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.

It is mostly things commonly used as food additives - so that we can quantify how to use them safely.

They get short codes in the process, which is an easier shorthand to refer to the substance and the tests. This is often easier more precise and/or easier than a fancier pseudonym and/or more chemical name (things like INCI may help both ways (e.g. water is aqua) but at least tend to standardize the names used somewhat).

Such naming can also make regulation a lot easier to do, including the health testing.

While regulations apply regardless of what name you use, it can make it somewhat easier for you to recognize what's in there.

Some negative fearful snap judgment got all E numbers associated with unnatural and bad for you, because it's largely just "the set of things we tested", it mostly isn't.

A good number of them are in fact nutrition you absolutely need, or are perfectly healthy, and/or perfectly natural.

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 calcium (basically),

E407 comes from seaweed,

E322 frequently comes from soy,

E948 is oxygen

Sure, there are also a few handfuls (out of hundreds) that I don't see having a place in my food, if I have any choice. And that was part of the point: the testing let us know we don't want it, the name lets us check more easily.

And a few that you'll probably never see - 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.

See also:

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

Some things worth talking about

BPA

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Phtalates

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PFAS

PFOA

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