Those darn chemicals

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BIG RED TEXT HELLO: This is not health advice, or necessarily correct. Do not make health decisions based on just this. Do your own research, and not just the stuff that agrees with your opinions.

Things barely worth talking about

E numbers

E numbers just means it's tested, not that it's good or bad for you.

It is mostly things commonly used as food additives, so that we can put numbers on how to use them safely.

They get short codes in the process, which is an easier shorthand to refer to the substance, and implicitly the tests.

Since a lot of things have other aliases (things like INCI) and/or more chemical names.

While regulations apply regardless of what name you use, (having to) put E numbers on the can somewhat easier for you to recognize what's in there, and look up the relevant tests if you wanted.

And yet, some fud still got all E numbers associated with being unnatural and bad for you.

Again, it's just a list of common enough that we want them to be tested for their use there.

A good number of them are perfectly healthy, and/or perfectly natural, and a few of them are nutrition that you absolutely need.

Consider:

E300 though E309 are vitamin C and E,

E101 is vitamin B2 used as coloring,

E160c is pepper extract, mostly used for coloring

E160a is carrot used for coloring,

E170 is (basically) calcium,

E407 comes from seaweed,

E322 frequently comes from soy,

E948 is oxygen

There are also a few that you'll probably never see in practice. There's rarely any silver (E174) or gold (E175) in food, but they're included for testing purposes, just so that you may know how safe they are when they are used in, say, cake decoration or drinks that want to look fancy.

Yes, there are also a few handfuls (out of hundreds) that I don't see having any place in my food, if I have any choice about it.

And that was part of the point: the testing let us know we don't want it, makes it easier for regulations to point at them to say 'never', lets us easily identify what food to avoid.

See also:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_number

Some things worth talking about - mixed

BPA

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Phtalates

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PFAS

PFOA

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