A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives

The essential guide for choosing safe and healthful food

A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives is back, in an up-dated fifth edition. This valuable reference gives you all the facts about the relative safety and side effects of more than 8,000 ingredients that end up indirectly in your food as a result of processing and curing, such as preservatives, food-tainting pesticides, and animal drugs. For example, drugs used to tranquilize pigs have actually been known to sedate diners!

More than 800 entries are new to this edition and cover recently developed food production technologies (genetically engineered vegetables, bovine growth hormone, and other outcomes of the processing of food today), as well as information on the new label regulations and on guidelines for safe food storage.

A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives is a precise tool that will tell you exactly what to leave on supermarket shelves as a reminder to manufacturers that you know what the labels mean and which products are safe to bring home to your family.

What am I eating? This book answers that question by describing more than 8,000 ingredients found in foods. The dictionary format lets you look up an ingredient alphabetically and learn what it is, how and why it's used, and the benefits and risks. You can decode an ingredient from a food label--haven't you always wondered just what "guar gum" is?--or just skim for interesting facts. For example, the entry on "civet, absolute" explains that this essential oil used as a flavoring is "derived from the unctuous secretions from the receptacles between the anus and genitalia of both the male and female civet cat." Not very appetizing! You'll find this ingredient in raspberry, butter, caramel, grape, and rum flavorings in beverages, desserts, and chewing gum. This book also explains commonly used (but poorly understood) food-label terms like "lite" and "low fat," what counts as a serving for different food groups, and various ways of processing food. There's a helpful chart of food storage guidelines, and resources (including Web sites) for people with food allergies or sensitivities. Ruth Winter, an award-winning science writer, is also the author of A Consumer's Dictionary of Cosmetic Ingredients and several other books. --Joan Price