ArticleScientific reports2020
Food additives: distribution and co-occurrence in 126,000 food products of the French market.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 54 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
54 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Pooled it
- An exploratory 12-week pilot study of gut microbiota and body-weight patterns during sodium nitrite exposure and Lactobacillus plantarum 299v supplementation in Wistar rats.BMC microbiology · 2026Article
- Ultra-processed food consumption during pregnancy and emotional and behavioral problems in offspring.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2026Article
- Quality-oriented diet therapy for chronic kidney disease.Nature reviews. Nephrology · 2026Review
- Improving consumer understanding of dietary health risks using the lens of ultra-processing: an experimental study.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Comparative Analysis of Food Additives in Products with and Without Added Sugar on the Polish Market.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Assessing the nutritional value and health risks of special low‑protein foods: narrative review.Orphanet journal of rare diseases · 2026Review
- Ultra-Processed Foods and Food Additives in CKD: Unveiling Hidden Risks and Advocating Smarter Food Choices.Clinical journal of the American Society of Nephrology : CJASN · 2026Review
- Food additives containing potassium, phosphorus, and sodium in ultra-processed foods: potential harms to individuals with chronic kidney disease.European journal of clinical nutrition · 2026Review
- Food additive mixtures in French children and adults: the nationally representative Esteban study.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Food additives in Latin America: a descriptive analysis of the packaged food supply in five countries.Globalization and health · 2025Article
- Food Additives Inhibit Intestinal Drug Transporters but Have Limited Effect on In Vitro Drug Permeability.Molecular pharmaceutics · 2025Article
- May Sulfites in Wine Affect Gut Microbiota? An In Vitro Study of Their Digestion and Interplay with Wine Polyphenols.Journal of agricultural and food chemistry · 2025Article
- Ultraprocessed Food and Risk of Cancer: Mechanistic Pathways and Public Health Implications.Cancers · 2025Review
- Health impacts of exposure to synthetic chemicals in food.Nature medicine · 2025Review
- Food additive mixtures and type 2 diabetes incidence: Results from the NutriNet-Santé prospective cohort.PLoS medicine · 2025Observational
- Prevalence of ultra-processed foods and beverages in newly launched products across the Americas: a comparison between the United States and Latin American countries from 2018 to 2023.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Additives in foods marketed to children in Uruguay, an emerging Latin American country.Journal of nutritional science · 2025Article
- Examination of hyper-palatable foods and their nutrient characteristics using globally crowdsourced data.PloS one · 2025Article
- The prevalence and co-occurrence of emulsifiers, thickeners and stabilizers in food products on the Norwegian market.Food & nutrition research · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
15 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundMore than 330 food additives (e.g. artificial sweeteners, emulsifiers, dyes) are authorized in Europe, with a great variability of use across food products.
objectiveThe objective of this study was to investigate the distribution and co-occurrence of food additives in a large-scale database of foods and beverages available on the French market.
designThe open access crowdsourced Open Food Facts database (https://world.openfoodfacts.org/) was used to retrieve the composition of food and beverage products commonly marketed on the French market (n = 126,556), based on the ingredients list. Clustering of food additive variables was used in order to determine groups of additives frequently co-occurring in food products. The clusters were confirmed by network analysis, using the eLasso method.
resultsFifty-three-point eight percent of food products contained at least 1 food additive and 11.3% at least 5. Food categories most likely to contain food additives (in more than 85% of food items) were artificially sweetened beverages, ice creams, industrial sandwiches, biscuits and cakes. The most frequently used food additives were citric acid, lecithins and modified starches (>10,000 products each). Some food additives with suspected health effects also pertained to the top 50: sodium nitrite, potassium nitrate, carrageenan, monosodium glutamate, sulfite ammonia caramel, acesulfame K, sucralose, (di/tri/poly) phosphates, mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids, potassium sorbate, cochineal, potassium metabisulphite, sodium alginate, and bixin (>800 food products each). We identified 6 clusters of food additives frequently co-occurring in food products.
conclusionsFood additives are widespread in industrial French products and some clusters of additives frequently co-occurring in food products were identified. These results pave the way to future etiological studies merging composition data to food consumption data to investigate their association with chronic disease risk, in particular potential 'cocktail effects'.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.