A Broken Promise of Food and Drug Safety
Most Americans believe the FDA exists to keep them safe. The reality is stark: over 7,000 unique chemicals circulate in our food, packaging, drugs, and personal care products, and the majority have never been meaningfully reviewed for long-term safety.(1)
Instead of acting as a watchdog, the FDA functions as a filing cabinet for industry submissions, relying on the ‘Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS)’ loophole. Companies can self-certify their own ingredients as safe, bypassing independent oversight. Of nearly 4,000 substances in the FDA’s food database, about 3,670 were never actively reviewed by the agency.
The Cost of Industry Capture
Lobbying has tilted the playing field. Since 1998, food and pharma interests have spent nearly $8 billion lobbying against stronger oversight. Efforts to close the GRAS loophole or restrict hazardous substances have been blocked for decades. Even the EPA’s endocrine disruptor program, launched in 2009, has not removed a single chemical from U.S. products.
This isn’t about a few questionable additives — it is systemic. Americans are routinely exposed to thousands of inadequately tested substances across food, packaging, drugs, and cosmetics. (2)
Case Study: A Cancer Rebel’s Perspective
They told me I had “an inoperable, incurable brain cancer.” But ‘incurable’ didn’t mean there was no cause — it meant the guidelines didn’t have a drug for it.” In Medical Guidelines: A Cancer Rebel’s Perspective (3), I describe how standard medical guidelines reduced my disease to a genetic fluke and a drug protocol. The root causes — years of unresolved dental infections and chronic inflammation — were dismissed with the words: “We don’t do teeth.”
This reflects the drug-first trap. Guidelines are written by panels intertwined with industry, incentivized to define “cure” as a prescription rather than prevention. Patients are steered toward toxic treatments and away from investigating underlying infections, environmental exposures, or chemical triggers.
My story is not unique. It is a lived example of how the FDA’s toxic web and the healthcare system’s perverse incentives combine to ignore causes, enforce compliance, and profit from endless treatment.
A Healthcare System That Ignores Root Causes
The problem doesn’t stop with chemicals. In medicine, ‘cure’ is defined almost exclusively as a drug. Since the Orphan Drug Act (1983), billions have flowed into drug pipelines, while root causes like chronic infections, inflammation, endocrine disruptors, and diet-driven dysfunction are dismissed as irrelevant.
Insurance and provider lobbying reinforce this drug-first system. Insurers decide what gets covered — often excluding critical tests that could reveal root causes — while providers are incentivized to treat symptoms, not prevent disease. Patients seeking answers about environmental or infectious causes are too often ignored or told “that’s not covered.”
The System Is Working—For Them
This isn’t a broken system. It’s a system working exactly as designed:
– For industry: endless new drugs, market exclusivity, and record profits.
– For regulators and policymakers: fees, royalties, patents, and revolving-door jobs.
– For insurers and providers: coverage restrictions that block root-cause testing, feeding patients back into the drug/procedure pipeline.
– For the public: exposure to thousands of inadequately reviewed chemicals, resulting in chronic health issues — obesity, infertility, diabetes, cancer — while being left uninformed about the true risks.
What Real Reform Looks Like
To protect public health, the FDA and policymakers must:
1. End the GRAS self-affirmation loophole — require independent FDA review of all additives.
2. Consolidate oversight — unify food, drug, and cosmetic regulation under a single accountable body.
3. Restrict lobbying influence across the entire healthcare system — not just food and pharma, but also insurers and provider networks whose lobbying skews coverage decisions and testing.
4. Ban financial conflicts of interest — policymakers and regulators cannot participate in profits, royalties, or patents tied to the industries they oversee.
5. Build a transparent public database of all chemicals in food, drugs, and cosmetics with plain-language safety summaries.
6. Re-center healthcare on root causes — covering and encouraging tests that detect infections, inflammation, endocrine disruption, and environmental exposures rather than defaulting to drugs.
Until Then
Americans must act as their own watchdogs — reading labels, scanning products with independent tools like Yuka, and demanding accountability. They need to be fully informed and must make the choice to stop consuming the poisons that regulators have failed to remove from the market.
(1) THE TOXIC WEB
(2) NO CAUSE NO CURE
(3) NAVIGATING MEDICAL GUIDELINES – A CANCER REBELS PERSPECTIVE
Linda Wulf
My journey with CNS lymphoma not only shaped my perspective on health but ignited a mission to uncover and educate about the myriad chemicals we encounter every day.
