Most replayed moment: The things hiding in your food? | Professor Marion Nestle

**Jonathan Wolf** (0:01)
Hello, and welcome to ZOE Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.
Today we're talking about food additives. Take a look at the back of some ultra processed packaged food, and you'll see a long list of unfamiliar ingredients, complex, science-y sounding names that most of us can barely pronounce. These are called additives. But what exactly are they? How are they tested? And most importantly, are they truly safe for us to eat? Food policy expert, Professor Marion Nestle, joins me to explore how additives became so deeply embedded in modern food production, and why now more than ever, it's essential for you to understand the things that are hiding in your food.
How are they discovered and produced, and how does that work?

**Marion Nestle** (0:49)
Well, companies discovered that if they put these additives in, then the bread would stay soft and last on the shelf, and the Food and Drug Administration in the United States didn't really get involved in that until the late 1930s, and all these things were in the food supply. People weren't dying on the spot. So by the late 1950s, they determined that the additives that had been around for a long time were generally recognized as safe or GRAS, G-R-A-S, GRAS, and they were out in the food supply. And the idea was if anybody could find anything wrong with them, they would take them out. Otherwise, they were in. And that's pretty much been the attitude. There are probably 10,000 food additives in the food supply.
At least I've seen that number. I certainly don't see 10,000 on food labels, but they have not been studied. Very, very few have undergone any kind of rigorous evaluation. And then since 1958, any new additives that came in, the companies that were using them were responsible for determining their safety and would appoint a committee. A committee would say, oh, we reviewed the research on this, these things are fine, and send a letter to the FDA saying these things are fine. But those letters were voluntary.
And the FDA has other things to do besides worrying about food additives. It's concerned about, you know, general food safety, microbial food safety. And additives have never been a priority.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:37)
So if I'm a company in the States and I want to add a new additive into my food.

**Marion Nestle** (2:44)
You appoint your own committee.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:47)
So basically it's like when my daughter marks her own homework and says she's done an excellent job, even though she clearly hasn't done an excellent job. And in this case, I just select my own group of people to agree that this new additive is fine. And I send a letter to the FDA saying, oh, I've done an internal inspection and decided this thing is fine.

**Marion Nestle** (3:09)
And you list all the references and send it. And occasionally the FDA has sent back letters saying, we don't think so.
But there haven't been very many of those. But they do exist. But it's not something that is looked at with the kind of rigor that our new head of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. thinks is adequate.

**Jonathan Wolf** (3:36)
I'm gonna come to that maybe just in a bit and just understand more, I think, the situation here and then look a bit at the picture, I guess, across the world as well. So firstly, the fact you're saying this with, I would say, some sense of humor, suggests that you think that these additives shouldn't just be viewed as clearly all safe and you should not worry about adding them to your foods.

**Marion Nestle** (3:59)
Well, I'll say again, people don't die on the spot from eating these things. And it's very difficult to determine how would you do the studies if you think about it, if you wanted to rigorously evaluate every single ingredient on the Wonder Bread list of ingredients, that would be enormously difficult. You would need thousands of study subjects. These are really expensive, difficult studies to run. People eat lots of different kinds of foods with lots of different kinds of additives in them. These are very complicated scientific problems to address. They're really hard. I think everybody underestimates how difficult nutrition research is. Because humans are not experiment animals, you can't lock people up and do rigorously tested experiments in which you know exactly what people are eating and wait for 30 years to find out whether the effects show. And additives are a minor consideration.
I mean, really microbial food safety is a much bigger one in the FDA's list of things that it has to worry about.