Letter: Cloning has no impact on safety of foods

Saturday, Jan. 6, 2007 | 7 a.m.

The Las Vegas Sun's Jan. 2 editorial, "What's in a clone," suggested labeling food products that come from animal clones.

Food and Drug Administration labeling regulations ensure labels don't carry false claims, and accurately and clearly provide consumers with important nutritional information. FDA specifies there is no need to place potentially misleading and confusing labels on a food product that is nutritionally equivalent to its counterparts.

The FDA determined that meat and milk from animal clones and their offspring is the same as food from conventionally raised animals - they are the same in taste, look, nutritional composition, and as safe as products already on the market. Based on the FDA's labeling policy, it is unlikely it will require labeling for foods from animal clones and their offspring. In fact, it wouldn't benefit consumers to place irrelevant information about the breeding technique used to produce a food product on a label.

Each day Americans eat food produced from assisted reproductive technologies like artificial insemination, embryo transfer, and in vitro fertilization. Today 75 percent of dairy cattle and 80 percent of hogs are born through artificial insemination. Despite the extensive use of these technologies, consumers don't choose between milk cartons labeled as "milk produced through natural mating," "milk produced through artificial insemination" and "milk produced through in vitro fertilization" because this information is extraneous and nondescriptive of the final product.

There is no reason why future labels should read, "Milk produced from a granddaughter of an animal clone" - the breeding method used to produce the milk has no impact on safety.

Jim Greenwood, Washington, D.C.