UNTIL the great cyclamate furor bubbled over this fall, few Americans paid much heed to the minute lettering on their cakes and candy bars, diet drinks and instant dinners. Even a magnifying glass was little help in explaining those obscure polysyllables: propylene glycol, calcium silicate, butylated hydroxyanisole, sorbitan monostearate, methylparaben. Today, the portmanteau word for such substances is "additives"—which translates into myriad chemicals that have made even bread a laboratory product and the cheese spread to put on it a test-tube concoction.
For many reasons, laboratory technicians and manufacturers have had to infuse foods with an infinite variety of chemicals. Two vital questions now nag both consumers and pure-food authorities: 1) Are these additives necessary or even desirable? and 2) Are they safe? In virtually no case is a simple declarative answer possible.
The additive explosion was triggered by three unrelated developments. First came the growth of a food-processing and -packaging industry that involved shipping foodstuffs thousands of miles and storing them for months. That was followed by a growing demand for health-promoting, and especially nonfattening foods. Then came the popularity of prefabricated, quick-service dishes and meals such as TV dinners. In assembling their products, manufacturers and processors have relied in some cases on nature's chemicals; in others, they have synthesized a chemically identical version of a natural product; in yet others, they have turned to new products unknown in nature. As a consequence, Americans are ingesting, willy-nilly, ever greater quantities of additives, perhaps as much as 3 lbs. annually (depending on how additives are defined) for an adult who eats the average of 1,400 lbs. of food a year.
Taste for Salt. By far the most ancient and frequently used of all food additives, of course, is sodium chloride (NaCl), or "common salt," which is essential to animal life. Grazing animals and fish extract it from the plants they eat. So peoples who live largely by hunting and fishing get all their bodies' salt requirements with no special effort.
However, salt can also be an agent of disease and death. A single quarter-pound dose might kill a man. Even the healthy person's normal intake of about one-third ounce a day is harmful to patients with certain types of high blood pressure or heart or kidney disease for whom doctors prescribe "salt-free" (actually, low-salt) diets. Some physicians fear that the inclusion of salt in such products as baby foods may lead to an excessive taste for salt and perhaps disease later in life. One manufacturer replies that every baby must have some salt, and that the concentration in its infant foods is only half that in canned foods for adults.