What Do Food Additives Do to Us?

In our first story, we look at how many food additives banned in Europe remain legal in the U.S., with our former research scientist Dr. Kristine Dennis.

Food-grade titanium dioxide, also called E171, is used extensively in food products as a whitening agent in things like chewing gum and some maybe not-so-obvious products, like baked goods and candy. In a survey of foods from a U.S. grocery store, white frostings, coffee creamers, and chewing gum had the highest concentrations, followed by some candies, almond and rice milks, and dairy products, like skim milk, sour cream, and yogurt.

And the tricky part in the U.S. is food additives like titanium dioxide are allowed to be listed generally as “color added” or as an anticaking agent or filler; so, you may not actually know what foods contain it. This is exactly what the food survey found––high amounts of titanium dioxide in some foods with no labeling indicating the product even contained titanium dioxide.

The only reason we care is because of risk. Titanium dioxide has been approved as a safe color additive for use in foods and drugs in the United States since 1966, and the European Union since 1969––until the European Food Safety Authority (known as EFSA) concluded in 2021 that titanium dioxide, E171, can no longer be considered safe as a food additive. What changed? Based on all the evidence available, a concern for genotoxicity, damage to our DNA, could not be ruled out. As a result of this report, the European Union prohibited its use as a food additive in August, 2022.

Since the 2021 report was issued, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been petitioned to no longer allow the use of titanium dioxide in foods, but that is still pending. Other international food regulatory organizations, like those in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, also do not agree with EFSA’s assessment, and still allow titanium dioxide in foods. Why all the differing opinions? The FDA notes that some of the genotoxicity tests considered by EFSA don’t represent the titanium dioxide used in foods.

Food-grade titanium dioxide is a mixture of micro-sized particles and nanosized particles. Nanoparticles are tiny materials ranging in size from 1 to 100nm. That’s about 100,000 times smaller than a human cell, which is what the genotoxicity studies in animals were done with. A common theme voiced by those disagreeing with EFSA is that you can’t compare nanoparticle toxicity studies where researchers mixed and dispersed the nanoparticles in a fluid with titanium dioxide in foods that rely on bigger microparticles for the desired color appearance. What about the 40% nanoparticles? Well, when you mix nano and microparticles together, a nano might glom onto a microparticle; so, it might not have the same effect as a straight nanoparticle.

So, on the one hand, the European Union considers no amount of food-grade titanium dioxide in food to be safe, banning its use and setting off a worldwide chain reaction with bans in other countries including Switzerland, Qatar, and most recently, Turkey. Meanwhile, other countries, including the U.S., U.K., and Canada, don’t consider the evidence for a ban compelling.

DNA damage isn’t the only problem though. Very little of the titanium dioxide we eat is actually absorbed, but when it is, it may just sit there and accumulate over time. But what happens to the 99% that isn’t absorbed? It ends up in our colons, where it can damage colon cells—and this is the food-grade additive. It may also have adverse effects on our gut microbiome, based on studies using just titanium dioxide nanoparticles, as well as the mixed version used as a food additive.

There are nontoxic ways for food companies to whiten their products, like rice starch or rice flour, but for the same effect more needs to be used, increasing costs.

If you live in a country like the U.S. where it’s still legal, what should you do? In my mind, there should be an extremely high bar for safety for cosmetic additives. And that’s what titanium dioxide is, basically white food coloring. Since it is in no way necessary, and tends to be used in ultra-processed junk food, we recommend trying to avoid it. Even if it were eventually exonerated, it would still be better to use soy milk than dairy coffee creamer and to choose oatmeal over powdered donuts.

In our next story, we look at who determines the safety of food additives.

November, 2013. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced their plans to all but eliminate trans fats from processed foods, citing a CDC statistic that the elimination of partially hydrogenated oils from the food supply could prevent more than 10,000 heart attacks and thousands of deaths, every year. Currently, trans fats enjoy so-called GRAS status: “generally recognized as safe.” How did these killer fats get labeled as safe? Who gets to determine that?

“Currently, a [generally-recognized-as-safe] determination is made when the manufacturer…of a food substance evaluates the safety of the substance [themselves]…and concludes that the use of the substance is [safe].” Did I just read that right? The company that manufactures the substance gets to determine if it’s safe or not? “This approach is commonly referred to as ‘GRAS self-determination.’” To make matters worse, not only do they not have to inform the public; they don’t even have to inform the FDA. In a footnote, they explain that a company may “voluntarily” tell the FDA they just came up with a new food additive that they’ve decided is safe, but are “not required to” even do that.

“The cumulative result is that there is an estimated [6,000] current affirmative safety decisions which allow for more than an estimated 10,000 substances to be used in food.” “In addition, an estimated 1000 manufacturer safety decisions are never reported to the FDA or the public.” “Manufacturers and a trade association made the remaining decisions without FDA review by concluding [on their own] that the substances” that they themselves are selling “were…safe.”

While “[m]anufacturers are not required to notify the FDA of a [quote-unquote safe] determination,” sometimes they do notify the agency, with a little FYI. At least in those cases, where they’re going public with their decision as to what they’re putting in our food, presumably they’re being above board and finding some independent third party panel. The objective of this study was to find out.

Of the 451 GRAS notifications voluntarily submitted to the FDA, 22% were made by someone directly employed by the company. 13% were made by someone directly employed by a firm hand-picked by the company, and 64% by a panel hand-picked by the corporation, or the firm the corporation hired. Are you doing the math? Yes, that means zero percent of safety decisions were made independently.

“An astonishing 100% of the members of…expert panels…worked directly or indirectly for the companies that manufactured the [food] additive in question.” 100%. And those were just the ones the food companies told FDA about. And, they used the same rent-a-scientist “experts” over and over, leading food industry watchdog Marion Nestle to ask, “How is it possible that the FDA permits manufacturers to decide for themselves whether their food additives are safe?”

“Maybe it’s because many of the companies providing our daily food are [corporate] giants with…political muscles national governments would envy.” “PepsiCo alone” [spent] more than $9 million in [a single year] to lobby Congress.”

The fact that food additives like trans fats have been allowed to kill thousands of Americans year after year comes as less of a surprise to those who realize “[t]hree of Washington’s largest lobbying firms [reportedly] now work for the food industry.”

Finally today, a story on what emulsifiers may be doing to our gut microbiome.

Today, when grocery shopping, unless you’re sticking to the produce aisle, “[it’s] nearly impossible to avoid processed foods, particularly …” if you’re eating the standard American diet, characterized not only by insufficient plant foods and too much meat, dairy, and eggs, but also lots of processed junk; and along with that, an “increased exposure to [food] additives…”.

For example, the artificial sweetener sucralose, sold as Splenda, can disrupt the human gut microbiome, and “induce glucose intolerance.” In other words, it can make your blood sugars worse instead of better. It’s relatively easy to avoid artificial sweeteners, but “it may be…more difficult to avoid ingestion of emulsifiers…because they are commonly added to [so many] foods.” In fact, “emulsifiers are the most widely used food additives,” and “most processed foods contain one or more [of them].” We now consume emulsifiers by the megaton every year, thanks to a multibillion-dollar industry.

You’ll commonly find emulsifiers in fatty dressings, fatty spreads, baked goods, mayonnaise, salad dressing, candy, and beverages. Why do we care? “Like all authorized food additives, emulsifiers have been evaluated by risk assessors, who consider them as safe.” However, there are growing concerns among scientists about their [potentially] harmful effects on [our intestinal barrier]” in terms of causing a leaky gut, as well as their effects on our microbiome. Moreover, they could possibly “increase the absorption of … environmental toxins” present in the food.

We know that the consumption of ultra-processed foods may be a contributor to weight gain, for example. Healthier, longer-lived populations don’t just have low meat intake and high plant intake, but they are eating minimally-processed foods. Maybe the emulsifiers found in processed foods could be playing a role, based on a number of preclinical studies. But who cares if “emulsifiers make rats gain weight”? When you read “emulsifiers can cause striking changes in the microbiota,” they’re not talking about within human beings.

Mice are often used to study diet’s impact on the microbiome, but we only share “a few percent of…bacterial genes” in common. Even the gut flora of different mouse strains can be considerably different from each other, so if you can’t even extrapolate from one type of mouse to another, how are you supposed to translate results from mice to human beings? “Remarkably, there has been little study of the potential harmful effects of ingested. . .emulsifiers in [us].”

For example, lecithin, perhaps best known as a key component of egg yolks, was found to be worse than polysorbate 80 in terms of allowing bacteria to leak through the gut wall into the bloodstream. But whether lecithin consumption in humans causes the same problem is yet to be determined. “There is certainly a paucity…of human trials [on] the effects of emulsifiers in processed foods,” but we at least have data on human tissue, cells, and gut flora.

“Dietary emulsifiers directly alter the [composition of the human microbiome]…ex vivo…potentiating intestinal inflammation”. Ex vivo means outside the body. Researchers inoculated an artificial gut with fresh human feces until they had a nice stable culture going, and then added carboxymethylcellulose or polysorbate 80, and got a boost in proinflammatory potential, starting within one day with the carboxymethylcellulose, and within the first week with polysorbate 80. “This approach revealed that both [emulsifiers] acted directly upon human gut [bugs] to increase [their] proinflammatory potential.” If you then test the effect of these emulsifiers on the protective mucus layer in petri dish cultures of human gut lining cells, you will find they can partially disrupt the protecting layer. But both this study and the last-used emulsifier concentrations were far in excess of what people might typically get day-to-day.

This is probably the study that raised the greatest potential concern. The researchers surgically obtained not just cells, but actual intestinal wall tissue, and found that polysorbate 80 could double the invasion of E. coli through the intestinal lining tissue, whereas adding fiber (in this case, fiber from plantains) could seal up the gut wall tissue twice as tight.