Episode 23 – Food additives: Can I have your E number?

Ed
What about you, Camilla? How do you fit into this? When you go to a supermarket, do you turn all the packaging around and read the list of ingredients? Or after a long day at work studying these things, you prefer not to?

Camilla
Of course, I do. I think I nearly manage to get the whole list of E numbers by heart. Not nearly there, but, getting there. And, yes, I still can't resist reading the label on the on the back of a package.

Intro
Science on the Menu, a podcast by the European Food Safety Authority.    

Ed
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Science on the Menu. 
My name is Ed Bray, and I work in the Communications team at the European Food Safety Authority, EFSA. Joining me today is Camilla Smeraldi. You are the Team Leader for the team at EFSA dealing with food additives and flavourings. Welcome to the podcast.
Today, we're going to be talking exactly about this: food additives, what is in our food? What are those E numbers that we see on the back of the packaging?
Camilla, we are really glad to have you help us unravel this, and to look at this more closely, we've got some foods here today to look at.
I am going to bring them out for you, and we are going to have a look and see what's in there and what are the different food additives. We are going to start with these. 
(sound of hard food in a glass)
You can hear, those listening, what's in here, but you won't know. I've got a vegan protein bar here that I picked up from the supermarket. Now interestingly it's got three different additives in there. It's got soy lecithin, it's got sorbitol, and it's got potassium sorbate. Can you talk us through what are those three additives doing in there?

Camilla
As, every food additive that's added to the food, they are there because they have to have a technological function. And the three that you mentioned have three different technological functions, in fact, starting from the potassium sorbate, which is an antioxidant. It's there to preserve the food, to keep it stable over time.
Moving on, you mentioned the soy lecithin. That's an emulsifier and, as all emulsifiers, they help, whenever we have two different phases, water and oil. So, again, it helps in keeping the two phases together and keeping the food together.

And last, you mentioned sorbitol. That can have more than one function. It is listed in the EU as a sweetener, but it has also some bulking properties.

Ed
The emulsifier is interesting.
It's a natural element of the food that the oil and fat will separate. Tell us more about that. Mayonnaise, for example, is a classic. How does that work? Why do you need an emulsifier sometimes?

Camilla
Yeah. I think we probably made mayonnaise at home, haven't you tried?
There's always that thrill: Will it stay nicely, firm, or will it be a disaster and the two phases will separate? What emulsifiers do is really helping the two different immiscible phases to stay together, to stay put, to stay firm, and delay a process which naturally occurs of the two parts slowly separating and ending up with the separation of the two. And the food, which usually is really not nice, for the texture of what you would expect out of a nice mayonnaise. 
At home, we don't put it when we prepare mayonnaise.
We usually try to do our best and cross our fingers that everything will stay together. But it's also true that when we prepare mayonnaise at home, then usually it's eaten within hours, a day. We keep it in the fridge, and then it's gone. 
When you think about emulsifiers on a larger scale, on an industrial production, the food that is prepared, the mayonnaise, which is sold in a jar or in a tube, has to stay on a shelf for months. So that's where all these food additives exert their technological function.
That's why they're there to keep our food for longer and keep it safe.

Ed
Right. We can come on to that. The food system that we have today, where we go to the supermarket and these products are on the shelves, etcetera. Let's move on to which other additives we've got here.
These are particularly colourful. 
(sound of food decorations in a glass)
I've got here some flowers that are edible that can go on cakes. In here, I looked at the label and there were a series of E numbers. E100 and different ones. I think there were seven or eight in there.
What are these additives doing in there?

Camilla
Whenever you see an E number that's the system that is in place to tell you that there is a food additive added. In particular, when you see an E number in the 100 series, that means that it's a food colour. 
Food colours, it goes without saying, they are there to give a colour to the food. They cannot be added to every food because one of the basic pillars of the EU legislation on food additives is that the use of food additives should not mislead consumers.
There are certain types of food where food colours are not allowed to be added. Because they could be used maybe to hide some alteration or some fraudulent practices.

Ed
Like, for example?

Camilla
There are some food colours that could be added to butter, to oil, for instance, to hide the fact that these have been there for a while.

Ed
And that's not allowed.

Camilla
That's not allowed by the legislation. In the case that you’re presenting there, the decoration flowers, they're using permitted food additives in that food category.
There can be different food colours. In the range of the E 100, you can find those that are the so called synthetic food colours, but there are also many of them that come out of natural extracts that can be extracted from plants, edible materials.
Some are very common, could come from carrots or lycopene from tomatoes and other sources of botanical origin. Some others may come from algae, for instance. It means that the food additive has been processed. 
The main difference is that when we talk about a synthetic food colour, it's usually one substance whereas whenever we are talking about an extract that comes out of a plant, we are in the presence of a mixture of different components that all contribute to the final colour.

Ed
Let's move on. Let's get these last three out.
We've got here some sweets. 
(sounds of candies in a plastic bag)
Some classic sweets that you would find in a supermarket, different colours there.
We've got different food products here. This is some Italian salami. We'll put that there.

And then finally, we've got some, ginger here. This is dry ginger, table ginger and it has suplhites in it. 
In the salami we've got sodium nitrite, potassium nitrate. And in the sweets, we've got citric acid.
Can you tell us talk us through there what's going on?

Camilla
Well, the nitrates are the food additives added to help preserving the meat. 
EFSA had reviewed the safety of nitrates some years ago. Based on that opinion, there has been a revision also of the limits and of the quantity of the food additive that can go into specific food categories, where these food additives can be used.
You have always to remember that for every food additive, the legislation specifies in which food categories it can be used, how much it can be used. 
The work of EFSA is exactly to help the risk managers taking these decisions. How do we do that? We try to establish for every substance which is used an amount we confidently trust that it doesn't affect the safety of the consumers. 
Then we estimate a theoretical exposure. We run several scenarios for this theoretical exposure. Imagine that these food additives are authorized at certain levels and somebody has really the habit of eating always the same food every day of their life and always the food which has the highest concentration of that food additive. It's a conservative scenario.

Ed
Very loyal to the brand.

Camilla
Very loyal to the brand! Exactly that’s how it’s called in fact. 
Also, we try to set a value which we consider and we are confident that it's safe, and then we compare it with the value of exposure for a typical consumer. That should inform the risk manager, for instance.

Ed
European Commission, essentially?

Camilla
Yes the European Commission and the Member States and as it happened, for instance, in the case of nitrates, that value the risk managers can work on the permitted uses, maybe limiting somewhere, revisiting where these food additives are really needed, on which level are they really needed, or are they sufficient to exert the technological function that they should exert and, and then revise the limits. 
Another element to be taken into account, as we mentioned nitrates, for instance. There's not only the added quantity or that we can ingest when we eat a food that contains a food additive, but many of these substances are anyway naturally occurring. 
The risk managers need also to take into account the fact that there will be anyway a background exposure from the diet.

Ed
So, we're getting nitrates from leafy vegetables, like spinach, etcetera. But here, they're used as an additive, so they're an extra. 
I guess that the important question is: are they are they needed? Are they really needed? You don't look at that.

Camilla
No. That’s not in the remit of EFSA. In fact, what we look at is really, are they safe? 
“Are they needed” it's another of the pillars in the EU legislation. For a food additive to be authorized, there has to be a technological function and the one that probably we all experience also in our daily life in a kitchen. No?
You squeeze a bit of lemon if you don't want a fruit or a vegetable to become dark and that you are basically adding an antioxidant. That’s something that really goes back in the history of mankind.

Ed
I guess that's the big question. 
We've always, as humans, been trying to preserve food that goes off over time, and we've been using salt or vinegar. We've been finding ways to keep the food for longer. 
I guess the big change happened after the 2nd World War, I imagine the 1950s. Is that right? When we started to go to big supermarkets and to change our lifestyles as consumers. 
We started to have ready-made meals and these kinds of things. How did that change how we eat?

Camilla
I'm not an historian, I can only figure it out from what I learned or heard on how our relationship with food changed significantly, and as you say, especially in many parts of Europe. 
You mentioned Second World War, there were months or years of food deprivation and then a few years later, a new economic status, availability of different staples that were not there, the opening of supermarkets, changed the socioeconomic life of many of us in Europe or even other parts of the world have definitely created a push for the production of food on a large scale, availability of foods to fill the shelves of supermarkets, and then it goes on with maybe less time available to cook, to prepare everything from scratch.
Also a growing demand. 

Ed
And additives are a by-product of that?

Camilla
Somehow, we have expectations about reproducibility of food. Whenever you cook at home, it's hardly that you get the same results twice. When you buy something, you are expecting something out of that. There's clearly an element of reproducibility. 
Also, as you mentioned, large scale implies the need for avoiding food waste. Food has to stay on the shelfs for longer. It's unthinkable that the food spoils quickly. That clearly probably gave a push to the use and the change of habits in the families that have less time to cook everything from scratch.

Ed
And what about you, Camilla? How do you fit into this? When you when you go to a supermarket, do you do you turn all the packaging around and read the list of ingredients?
Or after a long day at work studying these things, do you prefer not to?

Camilla
Of course, I do. I think I nearly managed to get the whole list of E numbers by heart. Not nearly there but getting there. I still, can't resist the reading the label on the on the back of a package. 
I see somebody has now this app that you can scan, and it gets the ingredient list. Probably more friendly for the vision than the small prints on the label. 
But I still do, I still check. Also, because, as I said at the beginning, food is not only made of additives. There are also other ingredients that I want to be conscious of when I do the choices.

Ed 
What would be your advice to someone like me?
I've got a range of products in front of me. I don't necessarily know all the terms of what I see on the packet, but I want to eat healthily. I don't want to have food with additives that don't need to be there. What what's your advice to me?

Camilla
My general advice to everybody would be really the change of diet.
I'm always nagging my daughter because every morning she got cereals for breakfast. There's no way of changing these habits. What I do, I just change the brand just because I don't want to live with a brand loyal scenario at home. 
My advice for everybody would be really to try and have the most varied diet that you can have. 
When we study, we rely quite a lot on studies conducted in animals, mainly rodents, and the diet of these poor animals is really the same day after day. And then if you think about when we're really brand loyal to something, we are really close to that.
Day after day, you will get the same package of the same foods. For me, you're really getting close to the scenario that we're using for estimating exposure. 
My advice would be trying to change the diet and also maybe try to dedicate some time. You can have an apple rather than a dried apple. But that's in general.

Ed
So, a healthy diet, but also very varied. 
I should check out maybe some areas of the supermarket where maybe I go less often and get some things from there as well. 
[…]
Well, let's leave it there. Thanks very much for joining us, Camilla.
I learnt a lot, and thanks very much to our listeners and viewers for joining us on another episode of Science on the Menu. 
Please subscribe to our podcast if you didn't already share it, like it, rate it. You can see the previous episodes on our website, but for now, that's all from me. 
Thank you again, Camilla, and see you next time on Science on the Menu.