Food additives
Good, bad, unintentional
Alexander Berezin, Naked Science
Vitamins and minerals are considered "good" food additives, and sodium nitrates and nitrites together with tartrazine are considered "bad". In fact, the former are not nearly as useful, and the latter are not as harmful as it seems. The most dangerous of food additives should be considered the so-called indirect. Let's take a closer look: what is best to avoid, and what is not worth paying special attention to.
To understand the topic of dietary supplements, you need to understand where they begin and where they end. Often a resident of Russia believes that food additives are E102 and similar compounds with the letter "E" and the number after it. In fact, this is not the case. "E" means "Europe", that is, it is only such dietary supplements that are allowed in the European Union.
However, their full definition includes all compounds that are added to food and are not initially included in it.
The American Academy of Pediatrics in 2018 identified the problem as follows: "Some additives get into food directly, but "indirect" additives may include compounds from plastics, adhesives, dyes, paper, cardboard" and other components of food and beverage packaging. Among them, bisphenols, phthalates, perfluorinated organic compounds, perchlorates, dyes of children's food and nitrites with nitrates cause the most concerns among the academy. Let's deal with each of these groups.
Blow below the belt
Bisphenols are common organic compounds. They are mainly used as hardeners of plastics, components of epoxy resins and polycarbonate for greenhouses. They also cover the inner surfaces of metal soda cans. Alas, they can be part of plastic solid containers for food.
Phthalates should not normally be contained in food packaging. Unfortunately, bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET, Polyethylene Terephthalate, code 01), for reasons that are not yet completely clear, can saturate the liquids contained in them with phthalates (apparently, some of the PET molecules still break down, giving phthalates, although why is unclear). It is PET bottles that are used for sodas, sweet teas, drinking water and the like.
The problem is that there are estrogen receptors inside human cells that respond to the main female sex hormone – estrogen. It is produced (and regulates physiology) in men, but much less than in women. So: all types of human estrogen receptors react to bisphenols and phthalates. That is, the body takes these "indirect" dietary supplements for a weak version of estrogens and reacts as if the level of estrogens in the blood has increased.
Of course, this does not mean that the organisms of men who consume soda are completely feminized by the female type, as in persons taking synthetic estrogens during sex reassignment operations. To do this, you need to consume so much bisphenol or phthalates that a person will have a banal severe poisoning (according to Russian GOST bisphenol is a moderately dangerous substance, which should be worked with in production with protective glasses).
However, they have a certain effect. As noted in the WHO report, bisphenol A in large doses causes problems in mice: among them are sexual disorders, precancerous changes, and a drop in sperm quality. This concerns female mice less: for them, the effect of compounds taken by the body for estrogen is more natural.
Of course, the laws do not allow you to take human men and regularly feed them large amounts of bisphenol. However, there is a nuance: in developed countries, the quality of sperm in men has been steadily declining since the 1970s. In 1973, there were an average of 99 million spermatozoa in a milliliter of seminal fluid of an American, in 2011 – only 47 million. Moreover, the decline in the number of spermatozoa is not slowing down even now, remaining at the level of 1% per year. The authors of the work, who discovered this problem in 2017, believe that we live in an emergency situation and the impending collapse of reproduction. After all, conception is impossible without spermatozoa.
Scientists who have discovered a catastrophic drop in sperm quality since the 70s believe: "The fact that the decline is observed in Western countries suggests that some common chemical components have caused what is happening."
This is logical: bisphenols and phthalates came to Western countries first of all. The reason for the concern is also understandable: due to the small number of spermatozoa, it is difficult for many men to conceive a child outside of IVF. For example, today in Denmark, 20% of all men of fertile age really cannot conceive children themselves. But for men from poor countries in Africa, Asia, South America, and so on, the quality of sperm did not have time to deteriorate noticeably – progress did not affect these parts of the planet so much.
It seems to be easy to avoid bisphenols and phthalates in food: it is enough not to drink from metal cans and plastic bottles, not to eat food from plastic containers. But there is a caveat: tubes at a number of food processing plants can be coated with bisphenol from the inside. Therefore, it is difficult to completely reset its consumption.
What are the dangerous components of Martian soil in food packages
The word "perchlorates" is most often used in the media, telling readers that the Martian soil is poisonous: the rovers discovered perchlorates, salts or esters of perchloric acid in it. It should be understood that this is not only a poison: potassium perchlorate (in very small doses) treats increased activity of the thyroid gland, since it inhibits its activity.
In 2017, the American authorities found that the amount of perchlorates in the food of the average American has grown significantly in less than 10 years. In food for children – by 23%, for infants – by 34%. For them, this can be especially dangerous, since the thyroid gland regulates the growth processes in the body. Large doses of perchlorates can lead to impaired brain development in children, the US Food and Drug Administration notes.
The question arises: where does the poisonous component, which usually pops up when discussing Martian soil, come from in food? The fact is that in recent years, perchlorates have been increasingly used in food packaging – mostly ready-made, sold in stores. One of the reasons: perchlorates reduce the amount of static electricity in closed packages.
Sausage and rice flakes contain the most perchlorates – at least in the USA. It is difficult to understand where we have the most of them, because there is no US Food and Drug Administration in Russia, and Rospotrebnadzor is in no hurry to inform the public about such a trifle as the concentration of perchlorates in food. Nevertheless, most likely, our picture is similar: we import food processing technologies from the West, and not vice versa. So sausage lovers can be considered warned.
Artificial dyes: allergy or worse?
From "unintentional" food additives that are moderately permitted in Europe and therefore do not have an E index, we finally move on to those that have such an index.
The first of the permitted, but not harmless compounds is tartrazine, a food additive E102. It is a long-used food coloring. It is easy to find it in Mountain Dew, and in Tarhun, and in a lot of other drinks. And also in ice cream (which has a color), mashed potatoes, yoghurts (having colors), store mustard (made from powder is often deprived of it), almost all store-bought soft drinks of yellow color, cakes, desserts, paella and risotto (store-bought), chips, "quicksup" cubes.
E102 can cause allergic reactions in about one in nine hundred people. If you have unpleasant symptoms after taking aspirin – often you will also have problems from tartrazine. The amount of it in the products is different, so sometimes the symptoms may be stronger, sometimes weaker. One person out of 900 is not so many, but it means that there are about 150 thousand people in Russia, and many millions in the world.
You can often hear that E102 carries another problem – allegedly it can cause attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children who absorb it with food. In fact, there are no scientific papers that could show such a connection convincingly enough. Perhaps E102 is capable of provoking slightly earlier manifestations of individual symptoms of this syndrome, but even this is not yet fully clear from a scientific point of view – as well as the mechanism by which it could do this.
Interestingly, the regulations of the Customs Union, which includes Russia, obliges the manufacturer to indicate that E102 (tartrazine) is contained in food and that it can reduce attention and cause problems with activity in children. Formally, however, the use of E102 is allowed here.
Nitrates and nitrites
Anyone who caught the end of the Soviet era remembers: the press loudly shouted about the dangers of nitrates from fertilizers. Now the media has new times and heroes, but nitrates have not disappeared from food. Technically, some of them could become even more in it, since the consumption of ready-made food sold in packaged form has increased markedly.
Nitrates (say, E251) effectively protect the finished food from spoilage, in addition, they give it a specific color: for example, they make the meat more pink or red than it was originally. A similar effect is given by sodium nitrite (E250). Almost anyone who uses ready-made food or semi-finished products will sooner or later encounter them.
There are scientific papers according to which people who used E251 more than the norm show an increased mortality rate from a number of diseases. Among them are Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, diabetes, stomach and rectal cancer.
However, it is difficult to understand what is the matter here and whether E251 is really "extreme". After all, the more often a person suffers from, say, diabetes, the more often he consumes ready-made or half-cooked food from the store. Again, with such a diet, he has a higher probability of chronic inflammatory processes in the gastrointestinal tract, and inflammatory processes in certain tissues increase the risk of cancer. How to understand: his chances of dying increased from E251 or from the mass of other components of ready-made food (one sample of it can contain dozens of "esh" at once)? If they were mice, we could divide them into groups and give one E251 with food, and not give the other, and then calculate their mortality statistics.
But people are not mice. Such an experiment cannot be carried out on them. Mice, alas, have a slightly different digestive system and a different risk of getting the above diseases. Therefore, it is not just difficult to prove exactly that E251 is to blame, but very difficult.
The situation with E250 (sodium nitrite) is no easier. Yes, they poison pigs in Australia, where these feral animals breed uncontrollably. Undoubtedly, pigs, having eaten enough food with E250, die, having previously lost consciousness. This happens because E250 greatly reduces the ability of blood hemoglobin to carry oxygen. In animals that have eaten it, oxygen starvation begins, and then death occurs.
But do not think that people and pigs are the same. To die with a probability of 50%, a person needs as much as 4.6 grams of the food additive E250, and it is difficult to imagine a consumer who can get so much with ready-made food. Pigs are just very greedy and can eat significantly more people at a time, which makes them so vulnerable to this dietary supplement. Therefore, they overeat E250 – the additive is put in any food – and after a few hours they lose consciousness and die. But it practically does not threaten the ordinary consumer of store products.
The really unpleasant feature of almost all nitrates and nitrites is not that they slightly impair the ability of the blood to carry oxygen, but that they also "knock down" normal natural levels of thyroid hormones. This is especially dangerous for a growing organism. Yes, there are suggestions that nitrates and nitrites correlate with some types of cancer, but it is understandably difficult to investigate this issue in humans. Therefore, there are no exact data in this area for today
"Useful" food additives
For many years it was believed that the cause of diabetes lies in excessive consumption of calories, including sugar – although there is, strictly speaking, no scientific evidence for this view. To reduce the risk of diabetes, various artificial sweeteners were added to the food, for example, aspartame, aka the food additive E951.
In 2016, a group of Israeli scientists decided to test how aspartame affects the likelihood of problems with glucose tolerance. Such disorders are the most important step on the way to type 2 diabetes. Experiments on mice have shown that consumption of E951 increases the risk of developing diabetes. The mechanism is not entirely clear: apparently, aspartame acts on microbes living in the intestines of mice, and changes their species composition in such a way that rodents cease to "cope" with glucose normally.
Interestingly, the number of diabetics in the world in 1985 was 30 million, and nowadays it exceeds 400 million people, that is, the disease is spreading rapidly, and the causes of this epidemic are not well understood today. Many more people die from diabetes and complications than from wars and all other epidemics, so it would be nice to find out what is the reason for such a surge.
Yes, in theory, the growing popularity of aspartame – E951 may be involved in the epidemic of diabetes. It was allowed to be used only in 1981, after that the popularity of the supplement grew. But we must understand that it is difficult to prove this. Mice, pigs, and other model animals are different from humans. To get "iron" results, it is necessary to feed a large sample of volunteers until they develop a prediabetic condition. It is clear that no ethical committee approving experiments on humans will miss such a study. That is why there is no definitive answer to the question about the dangers of aspartame yet – and this dietary supplement is unlikely to be banned in the foreseeable future.
However, this does not mean that consumers themselves cannot exclude the threat from their lives. It is enough to eat and drink less often with E951. This group includes many sodas and other sugary drinks.
Vitamins: useful or useless?
Advertising systematically inspires us that vitamins are useful for our daily activities. Allegedly, we receive few of them with food, which is why there is a shortage of these substances.
Here it is necessary to make a reservation. If you are sitting at the polar station and you have corned beef and water from your food, then yes, you need to carefully monitor the intake of vitamins from a number of groups. A similar situation is if there is a high proportion of semi–finished products in your diet, which are also not particularly balanced in terms of vitamins.
But most people on the planet have access to relatively fresh animal and vegetable food. If you eat vegetables and fruits at least once every couple of days, you will not lack most vitamins.
There are certain types of vitamins that are less common than others in ordinary food. For example, this is often considered vitamin E (food additives E306-E309). Until recently , they tried to attribute almost miraculous properties to him: it was believed that it both reduced the risk of cancer, and made Alzheimer's disease less likely, and even cardiovascular diseases were allegedly less common because of it.
Alas, it's not as simple as we were told in childhood. In fact, the main sources of vitamin E of natural origin are vegetable oils (olive), nuts and seeds. But the fact is that these same oils and nuts contain many healthy components at once – any natural food product, as a rule, has a complex composition. Almost all studies that find a link between increased intake of food with vitamin E and a reduced likelihood of heart attacks and strokes face this problem.
There is a lot of olive oil in the Mediterranean diet – but there are a lot of other components in it, and it is unrealistic to separate vitamin E from others in practice. You can't force a large group of people to take and give up vitamin E for life to see what their likelihood of heart and vascular diseases will be. And if they refuse it only for a short time, then the research will not have time to give statistically significant results.
There is another problem. High doses of vitamin E can be dangerous to health. With ordinary food, without artificial additives, this very rarely happens: no one drinks olive oil by the liter and does not eat nuts by 10 kilograms a day. But with cooked food, where there may be "shock" doses of E306, E307, E308 and E309 (different forms of synthetic vitamin E), the situation is noticeably more complicated. If you get carried away, you can get a dose higher than the recommended safe one.
And yes, what does "above recommended safe" mean? The American equivalent of Rospotrebnadzor believes that for adults it is one gram per day. His colleagues from the EU – 0.3 grams. Do you feel how poorly the question has been worked out? Rospotrebnadzor generally refrains from speaking publicly on this issue, apparently trying to avoid solving all these difficulties.
By the way, vitamin E supplements in vaping liquids are also blamed for the recent epidemic of vaping deaths in the United States. But what was the mechanism by which artificial vitamin E caused death is not yet known. All this shows that with dietary supplements in the form of useful vitamins, everything is still far from clear and it is necessary to rush at them in food with maximum care.
And what to do?
Let's emphasize right away: there is no complete guide for all potentially dangerous food additives above. Their list is too long, and the elaboration of the issue, from a scientific point of view, is small, so that in principle it would be possible to confidently make such a list. We have only identified the most common bottlenecks in the food additives industry – in a situation where a number of scientific papers strongly recommend thinking about the safety of such products.
However, even our short list gives rise to an unpleasant feeling that there are a lot of food additives. Since they write about them in as small a font as possible, it is difficult to find all the "difficult" compounds on the packaging. And is it necessary? If we bother ourselves with the choices of every pack in the store, we can get elected to chronic stress, which is far from harmless.
The general recommendations are nevertheless obvious. It makes sense to try to eat food that is minimally processed by the food industry: for example, unprocessed meat, vegetables and fruits in factory conditions. If you heat-treat and season them yourself, the chances of having enough excess are noticeably reduced.
Yes, there are bottlenecks. There is nowhere in cereal for children's breakfast without food additives, as well as in sodas. However, it is worth reducing the consumption of the latter by children – the harm from this product has long been reliably proven.
Another possible way to consume fewer insecure connections is not to get carried away with standardized network fast food. All these McDonald's and KFC have long and traditionally used large amounts of food additives to get the right branded taste, and their additives do not always seem harmless. Restaurants that are far from fast food often use fewer "eatables" in their diet, although this rule is not without exceptions.
However, the most justified step that a modern person outside the poorest countries can take with regard to dietary supplements is simply to relax. It is impossible to avoid their consumption, only to minimize it. But there is no point in being nervous about this, further shortening your life.
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