Ever baulked at your child eating blue cake at a birthday party, then running around, his mouth smeared a Kryptonite green? Or halted, exasperated, as you realised the colouring for your Christmas icing contains yet another E number?

You are not alone, and things are changing. Due to public concern about additives, companies are scrambling to develop natural alternatives, meaning that soon you won’t have to fake it to bake it.

“Additives in general, not just colours, have a very bad press,” says James McIntosh, toxicologist at Safefood. “Everybody has access now: put ‘food additives’ into Google and you’re going to get ‘this causes cancer’ and ‘this causes severe allergic reactions’. There are 101 different portals out there . . . and I would question their validity in terms of the advice they’re giving out.”

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Is there a need to worry? There are thousands of additives in use around the world, with an estimated 100 more proposed every year. And clear, reliable information is hard to come by.

Colourings are made from petroleum byproducts, crushed beetles, titanium dioxide, aluminium, iron, silver and gold, as well as food-based sources, such as turmeric, tomatoes, cabbage, peppers, carrots.

It's true we've come a long way since the 1800s, when sweets were often coloured with known poisons, such as mercury or lead. Today, regulation is better than it's ever been. Additives are tested rigorously by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) which calculates an acceptable daily intake (ADI) by finding the level at which no effect is observed on test animals and dividing by a safety factor of, typically, 100.

However, this is not entirely reassuring. One only has to look at the list of EU-approved colours (E100 to E200) to see numbers missing: many of these represent colours that were withdrawn when new studies found them to be unsafe.

A recent example was Red2G (E128), used in sausages and burger meat. It was withdrawn in 2007 after it was found that it might interfere with cell DNA and cause cancer in animals.

“Really, with all these regulations, not just in this particular instance, they’re almost playing catch-up,” says McIntosh. “Because industry, by its very nature, generates tonnes of chemicals of one kind or another, for various reasons, but to actually evaluate them and see how safe they are and the . . . reliable tests that are available, takes so many resources, so much money.”

Eating petrol

Indeed, the EU is currently re-evaluating all of the colours on the market, and has dramatically lowered the ADI on two in particular (Quinoline yellow, E104 and Ponceau 4R, E124). These two are part of a controversial group known as the azo dyes, produced in a chemical process from petroleum byproducts. Cheap, bright

and stable, they are beloved of industry, but not of consumer interest groups.

In the US, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) says tests on azo dyes have raised serious health questions. Many of the findings are tentative, but the CSPI argues that more independent study needs to be done to confirm their safety. It also questions whether short-term testing on rodents can offer reliable data about possible effects on humans over a lifetime.

As leading pharma-toxicologist Thomas Hartung has put it, “we are not 70kg rats: we take up substances differently; we metabolise them differently; we live longer”. Plus, ADIs are normally assessed through single-substance studies, which can’t anticipate the effect of mixing additives, as we all do in our diet.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that many people – especially parents – err on the side of caution. Industry surveys have shown that three-quarters of consumers want simpler labelling and nearly half avoid E numbers, presuming they are artificial, though many are from edible sources, such as carrots (carotenes, E160a), tomatoes (lycopene, E160), beetroot (E162) and chlorophyll (E140).

Much of this unease came to a head in 2007, when a Southampton University study, funded by the British Food Safety Authority and published in the Lancet, linked six artificial colours, plus a preservative, sodium benzoate, to hyperactivity in children. The "Southampton Six" (E102, E104, E110, E122, E124, E129) were all azo dyes.

The Food Safety Authority in the UK suggested a voluntary phasing out of the Southampton Six. The EFSA didn’t restrict the colours but ordered a warning to be put on labels. In response, confectionery giants raced to replace synthetic with natural, recognisable ingredients. In the first four years after the Southampton study hit the headlines, the value of natural colours grew by one-third globally, and outstripped that of synthetics in 2011.

Tangled up in blue

The race is still on. A natural source for blue eluded developers until recently: it is largely made now from an algae, spirulina.

A new category of colourant has also sprung up. “Colouring foods” can be listed as ingredients, as they are not highly distilled or processed like pigments. They are already in yogurts, vitamin-waters, and so on, and we’re likely to see a lot more of them. Raw materials include carrots, sweet potatoes, elderberries and blueberries.

However, some presumptions we have about what is natural can be misguided. You wouldn’t normally eat silver and gold, for example, but they are “natural” colourings. And castoreum, sometimes used for “natural” vanilla flavouring, is “actually a secretion from a beaver . . . I won’t say from where”, says Caryna Camerino, a baker and the owner of Camerino Cafe on Capel Street in Dublin. “Or the red food colouring [carmine]; it comes from cochineal, which is crushed up shells from a beetle, so you could call that natural, I suppose.

“To me, natural would be something that’s appetising, something that’s normal used in a food, I guess,” says Camerino, who feels scientific terms can be used to mask the source of additives. “If they’re hiding it, there’s a reason they’re hiding it; people wouldn’t like to eat it if they knew.”

Repairing the damage

Perhaps it is this sense that we are not told the full story that sparks the plague of conflicting information we see in the media and on the internet.

Adding colour is the most visible of the many ways food is manipulated to try to repair the damage done when it is processed. And it’s not just in confectionery: tinned peas are dyed green, and flavours are added to processed meats.

Prof Alan Reilly, chief executive of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI), seeks to reassure people in the face of the "pseudo-science" he claims abounds about food additives. Colours are strictly regulated, he says, and for them "to have any, if you like to call it, adverse effect on children's activity and so on, they have to be consumed in quantity. So small quantities are going to do no harm whatsoever . . . What I'm suggesting here is 'everything in moderation' .

“Certainly I would be advising people to be doing their own cooking, to be buying plenty of fruits and vegetables. I mean there are lots of vegetables out there with the colours of the rainbow . . . [and] an orange with orange colour and flavour is far better for a kid than a cupcake flavoured with some kind of orange colour.”

Safefood.eu has a user-friendly resource about food colouring, and the Food Safety Authority can be contacted for advice at fsai.ie; tel: 1890-336677 The CSPI report A Rainbow of Risks can be found at cspinet.org An essay by Prof Ben Mepham, who founded the Food Ethics Council, is at http://iti.ms/1yXgf0p