For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Health Issues page, Appetite for a Change page.

The “Food Safety Accountability Act” — which was introduced last year by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), but died not long after due to significant opposition from the natural health community — has been resurrected this year as bill S. 216.

This new bill, which is slightly less of a threat to the natural food and supplement industries than its predecessor, still contains dangerously vague language that may easily be misused by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to target and threaten the natural health community. Your help is needed to help get the bill amended or killed altogether.

The original bill, which was introduced last year as S. 3767, upped the penalty for “misbranding” or “adulterating” foods and supplements from a one-year maximum prison sentence to ten years. The major problem with this, however, is that “adulterated” and “misbranded” are two terms that the FDA has already manipulated and used to target various food and supplement companies that are selling safe, honestly-labeled products. Because of the vague wording in the bill, the FDA could have illegitimately used it to target practically any company it wanted to.