Food additives, controlled

The safety of foods—including food additives, food contaminants, and even some of the major natural components of foods—is becoming an increasingly complex issue. Prior to the enactment of the Food Additives Amendment to the FDCA, food additive control required that a food additive be non-deceptive and that an added substance be... 

Finally, the food processor has the responsibility of ensuring that losses of nutrients are minimal, and that known toxic components are removed or destroyed. He must also appreciate fully the implications of introducing additives or artefacts into processedfood. Food additive control, we may hope, is now well organised. However, the unintended appearance of entirely new chemical entities in processedfood remains a matter for concern and demands constant vigilance. 

Quality Specifications. Because of the extreme sensitivity of polyamide synthesis to impurities ia the iagredients (eg, for molecular-weight control, dye receptivity), adipic acid is one of the purest materials produced on a large scale. In addition to food-additive and polyamide specifications, other special requirements arise from the variety of other appHcations. Table 8 summarizes the more important specifications. Typical impurities iaclude monobasic acids arising from the air oxidation step ia synthesis, and lower dibasic acids and nitrogenous materials from the nitric acid oxidation step. Trace metals, water, color, and oils round out the usual specification Hsts. 

Abbott Laboratories, which has conducted additional toxicity and carcinogenicity studies with cyclamate, a 10 1 mixture of cyclamate—saccharin, and cyclohexylamine, claimed to be unable to confirm the 1969 findings. Abbott then filed a food additive petition for cyclamate in 1973, which was denied by the FDA in 1980. In 1982, the Calorie Control Council and Abbott Laboratories filed a second food additive petition containing the results of additional safety studies (73). That petition was stiU pending as of 1996. Cyclamate is, however, allowed for use in any or all three categories, ie, food, beverage, and tabletop, in about 50 countries. Sweet n Low, known in the United States as a saccharin-based table-top sweetener, contains exclusively cyclamate in Canada. 

Vibrating conveyors employing direc t contacting of sohds with hot, humid air have also been employed for the agglomeration of fine powders, chiefly for the preparation of agglomerated water-dispersible food products. Control of inlet-air temperature and dew point permits the uniform addition of small quantities of liquids to sohds by con-... 

The Delaney Amendment to the Food and Drug Act addressed the control of food additives. 

Data concerning use patterns of food additives and color additives are difficult to obtain. Although additives must be included on product labels in descending order of inclusion, major effort is required to evaluate even a simple presence on this basis, which would provide at best only limited information on the amounts used. In most cases, quantitative analytical controls are limited to efforts by control authorities to determine compliance with legal limits. Levels below these limits are of limited interest and are usually not published. ... 

Food additives are authorized at the EU level for all 15 member states, as well as for Norway and Iceland. The use of food additives is controlled by legislation that is harmonized across the EU. Domestic legislation in each member state is based on the various additive directives incorporated into specific national legislation. The community legislation on food additives consists of the following directives ... 

The permission to use food colorants is bound to their safety and is strictly regulated by specific laws controlled at national and international levels. Individual country laws differ according to specihc protocols, doses, and interpretations. Currently, the European Union (EU) has authorized 43 colorants as food additives and the United States (US) has authorized about 30. ... 

Bilchmann N B and Hald B (1985), Analysis, occurrence and control of ochratoxin A residues in Danish pig kidneys , Food Addit. Contam., 2, 193-199. 

Karabulut, O.A., Arslan, U. and Kuruoglu, G. (2004). Control of postharvest diseases of organically grown strawberry with preharvest applications of some food additives and postharvest hot water dips , Journal of Phytopathology, 152 (4), 224—228. 

After all the answers from the interviews had been uploaded, an expert analysed each supply chain for each of the seven defined criteria for quality and safety microbial toxins and abiotic contaminants potential pathogens natural plant toxicants freshness and taste nutrient content and food additives fraud social and ethical aspects. For example, an expert on freshness and taste would check each major step in a supply chain for tomatoes to determine if it fulfilled the definition of a CCP (HACCP, Principle 2) in relation to freshness and taste for this commodity. If the step was considered to be a CCP, the answers in the questionnaire that related to relevant substeps at this step would be reviewed, to assess the control procedures that were in use for this CCP. The expert would then fill in the text field, structuring the input to consist of the following points ... 

Federal Trademark Dilution Act, 25 256 Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments (FWPCA), 21 581 Federation of European Food Additives and Food Enzyme Industries (ELC), 12 37 Federation of German Industries (BDI) study, 24 194... 

The control of food additives has been much discussed in newspapers and other parts of the media and yet, rather surprisingly, there have been few scientific books about additives. There have been detailed reports of the work of expert committees such as the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (e.g. WHO, 2000) and informative commentaries on individual additives and legislative controls, notably those in the European Union (EU) (e.g. Leatherhead Food Research Association, 2000). There have also been articles on work to harmonise worldwide control of additives (Keefe et al., 2000). 

This technique has been established for many years particularly for water, soil and feeding-stuff analysis, where a large number of analyses are required for quality control or monitoring purposes. A number of applications have been published for food additives including aspartame (Fatibello et al., 1999), citric acid (Prodromidis et al., 1997), chloride, nitrite and nitrate (Ferreira et al., 1996), cyclamates (Cabero et al., 1999), sulphites (Huang et al., 1999 AOAC Int, 2000), and carbonate, sulphite and acetate (Shi et al., 1996). Yebra-Biumm (2000) reviewed the determination of artificial sweeteners (saccharin, aspartame and cyclamate) by flow injection. 

This group of methods can be applied to routine quality control analyses or for process control of food additives. Many publications describe new developments but few validated procedures are available in the literature. Some applications used within the food industry remain unpublished but some details are given below. A wide variety of techniques are available including biosensors, enzymatic, pH differential methods, X-ray fluorescence and NIR. 

CONNERS C K, GOYETTE C H, SOUTHWICK D A, LEES J M and ANDRULONIS P A (1976), Food additives and hyperkinesis a controlled double blind experiment , Pediatrics, 58, 154-66. 

The Delaney Amendment to the Food and Drug Act defined and controlled food additives any additives showing an increase in cancer tumors in rats, even if extremely large doses were used in the animal studies, had to be outlawed in foods recent debates have focused on a number of additives, including the artificial sweetener cyclamate. 

In recent years hydroxypyranones and hydroxypyridinones have been increasingly investigated for the control of metal ion levels in the body (324-327). The 3-hydroxy-4-pyranones maltol and ethylmaltol are of relatively low toxicity 328,329), and indeed have the pharmacological advantage of being permitted food additives. Hydroxypyridinones are particularly attractive for pharmaceutical purposes since their structure allows tailoring of many of their properties, as outlined in Section II.A.3.b earlier. They have been used in, or tested or proposed for, chelation therapy to remove excess of several toxic elements. This will be illustrated later in the sections... 

It has become customary among cancer epidemiologists to talk about certain lifestyle factors as important contributors to cancer risk. Lifestyle factors (smoking, dietary patterns, alcohol consumption) are assumed to be largely under the control of individuals. These are distinguishable from factors that are less directly in the control of individuals (occupation, medicines, consumer products), and those over which individuals have little or no control (food additives, pesticides, environmental pollutants). Just how much control individuals have over the various lifestyle factors is of course much debated. 

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