Food additives: Can I have your E number?
Science on the Menu: A Food Safety Podcast by EFSA
European Food Safety Authority
0.0 • 0 Ratings
🗓️ 20 November 2024
⏱️ 19 minutes
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Summary
We’ve been looking for ways to preserve food for millennia. Salt helped many civilisations develop. We pickled food in vinegar and stored fruit in honey. But for what purpose are food additives used today? And how did the emergence of supermarkets change this? What about health risks? Join us as we take some foods off the shelves to investigate! Listen out for tips on maintaining a healthy diet and how to decipher what’s on your food labels.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What about you, Camilla? How do you fit into this? When you go to a supermarket, do you turn all the |
| 0:05.4 | packaging around and read the list of ingredients or after a long pay at work studying these things |
| 0:10.7 | you prefer not to? Of course, of course I do. I think I nearly managed to get a whole list of E numbers |
| 0:17.2 | by heart. Not nearly there, but getting there. And yes, I still can't resist |
| 0:24.2 | reading the label on the back of a package. |
| 0:32.1 | Science on the menu, a podcast by the European Food Safety Authority. |
| 0:45.8 | Hello and welcome to another episode of Science on the Menu. |
| 0:50.3 | My name is Ed Bray and I work in the communications team at the European Food Safety Authority, EFSA. |
| 0:56.0 | Joining me today is Camilla Smeraldi. You are the team leader for the team at EFSA dealing with food additives and flavourings. |
| 1:03.0 | Welcome to the podcast, Camilla. |
| 1:05.0 | Thank you. So today we're going to be talking exactly about this. So food additives, what is in our food? |
| 1:10.0 | What are those e-numbers |
| 1:11.6 | that we see on the back of the packaging? So Camilla, we're really glad to have you help us unravel |
| 1:18.8 | this. And actually, to look at this more closely, we've got some foods here today to look at. |
| 1:26.4 | So I'm going to bring them out for you and we're going to have |
| 1:28.9 | a look and see what's in there and what are the different food additives. So to start, |
| 1:34.7 | we're going to start with these. So you can hear those listening, you can hear what's in |
| 1:40.0 | here but you won't know. I've got a vegan protein bar here that I picked up from the supermarket. |
| 1:48.2 | Now, interestingly, it's got three different additives in there. So it's got soy leicin, it's got |
| 1:53.2 | sorbitol, and it's got potassium sorbate. Can you talk us through? What are those three additives doing in there? |
| 2:00.6 | As every food additive that added to the food, they are there because they have to have a technological function. |
| 2:08.3 | And the three that you mentioned have three different technological functions, in fact, starting from the potassium sorbate, which is an antioxidant, so it's there to preserve the food to keep it stable over the time. |
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