Toxins, aflatoxins, natural toxicants and antinutrients in foods.

To deal effectively with food additives and safety requirements for them, there must be a constructive relationship between the flavor industry and the legislators. But that is not enough. The attitudes of the more vocal members of the community have had a good deal to do with regulatory and legislative principles under which we operate. We are not going to change those principles without changing some of the underlying attitudes. To achieve this, some new perspectives will be necessary.

Most people manage to go for very long times without thinking about natural toxicants. But it may be useful to look at them to see whether they can provide the perspectives for coping with risk in our environment, and specifically in our food supply.

I suspect it shatters some illusions of many people to hear, or worse yet, to understand, that there are “bad things” nature puts in our food. We have abroad the impression that the bad things have been put there purposely or inadvertently by humans and that nature is beautiful. This is a distorted perspective. In order to pursue this we need to settle on some definitions.

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