The Preservation of Food: Food Additives and its Cocktail of Chemicals
Food additives are one of the most renown topics nowadays. Many people are concerned about the effects these chemicals have in our food. Some explain that they are nothing but poisonous substances that should be banned from our diet, while others argue that there is no risk whatsoever linked to their consumption.
But as you probably already know, not everything is black or white; sometimes, it´s shades of grey. In our opinion, this phrase perfectly applies when it comes to the food additives industry. Indeed, even though not all food additives are healthy, not all of them are noxious neither.
We have to find a middle ground between questioning every single thing and being rightly concerned. We are not telling you to stop buying processed food, neither are we telling you that eating loads of them isn’t harmful; we are only telling you to be smart about it.
The first thing you need to know about food additives is that we have been using them for years, and when I say years, I mean thousands of years. They were so common that during the Roman Empire, soldiers were actually paid in salt which is where the word salary comes from (salarium in Latin).
Of course, since then, food additives have changed, yet they still aim for the same objective: the preservation of food. Thanks to progress in sciences we have been able to elaborate chemicals more and more useful. Even though sometimes, the cost of this progression was the quality.
Thankfully, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) (1) was created to regulate the food additives entering the market. Every chemical used in the processing of our food has to go through an assessment in order to establish whether or not it is harmless, which goes to show us that this industry is under control.
However, it has been discovered that some food additives available in the market could reveal themselves harmful for people suffering from certain conditions. For instance, asthmatic people might want to think twice before eating a product processed with sulfite, because studies have shown that between 5 and 10% of asthmatic people could react badly when consuming sulfite. (2) The advice we would give to these people would be to turn to sulfite-free products.
So, our final advice would be this: take a look at the labels. If you see the ingredient list of the product is filled with chemical names you can barely pronounce, then maybe you should consider putting it back on the shelf.
However, keep in mind that food additives were originally meant as taste-enhancing and preservation products that would make our lives easier, enabling us to taste products from all around the world, as well as enhancing their taste. So don’t give in to panic, choose your products wisely and you will be good to go.
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Biography:
pH7 (http://www.ph7foodtech.com/en) is a food technology company specialized in the production of food additives. They chose to develop healthier sulfite-free, phosphate-free and carbonate-free food additives that wouldn’t have harmful effects on their clients’ health. They own a facility in Barcelona (Spain) as well as in other parts of the world.