Are additives in food harmful?

Main issue or sideshow....

Questions and discussions on additives

When I teach the online course on supermarket nutrition strikes me how often I get questions about e-numbers either additives.

It is also widely discussed or even argued about on social media. Usually, this discussion is polarised and not nuanced, when nuance is sorely needed.

In fact, there are an awful lot of types of additives, sometimes listed under an e-number on the packaging or completely as a substance name. It is also sometimes possible to hide certain components under some kind of pseudonym.

But of course, you don't eat individual additives, you get them by eating foods, so context is also important.

Which basically every nutritionist agrees on:

• Is that products containing many additives are often highly processed foods full of sugar, fatty and salty. So unhealthy if you eat these often and a lot.
• If you avoid products with lots of e-numbers and other unpronounceable terms, you are more likely to make healthier choices, even if it doesn't actually have anything directly to do with the additives themselves.
• It is also well established that there are harmless additives such as citric acid and vitamin C. But also those that are harmful with high probability such as nitrite and benzoic acid. So you would rather minimise these (and make food safe to eat by other means).
• Besides, no one will argue either that additives, whose permissible dose is well below a potentially toxic threshold, will make you sick in the short term.

Lack of clarity over...

Where most ambiguity actually lies is not so much the toxicity of additives, but rather the long-term effects. This, especially when you ingest a cocktail of different additives, is almost impossible to study.

In fact, substances can also interact with each other, and there are hundreds of them. And then, of course, many more negative effects are possible than just toxicity.

For example, what is the impact on intestinal flora of certain additives? It is quite logical that preservatives, for example, not only suppress growth of bacteria in food, but also your gut flora. And changes in gut flora have also been measurable in research when using certain sweeteners. What exactly this means we don't know but for me it makes me cautious about it and not daily diet cola drink for the rest of my life. So because of these ambiguities, I sometimes jokingly call e-numbers experiment numbers.

My position

My stance on this issue probably doesn't surprise you. I choose minimally processed healthy products as much as possible and less ready-to-eat, which means I automatically take in fewer additives.

And for products I rarely eat, I am certainly not panicky if they contain some experimental additives.

I think the topic of e-numbers is a side issue for the average Dutchman compared to the topics of 'varied minimally processed food' and 'healthy fat percentage achieve and/or maintain'.

However, once you get the basics right, you could pay more attention to them as a next step, because: the fewer health experiments on your body, the better!