like “milk” and “cheese.”

The FDA’s crackdown on youth vaping, led by former Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, shows what’s possible when the agency’s leadership is committed to tackling a problem. U.S. obesity rates among children and adults that are just about the highest in the world certainly constitute a problem. Will Califf (who was confirmed in February) – or anyone else in the Biden administration – prioritize doing something about obesity and the litany of diseases it unleashes?