Word: salt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
GRAS List. In crude or dilute form, nature supplies some of the substances that have recently gained notoriety as additives. The first additives, aside from salt and seaweed, were spices. Some contained natural preservatives. Benzoic acid, used as a preservative for almost a century, occurs naturally in berries and in some fruits, such as plums...
...list of GRAS items classifies hundreds of additives by their principal purposes. Among them are anti-caking agents, which keep such things as salt, sugar and milk powder from clumping; preservatives (31 listed); emulsifying agents, used to help homogenize substances that do not normally mix (like fat in milk); sequestrants, which keep trace minerals from turning fats and oils rancid, and are also used to prevent some soft drinks from turning cloudy. In addition, the FDA has 80 "miscellaneous" GRAS substances from alfalfa to zedoary (an aromatic East Indian herb), from pipsissewa leaves to ylang-ylang, used as flavoring...
...list without sufficient testing. Moreover, an automatic guillotine such as that applied to cyclamates is too crude an instrument for determining acceptability. The food industry obviously has to use some additives to keep its products from spoiling and-in the case of such staples as bread, milk and iodized salt-to give them maximum nutritive and health-protective values. Just as clearly, the public demands low-calorie sweeteners as well as precooked heat-and-serve meals. It is well within the competence of chemists and manufacturers to meet society's demands safely. At the same time, the FDA needs...