These Popular Snacks Contain High Levels of Additives and Contaminants

For this investigation, we anonymously purchased and analyzed over 120 samples of 40 popular processed foods to determine the average amount of eight additives and two process contaminants present across multiple product lots.

We then compared the amounts detected against safe daily intake levels set by U.S. and European public health agencies—including the FDA, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), and California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment—and adverse effect levels identified in peer-reviewed scientific studies. Finally, a team of scientists analyzed the resulting data to calculate a “hazard quotient,” or the level below which no adverse health effects would be expected to occur, for each of the 10 substances, taking into account a lifetime of chronic exposure.

In all, 11 products exceeded this level of concern for adults, and 14 for children. These products contained enough of at least one concerning substance that consuming a single serving daily would pose an increased health risk over a lifetime. “These foods shouldn’t be part of a regular diet,” says Eric Boring, PhD, the CR chemist who oversaw this testing project. “Based on our findings, they should only be consumed occasionally, if at all.”

To be clear: There is no reason to panic if you’ve been consuming any of the products we tested. Though many exceeded the selected safety thresholds, none contained enough of a particular substance to cause immediate, severe harm, says James E. Rogers, PhD, director of food safety at CR. That’s because policymakers generally design these limits conservatively, starting from the highest dose found to have no negative effects in animal studies, and then applying a safety cushion to account for variation across the population and minimize the risks of long-term exposure. 

The result is what regulators call an acceptable daily intake—the amount of a substance a person can consume daily over a lifetime without an increased health risk. But that protective logic depends on the limits keeping pace with the science. In the U.S., by and large, they have not.

The issue dates back to the Food Additives Amendment of 1958, which was enacted in response to rising public concern over untested chemicals in the food supply. It shifted the burden of proof from the FDA to industry by declaring all additives unsafe unless manufacturers demonstrated to the agency’s satisfaction that they were reasonably certain to cause no harm. But the law did not require the FDA to revisit those determinations as the science evolved. 

As a result, once a substance enters the U.S. food supply, the FDA rarely reconsiders its safety. Take butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA), a preservative used to keep foods containing fats from going rancid: The FDA has permitted BHA in food since 1958, when it was added to the agency’s list of substances generally recognized as safe, or GRAS. But it has never established a formal acceptable daily intake for the substance, even as new evidence of harm has emerged.

After a 1986 study reported that BHA caused tumors in the forestomachs of rats, mice, and hamsters, some U.S. and European agencies took action. But not the FDA. The findings prompted the National Toxicology Program, a U.S. agency that tests chemicals of public health concern, to classify it as reasonably anticipated to be carcinogenic; California regulators to add it to their list of substances known to cause cancer; and European authorities to establish a daily intake limit.

In 1990, a doctor petitioned the FDA to revoke BHA’s approval as a food additive, citing the 1986 study and others that found it caused gastrointestinal bleeding in Japanese house musk shrews and cellular changes in pigs and monkeys. Though the agency is legally required to respond to such petitions, its next move would not come for 36 years: In February, the FDA announced it was beginning a reassessment of BHA’s safety in food.

This laggard pace is far from unusual, experts say. The agency’s 2024 decision to ban the use of brominated vegetable oil in food came 54 years after it had initially concluded the substance could not be generally recognized as safe due to toxicity concerns. The following year, it revoked its authorization for Red Dye No. 3, a synthetic colorant the agency had originally concluded was unsafe 35 years prior, after studies found it caused cancer in rats.

The FDA has the authority to remove from the food supply any substance that does not meet the reasonable certainty of no harm standard, experts say. But it rarely does so. The agency has “historically been very reticent to do anything where they could get sued or they can anger the food industry,” says Pomeranz, the health policy professor. 

The EFSA, by contrast, is legally required to reevaluate the safety of all substances in the European food supply, and has published reassessments of more than 240 additives since 2009. This mandate is one of several key differences that experts say explains the gap between the number of additives permitted in the U.S. and Europe.

The logic underlying much of European food regulation is that uncertainty about the safety of a substance is a reason to act, not to wait. The FDA generally takes an opposite view, requiring conclusive evidence of harm before restricting use. But “the law doesn’t create this burden,” says Tom Neltner, a researcher and consumer advocate who has studied the agency’s regulation of food chemicals for over a decade. “FDA’s attorneys create this burden.”

These different lines of thinking informed each agency’s response to titanium dioxide, a synthetically produced pigment used to whiten food and add brightness to other colors. The FDA first permitted its use in foods in 1960. Since then, research has shown that very small particles of titanium dioxide may accumulate in the body and damage DNA.

In 2021, an EFSA panel affirmed that these particles do have the potential to induce DNA strand breaks and damage chromosomes, but it couldn’t determine precisely how this happens or at what threshold. Rather than wait for more definitive evidence, the panel concluded that the unresolved questions were themselves reason enough to declare the additive unsafe for use in food. The European Union banned titanium dioxide from the food supply the following year. 

According to the Titanium Dioxide Manufacturers Association, the FDA in January 2023 stated that it had reviewed the EFSA’s findings and concluded that the “available safety studies do not demonstrate safety concerns connected to the use of titanium dioxide as a color additive.” The agency continues to permit titanium dioxide in food at levels of up to 1 percent of a product’s weight to this day.

In recent years, some researchers have begun to question whether the thresholds that undergird our regulatory system are capable of protecting consumers from the broader spectrum of harms identified by modern science. 

The acceptable daily intakes established by the FDA and other regulators are typically derived from studies designed to identify the dose at which a substance causes no observable adverse effects in animals. This approach has produced safety thresholds that protect against the kinds of acute harms detectable in animal studies, like organ damage, cancer, and reproductive issues. But it cannot as easily detect the kinds of effects that can emerge over years of habitual consumption at low doses—the kind that are thought to lead to chronic conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.

“Just because something doesn’t meet the threshold for being harmful or toxic to human health in a traditional sense doesn’t mean that it’s healthy,” says Allison Sylvetsky, PhD, a professor at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston who studies artificial sweeteners.

This disconnect is reflected in our tests of products for the artificial sweeteners acesulfame K, aspartame, and sucralose. None of the 21 products we tested contained enough of any sweetener to exceed the acceptable daily intakes established by the FDA or EFSA, even for children.

But in a series of large-scale studies published between 2022 and 2023, researchers analyzing the dietary habits of more than 100,000 French adults over 12 years found that consumption of these sweeteners at levels well below the current acceptable daily intake was associated with increased risks of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes. (These findings were generally more statistically significant for acesulfame K and aspartame than sucralose.)

The studies were observational, so they can only identify associations rather than prove causation, but because the size of the cohort was so large, and the time period over which participants were monitored was so long, many researchers feel they provide valuable evidence on the long-term effects of artificial sweetener consumption, particularly when considered alongside similar research published over the last decade.

“The big population studies really are showing pretty clear signals of association of these products with adverse health outcomes,” says Krieger, of Healthy Food America. “The evidence is worrisome to me at this point, and it keeps accumulating.”

When we compared the amounts we detected against levels associated with health risks in these studies, the picture shifted. Of the 21 products tested, 19 contained enough of at least one sweetener in a single serving to exceed the levels associated with an increased risk of developing cancer, heart disease, or diabetes in the French cohort study. (After we contacted the companies responsible for several of these products, a representative of the Calorie Control Council, a trade group representing manufacturers and suppliers of artificial sweeteners, sent an email objecting to the use of data from the French cohort study to draw conclusions about the risks posed by artificial sweeteners.)

Both Neltner and Krieger say that the FDA does not always factor this kind of research—epidemiological studies that observe outcomes across a population—into its safety reassessments, or give it as much weight as other types of studies. “For chronic hazards, they don’t believe in epidemiology,” Neltner says. “They want to see animal studies.”

The fact that multiple large-scale epidemiological studies have connected low-level consumption of artificial sweeteners to a wide range of health risks is an argument in favor of the FDA rethinking that approach, Krieger says. 

Regulators are “saying these products are safe for the food supply without, in my mind, sufficient evidence to be making that kind of statement,” he says. “We’re not asking them to have definitive evidence of harm, just a reasonable certainty we haven’t proven that these things don’t have harm.”

Many of these issues have been quietly compounding over the course of decades. “The joke has long been that the F in FDA was silent,” Neltner says. “It’s only recently that the food side is getting attention.”

Indeed, a recent groundswell of public concern has transformed food additive policy from a long-sidelined corner of regulation into a kitchen table issue that is capturing the attention of policymakers on both sides of the aisle.

At least 10 states have enacted legislation restricting additives linked to health issues since 2023. Most merely prohibit foods with certain additives from being sold in schools, but laws taking effect in Arkansas, California, and West Virginia over the next two years will ban the general sale of such products statewide.

“It is so exciting for those of us working for 20 years or more in this field to finally have this bipartisan engagement,” says Pomeranz, who described the California ban, which was passed in 2023, as an inciting incident. “People finally started to get it that the FDA wasn’t actually fulfilling its mission.”

Experts who have spent their careers calling for more stringent, health-protective regulations have found unlikely political allies in Kennedy’s coalition. “Some of what they aspire towards and want to see happen has been what the more traditional or mainstream public health advocates and academics have also been saying for years,” Krieger says. “There’s a window of opportunity that’s open right now.”

Multiple bills currently before the House and Senate would require the FDA to reevaluate the safety of at least 10 substances in the food supply every three years. The push for new federal regulations comes as the agency has begun to take its first steps toward building out the sort of systemic processes it has long lacked—the kind that might have surfaced concerns about substances like BHA decades ago. Earlier this year, the FDA unveiled a legislative proposal that would require food additive manufacturers to conduct “post-market safety evaluations and reassessments” and provide the agency with additional data. It also debuted a new framework for reassessing the safety of substances currently in the food supply, and launched reevaluations of the additives BHA, BHT, and ADA.

In a statement, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services press secretary Emily Hilliard said the new reassessment program will help “to ensure the Agency’s limited resources are focused on the most significant public health risks” and “that chemicals in the U.S. food supply continue to meet safety standards as scientific knowledge evolves.” Hilliard and other FDA spokespeople declined to comment on our specific findings and did not respond to a detailed list of questions about the agency’s regulation of food additives.

Whether the new political attention can translate into meaningful regulatory change, however, remains uncertain. Curbing the use of synthetic dyes like Red 40 has become a signature issue for the FDA under Kennedy, but the agency’s approach so far has relied entirely on voluntary industry commitments. Last April, the FDA announced an initiative to phase certain dyes out of the American food supply by the end of 2026. That deadline, which depends on manufacturers following through on their pledges rather than any regulatory enforcement, has since been extended to the end of 2027. By comparison, West Virginia’s law, which bans the sale of foods containing Red 40 and eight other additives the state has deemed harmful to health, takes effect Jan. 1, 2028, regardless of what industry chooses to do. 

The gap between the agency’s aspirations and reality may soon force a reckoning within the administration, Krieger says. “In the first year, it seemed like Kennedy, HHS, and the new FDA thought they would be able to make a lot of progress through voluntary agreements with industry,” he says. “I think they’re realizing that that period is maybe coming to an end, and if they really do want to make progress, they’re going to have to use regulatory tools.”

Such a shift would still have to confront the limits of a regulatory apparatus that some of the country’s most experienced food safety officials say is no longer fit for purpose. The system is not built to do what the American people currently expect, says Kessler, the former FDA commissioner. “To deliver what increasingly the American public wants with regard to toxic substances would take a transformation of the food program as we know it,” he says.