The US and Canada
Food additives permitted in one and not the other — and what each gap actually means.
266 additives are permitted in both. 423 are permitted in the US with no permission in Canada, none of them explicitly prohibited there. 124 are permitted in Canada with no permission in the US, none of them explicitly prohibited there.
A missing permission is rarely a ban. Usually no one has applied, the substance is named or grouped differently, or it falls under a different law. Only the first two groups below — prohibited, and removed — record a regulator’s decision against a substance, and even those are decisions about legal status, not findings this site draws about safety.
Permitted in the US, no permission in Canada
No Canadian listing matched 423
Health Canada’s lists name additives without E or INS numbers, so this site matches them by exact name. A substance listed in Canada under a name this site does not recognise will appear here. Treat these as unconfirmed, not as absent.
Permitted in Canada, no permission in the US
No listing in the parts of 21 CFR this site reads 124
The US does not require every food substance to be listed. A substance can be used as generally recognised as safe (GRAS) on the basis of a company’s own determination, or after an FDA response to a GRAS notice, neither of which appears in 21 CFR. So these may well be used in US food; this site cannot show it either way.
What this page is not
It is not a list of unsafe additives, and a regulator permitting something is not this site’s endorsement of it. Regulators reach different decisions on the same evidence, on different applications, and at different times. Each additive’s page shows every jurisdiction’s status with its citation, and where an assessing body has published a reading of the evidence, that reading, attributed.
Counts are of this site’s additive pages, which follow the regulators’ own listings: a group entry in one jurisdiction can correspond to several pages in another. Status as retrieved from each source; see Sources for dates.