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Rweeks asks: "Now, should we write to FDA mandating complete disclosure of all these ingredients on every product with this flavor "(artificial strawberry0 The Food and Drug Administration maintains a list of some 2000 ingredients that are designated Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) The chemicals that was listed for artificial strawberry flavoring are GRAS substances and thus do not have to be listed individually on food labels. For quite a few years the FDA has been reviewing the substances in the GRAS list to ensure that they are indeed safe or if they need to be removed from approval status.. More recently this procedure has been expanded into a food additive database that includes FDA approved additives and GRAS ingredients. This database has been given the designation of EAFUS which stands for (Everything Added to Food in the United States) To access this information use this URL: http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/%7Edms/eafus.html To keep things in perspective, all ingredients that make up what we call food are chemical in nature. Sugar ( sucrose), for example, is an organic chemical but it's name is not as formidable to our ear as amyl acetate or amyl butyrate et al. We are right to be concerned about the safety of so many of these ingredients that have been assumed to be safe for many years. As medical information expands some of these substances have been removed from the GRAS or EAFUS lists. It is a formidable task to review the entire GRAS list and staff and resources are too limited to cover them all at a speed we all should wish for. --- Martha Rohrer --- [log in to unmask] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn