By Courtney Brein, Linda Golodner Food Safety and Nutrition Fellow

Last week, the National Consumers League and a number of other concerned organizations sent letters to Members of Congress and FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg urging them to follow the United Kingdom’s example and start protecting children from synthetic food dyes. Specifically, the letter to Congress encouraged members to support legislation that would ban the use of dyes in school foods; fund a study by the Institute of Medicine on the broader issue of diet and behavior; and press the FDA to respond to a petition calling for a ban on most dyes.

Despite the FDA’s stance that no evidence exists of a link between consumption of food dyes and hyperactivity in children, a collection of studies carried out over several decades – and, particularly, two sizeable British government-funded studies conducted more recently – demonstrates that the adverse effect of food dyes on some children’s behavior does in fact hold statistical significance. These findings led the British government to request that food manufacturers stop using the dyes implicated in the studies.

As a result, a number of manufacturers removed synthetic food dyes from their products, and companies including McDonald’s, Nestlé, Kraft, Mars, Haribou, and Kellogg now all sell products free of these dyes in the United Kingdom. The versions of the very same products that these companies sell in the United States, however, still contain artificial dyes. For example, the Fanta orange soda sold in Britain gains its color from carrot and pumpkin extract, while the version sold in the United States gets its orange hue from synthetic dye.

The actions of these manufacturers demonstrate that removing synthetic food dyes from the food supply is, in fact, possible but will not occur without government pressure. Starting this July, the European Union will require companies to put a warning label about the link between synthetic food dyes and impaired behavior in children on most products containing these dyes, a measure which will likely encourage companies to reformulate their products, much in the way that requirements about disclosing trans fat on nutrition facts panels led to widespread product reformulation in the United States.

It is the hope of the National Consumers League, as well as of our fellow advocates, that the United States will become the next country to recognize the deleterious effects that synthetic dyes can pose for our children and take measures to begin to remove them from the food supply.

By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

At a conference last week I heard the co-founder of 23andMe speak about using her company’s technology to look at our DNA to predict the risk of getting a number of diseases. Anne Wojcicki described how her husband’s DNA showed he had a gene that makes him a likely candidate for Parkinsons disease. She didn’t mention her husband by name, but he happens to be Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google.

The 23andMe kit gives consumers the chance to deposit their saliva into a vial, send it to the company, and receive a comprehensive report that can predict the likelihood of getting 12 different diseases, of having adverse responses to nine drugs, and test whether they happen to be a carrier for 21 different diseases.

I find the description of what 23andMe can do both thrilling and intimidating. Thrilling because you can look into your future. Intimidating because do you really want to?

Interestingly, a New York Times article about these gene decoding services suggests that consumers are slow to pick them up. Some of the companies – the Times listed four that are in the biz – have laid off staff and are not seeing their customer base grow in substantially. DeCodeMe, for example, has 10,000 customers and Navigenics has about 20,000, 5,000 of whom were given discounts to be in a study.

This is understandable. What if you find out you show signs you’re likely to end up with a certain disease, and your insurance company claims this was a “preexisting condition” and denies you coverage in the future? I spoke with Anne Wojcicki about that and other privacy concerns. 23andMe consulted the electronic privacy group, Electronic Frontier Foundation to review privacy issues when designing the technology, she said.

The technology is evolving, and the product makers are evolving with it. And the companies have been doing some useful work, like comparing those who suffered miserably with swine flu to those who did not, with the possibility of discovering some useful information that a drug company can use to design its vaccines. Still, using the study of genomes to gauge health care risks is really a brave new world for most consumers and one that may never catch on. Only time will tell.

By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

I heard a lot of inspiring speeches yesterday at the annual meeting of Pharma companies. Congressman Butterfield from North Carolina talked about his district, which is one of the five poorest in the United States, where health care is unavailable to many of his constituents. He supports the health care reform bill that is likely to pass shortly in the House and Senate. The Governor of West Virginia, Joe Manchin III, spoke as well, talking about the new comprehensive program they’ve launched in that very poor state. The governor says it will cover anyone “who goes to work every day.” The governor pointed out that while the poor can get health care (not always), older Americans have access to Medicare, babies and children have S-CHIP, but everyone in between can’t get coverage, and many workers are too poor to pay health care premiums and get coverage. He talked about the importance of covering dental care, which is a window to good health overall. Good dental health can prevent a lot of dental and other diseases down the road.

Parents of children with rare diseases spoke, and their accounts were heartbreaking. One couple had lost their 24-year-old son recently; another is fighting to save their 13-year-old who suffers from a disease that ages children prematurely. I admired their bravery, their strength, their commitment to trying to find a treatment and cure for these diseases, whose results may show up long after the loved one or relative has died.

By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

Remember all those horror stories about passengers stuck in airplanes for hours on end without food, water, or the ability to get off the plane? Infants without food or diapers and adults without medications, but no — the airline, in the worst-case scenarios, wouldn’t let them off the plane. Kate Hanni was one of those passengers, and she turned the experience into a new life’s work: advocating for reforming how airlines treat their customers on board the airplane. Her group, FlyersRights.org, was formed after Kate was stranded with her husband and two children for nine hours on the tarmac in Austin, Texas. Kate vowed to organize other passengers to pass the long-stalled Airline Passengers’ Bill of Rights.

In support of FlyersRights.org and the flying public, this week all the major consumer groups, including NCL, sent a letter of support for an amendment introduced by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) that would set out basic consumer protections that anyone should expect. The amendment would allow passengers the option of getting off delayed planes after three hours on the ground, and it requires airlines to provide adequate food, water, temperature controls, ventilation, and working toilets to accommodate a 3-hour delay.

This is a no-frills bill that offers basic protections to consumers, but those protections could be so much greater — in fact, the news media have been reporting all week about toxins on the fabrics upholstering many airplanes. The chemical that’s been found, Tricresyl phosphate, is a neurotoxin known as “TCP,” which is in engine oil, and its presence means toxic residue has collected on the surface of the cabin from either a prior fume event or from gradual, continual accumulation of toxins. It’s hard to quantify the risk to passengers and, of course, the crew that rides in these planes day in and day out. But that’s a subject for a different blog post. We wish FlyersRights.org good luck in seeing passage of the airline passenger bill of rights and thank Senator Boxer for her leadership on this important consumer issue.

This just in from Capitol Hill:

BOXER, SNOWE RENEW CALL TO PASS AIRLINE PASSENGER BILL OF RIGHTS

Saturday’s Tarmac Stranding of Passengers Flying from Los Angeles to New York Highlights Need for Passenger Protections

Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) urged their Senate colleagues to promptly pass their Airline Passenger Bill of Rights after news that the passengers of Virgin America Flight 404, traveling from LAX to JFK on Saturday, were stranded on a tarmac in Newburgh, New York, for hours on end without adequate food or water.

Senator Boxer said, “It is inexcusable for passengers to be stranded on the tarmac for hours, forced to ration potato chips and given only a half cup of water to drink. This incident is yet another reminder of why we need to pass the common-sense, bipartisan Airline Passenger Bill of Rights, which is on the Senate floor this week. The Department of Transportation has also announced new rules to protect passenger rights that will go into effect next month. We need to make sure these important consumer protections become law.”

Senator Snowe said, “It is absolutely absurd that the passengers of Virgin America Flight 404 were forced to remain on the Newburg tarmac with limited access to food and water for more than four hours. Given this unfortunate incident, which further highlights the obvious decline of customer service for our nation’s traveling public, it is clear there has never been a stronger need to enact a Passenger Bill of Rights. The standards included in the Boxer-Snowe Passenger Bill of Rights are incorporated in the FAA Reauthorization, which is currently being debated in the Senate, and I stand ready to work with my colleagues to ensure our legislation is swiftly enacted into law.”

Senators Boxer and Snowe wrote legislation that would establish an Airline Passengers Bill of Rights – language that is incorporated in the FAA Authorization Bill that is on the Senate floor this week. In December, Department of Transportation Secretary LaHood announced a new DOT rule limiting tarmac delays that includes much of the Airline Passenger Bill of Rights. However, the DOT rule does not give passengers permanent protection because it could be overturned by a future administration.

###