<<Disclaimer: Verify this information before applying it to your situation.>> Felicia Satchell, Consumer Safety Officer, FDA, spoke July 15th, on the topic of Food Labeling Policy of the FDA, at the Celiac Disease Conference, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore Maryland. Ms. Satchell clearly and specifically addressed the issues of current food labeling policy as they apply (or unfortunately, don't apply) to the Celiac patient. She discussed FDA regulations regarding what ingredients must be disclosed on a food ingredient label, and what ingredients may be added without being listed. She described in detail, for example, that FDA regulations permit inclusion of "incidental additives" in a product without declaring these additives on the product label. Furthermore, there are no threshold levels of what FDA considers "insignificant." This regulation, among others discussed, bears directly on our ability to maintain a gluten-free diet. Ms. Satchell was direct about what is necessary for the FDA to establish guidelines and regulations for gluten-free foods. Currently, the FDA feels they have not been given information based on analytical methodology as to how to verify that a product is gluten-free. In other words, we do not have a reliable test for determining whether a product contains gluten, which would be necessary for enforcing any regulation. In addition, scientific evidence is required as to whether there is a threshold amount of gluten that can be tolerated by the Celiac, or whether no gluten at all is tolerable. Ms. Satchell demonstrated well her knowledge of the current FDA food policies as they affect the Celiac patient. Her information was helpful in making clear to us what the specific current regulations are that we must deal with everytime we read a product label. She also gave incentive to the Celiac community for providing, through research, the evidence the FDA needs to change the current regulations so that it can be easily determined if a product contains gluten. I transcribed the entire speech, which is too lengthy to be posted here to the list. It is definitely worth reading. Mike Jones has made the transcript available as a reference file from the Listserv. (Many thanks, Mike ) To obtain the file: Send in the body of an email to [log in to unmask] GET CELIAC FDA-BALT It will also be manually added to the August logfile by a Listowner for future database searches, the first week of September. Sue Goldstein White Plains, NY [log in to unmask]