Additive usage levels.

Abstract

With the adoption of the European Parliament and Council Directives on sweeteners, colours and miscellaneous additives the Commission is now embarking on the project of coordinating the activities of the European Union Member States in the collection of the data that are to make up the report on food additive intake requested by the European Parliament. This presentation looks at the inventory of available sources on additive use levels and concludes that for the time being national legislation is still the best source of information considering that the directives have yet to be transposed into national legislation. Furthermore, this presentation covers the correlation of the food categories as found in the additives directives with those used by national consumption surveys and finds that in a number of instances this correlation still leaves a lot to be desired. The intake of additives via food ingestion and the intake of substances which are chemically identical to additives but which occur naturally in fruits and vegetables is found in a number of cases to be higher than the intake of additives added during the manufacture of foodstuffs. While the difficulties are recognized in contributing to the compilation of food additive intake data, industry as a whole, i.e. the food manufacturing and food additive manufacturing industries, are confident that in a concerted effort, use data on food additives by industry can be made available. Lastly, the paper points out that with the transportation of the additives directives into national legislation and the time by which the food industry will be able to make use of the new food legislative environment several years will still go by; food additives use data by the food industry will thus have to be reviewed at the beginning of the next century.