Treating your food with radiation—is it safe?

Nutrition Health Review,  Summer, 2002  

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

How It All Began

The checkered past of food irradiation began nearly 50 years ago in an attempt to send can-packed bacon to troops in Vietnam. As part of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program, irradiation was developed to utilize the "peaceful atom" in a way that "the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life." Other innovations for the peaceful atom included the nuclear powered pacemaker and a nuclear coffee pot, both rendered obsolete as a consequence of new technologies and common sense. Food irradiation, however, would not fall by the wayside.

In 1963, after nearly a decade of research, canned bacon was sent to the soldiers in Vietnam. In 1968, The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) withdrew the regulation that permitted irradiating the meat after it was found that the Army's research was flawed. The FDA cited decreased survival rates, cancer, and reproductive problems among young animals that were fed the irradiated meat. Between 1971 and 1977, the Army contracted Industrial BioTest Ltd. (IBT), a giant among animal testing facilities at the time, to study the long-term effects of irradiated food on animals. The Army found IBT's work deficient two years into the study, but the contractual arrangement was allowed to continue. Several similarly flawed studies were conducted over the next several years, and government scientists eventually rejected their research.

In 1983, three IBT directors were convicted of falsifying chemical and pesticide data for research unrelated to irradiation. Despite IBT's lack of credibility, their results are still used as part of the basis for assurances on food safety today.

In the 1970's, Jack Sivinski and his team of irradiation biologists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) were testing irradiation as a way to sterilize spacecraft to eliminate microbes from Earth that could contaminate Mars. NASA eventually chose a different technique, but Sivinski had an idea: Nuclear waste might possibly be used to irradiate food. At a House Armed Services Committee hearing in 1983, The Department of Energy (DOE) admitted that "the utilization of these radioactive materials simply reduces our waste handling problem." Their proposal was all but defeated when, in 1988, a serious accident at Radiation Sterilizers in Decatur, Georgia, leaked cesium-137 (a water-soluble radioactive isotope) into a water storage pool. The incident cost $47 million to clean up and endangered workers and their families.

FDA's Flawed Studies

Despite their distressing history, irradiated foods are presently available for sale in the United States. The FDA has legalized high-dose radiation treatments for a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, spices, and meat products, despite the fact that their studies fail to meet most modern standards. FDA officials have knowingly sidestepped federal regulations and their own protocols and have allowed radiation to be used on several types of food on the basis of studies that their own experts have labeled deficient.

No significant research has been done on the safety of irradiated products since the FDA began to give its approval to food and nuclear interests. In 1982, FDA officials said that irradiating food with 1 kilogray of radiation was probably safe, but nothing has been done to study the effect of 7 kilograys, an amount it allowed for beef and lamb in 1997.

In 1986, the FDA announced its first major approval using seven key scientific studies. One of the studies had been declared deficient by FDA toxicologists, three were not written in English, and none of them met modern standards. One of the studies, completed in Germany, was called deficient by Marcia van Gemert, Chair of the Irradiated Foods Task Force (IFTG). She later wrote that the German study actually "claimed to show adverse effects of radiated food." Later, the FDA legalized the irradiation of eggs on the basis of a study conducted in 1959.

Unique Radiolytic Products

At a staff seminar held by the FDA in 1967, Jacqueline Verret said, "Since irradiated food and its unknown components will be added to the ever-growing pool of chemicals in the human environment, the possibilities of potentation of toxic effects, already formidable, become even more so." This is thought to be the first mention of the chemicals created by food irradiation.

Unique radiolytic products (URP's) appear after meat has been treated with irradiation and have been shown to cause genetic problems in rats and damage in human cells. URP's do not occur naturally in beef or in any other foods.

In 1977, ten years after Verret's speech and nineteen years after Congress approved the Food Additives Amendment, the first studies of these new chemical compounds began. Scientists at the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology (FASEB) measured concentrations of 65 chemical compounds in irradiated beef. Their findings uncovered five URP's found only in irradiated meat, 35 other chemicals that were not naturally occurring in beef, and a 650 percent increase in the concentration of benzene (a known carcinogen).