Food additive
Based on Wikipedia: Food additive
Every piece of candy your child drops into their Halloween bucket is a tiny chemistry experiment. Those bright orange Reese's cups, the electric blue Jolly Ranchers, the impossibly smooth chocolate bars that somehow don't melt in their hands—none of this happens by accident. Behind every treat is a cast of molecules working overtime: some keeping colors vivid, others preventing spoilage, a few making sure that peanut butter cup doesn't turn into a crumbly mess by November first.
These are food additives, and they've been with us far longer than the candy aisle.
The Ancient Art of Keeping Food Edible
Long before anyone understood bacteria or oxidation, humans figured out how to make food last. Salt could preserve meat for months. Smoke added flavor while simultaneously killing microbes. Vinegar pickled vegetables so they'd survive the winter. Sugar transformed perishable fruits into jams and jellies that wouldn't spoil.
These weren't considered "additives" at the time—they were simply how you kept from starving when fresh food ran out. The Roman Empire ran on salted fish and pickled cabbage. Medieval sailors survived on hardtack and salted beef. Every grandmother who ever made preserves was practicing food chemistry, whether she knew it or not.
But the industrial revolution changed everything.
The Processed Food Explosion
When food production moved from kitchens to factories in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a problem emerged. Factory food had to travel farther, sit on shelves longer, and look appealing even after weeks in a warehouse. The old methods—salt, sugar, smoke—weren't always enough. Manufacturers needed new tools.
Enter the modern food additive.
Some came from natural sources: pectin from apples to thicken jam, lecithin from soybeans to keep chocolate smooth, citric acid from citrus fruits to add tartness. Others were synthesized in laboratories, designed molecules-first to solve specific problems. An emulsifier to keep oil and water mixed in salad dressing. An anticaking agent to keep powdered cheese from clumping. A humectant to prevent cookies from drying out.
The result was a proliferation of ingredients that most consumers had never heard of. And with that proliferation came questions: What exactly am I eating? And is it safe?
The Alphabet Soup of Regulation
Different parts of the world have developed different systems for keeping track of these substances. In Europe, approved additives receive what's called an E number—the "E" standing for Europe. Acetic acid, which is essentially vinegar, becomes E260. Citric acid becomes E330. The numbering system is logical: 100-199 covers colorings, 200-299 covers preservatives, 300-399 covers antioxidants and acidity regulators, and so on.
Australia and New Zealand use the same numbers but drop the "E" prefix. So E260 becomes simply additive 260. This can create confusion: additive 103, called alkannin, is approved in Australia but has no E number because it's not permitted in Europe.
The United States takes a different approach entirely. The Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, maintains a list of substances "Generally Recognized As Safe," abbreviated as GRAS. To make this list, an ingredient must have a history of safe use or scientific evidence demonstrating its safety. The FDA also tracks ingredients by their Chemical Abstracts Service numbers—a global registry that assigns every known chemical compound a unique identifier.
What does this mean for the average consumer? Essentially, if something is sold as food in a developed country, it's been reviewed by someone. That doesn't mean the review was perfect, or that the substance is risk-free in all quantities, but it does mean someone in a government office has examined the evidence and made a call.
A Taxonomy of Additives
The world of food additives is surprisingly diverse. Each category exists to solve a specific problem.
Preservatives keep food from spoiling. They work by inhibiting the bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms that would otherwise turn your bread moldy or your meat rotten. Some, like vitamin C (also known as ascorbic acid), work by preventing oxidation—the chemical reaction that makes cut apples turn brown and oils go rancid.
Emulsifiers solve a basic physics problem: oil and water don't mix. Shake up a bottle of salad dressing and the oil separates out almost immediately. But mayonnaise, which is mostly oil, stays creamy for months. The secret is lecithin, an emulsifier that allows oil droplets to remain suspended in water. Without emulsifiers, ice cream would be a grainy mess, chocolate bars would have white streaks, and countless processed foods would separate into unappetizing layers.
Colorings replace what processing takes away. Fresh vegetables are vividly colored, but canning, freezing, and cooking can leave them looking drab. Food manufacturers add color back—sometimes natural colors extracted from plants, sometimes synthetic dyes created in laboratories. The goal is to make processed food look as appealing as fresh food, even if it's been sitting in a can for two years.
Flavor enhancers make food taste more like itself. The most famous is monosodium glutamate, or MSG, which intensifies savory flavors. Despite decades of controversy, repeated scientific reviews have failed to find evidence that MSG causes the symptoms some people attribute to it. It's naturally present in tomatoes, parmesan cheese, and dozens of other foods.
Acidulants provide tartness. Citric acid (from citrus fruits), tartaric acid (from grapes), and malic acid (from apples) all create the sour punch that balances sweetness in candy and soft drinks. Without them, many candies would taste cloyingly sweet.
Sweeteners come in two varieties. Nutritive sweeteners like sugar provide calories along with sweetness. Non-nutritive sweeteners—saccharin, aspartame, sucralose, stevia—provide sweetness with few or no calories. The latter have been the subject of intense scientific scrutiny over the decades, and current consensus holds that approved artificial sweeteners are safe at normal consumption levels.
Stabilizers and thickeners control texture. Pectin, extracted from fruit peels, makes jam gel rather than run. Carrageenan, derived from seaweed, keeps chocolate milk smooth. Xanthan gum, produced by bacterial fermentation, prevents salad dressing from separating. These substances give processed food the mouthfeel consumers expect.
Anticaking agents keep powders flowing freely. Salt, flour, and powdered milk would all clump without them. Silicon dioxide, calcium silicate, and various other compounds ensure that when you shake the salt shaker, salt comes out.
The Indirect Additives You Never Think About
Here's something most people don't consider: food comes into contact with packaging, and packaging is made of chemicals. Some of those chemicals migrate into food in tiny amounts. These are called indirect additives, and they've become a focus of growing concern.
Bisphenols, used in some plastic containers and can linings, can leach into food. Phthalates, which make plastic flexible, show up in packaged foods at low levels. Perfluoroalkyl chemicals, used in grease-resistant packaging, persist in the environment and accumulate in the body.
In 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics called for more careful study of these substances, particularly regarding their effects on children. The developing bodies of children may be more vulnerable to even low levels of certain chemicals. This remains an active area of research, with regulatory agencies around the world grappling with how to balance the practical benefits of modern packaging against potential long-term health concerns.
A History Written in Bans
The story of food additive regulation is, in many ways, a story of things that went wrong.
Consider boric acid. From the 1870s to the 1920s, it was a common food preservative. Meat, fish, butter—all might be treated with boric acid to extend shelf life. But studies on both animals and humans revealed troubling toxicity. After World War I, most countries banned it. Then World War II created desperate food shortages, and boric acid crept back into use. It wasn't finally and permanently banned until the 1950s.
Or consider safrole, a natural compound found in sassafras root. For decades, it gave root beer its distinctive flavor. Then researchers discovered it caused liver cancer in rats. Despite being completely natural—you could extract it from a tree in your backyard—safrole was banned from food in the United States under the Delaney clause, a 1958 law stating that no carcinogenic substance may be used as a food additive.
The Delaney clause sounds simple enough: if something causes cancer, don't put it in food. But biology is rarely so straightforward.
The Strange Case of Saccharin
In 1969, the United States and Britain banned cyclamate, an artificial sweetener, based on studies suggesting it might cause cancer. This left saccharin as the only approved artificial sweetener on the market. Millions of diabetics and dieters depended on it.
Then, in the 1970s, studies showed that saccharin caused bladder cancer in rats.
Under the Delaney clause, saccharin should have been banned immediately. But something unexpected happened: the public revolted. Sweetened soft drinks at the time came with postage-paid postcards that customers could mail to Congress, protesting any potential ban. Lawmakers received so many cards that they created a special exemption, allowing saccharin to remain on the market with a warning label.
Here's the twist. Decades later, scientists figured out why saccharin caused cancer in rats but apparently not in humans. Rats have a unique urinary chemistry. When they consume saccharin, it combines with certain proteins in their urine to form crystals that irritate the bladder lining, eventually leading to cancer. Humans don't have this chemistry. The warning labels were removed in 2000.
The saccharin story illustrates a fundamental challenge in food safety: animal studies don't always translate to humans, but we can't exactly conduct cancer experiments on people. Regulators must make decisions with imperfect information, knowing that both false positives (banning something safe) and false negatives (approving something dangerous) carry costs.
The Modern Approval Process
Today, getting a new food additive approved is a marathon, not a sprint.
In the European Union, the process typically takes a decade or more. First comes safety testing—five years of studies examining how the substance is absorbed, distributed, metabolized, and excreted by the body, plus evaluations of potential genetic damage, cancer risk, and effects on reproduction and development. Then the European Food Safety Authority (known as EFSA) spends two years evaluating all this data. Finally, another three years of bureaucratic process before the additive can be used EU-wide.
The United States uses a similar tiered system. The FDA's Redbook 2000 lays out detailed requirements for toxicity testing. Studies must examine acute effects (what happens immediately), chronic effects (what happens over a lifetime), and everything in between. If an additive is structurally similar to something known to be dangerous, extra scrutiny is required.
Trading Standards officers in the United Kingdom and similar agencies elsewhere conduct random testing of food products to ensure manufacturers are actually following the rules. The regulations mean little if no one checks compliance.
The Natural vs. Artificial Debate
There's a widespread assumption that natural additives are safer than artificial ones. This assumption is wrong.
Remember safrole? Completely natural. Causes cancer. Or consider coumarin, a compound that gives vanilla and cinnamon their pleasant aromas. In high doses, it damages the liver. Just because something grows on a tree doesn't make it safe.
Conversely, many synthetic additives have impeccable safety records. Ascorbic acid synthesized in a factory is chemically identical to vitamin C in an orange. The molecules don't know where they came from.
What matters is the specific substance and the dose, not whether it was extracted from a plant or constructed in a lab. The widespread "natural is better" belief has led some manufacturers to replace safe artificial colorings with natural alternatives that may actually be more problematic for certain consumers—some natural colorings, for instance, can trigger allergic reactions.
The Hyperactivity Question
For decades, parents have worried that food additives—particularly artificial colorings—might cause hyperactivity in children. This concern traces back to the 1970s, when a pediatric allergist named Benjamin Feingold proposed that artificial colors and flavors triggered behavioral problems.
The scientific evidence, however, has been frustratingly ambiguous. Some studies find modest effects. Others find nothing. A major 2007 study in the United Kingdom did find that certain combinations of artificial colors and the preservative sodium benzoate increased hyperactivity in some children. But the effects were small, not consistent across all children, and the study couldn't determine which specific additive was responsible.
Current scientific consensus: there's no clear evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between food additives and hyperactivity in the general population. Some individual children may be sensitive to certain substances, just as some people are allergic to peanuts. But the idea that food dyes are causing an epidemic of attention problems hasn't been supported by rigorous research.
Fortification: When Additives Are the Point
Not all food additives are about preservation or palatability. Some are added specifically to improve nutrition.
Food fortification has prevented countless cases of nutritional deficiency. Iodine added to salt has nearly eliminated goiter in developed countries. Folic acid in flour has dramatically reduced neural tube defects in newborns. Vitamin D in milk has made rickets, once common, a rare curiosity.
These micronutrients are technically additives—substances added to food that wouldn't otherwise contain them. But unlike preservatives or colorings, their purpose is explicitly health-related. They represent one of public health's quiet triumphs, preventing suffering on a massive scale with an intervention most people never think about.
What's Actually in That Halloween Candy?
So when your child comes home with a pillowcase full of treats, what exactly are they eating?
The typical candy bar contains sugar (the primary ingredient), some combination of fats and oils (often with emulsifiers to keep them smooth), flavorings (both natural and artificial), and colors (those bright wrappers aren't lying about what's inside). There might be preservatives to extend shelf life, acidulants to balance sweetness, and stabilizers to maintain texture.
Are these substances safe? By any reasonable standard, yes—at least at the levels present in occasional candy consumption. Every approved ingredient has been reviewed by regulatory agencies. The amounts used are far below any levels associated with harm in studies.
The real health concern with candy isn't the additives. It's the sugar. Obesity, diabetes, dental cavities—these are the genuine risks of excessive candy consumption. The E numbers and chemical-sounding ingredients on the label are, for the most part, a distraction from the simple fact that candy is candy: a treat to be enjoyed in moderation, not a staple food.
So let your kids enjoy Halloween. The food additives aren't going to hurt them. Just don't let them eat the whole haul in one sitting.