The US and Great Britain
Food additives permitted in one and not the other — and what each gap actually means.
195 additives are permitted in both. 494 are permitted in the US with no permission in Great Britain, none of them explicitly prohibited there. 199 are permitted in Great Britain with no permission in the US, of which 3 are explicitly prohibited or removed 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 Great Britain
Possibly covered by a related listing in Great Britain 2
Great Britain lists a substance under the same number — often a group entry such as “E 322 Lecithins” where the other regulator lists a single form. This site cannot tell whether that listing covers this form, so these are not counted as absent.
| Additive | Function | In United States | In Great Britain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grape skin extract INS 163(ii) | Colour | 1 provision | Anthocyanins (E163) |
| Magnesium phosphate INS 343(iii) | Acidity regulator | 1 provision | Magnesium dihydrogen phosphate, Magnesium hydrogen phosphate, Magnesium phosphates (E343) |
Regulated outside the additives list in Great Britain 160
Every function regulators give these — flavouring, enzyme, nutrient, solvent or processing aid — is one Great Britain regulates under separate rules, so they would not be expected on its list of food additives. Their absence here says nothing about whether Great Britain permits them.
Not on Great Britain’s list 332
Great Britain permits food additives only where it lists them, and these are not listed. That is not a finding against the substance: usually no one has applied for authorisation there. It does mean they may not be used as food additives in Great Britain today.
Permitted in Great Britain, no permission in the US
Prohibited in the US 3
The US explicitly prohibits these. This is a regulatory decision, and the citation names it.
| Additive | Function | In Great Britain | In United States |
|---|---|---|---|
| Calcium cyclamate INS 952(ii) | Sweetener | 19 provisions | 21 CFR 189.135 |
| Cyclamic acid and its Na and Ca salts E952 | Sweetener | 19 provisions | 21 CFR 189.135 |
| Sodium cyclamate INS 952(iv) | Sweetener | 19 provisions | 21 CFR 189.135 |
No listing in the parts of 21 CFR this site reads 196
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.