Janice, You wrote,

"New book: - Does anyone know anything about it?

"Infant Formula: Evaluating the Safety of New Ingredients"
by Institute of Medicine"

I have read some of it but got fed-up and probably won't finish it.  The lead
author (committee chair) of this evaluation is Richard Deckelbaum, MD.  He
has been an invited lecturer to Nestle and edited a book for Nestle, received
grants from the National Dairy Promotion Board, and an unrestricted grant from
Mead Johnson.  Some of the co-authors have similiar connections.  Linda Adair
has had funding from the Nestle Research Foundation (she has also written
research on hiv and breastfeeding in Malawi).  And George L. Baker, well.... he is
the retired medical director and VP of Mead Johnson.  Nothing like giving the
foxes the hen house to guard.

Anyway, I started reading the executive summary and got so mad, I can't
finish it.  The executive summary states that the "GRAS process is rigorous,
flexible, credible and transparent." and "existing GRAS process requires consensus
by qualified experts to evaluate the safety of the ingredients under
consideration, this consensus is often reached through a panel of scientific experts."
The current GRAS process is a notification process not an approval process.
Thus industry notifies the FDA that they believe their food item is safe.  The
studies used to determine GRAS, are the industry studies.  The FDA does not
take the responsiblity of approval, it is just accepting the industries
determination that their product is GRAS.  Thus Martek's oils (DHA and AA) were not "ap
proved" in 1997 because independent studies showed problems.  They are now
GRAS  because the rules of GRAS have changed and the only thing the FDA looked
at where Martek studies.  Yes, the GRAS process is "transparent."  It is
transparent that safety is evaluated by the industry that sells the product.

And I guess what killed my interest in reading further is that these new
novel ingredients (dare we use the word genetically engineered?) are already in
infant formula.  So why are we doing an evaluation after-the-fact?  Babies are
the guinea pigs for the infant formula industry and we accept this situation
because we believe that we absolutely need the infant formula industry.  But who
controls the research that makes us believe that we need this product?  Yeah,
you all know the answer to that question.
Valerie W. McClain, breastfeeding advocate

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