Fan Forum - View Single Post - Should Food Be Better Labelled for Allergies?

**sunnykerr** · 08-25-2008, 04:57 PM

FDA to consider rules for food allergy warnings

WASHINGTON (AP) -- It's one of the biggest frustrations of life with food allergies: That hodgepodge of warnings that a food might accidentally contain the wrong ingredient.

The warnings are voluntary -- meaning there's no way to know whether foods that don't bear them really should. And they're vague: Is "may contain traces of peanuts" more reliable than "made in the same factory as peanuts?"

Now health officials in the U.S. and Canada are debating setting standards, amid increasing concern that consumers are so confused they're starting to ignore the warnings.

"Really, the safest thing you can do is make all your food at home from scratch, period," says Margaret Sova McCabe of Sanbornton, New Hampshire, whose son Tommie, almost 8, is allergic to peanuts, dairy, wheat and five other ingredients.

But she doesn't find that practical -- and repeatedly has spotted longtime favorite "safe" foods suddenly bearing new warnings that accidental contamination is possible after all.

(...)

"Advisory labeling may not be protecting the health of allergic consumers," the FDA acknowledged.

(...)

About 12 million Americans have food allergies. Severe ones trigger 30,000 annual emergency-room visits, and 150 to 200 deaths a year.

Starting in 2006, a U.S. law required that foods disclose in plain language when they intentionally contain highly allergenic ingredients such as peanuts or dairy.

Left out of the law are accidental-allergy warnings -- for foods that might become contaminated because they were made in the same factory, or on the same machines, as allergen-containing products. The FDA has said that a quarter of inspected food factories have the potential for such a mix-up.

More and more foods bear precautionary labels, but there's a disconnect. The Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network, an influential consumer group, counts at least 30 different ways that the warnings are worded -- and consumers too often falsely assume that one food is riskier than another because its label sounds scarier.

Three-quarters of parents of food-allergic children surveyed by the group in 2006 said they would never buy a food with an accidental-allergy warning, down from 85 percent in 2003, when such labels were novel.

The FDA's own surveys found the allergic pay more attention to warnings that a food "may contain" an allergen than those "made in the same factory" labels.

Yet when University of Nebraska researchers tested nearly 200 products with various accidental-peanut warnings, they found that peanuts were more likely to have sneaked into products labeled "made in the same facility."

And Health Canada researchers recently discovered that some chocolate labeled as possibly containing "traces" of peanuts or tree nuts in fact contained up to six times the amount that the government considers a trace level.

FDA to consider rules for food allergy warnings - CNN.com

I have no idea how they're gonna go about this, but it would be such a relief. I have an allergy to all nuts. It's severe enough that I have to keep it in mind, but not severe enough to cause serious damage if I accidentally come in contact with nuts.

I've been denied desert several times at restaurants because of those stupid "may contain traces of" signs. I know, I know, not the more dire of treatments by any stretch, but I always figure it's a silly warning because I've never had a bad reaction at all. I've always thought of the warning in the same vein as I think of the warning in microwave oven manuals to not put your cat in there: Just taking unneccessary precautions so as to avoid civil actions.

If they were to make it more reliable as opposed to just something that was slapped on any given product, I think I'd follow it more closely.

What do you all think? Do we need yet more labelling on our food? Will this help at all?