The front of the pack tells you it's "high protein" and "no added sugar". The additives hide round the back in ten-point italic. Here's how to catch them in seconds.
Three wordings on an ingredient list almost always mean "processed": anything followed by a number (E102, E621), the word "modified" (modified starch, modified palm oil), and multi-word chemistry names (diphosphates, polyglycerol esters). Five families are worth knowing — colourings, sweeteners, emulsifiers, preservatives, thickeners — and you don't need to memorise them: we do the spotting in under two seconds when you scan.
Front of pack: colourful, confident, claims. "High protein." "No artificial colours." "Source of fibre." All fine, all regulated, all true in the narrow way food law allows them to be.
Back of pack: the ingredient list. Mandatory under FSA labelling rules, ordered by weight, written in the font size the law permits — which tends to be the smallest one the printer can manage. This is where additives live. Not because anyone's hiding them, just because nobody's making them easy to read.
The trick is not to read every word. It's to scan for three patterns.
1. Anything followed by a number. E102, E621, 331. All E-numbers are additives. Not every additive has an E-number (more on that in a minute), but a number after a letter is the fastest tell there is.
2. The word "modified". Modified starch, modified palm oil, modified whey protein. "Modified" means industrially altered. The base ingredient can be innocent; the modification is the processing.
3. Multi-word chemistry names. Diphosphates. Polyglycerol esters of fatty acids. Sodium stearoyl lactylate. If it reads like an exam question, it's doing a job in the product — usually emulsifying, stabilising or preserving.
One or two of these in a list is normal. Eight of them in a "healthy" labelled product is the story.
The loudest category. Artificial colours are what the Southampton study (2007) was about — the six food colourings the FSA ended up requiring warning labels for in products aimed at children. They're the ones to watch for most carefully, especially in kids' drinks, cereals and confectionery. Our dedicated guide: the Southampton Six.
Aspartame, sucralose, acesulfame K, stevia, saccharin. All approved by EFSA within acceptable daily intakes. The debate is about habitual high intake — and about whether they change what you want to eat next. Worth noticing, not worth panicking over. Our take on the most-asked one: is aspartame safe?
Mono- and diglycerides (E471), polysorbates (E433, E435), lecithin (E322), carrageenan (E407). Keep oil and water mixed, make textures feel creamy. Increasingly studied for gut-health effects — the research is at the "interesting signal" stage, not settled. If you see three emulsifiers stacked in one product, that's a marker of how heavily engineered the texture is.
Nitrates and nitrites (E250, E251, E252) in processed meats — the most-scrutinised. Sulphites (E220–228) in wine, dried fruit, some sauces — worth knowing if you're sensitive. Benzoates (E210–213) in soft drinks. Mostly doing the job of stopping you getting ill; the question is how much you're eating over time.
Less about risk, more about processing signal. Modified starches, xanthan gum, guar gum, pectin. Common in gluten-free products, plant milks, ready meals. A bowl of porridge uses oats. A bowl of something that markets itself as porridge-plus-protein probably has three thickeners.
That's the whole method. No chemistry degree, no app even — just pattern recognition.
Because standing in a Tesco aisle reading ingredient lists is a bad hobby.
Open NutraSafe, scan the barcode, and you get back every additive in the product, what family it's in, the FSA status, and our A–E grade. In under two seconds. Works on almost every product in UK supermarkets — Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, M&S, Morrisons, Aldi, Lidl, Waitrose, Co-op, Ocado.
A note on tone. We're not the "toxins" crowd. Most additives in most UK products are there for a real reason — preservation, safety, consistency. The point of scanning isn't to catch the industry out; it's to know what you're actually eating over a week. Some products are heavily additive-loaded. Some are surprisingly clean. The letter and the list tell you which is which, and the rest is your call.
Scanning, grading, the full additive breakdown and our E-number database all sit inside NutraSafe on iOS.
Get NutraSafe on the App Store