CSPI's Chemical Cuisine database rates additives—used to preserve foods or affect their taste, texture, or appearance—from ‘safe' to 'avoid.'
Learn more about food additives, how our rating system works, and why CSPI maintains this consumer tool in our Frequently Asked Questions. Click any question on the right to read the answer. D Panthenol
Food additives are substances added to foods to serve functions like preventing mold growth or changing color, consistency, texture, or taste. Additives can be single chemicals or mixtures of many chemicals, and they can be natural or synthetic.
Note: The term “food additive” has a specific definition in US federal regulations, but we are using the term in the more generally accepted usage as defined above. As such, our definition of “food additive” includes not only substances defined in regulation as food additives, but also includes “prior-sanctioned" substances—essentially, additives used prior to 1958—as well as color additives and substances that are “generally recognized as safe” or GRAS, each of which are defined a bit differently in regulations but are essentially the same as food additives. Federal regulations also use the term “additive” to refer to substances used in food packaging and other food contact materials, like processing equipment or storage containers, that can migrate into our foods. Currently, Chemical Cuisine includes only substances that are added to food directly, not those that come into contact with food.
CSPI assesses the safety of each ingredient in this database by reviewing the available scientific evidence.
The rating for an ingredient listed in Chemical Cuisine is based on a review of the available scientific evidence. This evidence includes toxicological, epidemiological, and exposure data from the peer-reviewed literature as well as health and safety assessments from authoritative sources such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the World Health Organization (WHO). We evaluate this whole body of evidence in reaching our conclusion on the safety of each additive while taking into consideration other information such as data availability, uncertainty, benefits of using the additive, and potential impacts on specific vulnerable groups (e.g., children or people who are pregnant).
You can rely on Chemical Cuisine while doing your grocery shopping. By referencing Chemical Cuisine while reviewing the ingredients lists (the small print typically on the back of packages) of foods and beverages you’re considering buying, you can make more informed choices to protect yourself and your family. Our hope is that eventually this database won’t be necessary because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will uphold its responsibility to protect consumers and the food industry will prioritize public health over profit. Until then, though, CSPI’s Chemical Cuisine is here to help.
Chemical Cuisine entries can be filtered by safety rating, purpose, or health concern. Entries are organized alphabetically, and you can choose a letter from A to Z in the leftmost column to see all entries beginning with that letter. You can also scroll the list on this page to see all food additives for which we have ratings.
When you select a particular ingredient, you’ll be directed to a page with more information about the research into that ingredient’s safety, associated health risks, and our reasoning for assigning a particular rating. We also provide info about what category of foods it’s commonly found in, so you can know which products to check for an ingredient you would like to avoid.
There are thousands of chemicals added to our foods. Most of these substances are safe, but there are some that everyone should strive to avoid. Other additives fall in the spectrum between “safe” and “unsafe.” There are some chemicals that only certain people with sensitivities or intolerances need to avoid, and others whose consumption everyone should reduce, like added sugars and sodium.
Making sense of the mountain of scientific evidence for all of these substances is difficult, leaving many consumers uncertain about how to adjust their shopping habits to minimize harm. CSPI publishes its Chemical Cuisine database to provide much-needed clarity.
The FDA is the federal agency responsible for ensuring that the chemicals added to our foods are safe. Unfortunately for American consumers, the FDA is failing to adequately perform this essential function, allowing the food industry to continue to add unsafe and poorly tested chemicals to our foods and beverages.
Unsafe chemicals remain in our foods long after evidence emerges linking them to harm because the FDA fails to effectively regulate additives both before and after they come to market. Case in point: The FDA determined in 1990 that the food dye Red 3 (also listed as FD&C Red 3 or Red #3) causes cancer in animals. Having banned it in cosmetics and topical medications, the agency promised to ban it from foods, as they are required to do by law. Yet more than three decades later, the FDA still allows Red 3 in our food. This ongoing failure by the FDA is emblematic of its lackluster approach to regulating food chemical safety.
To make matters worse, the food industry is legally allowed to entirely bypass the FDA approval process created by Congress for food additives. Companies can simply declare a substance to be “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, and begin putting it in our food without even notifying the FDA, let alone getting FDA approval. In effect, the food industry—not the FDA—decides what is safe for American consumers to eat.
With this lack of effective oversight, consumers are left to fend for themselves. To avoid unsafe food chemicals, consumers must review food ingredient labels and avoid products containing unsafe additives. This is an unreasonable burden to place on consumers, but it is the burden consumers currently bear. CSPI publishes Chemical Cuisine to ease that burden.
Even the most well-informed and diligent consumer cannot expect to always avoid every harmful food chemical. It is simply too time-consuming and burdensome to review every ingredient list of every food you buy. Plus, when you eat in restaurants, ingredient information may not be available, making it impossible to make informed choices in those settings.
We need broadscale reform to our entire food chemical regulatory system to shift the burden from consumers and back onto the FDA and the food industry,
CSPI is a leader in the fight for better food additive regulations across the United States. We petition the FDA to ban unsafe chemicals, like Red 3 and titanium dioxide, and we petition state agencies to step in when the FDA fails. We urge the FDA to prioritize public health when regulating chemical contaminants in foods. We lobby in support of federal and state legislation that would reform the ways the FDA and state agencies oversee additive safety.
Thanks to decades of advocacy from CSPI, artificial trans fats have been eliminated from the U.S. food supply. Seven cancer-causing flavor chemicals were banned in 2018 following a petition to the FDA from CSPI and our partners. In 2023, California became the first state to ban certain food additives, including Red 3, and to require heavy metals testing in baby foods. That same year, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) concluded that aspartame, the widely used artificial sweetener, is “possibly carcinogenic to humans” after CSPI repeatedly urged IARC to evaluate it. Coordinated efforts between CSPI, international experts, state lawmakers, and other partners, led the state of California to review the evidence linking synthetic food dyes to behavioral issues in kids and, in 2021, the state concluded that dyes indeed can “cause or exacerbate neurobehavioral problems in some children.” Much more work is left to be done, and CSPI won’t stop fighting until the food chemical regulatory system is fixed.
A legal loophole lets the food and beverage industries—not the FDA—decide which ingredients are safe for us to eat. Thousands of chemicals added to our foods have never undergone independent safety evaluations by the FDA.
Chemical Cuisine entries can be filtered by safety rating, purpose, or health concern. Entries are organized alphabetically, and you can choose a letter from A to Z in the leftmost column to see all entries beginning with that letter. You can also scroll the list on this page to see all food additives for which we have ratings. See the FAQ above for more information.
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