February 22, 2010
Decoding Expiration Dates
Last week Nadia Arumugam in Slate validated my long-standing skepticism about food expiration dates. I have always operated on the assumption that if food looks okay, smells okay and tastes okay, it should be fine. I have been known to cut mold off a block of cheese and eat the rest.
Courtesy Flickr user Desiree N. Williams
As Arumugam writes, the government mandates dates only on baby formula and some baby food. The rest of the dates came about voluntarily. She writes, “In the 1930s, the magazine Consumer Reports argued that Americans increasingly looked to expiration dates as an indication of freshness and quality. Supermarkets responded and in the 1970s some chains implemented their own dating systems.” One of the problem with the dates, says Arumugam, is the lack of consistency in the terms surrounding the dates. What’s the difference between “sell by,” “best if used by” and “use by”? Even though the F.D.A. doesn’t mandate the use of them, it does offer some advice to decoding the terms. None of them, not even the “use by” date are considered safety dates. The food might not be at peak quality after the date, but it can still be eaten safely. Even the “use by” dates on baby food are related to nutrient retention and texture rather than safety. I had always suspected that the printed expiration dates on food were more about protecting the companies than the consumers. But Arumugam writes that the dates don’t even have any legal bearing. Last year, a judge reversed the conviction of a man who relabeled more than a million bottles of salad dressing with a new “best when purchased date.” This extended the shelf life of the product so he could continue to sell them. In the reversal, the judge said, “The term ‘expiration date’ … on a food product … has a generally understood meaning: it is the date after which you shouldn’t eat the product. Salad dressing, however, or at least the type of salad dressing represented by Henri’s, is what is called ‘shelf stable’; it has no expiration date.” Even though the company decided to print a date on the package, a judge dismissed the date as not having any legal worth. When it comes down to it, it’s really the consumers job to determine when to toss food. And that’s the conclusion Arumugam comes to. But she also brings up an interesting point: “Better yet, we should focus our efforts on what really matters to our health—not spoilage bacteria, which are fairly docile, but their malevolent counterparts: disease-causing pathogens like salmonella and Listeria, which infect the food we eat not because it’s old but as a result of unsanitary conditions at factories or elsewhere along the supply chain.” (Soda fountains, for instance, or slaughterhouses or turkey farms.) Unfortunately, the solution to that problem isn’t as simple as a date stamped on an egg carton.
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I, too, have been known to demold cheese and move on. As you say, our senses (including common sense)can help a lot. I wish they could help us deal with the salmonella/Listeria problem! An intriguing post……
This topic is always coming up. I have two stumpers — or maybe not.
1) The other night I was in desperate need of Nyquil but the bottle I had in the medicine cabinet said “Expiration date 10/2006.” So, I didn’t take it. Should I take a medicine’s expiration date more seriously than a food expiration date? Does the FDA say anything differently about medicines?
2) My dad was eating a jar of peanut butter with a “Best by 2007″ date on it. I told him he might get salmonella poisoning, but he laughed and dug in. Should we pay more attention to dates on salmonella-prone foods?
I’m glad you do that cheese trimming thing too! Do you know Snider’s supermarket in Silver Spring? They have built a very successful business selling foods that are close to or beyond the sell by date.
The expiration date, required by law in the United States, beginning in 1979, specifies only the date the manufacturer guarantees the full potency and safety of the drug — it does not mean how long the drug is actually “good” or safe to use. Second, medical authorities uniformly say it is safe to take drugs past their expiration date — no matter how “expired” the drugs purportedly are. Except for possibly the rarest of exceptions, you won’t get hurt and you certainly won’t get killed. A contested example of a rare exception is a case of renal tubular damage purportedly caused by expired tetracycline (reported by G. W. Frimpter and colleagues in JAMA, 1963;184:111). This outcome (disputed by other scientists) was supposedly caused by a chemical transformation of the active ingredient. Third, studies show that expired drugs may lose some of their potency over time, from as little as 5% or less to 50% or more (though usually much less than the latter). Even 10 years after the “expiration date,” most drugs have a good deal of their original potency. So wisdom dictates that if your life does depend on an expired drug, and you must have 100% or so of its original strength, you should probably toss it and get a refill, in accordance with the cliché, “better safe than sorry.” If your life does not depend on an expired drug — such as that for headache, hay fever, or menstrual cramps — take it and see what happens.
One of the largest studies ever conducted that supports the above points about “expired drug” labeling was done by the US military 15 years ago, according to a feature story in the Wall Street Journal (March 29, 2000), reported by Laurie P. Cohen. The military was sitting on a $1 billion stockpile of drugs and facing the daunting process of destroying and replacing its supply every 2 to 3 years, so it began a testing program to see if it could extend the life of its inventory. The testing, conducted by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), ultimately covered more than 100 drugs, prescription and over-the-counter. The results showed that about 90% of them were safe and effective as far as 15 years past their original expiration date.
In light of these results, a former director of the testing program, Francis Flaherty, said he concluded that expiration dates put on by manufacturers typically have no bearing on whether a drug is usable for longer. Mr. Flaherty noted that a drug maker is required to prove only that a drug is still good on whatever expiration date the company chooses to set. The expiration date doesn’t mean, or even suggest, that the drug will stop being effective after that, nor that it will become harmful. “Manufacturers put expiration dates on for marketing, rather than scientific, reasons,” said Mr. Flaherty, a pharmacist at the FDA until his retirement in 1999. “It’s not profitable for them to have products on a shelf for 10 years. They want turnover.”
The FDA cautioned there isn’t enough evidence from the program, which is weighted toward drugs used during combat, to conclude most drugs in consumers’ medicine cabinets are potent beyond the expiration date. Joel Davis, however, a former FDA expiration-date compliance chief, said that with a handful of exceptions — notably nitroglycerin, insulin, and some liquid antibiotics — most drugs are probably as durable as those the agency has tested for the military. “Most drugs degrade very slowly,” he said. “In all likelihood, you can take a product you have at home and keep it for many years, especially if it’s in the refrigerator.” Consider aspirin. Bayer AG puts 2-year or 3-year dates on aspirin and says that it should be discarded after that. However, Chris Allen, a vice president at the Bayer unit that makes aspirin, said the dating is “pretty conservative”; when Bayer has tested 4-year-old aspirin, it remained 100% effective, he said. So why doesn’t Bayer set a 4-year expiration date? Because the company often changes packaging, and it undertakes “continuous improvement programs,” Mr. Allen said. Each change triggers a need for more expiration-date testing, and testing each time for a 4-year life would be impractical. Bayer has never tested aspirin beyond 4 years, Mr. Allen said. But Jens Carstensen has. Dr. Carstensen, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin’s pharmacy school, who wrote what is considered the main text on drug stability, said, “I did a study of different aspirins, and after 5 years, Bayer was still excellent. Aspirin, if made correctly, is very stable.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/460159
Fascinating. My mom’s told me for years expiration dates didn’t matter, but I wasn’t so sure. Thanks for the information.
I have a package of Luigi Vitelli fettuccine with no expiration date on it. But it has 010311B361 stamped on it and I have no idea how to decode the date…..is it still safe to eat?
Thanks so much