Stefan Åhman

The number on the back

by · · food , health , reflection , life

I’ve been refusing packaging with E-numbers on it. Vitamin C is an E-number. I couldn’t tell you which is which. That was anxiety with a system attached.

Underneath was a quieter anxiety. I want to grow old. I think food is the closest thing we have to a long-term medicine, and the codes felt like a signal of how much my food was being engineered before I bought it.

So I sat down to learn the system. The short version: the codes themselves tell you very little, and the length of the ingredient list tells you most of what matters. The long version is more useful, and it starts in 1962.

what the E means

E stands for Europe. The system was set up in 1962 by what was then the European Economic Community to give every approved food additive a single code. Before that, the same compound might appear under a dozen different names across borders. A colouring legal in France might be unregulated in Italy. The E-number was a piece of consumer protection. If something has an E-number, it has been through safety review and made it onto a positive list. If a substance isn’t on the list, it can’t be used.

That’s the part I didn’t know. The system was built to protect consumers. Now the code itself is what scares people.

but the list moves

Safety review isn’t a one-time pass. Additives that sat on the list for decades have been pulled back off it. Titanium dioxide (E171), used to whiten icing, sweets, and chewing gum, was banned in the EU in 2022 after EFSA said it could no longer rule out damage to DNA. It’s still legal in the US.

Others are on the list but contested. Carrageenan (E407) is under active re-evaluation. A French cohort study of 92,000 adults (NutriNet-Santé, 2024) linked common emulsifiers like E471 and carrageenan to higher cancer risk. Aspartame (E951) was reclassified by IARC as possibly carcinogenic in 2023. None of these are banned. Some are in food I’ve probably eaten this month, even though I try to avoid them. That’s the part I keep getting stuck on. How come they’re everywhere now?

So the approved list reads more like a current best guess than a verdict. Some E-numbers are essential nutrients. Some are under active suspicion. Most are somewhere in between.

the banana point

A banana contains around fifty compounds that would carry E-numbers if you put them in a package. Riboflavin (E101). Beta-carotene (E160a). Citric acid (E330). Pectin (E440). Phosphates. Oxygen (E948).

Nobody labels bananas, because nobody adds anything to a banana. But the chemistry is the same. The “E” is a labelling rule. It says something was added on purpose. It doesn’t say anything about danger.

The number range tells you function:

Within any range you’ll find both essentials and contested chemicals. E300 is vitamin C. E320 is BHA, an antioxidant the IARC classifies as possibly carcinogenic. The range doesn’t sort by safety.

why they show up more now

The number of additives keeps growing because of what supermarkets are. Long shelf life, consistent colour, consistent texture, low cost, scaled to thousands of identical units. Each of those is solved with one or two additives. A loaf of sourdough: flour, water, salt, starter. A loaf of sliced bread bought on Friday and eaten on Wednesday has fifteen ingredients because it has to survive the journey.

Cured ham is the inverse. The pink isn’t natural. Nitrites make it pink, and we’ve come to read pink as fresh and tasty. Take the nitrites out and the same ham looks grey. Most people would walk past it.

the trick I didn’t know about

Manufacturers have figured out that “E300” scares people and “ascorbic acid” doesn’t. Same molecule. The EU rule (Regulation 1169/2011) says every additive has to be declared, but the form is up to the manufacturer. The code and the chemical name are equally legal. They get to pick.

So a “clean label” cake might list calcium phosphate, sodium diphosphate, and monoglycerides instead of E341, E450, and E471. The product is identical. The label looks calmer.

It works in the other direction too. Citric acid sounds homemade. It’s mostly produced industrially by fermenting a mould on glucose syrup. Still safe. Still legal. Still not what the name suggests.

The lesson I’m taking from this: the words on the label tell me less than I thought. Avoiding “E-numbers” specifically just trains you to read for the surface of a label, which is the part the manufacturer has the most control over.

the colours

Of all the ranges, the colour range is the one I trust least.

E100 is curcumin from turmeric. Fine. E162 is beetroot. Fine. The synthetic dyes in the same range are a different story. Six of them have a warning label requirement in the EU: tartrazine (E102), quinoline yellow (E104), sunset yellow (E110), carmoisine (E122), ponceau 4R (E124), allura red (E129). The label has to say “may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children.” That sentence is printed on the package because of a 2007 study from Southampton University.

EFSA didn’t ban the dyes. The warning was a compromise. But manufacturers reformulated to avoid the warning more often than they kept the dye. You can see it in the sweets aisle. The bright red and yellow used to be everywhere. Now most candy in northern European stores is coloured with beetroot, paprika, spirulina, or turmeric.

This was the system working as designed. The science was contested, the label was a compromise, and the market moved.

what I stopped buying

I’m still working this out. A few things I just don’t buy anymore:

what I scan for

Length of ingredient list first, codes second. A long list is the real signal. It means I’m holding a product that needed a lot of help to stay edible. The codes are downstream of that.

A few things I still buy but read carefully:

When I do read the back closely, the Swedish labelling helps because additives are grouped by function. The categories I scan, roughly in order of how much they shape my decision:

Worth saying clearly: most of what I see falls outside any of these categories. Vitamin C (E300), citric acid (E330), pectin (E440), lecithin (E322), beetroot red (E162), riboflavin (E101). These are the codes that turn up most often, and they’re fine. The scanning is for the smaller set that isn’t.

the part I keep coming back to

The most useful move isn’t about which numbers to avoid. It’s about how much of my food needs a number at all.

A potato has no label. A tin of beans has one or two codes on the back. A bag of crisps has fourteen ingredients. None of those is wrong on its own. The ratio across a week of meals is what matters.

I don’t think this maps onto a clean rule. It’s more like: cook the base of meals from scratch most days, and the rest takes care of itself.

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