E for Additives. Maurice Hanssen
response to at least most of the four categories above would be ‘needed by whom?’. It is clear that in many cases it is the manufacturer that needs the colour, but as we see the removal of many of the artificial colours from the shelves of our shops it is obvious that more colours are being permitted than are ‘needed’ by many responsible manufacturers and retailers, and that these are certainly not demanded by us when we have the choice.
Artificial Colours
In the middle of the last century almost anything that gave colour was used to make food products more attractive. Substances containing mercury, lead, cyanide and copper were frequently used. At about the same time in 1856 Sir William Henry Perkin discovered his first ‘coal tar dye’, which was aniline purple, when he was only nineteen years old. Perkin transformed the cloth industry, whilst at the same time a selection of his colours, which faded less, had a wide range of bright hues and was cheap to use, became available for the food producers.
It did not take long for the regulatory authorities around the world to wonder about some of the colours being used and, depending on where you were, they were either negatively listed, which is to say banned, or positively listed, which means that you could only use those which the government felt were both suitable and harmless according to the scientific standards of the age.
In Britain in 1925 a number of colours which were obviously harmful were banned from use. These included any compounds of antimony, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, mercury and zinc, also one vegetable colour, gamboge (much used by painters), and five of the ‘coal tar’ colours—picric acid, Victoria yellow, aurine, Manchester yellow and aurantia.
It was not until 1954 that the Food Standards Committee proposed that there should be a list of acceptable colours instead of just a list of those that were not permitted. Accordingly, in both 1957 and 1973 lists of both natural and synthetic colours that were permitted were prepared. So what is the position today? Britain permits more artificial colours than almost any other western country. If Norway can manage without any artificial colours and the United States allows seven, we have to wonder why we permit sixteen.
It must be said that some of them seem to cause very few problems, even in those people who suffer from many allergies and intolerances. The toxicological questions and allergic reactions occur most frequently with E110, sunset yellow, and the yellow colour E102, tartrazine. This could be because they are used quite often. More research is needed, but that which is being undertaken at the moment seems to ignore the well-established fact that many people are allergic or badly affected by both foods and food additives, and that often the combination of the food and the food additive together is worse than either alone.
The 1987 FAC Report has certainly made one major step forward, and that is to give proposed average daily intake upper levels for a number of the colours under review. Very many problems with foods and food additives are related to dose and an effort to reduce the level is welcome. However, the FAC has not looked at the question of need from the consumer’s point of view and this could well be an area where the reader will wish to form a personal opinion.
Natural Colours
Professor Frank Curtis, Chairman of the FAC, said in a meeting at the House of Lords in 1987 that he was worried about the increased levels of daily intake of natural colour additives being used, because the tests that had been made on them did not take relatively high levels of consumption into account. This is a fair point. Safety is related to dose. But, having been told that an E-number means that an additive is safe, then it is strange that the natural food colours to do not seem to have been as well tested as we have been led to believe, even though they have received their E-numbers. Nonetheless, so many of them are in common use in a food form that it is difficult to feel really worried about them. For example, if a manufacturer wishes to brighten a strawberry yogurt with beetroot juice instead of E123, amaranth, then the argument goes that the beetroot red colour may also cause problems. On the other hand, beetroot is part of a normal diet whereas amaranth is not.
If we are to be told that colours are necessary for a happy life and a good diet, then certainly a lot more work needs to be done on their safety and necessity, for it is certain that many producers of good food are finding that when they use fine ingredients and first-class methods of conservation the need for colours, artificial or natural, disappears. It is high time we became far less concerned with consistency in the colour of manufactured products, in the way that we do not mind variations of colour in the kitchen. We are already becoming used to a different palette of colours in the foods we eat and this trend will continue as we consume fewer and fewer of those most dispensable of all food additives, the colours.
For a note on some new EC proposals, please see page 374.
1Historical Development of Food Coloration, John Wallford. Developments in Food Colours, Elsevier 1984.
1‘Food Advisory Committee Final Report on the Review of the Colouring Matter in Food Regulations 1973’, HMSO, 1987.
The Food Act prohibits the addition to food of any harmful substance. Is a flavour harmful or not?—we cannot be sure. The dividing lines between ground almonds, almond essence and synthetic almond flavouring could well illustrate the various stages between being an ingredient and an additive. So it would seem that what we really need to know is precisely what ingredient or additive is being used, so that we have the freedom to decide whether or not to eat it. At the moment there is no statutory declaration of the nature of food flavourings. We also need to have information on the toxicity of these flavours.
The European Community is attempting to produce a framework for controlling flavourings as part of the general harmonization of the Food Law within the community. Because some 4,000 substances are involved this will inevitably take a long time.
Many flavourings are difficult to analyse because they are chemically identical (nature-identical) to the substances which gave the product its character in the first place. This fact could produce bad law because, if you cannot analyse whether the substance is natural or artificial as an additive, then regulations controlling its use have little strength unless we also bring in—and this is envisaged—regular random factory inspections of food manufacturers to check precisely the nature of the ingredients that goes to make up their products. This is in addition to having the contents clearly defined on the label, so that we can make up our minds, too.
The European Community is working towards a positive list, which means giving approval for specified artificial and natural flavours. In spite of obvious difficulties this lack of information remains a substantial gap in our knowledge of what we are eating which should be remedied as soon as possible.
As to safety we have few doubts. Very few problems have been shown to be caused by food flavours and, so far as we can tell, none of these under normal circumstances. This is because the effectiveness of a food flavour depends on it being chemically similar to that found in nature and, if you happen to be allergic to strawberries, you would be unlikely to eat strawberry-flavoured products which could produce the same problems.
Watch out for ‘smoked’ fish. It is legally permissible to dip fish into ‘liquid smoke’, which is in truth a flavour, and then add colour as a replacement for the hues of the normal smoking process. Such fish can be described as ‘smoked’. Also, both smoked and cured fish, as with ham, when sold not ready-packed only have to carry the words ‘added permitted colour’, and so avoid the obligation to give a true list of ingredients.
A report from