This is any food that contains a foreign, harmful ingredient, or an additive that's
not permitted or not disclosed, or food that is rancid or has otherwise gone bad.
The FDA prohibits all of this kind of stuff.
In addition to this requires food labeling.
Now if you've ever seen a packaged food item, you know that it has this
black rectangle on it, right, and it says nutrition information.
Foods didn't used to be required to display all this information,
in fact it use to be packaged foods didn't have to disclose anything.
And then they just had to disclose their ingredients.
And now they have to disclose their ingredients and
their nutritional information.
So how many calories from each of your macronutrients,
fats, and carbohydrates, and protein, and all that kind of stuff?
The FDA requires that labeling.
Also requires the label of all packaged foods to contain
the contact information for the manufacturer, so
that if you have a problem with it you know who at least made this good.
Moving on to the next big area of regulation that the FDA oversees,
drugs and medicinal devices.
The FDA requires a really, really extensive trial process before it
approves any drugs to be used in consumers in this country.
So many stages of clinical trials.
You gotta start with animal trials, and then you move on to trials in humans,
multiple rounds of this before a drug will be approved for sale on the market.
And even then, the FDA categorizes drugs.
So some drugs are very highly restricted and
can only be obtained with a prescription.
And even among prescription drugs some are even more highly regulated than others.
And then drugs that have been shown be very, very,
very safe can be sold over the counter.
These are things like Tylenol and stuff like that that we know has very,
very few side effects.
The FDA also regulates the advertising of drugs, especially to consumers.
It actually didn't used to be the case that pharmaceutical companies could
advertise drugs directly to consumers at all.
But the FDA, about 20 years ago, lifted that restriction and
allowed advertising directly to consumers.
But placed rules about mandatory disclosures, disclosures of side effects,
all that kind of stuff.
So if you see an ad on TV for a drug,
you always hear some sort of list of potential side effects.
That's because the FDA requires that to accompany any advertisement for
a drug to consumers.
Now the last thing, or the last real important thing,
that the FDA regulates is cosmetics and beauty products.
So when we say cosmetics, we all know what that means, makeup,
stuff like that, but also any kind of beauty product, deodorant, shampoo,
anything you put on your body, lotions, whatever.
Cosmetics and beauty products are required to list their ingredients and
place any notice of harmful ingredients that might be in the product.
And FDA also prohibits the mislabeling or misleading labels or
any adulterated products that fall into this cosmetics and beauty products realm.
[MUSIC]