In this series of articles, we’ll delve into the mysteries of food together with our writer Elina Pajula, who is majoring in Food Sciences with a minor in Nutrition. Her hobbies include doing research on anything food-related and dinosaurs.
Claim #1: “Food additives are unsafe”
Do you like your bread soft and fluffy? And pink sausages instead of grey ones? Would you also like to be able to use the ketchup you opened today also next week? These advantages are all achieved with food additives, but should you be worried about eating them?
I have sometimes heard people claim that food additives such as preservatives, colors, sweeteners and antioxidants are used ‘just in case’ or ‘for fun’, but as demonstrated in the examples above, this is definitely not the case; these substances are added to foods for technological purposes such as prolonging shelf life. What’s more, the use and safety of food additives are strictly controlled by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and permits to use food additives can’t be granted without justified needs.
The EFSA uses the latest scientific information and international expert panels for safety evaluation and establishing the acceptable daily intake (ADI) value for each additive (check out how it’s done in this video). Food manufacturers then have to strictly stick to the ADI values so that there is a reasonable amount of additive per recommended portion size. Usually only very small amounts of additives are needed: for example, did you know that a person weighing 70 kg needs to drink more than six liters of diet soda daily to exceed the ADI established for aspartame (an artificial sweetener)?
In fact, some foods could even be unsafe to consume without additives: a lot of items would get spoiled much faster without preservatives, there would be more contaminations by foodborne pathogens, and the nutritional value of foods could suffer from oxidation. However, the growing trend of consuming ‘natural’ products challenges the food industry with consumers deeming food additives as ‘unnatural’ – even when most of them can be found in nature. For example, the gelling agent, pectin, is naturally found in many fruits and berries as well as ascorbic acid (vitamin C), which is used as an antioxidant to prevent oxidation of foods, such as vegetable oils, from rancidification (i.e. smelling and tasting musty and unpleasant!). Because the demand for food additives is constantly growing in food manufacturing, many natural compounds such as pectin need to be produced synthetically, but it’s essentially identical to the one extracted from plants.
Last but definitely not least, it would be far more beneficial to focus on the real diet-related problems, such as excess salt, sugar, fat and alcohol consumption and malnutrition. So following an all-round healthy diet including lots of veggies, fish, low-fat dairy products and wholegrain, improves your health more than avoiding E-codes ever would.
So the final verdict on the dangers of food additives? Definitely a myth!