Are Food Additives Evil? We Have an Almost-Civil Debate

If you eat food or like science, you may be aware of the current dispute between Food Babe and Science Babe. Food Babe, essentially, never met a multi-syllabic ingredient she could bring herself to like. Science Babe seems to think we should all be drinking BHT-laced smoothies. That’s a bit of an overstatement, to be sure---but so is most everything that these warring factions are spewing out in their battles over the additives that lace your food, from the long-chain emulsifiers that keep ice cream smooth to the titanium dioxide that keeps powdered sugar pure and white.

To food fear mongers and self-described health gurus, those additives are toxins. To scientists and food manufacturers, they're marvels of efficiency and control over the physical world. But the argument over just why and when we use them in the food supply is bigger than brief, headline-grabbing online spats. What we eat is who we are: traditions and intellect and knowledge and media all vying for our hearts and minds while we feed ourselves and our loved ones and try to live a healthy life. The question is, how do you use science to make decision about what to eat? Or can you? WIRED eaters and science-knowers Katie Palmer and Sarah Fallon (readers will have to make their own assessments of the babe part) got into a little philosophical kerfuffle (philofuffle) about the Babe vs Babe situation. You can be a fly on the wall.

KP: The problem that a lot of people have with the Food Babe’s arguments is that they seem to define anything with a slightly difficult-to-pronounce chemical name as a toxin. Over the last year or so, Vani Hari and people like her have successfully campaigned to get a number of scary-sounding chemical additives removed from food---like azodicarbonamide, the “yoga mat chemical,” from Subway bread, and titanium dioxide from Dunkin’ Donuts powdered sugar. The Science Babe’s argument, echoed by less vitriolic and click-baity chemists, is that just because you can’t pronounce something doesn’t mean it’s bad for you. And just because a chemical appears in something like a yoga mat doesn’t mean it’s bad for you, either.

SEF: Right, you can’t just freak out whenever someone says “cholecalciferol.” (Duh, it’s vitamin D.) But at the same time, plenty of additives actually have turned out to be bad news. Brominated vegetable oil is banned all over the world, for example. Oooh, and remember Olestra? The "fat substitute" that included side effects like, forgive me, "anal leakage?" There’s so much we still don’t know---that’s the problem. A recent study published in Nature suggests that emulsifiers like carboxymethylcellulose and polysorbate-80 damaged the microbiomes of mice, giving them colitis and metabolic syndrome. Made them fat and poopy. Researchers only recently started looking at microbiome disruption at all. What else could food additives be doing to us?

KP: That’s a fair question, but I think you know where I’m going to go next. The problem with that study---and with most of the studies of the health effects of different food additives---is that people are not mice. We don’t have a fantastic sense of how a dosage in a mouse compares to a dosage in a human. And you can’t exactly go feeding humans extraordinarily high doses of emulsifiers and expect that to get by your IRB. (The emulsifier guys are planning on a human study, but the most they can do is ask people in one group to eat normally, and the other to avoid foods with emulsifiers.)

In the absence of that data, scientists and policymakers have a really hard time determining exactly what is toxic to humans. I think that’s the big underlying issue here: Without being able to define a toxin, people fall into these broad rhetorical arguments, Food Babe vs. Science Babe. And toxicity depends on so much more than the chemical origins of an ingredient---it depends on dosage, and length of exposure, and even individual differences in how you metabolize a particular molecule.