The Widespread of the Food Additive——A Misunderstanding of Food Additive
Nowadays, lots of food safety incidents draw people’s attention. “Food Additive” becomes well-known. Many originally unfamiliar chemical terms become household names due to their links with foods familiar to people. For example, poison milk powder with melamine, ham with clenobuterol hydrochloride, and beef cream with amino acids, etc. Food additive has gradually been regarded as high-profit, illegal, and even poisonous stuffs.
So, what are food additives?
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization’s relative regulations, food additives are defined as substances added to food to preserve flavor or enhance its taste and appearance. At present, China’s food additives have been classified into 23 categories, more than 2000 varieties, and among them, the spices, fragrance varieties are over 1800 kinds. The most common is bleach, leavening agents, colorants, antiseptic, and spices, etc.
Food additives almost exist in all kinds of foods. What’s the function of food additives? Do food additives really harmful to human body? Actually, food additives are the ensurance of food safety. Food additives can not only improve food appearance and taste, but also are beneficial to food processing, and the users of them are more adapted to the production mechanization and automation. The most important is food additives are convenient to food preservation and prevent food to go bad. Besides, food additives are “savior” to some people who have special needs. For instance, people with diabetes can not eat sugar, they need no nutritional sweetener or low-calorie sweetener, and these food additives realized the supply of foods without sugar.
Food additives have so many advantages, why do people regard them as poisons? They are to blame for the food safety incidents? In fact, those additives leading to poison are not food additives. People confused the concept of illegal additives with food additives, and the latter became the scapegoat of the food safety problems.
We need to crack down on the illegal additives, standardize the production and use of food additives. The food additives still have some problems, such as unclear sources and unfair raw materials, and the most serious problem is abusing. But we need not panic on food additives. Along with the national standards of the upcoming law, the production and use of food additives will be more standardized. In daily life, we should strengthen self-protect consciousness, know more knowledge about food safety, and especially don’t buy over-colored or too strong-taste food.
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