A friend sent me a piece about tainted supplements in the United States, and one paragraph grabbed my attention.
The New York Times said, “In recent years, a vast majority of supplement suppliers have located overseas—principally in China. Nearly all of the vitamin C and many other supplements consumed in the United States are made from ingredients made in Chinese plants. Those plants are almost never inspected by the FDA because the agency is not required to do so, has little money to do so and does not view the plants as particularly risky.”
China has an agency that is similar to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) called the China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) founded in 2003 as part of an effort in China to improve food safety. Today, there are about ten government departments and ministries under the State Council responsible for food safety in China.
Although China’s CFDA is relatively new compared to America’s FDA (est. 1906), China appears to be taking food safety seriously compared to weaknesses discovered in America’s FDA.
Evidence that China is serious about food safety appeared on July 10, 2007, when Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of the CFDA was executed by lethal injection for taking bribes from various firms in exchange for state licenses related to product safety. When has the United States sent a corrupt FDA or corporate official to prison let alone executed someone convicted of corruption?
Until the 1906 Food and Drug Act, America did not have an FDA (FDA Early History), and recently the Union of Concerned Scientists revealed that hundreds of agency scientists had been pressured to approve drugs despite reservations about safety.
For instance, WashingtonBlog.com reported that in the U.S. Giant Food Corporations Work Hand-In-Glove With Corrupt Government Agencies to Dish Up Cheap, Unhealthy Food. “Multinational food, drink and alcohol companies are using strategies similar to those employed by the tobacco industry to undermine public health policies, health experts said on Tuesday.”
Then there was the New Harvard Study that revealed how we cannot trust the FDA with public safety. The study points out how the FDA, which supposedly must be in charge of public health and safety, is nothing more than a puppet for giant pharmaceutical and drug companies.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Honorable Mentions in General Fiction
2012 San Francisco Book Festival
2012 New York Book Festival
2012 London Book Festival
2009 Los Angeles Book Festival
2009 Hollywood Book Festival
Finalist in Fiction & Literature – Historical Fiction
The National “Best Books 2010” Awards
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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
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