Food Additives

Subtracting the additives - Is it always bad to add?

Food additives aren’t new. Salt, sugar and vinegar have been used as preservatives for centuries but our modern diets rely on synthetic preservatives, emulsifiers and antioxidants. Without them, food quickly goes off, or loses its colour and goes rancid, or ingredients, like oil and water in low-fat spreads, separate.

These sorts of additives are needed to keep food safe and pleasant to eat but in the past they’ve been over-used. Asda uses these additives at the lowest level possible.

Naturally good food

A major study in 2007 found a link between hyperactivity and consumption of some food colours and the preservative sodium benzoate.* These additives are EU-approved and widely used in the UK, but their effect on children’s behaviour and lack of nutritional value means that consumers, especially parents are wary of them.

In April this year, the Food Standards Agency Board agreed to advise UK Ministers that manufacturers should voluntarily remove these colours from their products by 2009.
Asda has already done it!

We were the first supermarket to remove artificial colours and flavours from all our products.

This meant reformulating thousands of products. Asda nutritionist, Vanessa Hattersley, said, “Reformulation was hard work but it was a labour of love. Colours like Sunset yellow (E110), Carmoisine (E122) and Allura red (E129) add nothing in terms of nutrition – without them our products look natural and taste as good as ever”.

There were problems because some artificial colours and flavours simply don’t have a natural alternative, such as the bright green of mushy peas from Tartrazine (E102) and Green S (E142). Rather than stop selling this family favourite, it was decided to go without, so the peas are now paler in colour (like homemade mushy peas) but they taste the same and still go brilliantly with chips!

We’ve also removed flavour enhancers, such as monosodium glutamate, and the sweetener aspartame. We removed hydrogenated fat (usually called hydrogenated vegetable oil), which often contains trans fats, thought to play a more significant role in the development of heart disease than saturated fats.

The work means that some food in your basket now looks a little different, but the flavour hasn’t changed a bit.

Pass the salt

Salt is another big concern for consumers and, incredibly, around three-quarters of the salt we consume is in ready-prepared foods.
To cut these levels the Food Standards Agency set strict salt reduction targets. Asda has achieved the targets, long before the FSA’s 2010 deadline, by removing an amazing 396 tonnes of salt from its own label products.

We’ve done the hard work, so you don’t have to

Even natural food colours have E numbers and complicated names. The good news is that if you’re buying an Asda own label product, you can trust it to be free from the synthetic stuff. There are now no artificial colours or flavours in its own products - so you no longer need to check labels for them. Vanessa said, “I’m really proud that Asda has kept its promise to get rid of unnecessary additives in its own products – it’s one less thing for our customers to worry about”.

You can find out more about artificial additives in foods and the effects on children by visiting the Food Standards Agency or The Hyperactive Children’s Support Group.

*Food additives and hyperactive behaviour in 3-year-old and 8/9-year-old children in the community: a randomised, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial by the University of Southampton, funded by the FSA.