The Food and Drug Administration has permanently removed its recommendation that companies conduct tests on animals to establish bone health claims for marketing food and beverage products sold in Taiwan.
This is the fifth health claim regulation that the agency has scrapped clean of animal tests. Coming after a push from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and hearing from more than 28,000 PETA supporters, this decision exemplifies the global shift in animal testing.
The agency had previously recommended that experimenters cut out the ovaries of mice, rats or hamsters and feed the animals a calcium-deficient diet to induce osteoporosis, feed or force-feed them the test food, and then kill and dissect them.
These cruel, painful and useless experiments have never held any meaning for human health.
These amended regulations now only accept human tests, the gold standard of human nutrition research. Instead of cutting up and killing animals, researchers could also use computer modeling and artificial intelligence, organs-on-a-chip, and many more human-relevant techniques to study human nutrition. This is the future and the future is here.
Companies such as Taiwan Sugar that fail to recognize we are well into the 21st century would be left behind. As cutting-edge tech takes over institutionalized inertia, those companies that stop relying on useless animal experiments, including Barilla, Ferrero and Unilever, would be the leaders in their fields.
Taiwan has taken a progressive step forward and must continue to adopt advanced testing methods across the board.
Caring consumers would continue to buy products not tested on animals and to call for a continued shift to modern methods.
Jason Baker is a senior vice president for PETA Asia.
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