Nutritional food additives

Nutrients functions are to improve or maintain the nutritional quality of foods. Many food additives, including vitamins and minerals, serve nutritional functions. Other nutritional additives include amino acids, fatty acids as well as other pure chemical compounds.

Vitamins and minerals added to many common foods such as milk, flour, cereal, and margarine to make up for elements likely to be lacking in a personal diet, replace those lost in processing or improve shelf life.

Most salt contains iodine to prevent goiter a condition resulting for iodine deficiency. It was one of the earliest used of nutritional additives to correct dietary deficiencies. In 1833, the French chemist Boussingault recommended the addition of iodine to table salt to prevent goiter.

Nutritional additives can be used to restore nutrients to levels found in the food before storage, packaging, handling and processing.

Other example of nutritional additives is fluoride may be added to drinking water to supply the mineral fluorine, required for normal tooth development in children.

Margarine, for example, is used as substitute for butter for economic reasons, Vitamin A and D thus need to be added to margarine to raise it nutritional value equal to that of the butter.
Nutritional food additives

Vegetable oils

Numerous vegetable oils are derived from various sources. These includes the popular oils; the foremost oilseed oils –soybean, cottonseed, peanuts and sunflower oils and others such as palm oil, palm kernel oil, coconut oil , castor oil, rapeseed soil and others.

Vegetables oils in particular are natural products of plant origin consisting of ester mixtures derived from glycerol with chains of fatty acids containing about 14-20 carbon atoms with different degrees of unsaturation.

Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil is made by reacting vegetable oil with hydrogen. When this occurs, the level of polyunsaturated oils (good fat) is reduced and trans fats are created.

Trans fats can be found in foods such as vegetable shortening, some margarines, crackers, candies, baked goods, cookies, snack foods, fried foods, salad dressings, and many processed foods.

Vegetable oils are important in human nutrition, providing energy, essential fatty acids and lipophilic vitamins.  About 15% of all vegetable oils are used for the manufacture of various industrial and technical products.

Vegetable oils are associated with heart disease, breast and colon cancer, atherosclerosis and elevated cholesterol.
Vegetable oils 

Definition of Food Additive

The term does not include chance contaminants. An additive may be reactive or inactive; it may be nutritive or nonnutritive; it should be neither toxic nor hazardous.

Some substances, such as pesticides and packaging components, are added to foods unintentionally, and these are, of course, undesirable, and may be hazardous to health.

Because of their toxicity, their presence is closely regulated by strict government tolerance.

Food Additive in General

Food Additive in General
A food additive is a substance (or a mixture of substance) which is added to food and is involved in its production, processing, packaging and/or storage without being a major ingredient.

Additives or their degradation products generally remain in food, but in some case they may be removed during processing.

The following examples illustrate and support the use of additives to enhance the:

Nutritive Value of food
Additive such as vitamins, minerals, amino acids and amino acids derivatives are utilized to increase the nutritive value of food. A particular diet may also require the use of thickening agents, emulsifiers, sweeteners, etc.

Sensory Value of Food
Color, odor, taste and consistency or texture, which are important for the sensory value of food, may decreases during processing and storage. Such decreases can be corrected or readjusted by additives such as pigment aroma compounds or flavor enhancers.
Development of “off flavor” for instance, derived from fat or oil oxidation, can be suppressed by antioxidants. Food texture can be stabilized by adding minerals or polysaccharides, and by many other means.

Shelf Life of Food
The current forms of food production and distribution, as well as the trend towards convenient foods, have increased the demand for longer shelf life. Furthermore, the world food supply situation requires preservation by avoiding deterioration as much as possible.
The extension of shelf life involves protection against microbial spoilage, for example, by using anti-microbial additives and by using active agents which suppress and retard undesired chemical and physical changes in food.
The latter is achieved by stabilization of pH using buffering additives or stabilization of texture with thickening or gelling agents which are polysaccharides.

It is implicitly understood that food additives and their degradation products should be non toxic at their recommend levels of use. This applies equally to acute and to chronic toxicity, particularly the potential carcinogenic, teratogenic (causing a malformed fetus) and mutagenic (causing a malformed fetus) and mutagenic effects.

It is generally recognized that additives are applied only when required for then nutritive or sensory value of food, or for its processing or handling.
Food Additive in General