Food additives in Europe 2000

The food additives presently permitted for use in EU are not subject to a periodical review regarding their inherent safety. Some have not been re-evaluated by the Scientific Committee for Food (SCF) for more than 20 years, and the majority have not had a formal safety check for more than 10 years.

The purpose of this report is to investigate whether that may constitute a safety problem for the European consumer today or whether the safety of the presently used food additives has been securely guarded by the solidity of the safety data used for the lastly performed safety evaluation.

This report contains 163 monographs covering more than 300 food additives with individual E-numbers from E100 to E1521, discussing the evaluations of the SCF and JECFA and including the validated results of a search covering the scientific literature up to mid 2000, a summary table with prioritisation for re-evaluation of the individual substances, a list of additives by E-numbers and an index of additives by alphabetic order. In the introductory chapters and the explanatory section of the report the principles for safety assessment of food additives by SCF is presented, the background for the structure of the individual monographs are given as well as summary of recommendations from the individual monographs and priorities for reassessment suggested by the Nordic Working Group on Food Toxicology and Risk Assessment.

The report demonstrates that there is no need for any urgent action regarding re-assessing the use of the presently approved food additives.

However, the review points out a series of aspects which warrant attention e.g. that many substances have not been re-assessed for many years, although new data are accumulating in the scientific literature and in certain cases calls for a new assessment and that for some additives their uses should be assessed to reassure that the exposure complies with the recommendations of SCF.

It is recommended that a mechanism is put in place in EU, which ensures a systematic, periodic review of all permitted food additives. In the meantime it is suggested to use the data in the present report as help for prioritisation of action.

To facilitate the process and the overview of the situation regarding the safe use of food additives in Europe, the data presented in this report will be made available for the European authorities, food producers and retailers as well as consumers in a data base as the next step of this Nordic project.