Food additives alter characteristics such as color, longevity and flavor. Additives can make foods more affordable or more appealing to the eye and taste buds. Federal authorities carefully regulate additives to ensure they don't harm anyone, but that doesn't make the ingredients 100 percent risk-free.
Safety Standards
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, is the primary authority on additive safety. A manufacturer or sponsor of an additive must provide the FDA with evidence that its product is safe for its intended purposes before the FDA allows it to be used. When considering an additive for consumption, the FDA looks at the substance's properties and composition, assesses how much of the substance would generally be consumed, determines whether it would present any immediate or long-term health effects, and checks other safety factors.
Considerations
The FDA will only allow an additive to be used if there is reasonable certainty that the product would do consumers no harm. If a product could feasibly be harmful in large amounts, the FDA might permit its use in very low quantities, such as 100 times less than the harmful amount. The FDA warns, however, that science has inherent limitations and that it could never be absolutely certain that a product poses zero risk to consumers.
Potential Adverse Reactions
In rare instances, certain groups of consumers have adverse reactions to a food additive. For instance, some asthmatics might have breathing troubles after consuming sulfites, which are additives used to prevent browning in some foods. Additionally, about one to two out of every 10,000 people have experienced itching and hives after consuming the coloring additive FD&C Yellow No. 5, according to the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at the University of Arizona. Other additives that have caused reactions include monosodium glutamate, or MSG, which can lead to chest pain and warm sensations in the body, and the artificial sweetener aspartame, which can cause effects such as tissue damage in people with the genetic disease phenylketonuria.
Your Responsibility
If you believe you have experienced an adverse reaction to a food additive, remove it from your diet for three or four days. The symptoms you're experiencing should go away within one day if the additive is truly the culprit, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. Contact your physician about your reaction, carefully read food labels to avoid the additive in the future and inform the FDA's MedWatch program about your findings.
Member Comments