FDA CFSAN’s News for Educators—October 2019

Food Safety October 15 is Global Handwashing Day! Handwashing is a key step in safe food preparation and one of the most important things we can do to avoid getting sick and spreading germs to others. Handwashing helps protect against everything from the common cold to more serious infections like the flu and many types of diarrhea. Sign up today for the Partnership for Food Safety Education’s webinar on the importance of handwashing in food preparation and encourage your audiences to scrub germs away by following these five steps: Wet your hands with clean, running water. Lather your hands by rubbing them together with soap. Scrub for at least 20 seconds and be sure to get the backs of your hands and under your nails. Rinse your hands well under clean running water. Dry your hands using a clean towel.

Nutrition CFSAN has a wealth of information to help you educate the communities you serve about important heath topics. Recognizing that nutrition is a key component of good health and disease prevention, CFSAN has developed the Health Educator’s Nutrition Toolkit. This new toolkit is designed to help health educators, dietitians, physicians, other health care and nutrition professionals, social workers, youth counselors, and program directors teach consumers about the Nutrition Facts label and how to use the information it provides to make healthier food choices. The Toolkit offers a wide range of resources, including realistic tips on how to shop for and prepare food as well as order food when eating out to build a healthy diet.

Cosmetics and Colors Color additives are dyes, pigments, or other substances that create color when added or applied to a food, drug, cosmetic, medical device, or the human body. They can be found in a wide range of consumer products—from cough syrup and eyeliner to contact lenses and cereal. In foods, color additives are often used to enhance natural colors, help identify flavors (like purple for grape flavor or yellow for lemon flavor) or add color to ‘fun’ foods like Halloween cakes and candies. From pumpkin cupcakes to candy apples, these color additives help turn ordinary foods into spooky holiday treats! When used properly, color additives are very safe. FDA approves all color additives allowed in foods, drugs, cosmetics, and medical devices. In addition, some color additives are batch certified by FDA’s in-house laboratories before they are used in products. When FDA approves the use of a color additive in a food or beverage, regulations specify the types of products in which the color additive can be used, the maximum amounts of allowed additives, and how the color additive should be identified on the product label. If consumers want to limit their intake of color additives or avoid them altogether, they can identify whether color additives are in a product by reading the ingredient list on the packaged food or beverage.

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