Food additives are chemicals added to foods to keep them fresh or to enhance their colour, flavour or texture. They may include food colourings (such as tartrazine or cochineal), flavour enhancers (such as MSG) or a range of preservatives.
Most food additives are listed on the product label, along with other ingredients, in a descending order by weight (flavours are an exception and do not need to be identified). Sometimes, the additive is spelt out in full. At other times, it is represented by a code number: for example, cochineal may be listed as Colouring (120); sodium sulphite may be shown as Preservative (221).
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Food Standards Australia New Zealand is responsible for the approval of which food additives are allowed in Australian foods. All food additives used in Australia undergo a safety assessment, which includes rigorous testing, before they are approved.
Toxicological tests on animals are used to determine the amount of the additive that is expected to be safe when consumed by humans. This is usually an amount 100 times less than the maximum daily dose at which ‘no observable effects’ are produced by an additive consumed over the test animal’s lifetime.
If there is any doubt over the safety of an additive, approval is not given. If new scientific information becomes available suggesting that a food additive is no longer safe, the approval to use the food additive would be withdrawn.
Most food additives are tested in isolation, rather than in combination with other additives. The long-term effects of consuming a combination of different additives are currently unknown.
Some people are sensitive to particular food additives and may have reactions like hives or diarrhoea. This doesn’t mean that all foods containing additives need to be automatically treated with suspicion. All foods are made up of chemicals and food additives are not always ‘less safe’ than naturally occuring chemicals.
Many of the food additives used by the food industry also occur naturally within foods that people eat every day. For example, MSG is found naturally in parmesan cheese, sardines and tomato in significantly greater quantities than the MSG present as a food additive. People with food allergies and intolerances are also often sensitive to chemicals found naturally in certain foods, such as nuts or shellfish.
Many people view food additives as a major food threat. However, in terms of health risk, food additives would come in at the end of the line, after food-borne microorganisms (like salmonella), inappropriate hygiene and eating habits, environmental contaminants and naturally occurring toxins.
The different types of food additive and their uses include:
There is a common misconception that processed foods automatically contain food additives. Foods like long-life milk, canned foods and frozen foods are all processed, yet none of them need extra chemicals.
If you are unsure whether or not a product contains an additive, check the label. However, some listed ingredients may contain food additives without mentioning them on the label. For instance, ‘margarine’ might be a listed ingredient and margarine contains food additives.
For most people, additives are not a problem in the short term. However, 50 of the 400 currently approved additives in Australia have been associated with adverse reactions in some people. Some food additives are more likely than others to cause reactions in sensitive people.
It is often the additives that are used to give a food a marketable quality, such as colour, that most commonly cause allergic reactions. Some of these hypersensitive reactions include:
It is important to realise that many of the symptoms experienced as a result of food sensitivities can be caused by other disorders. Medical diagnosis is important. If you try to diagnose yourself, you may restrict your diet unnecessarily and neglect an illness.
Some food additives that may cause problems for some people include:
If you think you may have a food additive sensitivity, it’s important to seek professional help since all of the symptoms you may be experiencing can also be caused by other disorders.
It may help to keep a food diary and note carefully any adverse reactions. In the case of a sensitivity being identified, the usual practice is to eliminate all suspect foods from the diet and then reintroduce them one by one to see which additive (or additives) causes the reaction. This should only be done under medical supervision, since some of the reactions – such as asthma – can be serious.
Earlier this year, the FDA announced plans to ban the food coloring Red No. 3 in food and drink, stoking the conversation around so-called food additives.
Since the s, consumers have read ingredient labels on packaged foods with an increasingly critical eye. Our consumer culture has shifted since the s and ’60s when we marveled at the innovations of the early industrial food age; now, influential voices warn that edible evil may lurk around any corner and clean, simple purity is touted as the ideal goal for anything we consume.
But folks often struggle to define what they deem bad about food additives, and, surprisingly, they have an equally difficult time pinpointing which ingredients they believe are good.
In reality, food and nutrition don’t abide by black-or-white, good-versus-evil logic. Food is dizzyingly complex, and our bodies are complicated. Legitimate panaceas and universal poisons are rare, so when it comes to actual food, we’re left to determine how we feel about intermediate shades of gray. Those nuances cannot be boiled down to a “Ten Things Food Scientists Won’t Eat” listicle, so instead, here is a guide to understanding what some of these ingredients are and what jobs they perform in our food.
Hopefully, this overview will equip you with tools to help decide what you do and don’t want to eat.
From a food chemistry perspective, a preservative is a substance added to food to prevent either microbial growth or oxidation. Food preservation has been one of our core survival strategies since we became human. Salt, sugar, vinegar, alcohol, some herbs and spices, and wood smoke are all chemical preservatives. Homemade pickles, last season’s peach jam, raw apple cider vinegar, natural wine, a sprig of rosemary, and backyard barbecue brisket are all, scientifically speaking, packed full of preservatives. But according to the FDA definition, these examples are exempt from the regulated designation of preservative, so most of the conversation around preservatives in packaged food has focused on a handful of ingredients, including various forms of sorbic acid, benzoic acid, nitrate, nitrite, and sulfite.
At a fundamental level, the most polarizing preservatives—those with microbe-stopping power—preserve food by disabling the microbial machinery that bacteria, yeast, and molds use to grow. Some, like sorbic acid and benzoic acid, share a strategy in common with acetic acid in vinegar: They’re Trojan horses. They appear harmless, bypassing the cellular defenses of pathogens like Listeria, then delivering a burst of enzyme-disabling acid inside the cell. Other preservatives, such as nitrites and nitrates used for curing meats, take a more indirect approach. They mimic some of the chemical attributes of oxygen to create an inhospitable environment for the growth of certain oxygen-hating microbes, such as Clostridium botulinum, which causes botulism and thrives in low-oxygen environments.
Chemical preservatives aren’t the only way to keep food safe and fresh, but no single preservation method works without compromise. Heat pasteurization kills microbes, but some foods get real gross real fast when heated—imagine what would happen if you boiled a quart of egg salad or creamy basil pesto—and excessive heating can degrade some nutrients. Freezing can preserve virtually any food, but the energy required to freeze, store, and distribute frozen foods drives prices up higher than their shelf-stable counterparts.
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Salt works great for preserving soy sauce and pickles, but most people have a finite sodium consumption budget. Alcoholic beverages are virtually impervious to pathogens but can only be consumed in limited quantities. Dehydrated foods don’t have enough water to support microbial life, but not everything tastes great when dried.
Food companies don’t put preservatives into food out of malice; they do it in order to meet the demands that consumers communicate to them. Decades of consumer behavior trends have taught food companies that we want cheap prices, long shelf lives, and portable convenience. In many instances, the only way to deliver all of that in one package is to use preservatives. Anyone who wants to consume fewer preservatives can do so, but they must have the means to pay premium prices and sacrifice some consistency, convenience, and portability in the food they buy.
Flavors are basically edible fireworks. Whereas preservatives carry the heavy burden of acting as a shield between our food and the microbial or oxidative forces that try to corrupt it, flavors exist purely for our entertainment. There are hundreds of molecules that excite our olfactory bulbs and taste buds, and the way those molecules are gathered determines how the flavoring ingredient is categorized.
Extracts are tastes and aromas pulled directly from a specific food like vanilla beans, lemon peels, or hazelnuts. These sources—like many spices, herbs, flowers, citrus, and nuts—naturally stockpile strong-smelling oils, which are vital for a potent extract.
Ingredients that lack essential oil reservoirs typically don’t have the aromatic firepower to make extracts on their own, which is where natural flavors come in. Natural flavors technically must consist of tasty or smelly molecules extracted from plants, animals, fungi, or other biological sources, but, unlike extracts, they can include cocktails of flavor notes from multiple sources. To create a natural strawberry flavor, for example, a flavoring ingredient supplier might take the soft, delicate aroma from a kettle full of strawberries and amplify it with fruity aromas gathered from other fruits, like apples or blueberries, to create a flavor that packs the right punch to echo loudly throughout a bag of strawberry candy. There are also strawberry-type natural flavors that don’t include any actual strawberries as the source material, instead relying solely on other berries, vegetables, or ingredients like caramelized sugar to conjure the right balance of grassiness, creaminess, and ripe fruitiness to evoke strawberries.
If any artificial ingredients are used to affect flavor, then the flavor must be categorized as artificial. Artificial flavors—which are catalogued on an FDA-approved list—are purified taste and aroma molecules that have been synthesized from scratch using chemistry. Artificial flavors often contain many of the same molecules as comparable natural flavors. But because they’ve been precisely synthesized and purified, they tend to yield more narrowly focused, low-cost flavor experiences, but with less depth and complexity than natural flavors.
Artificial flavors, while unappealing to some, have fueled relatively little controversy lately, in part because they are so clearly labeled and thus easy to avoid for those looking to abstain. Ironically, natural flavors have become more of a lightning rod because natural flavor is an umbrella term that covers a massively diverse category of ingredients. The phrase natural flavor can refer to flavors that have been extracted into oil, alcohol, or other solvents, and the phrase can include one flavor or a combination of several. On some labels, other flavorful ingredients like extracts, spices, and herbs are lumped in under the natural flavor designation. The more that consumers understand the world of flavors beyond simply natural versus artificial, the more that ingredient suppliers, food companies, and regulatory bodies become more incentivized to turn the lights on and share even greater detail.
Artificial colors (also known as certified color additives) are among the most tightly regulated ingredients in the food industry. There are only nine certified color additives currently approved by the FDA for use in food—soon to be eight, once the Red No. 3 ban goes into effect. Companies have until January 15, , to find an alternative food-coloring strategy before it officially becomes illegal to use the synthetic dye in any food or beverage sold in the US.
Each color is approved only for a specific set of food or beverage applications, with strict maximum dose levels. The list of approved applications for some colors is fairly broad, such as FD&C Yellow No. 5 (the “FD&C” means the coloring has been approved for use in food, drugs, and cosmetics), which can be used in confections, cereals, snack foods, beverages, condiments, baked goods, and yogurt. Other colors have hyper-specific approved uses. For example, Citrus Red No. 2 can only be used to enhance the color of orange peels, and Orange B is only approved for use in hot dog and sausage casings.
Artificial colors are typically cheaper to use than their natural counterparts, but food companies often use them because they can deliver louder, more vibrant, and more stable colors in smaller doses, saving valuable recipe real estate for building flavor.
Natural colors, which are derived from plants, animals, fungi, microbes, and naturally occurring minerals, tend to yield more muted hues that fade more quickly over time. Natural colors can be sensitive to heat, light, oxygen and changes in pH. Pigments extracted from berries, cabbage, and red radishes, for instance, may register as a purply-blue when used in a neutral-pH cookie dough but change to a pastel pink when added to an acidic lemonade.
Still, natural colors have come a long way in recent years. Where artificial colors were once practically the only options available to the food industry, we now have access to colors pulled out of everything from spices, fruits, and root vegetables to insects, microbes, and even rocks. There isn’t yet a bulletproof replacement for the edible confetti aesthetic of artificial colors, but the natural world is full of colors, and innovative food ingredient companies are mining all that nature can offer.
While they each go about their job slightly differently, the primary purpose of stabilizers, emulsifiers, and fillers is to modify the texture and physical behavior of foods and beverages.
Stabilizers have very little to do with microbial shelf stability—that’s a job for preservatives. Instead, stabilizers are cowboys tasked with wrangling a very specific herd: water. Long, noodle-y carbohydrates and protein molecules have the ability to corral water, thus building structure to make foods and beverages thicker and sturdier, and in some cases, to form gels. The thicker a liquid is, the less likely it is to separate into layers, which is why stabilizers like xanthan gum are nearly ubiquitous on the labels of salad dressings and bottled sauces. This same principle allows ingredients like guar gum and carrageenan to help keep ice cream smooth in the freezer by preventing stray bits of liquid water from joining slow-growing ice crystals. Stabilizer-thickened liquids also feel creamier, which is why creamy beverages such as plant-based milks often rely on stabilizers like gellan gum, which are effective in very small doses, are virtually calorie free, and evoke creaminess without relying on a ton of fat.
From a physics perspective, the boundary between oil and water is one of the most awkward, uncomfortable places in food. Fundamental physical forces incentivize oil and water to get as far away from each other as possible, driving vinaigrettes to separate and fat to rise to the top of a protein shake. Emulsifiers are peacemakers that help ease the tension at oil-water boundaries to prevent separation. These hybrid molecules have the ability to straddle the boundary between two worlds, helping mayonnaise to achieve maximum airiness, chocolate to stay creamy, and peanut butter to avoid needing to be stirred. Some emulsifiers are cousins of the fat family, such as lecithin, while others are specific types of protein or unique carbs, such as acacia gum. Regardless of type, all emulsifiers are molecules with one end that is chemically similar to fat and one that is comfortable in water.
Fillers are a difficult-to-define category of miscellaneous food ingredients that are often maligned as purposeless impurities intended to cut cost, which, it could be argued, is itself a purpose. The profile of a perfect filler is an ingredient that is cheap, bland, and doesn’t do much in a recipe apart from taking up space. Maltodextrin, the name given to small bits of broken-down starch, is the archetypal filler because it’s abundant, tastes like practically nothing, dissolves easily on the tongue, and stays out of the way in most products. Fillers also occasionally serve important functional roles. A tablespoon of a pure, hyper-potent sweetener like stevia would melt your face off with sweetness, so maltodextrin is used to dilute that flavor back down to the level of cane sugar to facilitate a more intuitive experience when you tear open a green packet for your morning coffee. Fillers are also critical in performing a dozen other thankless jobs to help get some of our favorite foods to the table. For example, fillers help prevent powders from clumping, give doughs the texture they need to jump through all kinds of hoops on a commercial baking line, and prevent gummy candy from sticking together.
If we want to avoid any of these ingredients, we can certainly do so; we just need to be prepared to give up what they do for us.
After decades of debate over the health impact in food of monosodium glutamate—the sodium salt of glutamic acid—public opinion in the US may be beginning to shift back in favor of MSG. This common amino acid salt is the primary driver of umami, one of our basic tastes. Unlike other basic tastes, umami has the unique ability to be amplified exponentially when MSG rallies together with a couple of other savory friends. Disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate are salt forms of two nucleotides, the building blocks of our genetic code, and they have a synergistic relationship with MSG. When MSG comes together with one or more other flavor enhancers in a single bite, they create an upswell of umami that drives some of the deepest, richest flavors in all of food.
In addition to contributing savoriness, these flavor-boosting ingredients can also make other flavors feel more powerful. Low-sodium soups and sauces often depend on umami to help bridge some of the gap in flavor intensity lost from reduced salt levels. MSG and its flavor-enhancing cohorts are also some of the more resilient flavor molecules in food, capable of surviving the harshest processing conditions, from the infernal heat of a pressure canner to prolonged purgatory sitting on a shelf or in the freezer.
The impact of MSG and other flavor enhancers reaches far beyond commercially prepared, packaged food. Umami-rich ingredients are abundant in the natural world, and ingredient suppliers have spent the past couple of decades harnessing that abundance. We now have a greater variety of savory ingredients to choose from, including dozens of varieties of cheese powders, nutritional yeasts, concentrated forms of fermented foods, and extracts of everything from tomatoes and mushrooms to kelp and scallops. Each of these ingredients contains monosodium glutamate or other flavor-enhancing molecules. Interestingly, while the search for what proponents call clean-label alternatives to MSG and other pure flavor enhancers began as a reactionary response to consumer label skepticism, it ended up yielding a whole suite of exciting new resources to supply the golden era of savory food.
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