Cheerios: The Latest Victim of Deregulation
Deregulation has been at the top of the republican party’s priorities list since at least 1981 when Ronald Reagan told us government is "the problem".
A consistent talking point we’ve heard for decades from the right is about the alleged “evil of regulations”.
“Regulations kill jobs,” republicans and libertarians claim.
“Regulations stifle innovation,” they argue.
When they say these things, their audience isn’t an average working person like you. Anti-regulation rhetoric is employed the same way the phrases “cutting taxes” and “tough on crime” are: as a shout-out to the morbidly rich relying on republican policies to eliminate anything constraining corporate greed.
Environmental regulations hold accountable corporate polluters seeking to dump their waste in the cheapest ways possible, public health and safety be damned.
Medical regulations hold accountable insurance companies and providers from taking more advantage of patients than they already do.
Educational regulations ensure students aren’t being discriminated against and are provided the most safe, equitable environments in which to learn.
Legal regulations constrain abuses in the criminal justice field to hold accountable law enforcement officials and legal professionals who abuse their power.
Of course, nothing is air-tight. There will always be those out to exploit loopholes. That’s no defense against regulation.
Regulations keep people honest and they’re incumbent upon a civilized society.
We expect our kids to abide by the rules of our households and students to abide by school rules.
We expect motorists to have valid driver licenses and adhere to traffic laws.
When we purchase food, we trust it’s undergone rigorous inspections. We usually don’t have to wonder if what we put into our bodies is going to make us sick.
However, a new study from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) discovered that the toxic agricultural chemical chlormequat chloride used normally to alter plant growth, linked to reduced fertility, reproductive system harm, and altered fetal growth in animals, was found in urine samples of four in five — 80% — of Americans.
Most curious is the time frame in which use expanded from non-edible plants to grain. Despite its not being previously approved for use on edible plants in the US, in 2018 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decided to allow the importation of foods treated with chlormequat. It has now been detected in some oat-based foods like Quaker Oats and Cheerios.
Researchers collecting urine samples in 2017 found the chemical in 69% of samples. From 2018–23, though, that figure jumped to 74–90% in samples collected.
As explained in the journal Nature:
In April 2018, the U.S. EPA published acceptable food tolerance levels for chlormequat chloride in imported oat, wheat, barley, and some animal products, which permitted the import of chlormequat into the U.S. food supply. The allowable levels were then increased for oats in 2020.
Why is 2018 significant?
Think about who was in office then.
At the beginning of his administration, Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13783, “Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth,” which required federal agencies to review regulations that potentially “burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources.”
Trump put in charge of the EPA first Scott Pruitt, who was personally involved in purging information about climate change from the EPA website and replacing it with sites promoting Donald Trump’s fossil fuel agenda. His successor was Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist who fought Obama-era environmental regulations.
In 2019, the EPA decided not to ban the neurotoxic pesticide chlorpyrifos the agency’s own scientists concluded is known to cause pediatric brain damage.
In an attempt to supposedly “streamline the approval process for new drugs and technologies,” the Trump administration sought to eliminate approximately 75–80% of ALL Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations.
Before leaving office, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar explained his agency was finalizing a rule called Securing Updated and Necessary Statutory Evaluations Timely (SUNSET) that would allow to expire (aka “sunset”) all FDA regulations after a decade unless reviewed.
By the time the Trump presidency was over, it had rolled back over 100 environmental rules, 10 pertaining to toxic substances and safety.
The deregulation mania did not begin with Donald Trump. He was just another useful tool in the scheme. Deregulation has been at the top of the republican party’s priorities list since at 1981 when then-president Ronald Reagan famously laid bare during his first inaugural address, “Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.”
Since then, libertarian policies to prevent government agencies from “interfering” in allowing oligarchs from wreaking havoc on infrastructure have become republican party dogma.
And about what to do with those tainted Quaker products?
Studies of organic oat-based products had a lower detection rate, 12.5%, as opposed to 92% in non-organic products.
Dr. Asima Ahmad, chief medical officer and co-founder of fertility care platform Carrot Fertility, added:
Similar to how I counsel my own patients, I recommend trying to eat organic and freshly prepared foods as much as possible. It’s going to be the responsibility of each and every patient to read the ingredients of every product that they consume. Nothing in high amounts is healthy. Try to diversify and not to eat the same product or the same exact grain and from the same company over and over again. I think that’s the best advice we can tell our patients. We know that fruits and vegetables and balanced diet — what we call the Mediterranean diet — is healthy for fertility.
There is an active class-action lawsuit against General Mills Inc. filed in California federal court alleging “All flavors of the products are sold for similar prices, are packaged in similar packaging, are manufactured using the same base formulation and contain unhealthy and unsafe levels of chlormequat.”
It explains that General Mills neither lists chlormequat in Cheerios’ ingredients nor warns potential consumers about the pesticide that may be present in it.