Saudi Arabia authorities have reportedly prohibited the sale of energy drinks at all government, education, sports, and health facilities and outlawed all forms of advertising, including the sponsorship of any sporting, social or cultural events by energy drink companies. Expected to significantly affect what industry experts cite as one of the world’s top 10 markets for energy drinks, the action follows a recent Interior Ministry study highlighting the purported “adverse effects of energy drinks.” The ban on advertisements and promotions includes all print, audio and visual media, and the new regulations will require companies to put health warning labels on energy drink products. See Alarabiya.net, March 5, 2014.
Posts By Shook, Hardy & Bacon L.L.P.
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has updated its analysis of the occurrence of arsenic in food in Europe, setting lower estimates of dietary exposure to inorganic arsenic than the agency reported in 2009. The analysis includes nearly 3,000 data samples of inorganic arsenic, evidently more toxic than organic compounds, and EFSA reports that the estimates’ accuracy has improved due to new consumption and occurrence data and a more detailed classification of foods. Arsenic, which has been linked to health problems such as skin lesions, cardiovascular disease and some forms of cancer, is a widely found contaminant that occurs both naturally and as a result of human activity. It appears in various forms, which can be either organic—containing carbon—or inorganic. Food, particularly grain-based processed products, such as wheat bread, rice, milk, dairy products, and drinking water are the main sources of exposure for the general European population. Although the European…
The World Health Organization (WHO) has launched a public consultation on its draft guidance for sugar intake that aims to help countries limit sugar consumption and address public health issues such as obesity and tooth decay. The action follows increasing concern that consumption of free sugars, particularly in the form of sugar-sweetened beverages, “may result in both reduced intake of foods containing more nutritionally adequate calories and an increase in total caloric intake, leading to an unhealthy diet, weight gain and increased risk of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs).” The organization also cites concern about the role free sugars play in the development of dental disease, noting that they are the most prevalent NCDs globally despite the treatment and prevention improvements of the last decade. WHO estimates that the cost to treat dental disease—5 to 10 percent of the health budgets in many industrialized countries—would exceed the financial resources available for all…
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has reopened the comment period on its draft industry guidance titled “Ingredients Declared as Evaporated Cane Juice” on food labels. First published for comments in October 2009, the draft guidance advises industry of “FDA’s view that the common or usual name for the solid or dried form of sugar cane syrup is ‘dried cane syrup,’ and that sweeteners derived from sugar cane syrup should not be declared on food labels as ‘evaporated cane juice’ because that term falsely suggests the sweeteners are juice,” and they are not “juice” as defined in federal regulations, 21 C.F.R. 120.1(a). FDA seeks “additional data and information to better understand the basic nature and characterizing properties of the ingredient, the methods of producing it, and the differences between this ingredient and other sweeteners.” Among the specific questions the agency has raised are (i) “How is ‘evaporated cane juice’…
A recent study funded by the National Toxicology Program and conducted by researchers with the Food and Drug Administration’s National Center for Toxicological Research has reportedly found no evidence linking low doses of bisphenol A (BPA) to adverse estrogenic effects in an animal model. K. Barry Delclos, et al., “Toxicity Evaluation of Bisphenol A Administered by Gavage to Sprague Dawley Rats From Gestation Day 6 Through Postnatal Day 90,” Toxicological Sciences, February 2014. To examine the effects of BPA on Sprague Dawley rats shown to be sensitive to estrogenic compounds, scientists administered the substance to rat dams from the sixth day of gestation through labor and to their pups from the first day after birth through postnatal day 90. These rats received either a low dose of BPA (2.5-2700 µg/kg bw/day) or a high dose (100,000 and 300,000 µg/kg bw/day), with the lower dose reportedly corresponding to approximately 70,000 times the…
A new study has concluded that advanced glycation endproducts (AGEs), which occur in heat-processed meat and animal products, can cause brain changes similar to those found in Alzheimer’s disease or metabolic syndrome, a pre-diabetic state. Weijing Cai, et al., “Oral glycotoxins are a modifiable cause of dementia and the metabolic syndrome in mice and humans,” PNAS, February 2014. Led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the study reportedly used a mouse model to show that consuming AGE-rich foods “raised the body’s level of AGEs, which, among other effects, suppressed levels of sirtuin, or SIRT1, a key ‘host defense’ shown to protect against Alzheimer’s disease as well as metabolic syndrome.” The study’s authors noted that mice fed a high-AGE diet not only exhibited high levels of AGE in their brains and low levels of SIRT1 in their blood and brain tissue, but also developed cognitive and…
Johns Hopkins Public Health, a magazine of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, has devoted a special issue to food topics and includes an article about Health Policy and Management Professor Stephen Teret, who founded the Johns Hopkins Clinic for Public Health Law and Policy and recently engaged law students in a project addressing caffeinated foods. His students reportedly explained to U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Deputy Commissioner for Food Policy Michael Taylor that the agency should be focusing on this issue. While Teret was apparently not concerned initially about any purported health effects of caffeine, he suspected that consumers might eat more waffles than normal if they started “feeling really good from the waffles because of the caffeine.” In this regard, he said, “It’s the sugar for some of these products or the salt or the fat that will ultimately give you health problems, not the caffeine, but,…
George Washington University Law Professor John Banzhaf, who is known for his anti-tobacco advocacy, contends that recent court rulings involving food company defendants facing consumer-fraud and product-mislabeling allegations have opened “the door even further to a growing wave of such suits.” He argues that class action lawsuits over labeling terms such as “natural” and “all natural” will lead to increased transparency in food advertising and a reduction in obesity. He also claims that The American Lawyer attributed this exploding wave of litigation to “the movement started by Prof. John Banzhaf several years ago to use legal action as a weapon against the problem of obesity, just as he had earlier done in leading the use of legal action as a weapon against smoking.” See John Banzhaf News Release, February 27, 2014. Issue 515
New York Times op-ed writer Mark Bittman, who frequently writes about food-related issues and calls for changes in government policy to address over- or unhealthy-consumption problems, has found an ally in City University of New York School of Public Health Professor Nicholas Freudenberg who has authored a new book titled Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting Public Health. Freudenberg, who serves as faculty director for the New York City Food Policy Center, apparently explains how the food and beverage, tobacco, alcohol, firearms, pharmaceutical, and automotive industries have used the playbook created by “the corporate consumption complex” of corporations, banks, marketers, and others that purportedly promote and benefit from unhealthy lifestyles. Freudenberg takes issue with what he perceives as their message that anything restricting rights “to smoke, feed our children junk, carry handguns and so on” is un-American. According to Bittman, Freudenberg’s grouping of these industries “gives us a better…
A three-attorney, Pasadena, California-based law firm has filed numerous 60-day notice letters since March 2013 to companies that make alcoholic beverages, warning that they have failed to comply with a section of the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986 (Prop. 65) by selling without the required warnings (i) “alcoholic beverages, when associated with alcohol abuse,” (ii) “ethyl alcohol in alcoholic beverages,” and (iii) “ethanol in alcoholic beverages.” The letters, filed on behalf of John Bonilla, Rafael Delgado, Jesse Garrett, and Rachel Padilla, assert that the companies have sold their products in the state without first indicating to consumers under “Title 27, CCR § 25603(e)(1): ‘WARNING: Drinking Distilled Spirits, Beer, Coolers, Wine and Other Alcoholic Beverages May Increase Cancer Risk, and, During Pregnancy, Can Cause Birth Defects.’” According to a news source, four individuals have filed Prop. 65 violation lawsuits in the Los Angeles County Superior Court, alleging…
