Wendyl wants to know: Artificial colour earns black mark for red jelly treat
5:30 AM Saturday Nov 24, 2012
Aunt Betty's Jelly Jiggle Topping. $4.69 for 340g. Photo / Supplied
Aunt Betty's Jelly Jiggle Topping
$4.69 for 340g
This brightly coloured bottle of squeezable jelly made it into my house via an enthusiastic grandfather who saw the words "made with real raspberry juice" and brought it home.
This jelly tastes like the jelly you get on the top of a Jelly Tip icecream so I can see why it would be enthusiastically accepted on some icecream by most families.
It also uses no artificial flavours which is great. But what have they used to get the bright-reddish pink colouring?
Ingredients (in order of greatest quantity first):
Sugar
This is a sweet topping which you put on icecream so of course it's going to have sugar in it but 41 per cent is very high. Each 20g squirt will give you just under two teaspoons of sugar.
Raspberry juice
(35 per cent) (from concentrate)
This is great to see. More and more food producers are swapping out sugar in favour of fruit sugars. It's more natural and has nutritional value, unlike sugar.
Water
Food acids (330, 331)
These are citric acid (330) and sodium citrates (331) which will be in here to flavour, balance acidity or preserve.
Thickeners (418, 415)
These are gellan gum (418) and xanthan gum (415), both natural gums used in here to keep the jelly thick.
Natural flavour
Hurrah! Nice to see a food producer use a natural flavouring instead of opting for a much cheaper alternative which is an artificial flavour.
Preservative (202)
This is potassium sorbate (202) which has no known health effects.
Firming agent (333)
This is calcium citrate which is a salt of citric acid and will be in here to create a jelly-like consistency.
Colour (123)
This is a real shame.
To have bothered using a natural flavouring but then opting for amaranth or red no 2, which is a colouring banned in the United States, is disappointing.
This colour was banned in the US in 1976 because of concerns it is a carcinogen and it was reaffirmed in 1980.
Russia has also banned it and in the past Norway and Austria banned the colour.
Its use is restricted in Europe to fish roe, aromatic wines and other alcoholic drinks.
My recommendations:
I'm all for food producers making an effort to take away artificial flavourings and use real fruit to provide flavour and sweetness.
Which is just what Aunt Betty's have done.
But, in my opinion, they stopped short of making this product a safe treat by using the artificial colour amaranth which is banned in the US for good reason. It has some nasty health studies attached to it.
Many food producers are now opting for more natural red dyes such as cochineal/carmine that are available.
So, for this reason, and this one alone I would recommend opting for homemade raspberry jam on your icecream because last time I looked you didn't have to add colour to jam.
Highlights
* Uses natural flavour and real raspberry juice.
* Uses an artificial colour banned in the US.
* 41.2 per cent sugar
Is there any way to get round this? I am sure there are some really bad ones out there, but surely if they were that dangerous they would already be banned here? I am not in the food industry and have no affilation of any sort, I just hate bad science and paranoia about food with "chemicals" in it, - EVERYTHING is made up of chemicals
This point falls down when the history of the US decision is explained. The FDA decision in 1976 was based on political pressure as opposed to the body of scientific evidence. The Russian paper which sparked the hysteria was highly controversial even at the time and later dismissed in safety evaluations by other regulatory bodies such as the EU and Canada.
The decision of the FDA to remove its approval (all the while publicly pointing out there was no health risk) is the subject of a chapter in the American Council on Science and Health's publication "Fact versus Fears: A Review of the Greatest Unfounded Health Scares of Recent Times" which can be read here: "Facts Versus Fears" link.
In the case of the USA, the US Food and Drug Administration did not ban amaranth - it removed its provisional approval (after a much-discredited Russian study) due to political and consumer pressure and said it would review its certification after further studies.
Even then the FDA Commissioner said "there was no evidence of a public health hazard". There appear to have been no moves to go down the expensive path of getting it reinstated because the industry has access to other reds such as Allura Red.
There have been more recent studies by the European Food Standards Authority and Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives which concluded that Amaranth is not carcinogenic, which was the concern raised from the 1970s Russian study.
Joanne McDonald - Technical Manager Hansells