Food Additives - do we need them?

The last 100 years has seen radical changes in the food supply of societies around the world. While less and less people working on farms, people now expect and demand a greater variety of food. As the affluent middle working class becomes larger, the demand for pre-packaged, convenience foods has also grown considerably as families find it less convenient to cook meals from scratch.

Making convenience foods both varied as well as nutritious and safe (not to mention cheap), is now being done using modern technology. This technology includes food additives that have been proven both useful as well as safe through long use and stringent testing.

So what exactly are food additives and why use them?

Additives are functional ingredients: they are added into foods on purpose to improve safety, nutritional value and/or taste and appearance. Basically, food additives are used to:

Preserve foods safely e.g. preventing bacteria from growing and causing food to rot or cause food poisoning.

Maintain food nutrition e.g. preventing the loss or breakdown of vitamins and amino acids.

Give food special qualities e.g. artificial sweeteners for making diabetic snacks or using bulking agents to make food less fattening.

Make food more appealing (taste or appearance) e.g. thickeners and stabilisers to prevent the ingredients of ice cream and salad dressings from separating.

History of food additives

Food additives have been around almost as long as man himself. Food additives have been used to preserve food from one harvest to the next with better appearance and nutritional value for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians used colours and flavourings to make food look and taste better, while ancient Romans utilised spices, salt and vegetable colouring to enhance their meals. All over the world, salting and smoking food has been practised to preserve food.

More recently, technology and the discovery of new, effective food additives has led to their widespread use. These include emulsifiers in margarine (to keep it in a solid block), baking soda in cake mixes and gelling agents in jams. The use of these additives has offered consumers a wide range of reasonably priced foodstuffs of a high and constant quality. In fact, without food additives, it would be impossible to produce low-calorie or low-fat products such as margarine.

The sources of food additives are:

Products of vegetable origin
- Thickening agents extracted from seeds, fruit and seaweed
- Colours isolated from seeds, fruits and vegetables
- Acidulates such as tartaric acid from fruit

Nature-identical products produced by synthesis or biosynthesis
- antioxidants such as ascorbic acid in fruit and tocopherol in vegetable oils colours such as carotenoids, the colouring agent in many fruits and vegetables.
- Acidulants such as citric acid present in citrus fruit

Products obtained by modifying natural substances
- Emulsifiers derived from edible oils and organic acids
- Thickening agents such as modified starches and modified cellulose
- Bulk sweeteners such as sorbitol and maltitol Man-made products such as butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA)
- Colours, such as indigotin and quinoline yellow
- Intense sweeteners such as saccharin.

How safe are food additives?

Some additives have been used for decades or even centuries, so we have a lot of experience regarding both their usefulness and their safety. To continue to assure safety, scientific experts review these traditional additives every so often, and any reasonable doubts are evaluated. New additives must not only have a demonstrated useful purpose, but also go through a thorough and rigorous safety evaluation before they can be approved for use.

Basically, both new and traditional additives are tested by an independent experts who evaluate whatever information is available. In the EU this group of experts is the Scientific Committee for Foods. The Information they evaluate includes lifetime feeding studies which assess how the additive is handled in the body, stability of the additive in different foods and beverages, and the intended uses in order to understand how much of the additive is likely to be consumed. If the experts feel that specific information is lacking, they will require additional tests

. Once sufficient information is available for a thorough evaluation, the experts will calculate an acceptable daily intake (ADI) for the additive i.e., the amount of the additive that can be daily consumed safely over a lifetime. This is typically done by finding, through extensive testing, the level at which no effect is observed and then dividing by a safety factor of typically 100. The purpose of the safety factor is to provide additional security in case humans are more sensitive to the additive than the test animals are, and in case some people are more sensitive than others.

Next, the regulators apply the ADI to establish the amount of the additive which may be used, taking into account the likely consumption of the foods and beverages which will contain the additive as well as the amount of the additive needed to achieve its function. These permitted levels ensure that the total consumption of an additive is normally far below the ADI. It is important to note that since the ADI is based on lifetime feeding studies, and because the ADI has a built-in safety factor, the consumption of an additive above its ADI on a given day is not a cause for concern. In fact, human dietary surveys have confirmed many times that consumption above the ADI on one day is more than accounted for by consumption comfortably below the ADI on most other days.

Can people be allergic to food additives?

Many people are allergic or intolerant to foods such as milk, eggs, fish, shellfish and wheat. In fact, about one in every fifty individuals is allergic to some food substance. Allergic reactions include migraine headaches, diarrhoea, respiratory problems and skin rashes. In contrast, however, intolerance to food additives has been shown to be uncommon.

Among the most recent and reliable investigations into food additive intolerance was carried out by a regional authority in the United Kingdom which found that 3 out of 18,000 respondents exhibited any intolerance to food additives. This finding agreed with an earlier estimate by experts of the European Commission. Therefore, among adults, food additive intolerance appears to be very rare.

Conclusion

While food additives have been used for centuries, they have gained increased importance and widespread use in the last few decades. Food additives help assure a constant food supply of safe, healthy, nutritious, varied and appealing products at an affordable price, something we have come to expect.

Because of strict regulation and thorough testing, food additives are safe elements of our diet. Of course, clear labelling adds to consumers' ability to make informed choices about the foodstuffs they buy.

Reference:
Essay written based on information from the European Food Information Council (EUFIC). For more information, please visit http://www.eufic.org [copyright granted on website].

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all original pictures taken by team member Jason Yeo