Food Additives: Blessing or Bane?

UNTIL the great cyclamate furor bubbled over this fall, few Americans paid much heed to the minute lettering on their cakes and candy bars, diet drinks and instant dinners. Even a magnifying glass was little help in explaining those obscure polysyllables: propylene glycol, calcium silicate, butylated hydroxyanisole, sorbitan monostearate, methylparaben. Today, the portmanteau word for such substances is "additives"--which translates into myriad chemicals that have made even bread a laboratory product and the cheese spread to put on it a test-tube concoction.

For many reasons, laboratory technicians and manufacturers have had to infuse foods with an infinite variety of chemicals. Two vital questions now nag both consumers and pure-food authorities: 1) Are these additives necessary or even desirable? and 2) Are they safe? In virtually no case is a simple declarative answer possible.

The additive explosion was triggered by three unrelated developments. First came the growth of a food-processing and -packaging industry that involved shipping foodstuffs thousands of miles and storing them for months. That was followed by a growing demand for health-promoting, and especially nonfattening foods. Then came the popularity of prefabricated, quick-service dishes and meals such as TV dinners. In assembling their products, manufacturers and processors have relied in some cases on nature's chemicals; in others, they have synthesized a chemically identical version of a natural product; in yet others, they have turned to new products unknown in nature. As a consequence, Americans are ingesting, willy-nilly, ever greater quantities of additives, perhaps as much as 3 lbs. annually (depending on how additives are defined) for an adult who eats the average of 1,400 lbs. of food a year.

Taste for Salt. By far the most ancient and frequently used of all food additives, of course, is sodium chloride (NaCl), or "common salt," which is essential to animal life. Grazing animals and fish extract it from the plants they eat. So peoples who live largely by hunting and fishing get all their bodies' salt requirements with no special effort.

However, salt can also be an agent of disease and death. A single quarter-pound dose might kill a man. Even the healthy person's normal intake of about one-third ounce a day is harmful to patients with certain types of high blood pressure or heart or kidney disease for whom doctors prescribe "salt-free" (actually, low-salt) diets. Some physicians fear that the inclusion of salt in such products as baby foods may lead to an excessive taste for salt and perhaps disease later in life. One manufacturer replies that every baby must have some salt, and that the concentration in its infant foods is only half that in canned foods for adults.

The dispute over monosodium glutamate (MSG) is more complicated. Although it occurs naturally in some foods, especially mushrooms, sugar beets and green peas, it is not essential to life. Yet preparations of a seaweed have been used for thousands of years to lend savor to bland food and give it a "meaty" taste. Japanese chemists discovered in 1908 that an active ingredient of the seaweed is MSG. Not only many Americans but some Orientals as well suffer a sensitivity reaction to MSG--sold in the U.S. under the trade name Ac'cent--and virtually all such sensitive people will react to an excessive dose with discomforting, if temporary allergic symptoms. After recent outbreaks of this "Chinese restaurant syndrome," New York City's department of health has instructed cooks to use MSG sparingly, but no one knows what precise limits should be set.

The Popeye Problem. Two things prompted the Food and Drug Administration to undertake a detailed study of other possible effects of MSG. One was the recent publicity given to the fact that some baby foods are laced with the stuff--simply to titillate their mothers' palates, as Consumer Crusader Ralph Nader (TIME cover, Dec. 12) pointed out. (Gerber is no longer putting MSG into baby foods.) The second factor was a report by a St. Louis psychiatrist, Dr. John W. Olney, that when he injected MSG under the skin of newborn mice it caused brain damage and other developmental defects. Though this phenomenon may have no relevance to MSG's use in food, there is no medical evidence on the possible damage of concentrated MSG in a baby's bloodstream. In fact, many potentially harmful chemicals occur naturally in familiar foods. Spinach is rich in oxalic acid, which is the foundation for a common type of kidney stone. (Popeye in real life would have suffered endless agonies from passing stones.) Carotene, the pigment that puts the color in egg yolks, sweet potatoes, mangoes and carrots, is used by the body to make Vitamin A--but consumed in excess causes a kind of jaundice.

GRAS List. In crude or dilute form, nature supplies some of the substances that have recently gained notoriety as additives. The first additives, aside from salt and seaweed, were spices. Some contained natural preservatives. Benzoic acid, used as a preservative for almost a century, occurs naturally in berries and in some fruits, such as plums.

The first U.S. Pure Food and Drug Law, passed in 1906, gave, the enforcement authority (now the Food and Drug Administration) no power to rule on the safety of any substance that a food processor proposed to put in his packages. Not until 1958 did Congress give the FDA the power to pass on additives before they went on the market, but by then it had delayed so long that hundreds of additives had been in wide use for many years. So the new law contained a grandfather clause, exempting substances already employed and "generally recognized as safe (GRAS) for their intended use."

The FDA's list of GRAS items classifies hundreds of additives by their principal purposes. Among them are anti-caking agents, which keep such things as salt, sugar and milk powder from clumping; preservatives (31 listed); emulsifying agents, used to help homogenize substances that do not normally mix (like fat in milk); sequestrants, which keep trace minerals from turning fats and oils rancid, and are also used to prevent some soft drinks from turning cloudy. In addition, the FDA has 80 "miscellaneous" GRAS substances from alfalfa to zedoary (an aromatic East Indian herb), from pipsissewa leaves to ylang-ylang, used as flavoring.

In all, there are thousands of permitted additives, and few have ever been tested thoroughly for possible long-term harmful effects in man. No one can be really certain that any particular substance may not induce cancer over a 50-year period, or cause thalidomide-like deformities in the unborn. Although there is only the remotest chance that even a minority might be hazardous, further testing of many additives, by chromatographic techniques that did not exist when the substances were first introduced, is clearly indicated. The FDA has already arranged with the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council to supervise such studies of saccharin and MSG.

Saccharin has been known since 1879, and widely used since the early 1900s. Entirely synthetic and unknown in nature, saccharin provides no calories and nothing to elevate the diabetic's blood sugar. Its one drawback is that in many users' mouths it leaves a bitter, aftertaste. The cyclamates, also synthetic, are effective sweeteners with the advantage of no aftertaste. Extensively tested in the 1940s and '50s, cyclamates slipped onto the GRAS list just before Congress closed the books in 1958 and before it adopted an amendment, named for Representative James J. Delaney of New York City, that forbade the inclusion in foodstuffs of any substance known to cause cancer in man or any species of animal. Whether the Delaney Amendment is a wise provision or is too simplistic is debatable. It is possible that many otherwise safe substances, if given to animals in grossly excessive doses and by unnatural routes (for example, injected under the skin of newborn mice), might cause cancer in some species.

Crude Guillotine. Cyclamates, given in doses 50 times greater than any likely human consumption, have caused bladder cancer in mice and rats, as well as the birth of deformed chicks. This was duly reported to the FDA by Abbott Laboratories, major producer of cyclamates. Within a week, Secretary Robert Finch of Health, Education and Welfare ordered cyclamates off the market, save for fruit already packed for distribution or foods prescribed for health reasons, for diabetes, say, or obesity.

In the two months since the cyclamate ban, it has become clear that far too many additives were used and allowed on the GRAS list without sufficient testing. Moreover, an automatic guillotine such as that applied to cyclamates is too crude an instrument for determining acceptability. The food industry obviously has to use some additives to keep its products from spoiling and--in the case of such staples as bread, milk and iodized salt--to give them maximum nutritive and health-protective values. Just as clearly, the public demands low-calorie sweeteners as well as precooked heat-and-serve meals. It is well within the competence of chemists and manufacturers to meet society's demands safely. At the same time, the FDA needs the unquestioned authority and financial resources to ensure that the world's greatest consuming society can be far better informed--and protected. Last week's reorganization of the FDA, with the prospect of an increased budget, should make that possible.

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