January 30, 1970

Mrs. Leonard Meeter
$039 Eskridge Terrace, N.W.
Washington, D. C. 20016

Dear Mre. Meeter:

Thank you for your letter of January 18. I have been receiving sporadic news

of the hearings on FDC-78 with considerable interest, partly in en effort to

frame a well-formed point of view about the issues therein. It seems prepostrous
that a well conceived effort at the fortification of foods be frustrated in this
way. On the other hand, Mr. Goodrich is undoubtedly correct in pointing to the
potentialities for abuse in the advertising of such products and in the exploitation
of consumers through their often ill-conceived anxieties about good nutrition in
relation to health. I was therefore gratified at the constructive recommendations
of the panel of Dr. Mayer's conference on food, nutrition and health - both ite
encouragement of new foods and food supplements, and alao the recéemmnded regula-
tions concerning the fair and accurate advertising of foods and disclosure of
constituents. I should think that Dr. Mayer would be a very well qualified and
very well notivated witness on your behalf.

I regret, however, that I cannot serve in the capacity of witness as you asked,
both for reasons of personal convenience and, more importantly, because of the
attack that might justifiably be made on my credentiale as an expect in nutrition.
I would certainly defend my competence to comment on the fiddings of others in
this field, but having done essentially no research and little technical writing
in it, I could very well be impugned for pretending to be a primary expert. There
is, I believe, a long list of professors of nutrition who would strongly favor
your side. I would be surprised if you had not already contacted Dr. FRederick
Stare at Harvard, who could also readily put you in touch with many others. I
could also refer you to Professor Roger J. Williams of the Clayton Foundation,
University of Texas, Austin; Dr. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi at the Marine Biological L
Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts; and Dr. Aaron M. Altschul of the International
Agricultural Development S&rvice, USDA.

You asked me to comment in particular on the relationship between genetics and
nutrition. As the literature on lactose utilization illustrates very well,
there are still many unanswered questions in théésfield. Individual variability
is already known to play a very important role in the response to cyclanates,
and is probably also very important in the effects of MSG. I am confident that
we have found only a few examples of this kind, only because we have not looked
very hard. There are also considerable numbers of people who need information
about the composition of food that cannot ordinarily be obtained very easily >

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Mra. Leonard Meeter January 30, 1970
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for example, the presence of gluten, some notorious allergens like eggs, and

for many people, the precise amount of salt or of carbohydrate in a given food.
Some of these points hould be inferred from a label, but cannot when the components
of a given product are already a secondary food whose composition is not detailed.

On the other hand, I do not see very much sense in encouraging a great deal of
self-prescription by people with a limited or distorted knowledge of nutrition.
There are not enough physicians to do this kind of work, and they have usually
not been properly trained for it anyhow, so perhaps we do need to encourage the
growth of another category of professionally trained consultants who would be
able to cope with advertising at an ethical level as compared to mass promotion.
This approach still leaves many unsolved difficulties, for example, what to do
about dietary supplements, like chromium, whose status is still controversial as
far as human requirements are concerned. (That reminds me, by the way, that you
might recruit Dr. Walter Merz, Chief, Vitamin and Mineral Nutrition Laboratory,
Agricultural Research Service at the USDA at Beltsville, for expert testimony on
trace metals like chromium. I could of course also mention Dr. H. A. Shroeder
of the Dartmouth Medical Sehool.)

Thank you for sending me Dr. Robinson's statement, which certainly does contain
many illuminating criticisms. I am sure you will not be surprised if I return
to some of these issues in comments through my column in the Post.

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics