My latest column on BusinessWeek.com reports on how the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has come down on small cherry farmers and distributors for claiming that tart cherries can improve your health. I still can’t figure out why the FDA decided to pick on cherry farmers, who tend to be law-abiding Americans, when major corporations like Kellogg’s and Welch’s make major health claims for their products.
One FDA legal expert I spoke with in reporting the column told me his suspicion: because tart cherries really do help improve conditions like arthritis and gout, Big Pharma convinced the agency to go after the farmers, to protect sales of drugs targeted at these conditions. I had no evidence to confirm this, so didn’t mention anything about it in the column. But then I read an article in today’s New York Times summarizing an inquiry by Rep. Henry Waxman of California into the FDA’s enforcement activities, and note that the FDA receives about $380 million a year in fees from pharmaceutical companies…and I began to wonder if perhaps there is something to his claim.
Another thing that strikes me about Rep. Waxman’s inquiry is his finding that the number of warning letters issued by the FDA to food producers, drug companies, device makers, and others, declined by more than half since 2000. While Rep. Waxman is worried about quantity, I worry about quality. The 29 warning letters sent out to the cherry farmers and distributors last year was a big ado about very little, in my estimation. This is our protector of the food chain?
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