On weekends, my mother and wife went out shopping, and as soon as the two came home, they began to quarrel. Mother righteously said, this food bought outside, can not eat, you do not see what is written about sodium benzoate or sodium glutamate? This is all additives. The wife also showed no weakness: if there is an additive, you can't eat it, so don't eat anything. The two of them quarreled more and more fiercely, I saw that the situation was more serious, and quickly came out of the study, and as soon as the two people saw me like seeing a savior, they called me to go over and judge. My mother insisted that food additives were not a good thing. The wife thinks that it is okay to have additives, and there is no need to make a fuss. Most consumers do not understand the issue of food additives, and they often go to two extremes on this issue, one is a stick to kill and the other is considered to be no big deal. So how exactly should we look at food
What about additives?
Food additives refer to the improvement of food quality and color and fragrance, as well as for the needs of antiseptic preservation and processing technology and added to the artificial synthesis or natural substances in food, food additives using standard GB2760 to divide food additives into 23 categories, acidity regulators, anti-caking agents, defoamers, antioxidants, bleaching agents, leavening agents, gum-based candy in the basic substances, colorants, colorants, emulsifiers, enzyme preparations, flavor enhancers, flour treatment agents, coating agents, moisture retention agents, nutritional enhancers, preservatives. Stabilizing and coagulants, sweeteners, thickeners and flavors for food, processing aids for the food industry and others. After understanding the above knowledge, everyone will not talk about additive discoloration.
Since the last time I told my mother about food additives, my mother has not talked about adding color. But there are still doubts about food additives. One day, my mother saw me reading the newspaper and came to me and asked, "Do you think this food additive really doesn't cause any harm to the body?" Regarding whether food additives are harmful to human health. I'm afraid that it is not only my mother who has doubts, but also many people who have such doubts. First of all, we should treat illegal and legal additives differently, and we should not harm legal additives because of illegal additive incidents, and be afraid of all additives. Things like Sudan red and melamine are illegal additions, and no country approves their use.
Legal food additives should also not be over-added. National Food Safety Standards Food Additives Use Standard GB2760 has a clear standard limit for legal food additives, legal additives have been experimented with, after risk assessment, the appropriate amount of addition generally speaking, there is no big harm. However, the consequences of long-term consumption are not always clear, and further research is still needed. Some food additives that are known to have greater harm should be banned in time and replaced by a new generation of additives with little or no toxicity. For example, synthetic pigments such as carmine, amaranth red, and erythrospocene have long been banned from use in the United States because they may be carcinogens. For another example, because the six pigments of sunset yellow, quinoline yellow, acid red, temptation red, lemon yellow and carmine have been found to cause children to be overactive, the British government recommends that enterprises no longer use them. But these pigments are still legally used in China.
There are many types of legal food additives that should be treated differently. Some additives belong to nutrients, such as vitamins, mineral elements, and proper addition is beneficial and harmless to the body. Some additives, although they have no nutritional value, are also necessary, such as preservatives. Although the name preservative makes some people feel terrible, "preservative-free" has become a selling point for some foods, but for foods that need to be preserved for a long time, the use of preservatives is necessary. Preservatives can inhibit the activity of microorganisms, prevent food from spoiling, and prolong the shelf life of food. If preservatives are not used, once the food spoils, the toxins produced by microorganisms may cause greater harm to health.
However, there are also additives that are not too necessary, such as pigments. The pigment itself has no nutritional value, nor can it increase the taste and texture of the food, but is only used to dye the food and make it look gorgeous and good-looking to attract consumers to buy. Food coloring includes both natural and synthetic colors. Natural pigments are pigments extracted from plants, animals, and microorganisms, with poor stability, easy to fade, high price, and not much use. Synthetic pigments are used more often, mostly azo dyes made from coal tar. Synthetic colors, even if they are allowed to be used as food coloring, are not necessarily harmless to the human body. Some of them have been found by animal experiments to be carcinogens (including carmine, amaranth red, erythrosite, temptation red, sunset yellow), some can aggravate the condition of asthma patients, some can cause allergies, and some can cause children to overactivate. Since pigments do not have any benefit to the human body, but may be harmful, their use should be more strictly restricted.
The toxicity of additives varies. For example, commonly used food preservatives include sodium nitrite, benzoic acid, sorbic acid, etc., and their toxicity is very different. Sodium nitrite is generally used as a preservative and color protector for meat and fish products, which can inhibit the growth of botulinum toxin and avoid botulinum toxin poisoning. However, sodium nitrite has a certain degree of toxicity, rat oral sodium nitrite, the semi-lethal amount is about 180 mg per kilogram of body weight (semi-lethal amount is a common indicator of toxicology, refers to the amount that can cause half of the experimental subjects to die, the lower the toxicity is stronger. The semi-lethal amount of table salt is 3600 mg /kg). Under acidic and heated conditions, sodium nitrite can react with amino acids in meat to produce the carcinogen amine nitrite. Benzoic acid and sorbic acid can inhibit the growth of mold, yeast and certain bacteria, and they and their salts are widely used in food and beverage preservatives. Benzoic acid is less toxic, with a semi-lethal amount of about 1700 mg/kg in rats. But benzoic acid in beverages can react with vitamin C to produce the carcinogen benzene, especially under conditions of heat and light. Sorbic acid has the lowest toxicity, with a semi-lethal amount of 7360 mg/kg in rats. Sorbic acid is an unsaturated fatty acid that is rapidly broken down into carbon dioxide and water in the human body, and no adverse reactions have been reported in sorbic acid. Sorbic acid is less toxic than benzoic acid, good antiseptic effect, can replace benzoic acid, but because sorbic acid is more expensive, domestic enterprises in order to reduce costs are still commonly used benzoic acid.
And cyclamate. The chemical name of cyclamate is sodium cyclohexylsulfamate, a sweetener commonly used in food production, and its sweetness is 30 to 40 times that of sucrose. Regular consumption of foods with excessive cyclamate content will cause harm to the liver and nervous system of the human body due to excessive intake. Especially for the elderly, pregnant women, children and children with weak metabolic detoxification ability, the harm is even more obvious. Third, it is saccharin. Saccharin is the oldest sweetener, and the commercial saccharin sold on the market is actually the sodium salt of the soluble benzoylsulfonimide, referred to as sodium saccharin. It is an organic chemical synthetic product, a food additive rather than a food, and has no nutritional value for the body except for causing a sweet feeling in the sense of taste. If you eat more saccharin, it will affect the normal secretion of gastrointestinal digestive enzymes, reduce the absorption capacity of the small intestine, and reduce appetite. The raw materials for the manufacture of saccharin mainly include toluene, chlorosulfonic acid, o-toluidine, etc., which can cause acute poisoning after a large amount of ingestion into the human body.