>If I wasn't generally opposed to an ever-growing scope of federal powers, I'd probably support an effective ban or extremely high bar on new additives. If food companies aren't willing to test it they shouldn't bother trying to sell it.
I think you are underestimating the cost of testing a new additive. It's also the case that the risk on additives is not nearly as high as with a drug, which paradoxically both makes the testing less important and also vastly more expensive (since the effect size is smaller). Something like xylitol for instance seems completely safe and we didn't have a huge obvious reason for thinking it was likely to be problematic. In fact previous studies were unable to pick up on the signal of increased stroke risk because they were confounded by the fact that sugar free consumers were vastly more likely to have those anyway.
As an additional point I'll just note that regulating this stuff would then have to deal with the fact that many things (like red meat) are already associated with known health risks. Putting principles aside, even if you want to only ban "additives", you'll start running into issues like we see with nitrates/nitrites, where organic manufacturers add celery juice (extremely high in nitrates), to avoid the label of added nitrates.
