Food Additives – Ultra-Processed Food and Health Risks
Food additives are everywhere. They are in, the processed foods like cookies and breakfast cereal, frozen dinners, and the special treats you may indulge in from time to time.
You may not think much about them, since they comprise a small amount of each serving. But many food additives are toxic and many of them are banned in other countries. And many carry with them serious or unknown risks.
Food additives are largely found in ultra-processed foods and help to make low quality food look better, taste better and last longer on the shelf.
Today’s article will explore food additives and what you need to know in terms of your health.
Keep reading to discover answers to these questions:
- What are food additives?
- Where are they found?
- What are the health risks?
- What specific food additives to watch out for?
- How to avoid food additives in daily life?
What Are Food Additives?
Food additives are substances added to food products for specific reasons related to product taste, appearance and shelf-life. Food additives can be natural, such as salt added as a preservative or turmeric added for color.
Most food additives in the modern food supply, however, are not natural. Many are synthetic chemicals used to keep product costs low, cover up the taste, texture or appearance of low-quality ingredients, extend the shelf-life and create products that are addictive.
These are the types of additives we will be focusing on today.
According to the Environmental Working Group, there are over 10,000 additives currently allowed in the food supply.
Direct additives are deliberately added to food during processing, while indirect additives end up in food from processing, packaging and storage processes.
Food additives often fall into these categories:
- Preservative
- Emulsifier
- Thickener
- Color agent
- Flavor agent
Where Are Food Additives Found?
Food additives go hand in hand with ultra-processed food; if we didn’t have ultra-processed food, we wouldn’t be exposed to so many chemical additives.
Ultra-processed foods are made from substances extracted from food, instead of the whole food itself. Ingredients like fat, starch and sugar are combined with stabilizers, artificial flavors, food dye and chemical preservatives to create a food-like product.
These products are formulated in a laboratory and are designed to stimulate taste receptors to provide a desirable ratio of sugar to fat to keep you coming back for more. If you can’t eat just one and find yourself devouring the whole package, this is by design.
Manufacturers even add MSG (monosodium glutamate, often seen on the label as “yeast extract”) and other additives to make ultra-processed foods even more addictive.
Ultra-processed foods typically contain a long list of ingredients, many of which you may not recognize as food (or be able to pronounce). You certainly couldn’t make them in your home kitchen.
Examples of ultra-processed food includes:
- Frozen meals
- Soda and other sugar-sweetened, flavored beverages
- Processed meat
- Fast food
- Packaged cookies and crackers
- Cakes, cookies and pies
- Bread
- Ice cream
- Chips
- Sweetened cereals
According to NHANES (National Health and nutrition Examination Survey 2009-2010) data, ultra-processed foods comprise 57.9 percent of the American diet. This is also where Americans get 90 percent of added sugars. Eighty two percent of Americans exceed the recommended daily limits for sugar intake.
Unsurprisingly, this type of diet is not without risk.
Ultra-processed foods and high sugar diets are linked to a host of health risks and chronic disease, including:
- Metabolic syndrome
- Type 2 diabetes
- Cardiovascular disease
- Fatty liver disease
- Hypertension (high blood pressure)
- Excess body weight and obesity, including central obesity
- Stroke
- Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease
- Cancer
- Dental cavities
- Irritable bowel syndrome
- Food sensitivities and allergies
Ultra-processed foods displace nutrient-dense foods from the diet contributing to nutrient deficiencies, negatively affect metabolic health and are source of toxin exposure, both the ones on the label and others via contamination such as glyphosate and heavy metals.
The bottom line is that ultra-processed foods are addictive, toxic, and carry huge health risks. A large reason for this is the food additives they contain.
Dirty Additives and Health Effects
Food additives are pervasive in the food supply and underregulated, especially in the United States. Here are some of the most concerning food additives to be cautious of:
Artificial Colors
The main culprits here are the FD&C (Food, Drug & Cosmetics) colors including Yellow 5, Red 40 and Blue 1 that are derived from petroleum. These coloring agents are added to highly processed food with little nutritional value, such as candy and sugary foods aimed toward kids.
Food dyes trigger behavior issues in children such as hyperactivity and are also linked to autism spectrum disorder.
Artificial and Natural Flavors
Flavors are industry loopholes for adding chemicals to food that do not need to be disclosed on the label. They are secret and proprietary. Food manufacturers are not required to disclose the ingredients.
The average flavoring agent may contain over 100 distinct ingredients. Artificial flavors are synthetic, but you might be surprised to learn that natural flavors may largely be synthetic also, with only a tiny fraction of the formula required to be derived from a natural substance.
Flavors may contain GMOs, fragrance ingredients, synthetic chemicals such as propylene glycol, BHA (see below), allergens and more harmful chemicals.
BHA and BHT
BHA (butylated hydroxyanisole) and BHT (butylated hydroxytoluene) are used as preservatives in food and in food packaging, acting like an antioxidant to improve shelf-stability. They are also used in cosmetic and pharmaceutical products.
BHA is listed as a known carcinogen under California Prop 65 (Add link to Prop 65 article) and has endocrine disrupting properties, affecting estrogen and thyroid hormone. Evidence suggests that BHT may be carcinogenic and endocrine disrupting as well and causes organ toxicity in animal studies.
BHA and BHT have been banned in the European Union but are commonly used in the United States food supply.
Propyl paraben
You may be aware of parabens found in cosmetics and other consumer goods, but shocked to learn that it is also added to food. It’s a chemical preservative added to flour, food dyes and other ingredients to prevent mold.
Parabens are a class of endocrine disrupting chemicals. Propyl paraben acts as a weak estrogen, has antiandrogenic (anti-testosterone) activity, negatively affecting fertility and reproductive health.
Potassium bromate
Potassium bromate is a chemical added to flour to strengthen dough. Although you only need flour, water and yeast to make bread, many commercial and highly processed breads and bread products contain many more ingredients, including this one. Some of the potassium bromate degrades with the baking process, but some of it remains.
California lists potassium bromate as a known carcinogen and is prohibited in Canada and the European Union.
TBHQ
TBHQ (tert-butylhydroquinone) is another food additive used in the preservation of ultra-processed food to be aware of. It often shows up in foods high in processed vegetable oils, including fast food.
TBHQ may harm the immune system, affecting the maturation of natural killer cells, important immune cells for defending the body against pathogens. Other research shows that TBHQ may increase susceptibility to food allergies.
These are just a sprinkling of food additives to watch out for, although there are thousands more. We don’t have adequate research on many of the food additives in the food supply, let alone a complete understanding of their interactions and accumulative effects.
How To Avoid Food Additives
From a common-sense perspective, it makes sense to avoid additives as much as possible. Here’s how:
Eat like your ancestors. As little as 100 years ago, we had access to far fewer ultra-processed foods and chemical additives. Go back 1000 years and there were none.
The truth is that our food supply has evolved much faster than our genetics and we are not equipped to metabolize industrial foods. As the food supply became more industrialized, first with agriculture and then with food manufacturing, human health suffered. The suffering has only accelerated.
A very helpful approach to ditch ultra-processed food and additives is to focus on what to eat for optimal health. Start with the Paleo diet and personalize from there. By replacing processed food with nutrient-dense whole food that supports your genes you can begin to undo the damage caused by toxins in the modern diet.
Need some culinary inspiration? Start here.
2. Read labels. Every label. The first thing to look at on any food package is the ingredient list. If a product has more than 5 ingredients, any ingredients that you don’t recognize, or any ingredients from the list shared today that you do recognize as harmful, skip it. Find an alternative.
Label reading is also important for products considered health foods or Paleo foods. With the rise of popularity of the Paleo diet, there are certainly some great, high quality convenience options. Other products, however, might have fancy marketing without the quality to back it up. Yeast extract and natural flavors are red flags in natural food products.
3. Watch out for added sugar. Sugar is another clue that a product is ultra-processed and there may be a better alternative out there for you. When label reading, sugar may be disguised as a hundred other names, such as:
- Corn syrup or high fructose corn syrup
- Agave
- Glucose, sucrose, fructose or any other “-ose”
- Barley malt
- Evaporated cane juice
- Rice syrup
- Fruit juice concentrate
- Artificial sweeteners: sucralose, acesulfame potassium, aspartame, saccharin
Don’t be fooled.
When you see artificial colors, flavors and chemical preservatives on a packaged food item, alarm bells should go off in your head.
This isn’t real food, not even close. The more you shift away from food additives and ultra-processed sugary food, the more you prevent chronic disease and restore your health.
We live in a toxic world and one of the easiest ways to avoid toxins is by what you choose to eat. What will your next choice be?
References
- https://www.ewg.org/consumer-guides/ewgs-dirty-dozen-guide-food-additives
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7694501/
- https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/6/3/e009892
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33167080/
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32006369/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3441937/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4462476/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6061990/
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29134528/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6287942/
- https://www.jimmunol.org/content/192/1_Supplement/119.30.short