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.
On March 22, 2023, at the close of their meeting in Moscow, media microphones were allowed to record Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) telling Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin, “Right now there are changes — the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years — and we are the ones driving these changes together.” Widely read as Xi’s oath to create a China-Russia-dominated world order, it can be considered a high point for the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea (CRINK) informal alliance, which also included the dictatorships of Venezuela and Cuba. China enables and assists Russia’s war against Ukraine and North Korea’s
After thousands of Taiwanese fans poured into the Tokyo Dome to cheer for Taiwan’s national team in the World Baseball Classic’s (WBC) Pool C games, an image of food and drink waste left at the stadium said to have been left by Taiwanese fans began spreading on social media. The image sparked wide debate, only later to be revealed as an artificially generated image. The image caption claimed that “Taiwanese left trash everywhere after watching the game in Tokyo Dome,” and said that one of the “three bad habits” of Taiwanese is littering. However, a reporter from a Japanese media outlet
Taiwanese pragmatism has long been praised when it comes to addressing Chinese attempts to erase Taiwan from the international stage. “Taipei” and the even more inaccurate and degrading “Chinese Taipei,” imposed titles required to participate in international events, are loathed by Taiwanese. That is why there was huge applause in Taiwan when Japanese public broadcaster NHK referred to the Taiwanese Olympic team as “Taiwan,” instead of “Chinese Taipei” during the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics. What is standard protocol for most nations — calling a national team by the name their country is commonly known by — is impossible for
India is not China, and many of its residents fear it never will be. It is hard to imagine a future in which the subcontinent’s manufacturing dominates the world, its foreign investment shapes nations’ destinies, and the challenge of its economic system forces the West to reshape its own policies and principles. However, that is, apparently, what the US administration fears. Speaking in New Delhi last week, US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau warned that “we will not make the same mistakes with India that we did with China 20 years ago.” Although he claimed the recently agreed framework
RSS