Against food additives, Yuka now adopts a “name and shame” policy. The French application which allows its users to sift through the quality of food products is launching a new feature this Tuesday. Its objective is to make it possible to publicly display manufacturers who use one of the 55 additives categorized as “at risk” and appearing in red on the application.
“The public authorities unfortunately take too long to ban, prohibit substances that are controversial, we have to wait decades,” regrets Julie Chapon, the co-founder of Yuka, to France Inter. Thanks to the new functionality, it is counting on the 22 million French users to speed things up.
And to do this, there are two possibilities. The first is to directly contact the customer service of a brand that uses a controversial additive by email, using a template written by Yuka. For example, for the crispy milk chocolate muesli from the “U! “, the email is written as follows: “Hello, I scanned product 3256224124887 on the Yuka application. It contains an additive assessed as risk (Mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids). This additive could, in the event of high consumption, increase the risk of cancer and cardiovascular diseases. It is also suspected of disrupting the intestinal flora, which could result in increasing the risk of autoimmune and allergic diseases, as well as the risk of inflammatory diseases. I ask you to remove it in order to protect the health of consumers. »
The second option consists of calling on the brand on “I scanned one of your products on @YukaApp, it contains an additive assessed as risk (E471). I ask you to delete it in order to protect the health of consumers,” it is specified in this specific case. In total, some 15,000 products can be identified among the three million referenced.
Among the many controversial food additives, we find in particular sweeteners bad for the intestinal microbiota, emulsifiers which could increase the risk of metabolic diseases such as diabetes, or even colorings suspected of promoting hyperactivity in children.
