The Supreme Court has ruled that the user of a deleterious product in foods must justify that use. Prof. A. J. Carlson* sees a scientific reason therefor:--
Modern chemistry has opened up another avenue of poisoning the human system through the field of food preservatives and food substitutes. We have the problem of the harmfulness or the harmlessness of the various baking powders, of benzoic acid as a permissible food preservative, of saccharin as a substitute for sugar, etc. Many of the experiments purporting to prove the permissibility or harmlessness of the substance or preservative, even those carried out by competent scientists, seem to me wholly inadequate. I have in mind, as an example, the experiments and finding of the Remsen Consulting Board, on the question of saccharin in foods. Under the direction of this board, composed of leading biochemists and chemists, varying quantities of saccharin were fed to a small number of healthy young men, daily, for periods up to nine months. The board concluded that the daily ingestion of this food substitute below a certain quantity (0.3 gram per day) is without injurious effects; above this saccharin produces injury. This conclusion became guide to federal legislation and regulation. Was the above conclusion warranted by the experiments performed? We think not. All the experiments proved was that the substance (saccharin) when taken by healthy young men over this period did not produce any injury that the commission could detect by the tests used. Society is composed of individuals other than healthy young men, and nine months is a short period in the span of human life. There are many deviations of physiological processes that can not be detected by body weight, food intake, or the chemical examination of the urine. Most of the organs in the body can be injured a great deal before we become actually sick. It would seem a safer principle for governments and society to insist that the burden of proof of harmlessness falls on the manufacturer or the introducer of the new food substitutes rather than on society, and the test of the harmfulness or harmlessness should involve all phyidological processes of man.
*Prof. A. J. Carlson, Science, April 6, 1928, page 358.
