Chemical food additives are used for preservation, coloring, flavor enhancement, and nutritional value. Common additives include sweeteners, iodine, vitamin D, B vitamins, iron, and folic acid. Some additives, such as sodium nitrate and sulfites, can cause health problems.
Chemical food additives can be derived from synthetic or natural sources and are typically used for one of four purposes. They act as food preservatives to extend shelf life and prevent spoilage in hot and humid conditions, are used as coloring agents and flavor enhancers, or are added to increase the nutritional value of foods. Processed foods tend to have many chemical additives that are introduced into the products in small quantities, but the most common bulk food additives are those designed as flavor enhancers. These include natural sugar, high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners like aspartame. Other common flavor enhancers include monosodium glutamate (MSG) and natural spices with synthetic or natural origins such as spearmint, almond and vanilla flavors.
While sweeteners are the most common category of food additive, two others added specifically for health benefits are also widespread. These include the mineral iodine, which is usually added as potassium iodide to serve both as a preservative and to prevent thyroid disease caused by lack of the compound in the diet, and vitamin D, which is added to milk to prevent bone and bone disease. promote eye and skin health. Both iodine and vitamin D have been added to foods in the United States since the 1920s and 1930s.
Another key area where natural additives are used to fortify the nutritional value of a food is with the addition of B vitamins, iron and folic acid to processed white flour. Most of these vitamins are naturally present in flour but are lost during the milling process. They have been added to the final product since the 1940s to prevent diseases such as pellagra and beriberi in children and adults and spina bifida in infants.
While artificial additives can fall into a range of about 20 different categories. from anticoking agents to emulsifiers and humectants, many of the most common are used to prevent the spoilage of natural fats and oils in foods. These chemical food additives include butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT), as well as fat substitutes that taste like fat like olestra and sterol esters. Other chemical additives that are used both as fat substitutes and as food stabilizers or preservatives are gums acquired from various plants such as seaweed. These include carrageenan, guar gum, locust bean gum and other well-known additives such as xanthan gum and gum arabic.
Of the hundreds of different chemical food additives, two categories of preservatives that are commonly used cause excess health problems. These include sodium nitrate compounds, which can play the multiple roles of preservatives, coloring agents, and flavoring agents simultaneously, and are widely used in cured meats and elsewhere to prevent bacterial growth. Sulfites are another broad category of chemical food additives used to prevent discoloration in nuts and to keep seafood like shrimp and lobster fresh. These compounds are particularly troublesome for people with asthma and some types of allergies, as, in high enough concentrations, they can cause anaphylactic shock which can lead to death if not treated immediately.
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