One more thing about corn syrup

Anyone who has been within a 5km radius of me in the past few years has probably heard me rant on about corn syrup, and I hinted at my feelings toward the substance here. Corn syrup — specifically high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) — has been in the news lately because:
1. The food industry has been trying to promote it as a "natural" ingredient.
2. The US Food and Drug Administration recently reversed a ruling stating that HFCS could not be labeled as "natural" because it contained synthetic fixing agents.

Well, an article in FoodNavigator, a popular food industry news site, explains why:
The process sees the enzymes for making HFCS being fixed to a column by the use of a synthetic fixing agent called glutaraldehyde. However, this agent does not come into contact with the high dextrose equivalent corn starch hydrolysate and so it is not "considered to be included or added to the HFCS"

Sounds like typical regulatory doublespeak, right? Right. They are saying that although this chemical, glutaraldehyde, is used in manufacturing this "natural" substance (Side note: Since when are natural things manufactured?), it is not actually in the food. That's all well and good, but perhaps the FDA neglected to reflect on the toxicity of a chemical like glutaraldehyde. They should know all about it, because they have been strictly monitoring occupational exposure to it for over 60 years.

Now, I know a whole lot about this relatively obscure chemical. Perhaps ironically, I wrote my master's thesis on, of all things, glutaraldehyde, along with few other chemicals that were being introduced to eliminate the use of such a toxic substance altogether (summary here). Glutaraldehyde is long known to cause respiratory and skin allergies as well as a debilitating and little understood form of occupational asthma—not from ingesting it but from just being around it.

Glutaraldehyde is commonly used in leather tanning, and as a high level disinfectant for delicate hospital equipment. It is used to clean endoscopes and other medical equipment that can't be subject to heat sterilization. This stuff can kill tuberculosis and HIV, and they are using it to manufacture "natural" "food" products?! Something is not right here.

Definitions of natural notwithstanding, this leads me to another perhaps more serious concern. Because glutaraldehyde is so toxic, occupational health regulations require that its use be minimized in hospital settings and it can only when there is no safer alternative for cleaning medical equipment. So why are we exposing factory workers to it and putting them at risk of debilitating respiratory illness simply so we can use up all that subsidized American corn to make a cheaper form of sugar for food processing? I suspect that those handling the substance in these factories don't have the same level of protection as Canadian hospital workers.

The FDA, nor its Canadian counterpart Health Canada, does not have a spectacular record of protecting employees over ceding to industry demands. After two years of pestering both agencies, along with the manufacturers of glutaraldehyde and several supposedly safer alternatives, I found that it didn't take much for these companies to convince the regulators that their new thing was not only safe enough for market, but safe enough to relax occupational health regulations.