Food Additives: The Benefits and Its Side Effects

Yellow 6, Yellow 5, Red 5, Green 6, Blue 6. These are colors that are often seen in our foods. Most people do not question anything about what make the food the color that appears to be. This is known as food additives and there are its benefits and its side effects.

What are Food Additives? 

Food additives (or artificial flavors and artificial colors) refer to substances that become part of a food product when they are added during the food making process. There are two types of food additives--direct food additives and indirect food additives:

Direct Food Additives

Direct food additives are generally added during processing to add nutrients, help food preparation, keeping the product fresh, and enhancing the appearance of food. It can be man-made or natural. Natural additives include adding herbs or spices in foods, pickling foods in vinegar, and using salt to preserve meats.

Indirect Food Additives

Indirect food additives refer to substances that can be found in food during or after it is processed. They are not intentionally put in foods. In fact, the additives exist in small amounts in the final product.

How Does the Food Additives Work?

Food additives perform in the following ways:

• Gives the food its consistent and a smooth look:  Its emulsifiers avoid products from being separated from its stabilizers and its thickness gives a consistent look, anti-caking agents allow substances to flow without any problems.
• Improvement/preservation of the nutrient value: A large number of foods and drinks are fortified and enriched to supply vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients to various foods, as in flour, margarine, milk, and cereal, just to name a few. This aids in making up for vitamins or minerals that may be lacking in a diet. Every product that consists of nutrients should be labeled.
• Keeping the food very wholesome: Microorganisms, as in bacteria, can cause foodborne illnesses. Preservatives can limit the spoilage in which air, fungi, bacteria, or yeast may cause. Some preservatives aid in preserving the flavor in baked goods by preventing the fats and oils from becoming rancid. They also keep fresh fruits from turning brown when the air exposes them.
• Controlling the acid-base food balance and giving leavening: Some additives aid in changing the acid-base food balance to achieve a specific flavor and/or color. Leavening agents that release acids during the heating process. This will react with baking soda to aid biscuits, cakes, and other baked goods to rise.
• Giving and enhancing color: Certain colors enhance the food appearance. In addition, a large number of spices as well as natural and man-made flavors, give the food their taste.

Even with food additives having its benefits, it also have its side effects. Many people's concern about artificial coloring have to do with man-made ingredients that are added to foods. These include benzoic acid in fruit juices, artificial sweeteners, as in aspartame and saccharine, nitrates and nitrites in hot dogs and other meat products, sulfites in beer, wine and packaged vegetables, just to name a few.

U.S. Food and Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, has a food additive list that are deemed to be safe. Although many of these food additives that have not been tested, they are deemed to be safe by the majority of researchers. The substances that are featured on the "generally recognized as safe," or GRAS, list has seven-hundred items, which is checked on a regular basis.

Food additives in products that are sold are regulated and supervised in the United States. However, people that have specialized diets and/or food intolerances should be cautious in choosing products in their local supermarkets and/or grocery stores.

Rule of Thumb: Always read the nutritional facts label so you will know what is exactly in your food and which ingredients that you are putting in your body.