Continuing the Conversation With
Jim Jones

In your leadership role, what's your vision for FDA’s Human Foods Program?

The vision is that food should be a vehicle for wellness. That's the vision. That's ultimately where we want to be. Whether you're talking about microbiological safety, chemical safety or nutrition, food should be about helping people be well and live well. It shouldn't be about disease. It shouldn't be about diet-related chronic disease. It shouldn't be about chemical safety. It should be about wellness. And that's fundamentally quite aspirational, but food nutrition and wellness is what binds us all.

How does risk management factor into your vision?

Fundamentally FDA, and particularly the Human Foods Program, is a risk management organization. We are managing public health risks, and we do it all the time. And I think a little bit of it is just helping the team there understand the nature of their work is fundamentally about managing risk in this framework.

Whether we are deciding whether to issue a warning letter to a company because of cross-contamination of sesame, or we're deciding the level of lead in a spice that we're going to recall, these are risk management decisions. You're making choices about how to manage a risk. Is the risk of a chemical such that we need to take it off the market or reduce people's exposure to it? Or is it about the level of listeria in a soft cheese that's going to lead to a recall? Ultimately, I don't think that the framework for risk management is any more advanced than it has been in the last decade or so. But today, it's about intentionality and understanding you're making choices about how to manage risk.

Speaking of risk management, will the agency modify ways of assessing some of the food additives or chemicals of concern we’ve seen in the news lately?

We're going to assess them for their safety. We just need to do more of those assessments than we're currently doing. And I think we are able to do these assessments more frequently now. It's a judgment call as to how much is enough, but more than we've historically done. It's clearly that we need to be doing. And we need to be predictable about it. Every year we will [identify] a number of chemicals [that] we're going to look at and then we need to do it.

Is FDA considering any actions or policies regarding so-called ultra-processed foods, given the public’s interest in better understanding how they impact public health?

We need more research on ultra-processed foods. Right now, we think that there are a lot of studies that show an association between ultra-processed food and a negative health outcome, but causality has not been demonstrated. And it's important to have causality to define it and then to regulate it. And so, we think that the next thing that we need to do is to get more research to get greater certainty around whether or not ultra-processed foods are causing bad health outcomes.

Are there any challenges to doing this kind of research?

Well, it's complicated to do this kind of research. You're looking at instituting the same controls as you would use in drug research, but it has to be incredibly controlled to be able to tease out what is the contribution of a food versus other lifestyle-related issues, which is complicated. I think funding has been an issue. Also, I think this issue has only been on the radar for a relatively short period of time. And it takes a while for society to rally around getting good science behind challenging questions, even though the questions seem like they’ve been banging around for a while, but it really hasn't been that long.

When considering ways in which food science and technology can transform the food system, do you have an industry-wide call to action?

Well, I think nutrition is the no-brainer. I mean, the people who come to this meeting (IFT FIRST 2024) have the knowledge, the brain power, and the resources to figure out how to optimize foods so that they are nutritious, so the consumer wants to buy then, and so the food companies are still able to make money. The consumer wins because they're healthier and the food company wins because they're still making money, if not more money. Talk about a win-win-win.

I'd love to see a company do an analysis of how much more product they could sell if the product was healthier and therefore their customers live longer. Now maybe you can't tease that all out because people are buying more than just your product. That's why some of these programs that [FDA is] managing will affect all products and should make everybody healthier because all products will have a front-of-pack labeling. All products will be reducing their sodium, for example. And so, everybody wins.ft