Issues You Need to Know About Food Additives

Why does one kind of food need to use multiple food additives?

In recent years, a series of reports such as "a snow ice cream with 19 additives" and "a 25g cake with 17 additives" have formed the conclusion that "humans eat nearly a hundred kinds of additives every day." In fact, this means that multiple food additives are needed to meet the requirements of production technology and taste, and that is all.

For example, a colorful ice cream may require several different colors of colorants, while a creamy white ice cream does not need colorants. However, it is still thanks to emulsifiers and thickeners that it becomes a soft and smooth ice cream with good texture.

Currently, according to the national standard requirements, the principle of using food additives is: it should not cause any health hazards to the human body; it should not conceal the quality defects of food itself or the processing process, or have the purpose of adulteration, blending, or counterfeiting; it should not reduce the nutritional value of food itself; and the amount used in food should be minimized on the premise of achieving the expected purpose.

Is it safe to use multiple food additives?

Some people may worry that the simultaneous use of multiple food additives will result in terrible consequences. Scientists did not study all possible combinations of food additives, nor could they, because 2,000 food additives can have billions of combinations. However, scientists conduct strict and detailed risk assessments for each food additive and strictly regulate its range and amount of use by leaving sufficient safety factors to ensure safety.

The evaluation of the safety of food additives has already taken into account the issue of "large amount", which can be described as "eating food additives as meals". The dosage that does not produce any adverse effects through animal experiments is divided by a protective factor (usually 100 times) to obtain the safe dosage for the human body. And "long-term" is measured by the length and intensity of "lifetime" and "every day", supplemented by the above insurance factors, as a scientific basis for formulating standards, so as long as they are used according to standards, their safety is not a concern.

However, long-term and excessive consumption of certain foods may still pose health risks, which is the case for any food, even "additive-free" ones. For example, the media reported that long-term consumption of carbonated drinks could cause death, but this cannot be blamed on the food additives in the drinks, excessive energy intake from "pure natural" sucrose in the drinks may be the main cause.

A certain environmental protection organization claimed that the food additives in snacks were detrimental to children's health, which is also a misconception about food additives. The actual situation is that excessive consumption of snacks can affect normal dietary nutrition intake of children, which is certainly detrimental to health.

You may also be interested in the following food additives provided by allulose suppliers:

Resistant dextrin

Tapioca fiber powder

Bulk allulose