Food additives: boon or bogeyman?

effects, if any, of foods or components of foods on animals or humans ingesting them. The safety or otherwise of food is, understandably, an emotive subject ; after all, we each push inside our body several times our own body weight of the stuff every year! With this intimate connection with so much food, we all tend to consider ourselves instant experts. There even seem to be a fair number of self-appointed, untrained, doit-yourself amateur toxicologists a category as implausible as that of do-it-yourself amateur brainsurgeons. These are the publicists who seek to make their names and further their careers, sell more news-