Rumors debunked: Domestic cooking oil is labeled as carcinogenic and affecting fertility?

Recently, a video was circulated on the Internet, showing that on the shelves of a supermarket in a foreign country, a Chinese brand of edible oil product was affixed with a warning label that read "Warning: Cancer and reproductive system damage". This label has attracted widespread attention and misunderstanding. Some people believe that this is because the product uses genetically modified technology, so the potential risks need to be indicated. However, this statement is not accurate.

First, the safety of genetically modified products has been widely certified by international scientific research and regulatory agencies, including but not limited to generation tests, lifelong feeding tests, homogeneity equivalence evaluation, etc. We currently have no convincing evidence that genetically modified foods pose a safety risk to humans. The laws of some countries do require food to indicate whether it contains genetically modified ingredients, but the purpose is to protect consumers' right to know and let them choose whether to buy it.

Secondly, the appearance of warning labels is related to national and regional labeling regulations. If the legal basis of the label is not clear, it is likely to cause misunderstanding, such as the warning label we saw in the video.

In fact, if we look closely, there is a P65 Warning under this warning. This is because this type of warning label originates from the California P65 Act. In 1986, California reviewed and passed Proposition 65, the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act. The act requires businesses to label products when the level of substances that may cause cancer or damage the reproductive system reaches a certain level.

The list compiled by the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) includes nearly 1,000 potentially hazardous chemicals. It covers a very wide range of categories, but GMOs are not included as a basis for evaluation. So from here we can also see that this label actually has nothing to do with GMOs.

Then, even if there is such a label on the product you buy, it does not mean that the product will necessarily pose a health risk to you. In fact, the implementation of this law has always been controversial. In fact, if you live in California, you will not only see this warning when buying food, but also often see this scary warning when buying toothpaste, water purifiers, CDs, and even when traveling.

For example, this is a warning sign in Disneyland, California.

This is a warning sign from a California restaurant:

The core of the law is to prevent consumers from being exposed to harmful substances without warning, but its evaluation standards and implementation details are considered too strict, causing many businesses to mark warnings on almost all products and even places in order to avoid legal risks, even if the toxic content does not actually reach a dangerous level.

More importantly, the bill does not stipulate the limits of harmful substances in different products, such as how many milligrams per kilogram, but gives a maximum safe daily intake limit for the human body, which makes the bill very difficult to implement in practice. For example, for the element lead, although the World Health Organization has abolished the tolerable weekly intake (PTWI) of lead, which was the previous upper limit of 25 micrograms per kilogram of body weight for adults due to increased awareness of the hazards of lead. However, the P65 bill sets a daily limit of only 0.5 micrograms of safe lead intake. This means that for an adult weighing 50 kilograms, this new standard is only 0.04% of the original WHO standard. We do not deny the need for stricter safety intake standards to protect the health of the population, but it is clear that this standard is too strict.

At the same time, an example given in the bill mentioned that even if the lead content in seaweed is as low as 0.1 ppm (0.1 mg/kg), in principle it may still exceed the safety limit as long as the intake is large enough, so a warning must be clearly marked on the seaweed packaging.

In other words, the warning does not mean that the product is unqualified, but it indicates that it contains hazardous ingredients. However, whether it can cause harm to consumers depends on the specific intake or exposure. In fact, this is also the core of Proposition 65, which is "to inform consumers that they are exposed to chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and/or reproductive toxicity, but it does not necessarily mean that the product violates any product safety standards or requirements."

At the same time, there is a little-known fact when the law is implemented, that is, if I want to avoid risks, I can directly give a warning without doing any testing or submitting any reports, then I don’t have to accept a fine of up to $2,500 per day during the sales period. This is why similar labels can be seen on almost all products in California.

In some news reports, we can see the word "national punchline" used to describe Proposition 65. Although the original intention of Proposition 65 was to protect public health, the strict standards and widespread labeling during its implementation have made this warning lose its original meaning.

Based on the understanding of the reason for the warning, I believe everyone will have a more objective judgment. The argument in the video that genetically modified foods labeled by the United States are carcinogenic is out of the question, and we should not blindly believe in information sources that have not been fully verified.

Author: Feng Yang from Shaanxi Nutrition Society