worried about the thousands of chemicals that have reportedly been slipped into our food supply

without FDA approval? Or that companies can simply declare their own ingredients as safe with

no oversight? But let's talk about what it really means to be generally recognized as safe.

Music to be generally recognized as safe.

Hello, I'm Monica Reinagle, and this is the Nutrition Diva podcast, a show where we take a closer look at the latest nutrition headlines and memes and sort fact from fiction. And today, we are tackling a rather obscure

regulatory term that lately has become quite a buzzword. Grass, G-R-A-S, is a regulatory term for

certain ingredients used in food manufacturing. It stands for generally recognized as safe.

There are some influencers out there suggesting that many of the ingredients that fit under this

regulatory umbrella are anything but safe, or, for that matter, generally recognized. So in this episode, I want to explain how the grass process really works,

clear up some of the most common misperceptions,

including about whether the EU allows fewer additives than the U.S.,

and hopefully leave you with a little more peace of mind about what's in your food.

I want to thank the International Food Information Council,

who recently hosted an in-depth informational session for food and nutrition professionals,

featuring government and legal experts who were able to dispel a lot of misinformation on this topic.

And I'm happy to have an opportunity to pass some of that clarity along to you. Before we get into some of the most common

myths or misunderstandings about grass status, let's clarify some categories, because not

every substance in food requires FDA approval.

Everyday foods and staples, things like apples and flour, sugar, salt, oils, don't need to

go through any formal FDA approval process. They've always been recognized as safe to eat. Anything that's added to

these ingredients during the manufacturing process, whether that's things like vitamins or protein isolates,

or added fiber, preservatives, emulsifiers, thickeners, all of those things are considered to be

...