See this on your own shelf
Frela reads the ingredient list and scores the whole product — additives, nutrition, processing and organic certification together.
No scare stories and no reassurance you haven't earned. Each page sets out what the substance is, what regulators actually concluded, and how Frela's score treats it — including the ones that turn out to be fine.
Tartrazine is one of only six colours in Europe that must carry a printed warning about children's attention and behaviour. Frela rates it high because that warning is a regulatory conclusion, not a campaign group's opinion.
Titanium dioxide is the clearest case on this list: EFSA concluded in 2021 that it could no longer be considered safe as a food additive, and the EU banned it. If you find it on a food label in Europe today, something is wrong.
Sodium nitrite does a job nothing else does as well — it stops botulism in cured meat — but it also forms nitrosamines when meat is cured and then cooked hot. Frela rates it high because it is the additive most directly tied to a Group 1 carcinogen classification for the foods it appears in.
Aspartame is the most studied sweetener in existence, and the two bodies that looked at it most recently reached conclusions that sound contradictory but are not. Frela rates it high on precaution after the 2023 IARC classification — while being clear that food safety regulators did not change their intake limits.
Carrageenan comes from seaweed and has been eaten for centuries, but the scientific argument is about a technical distinction most coverage skips: food-grade carrageenan versus its degraded low-molecular-weight form. EFSA kept the ADI in 2018 while flagging that it could not fully resolve that question.
Most of what people believe about MSG comes from a 1968 anecdote that blinded trials never reproduced. The reason Frela still rates it moderate has nothing to do with that folklore — it is that EFSA set an intake limit in 2017 and found some people exceed it.
Sucralose is around 600 times sweeter than sugar and passes through the body largely unchanged, which is the basis for its safety case. The open questions concern what happens when it is heated in baking, and what it does to the gut microbiome.
E471 is one of the most widely used additives in Europe and one of the least dramatic. EFSA found no need to set a numerical intake limit. The two things genuinely worth knowing are that it can be animal-derived, and that it is not the emulsifier the microbiome research is actually about.
Lecithin is a phospholipid mixture found in egg yolk, soybeans and human cell membranes. EFSA set no numerical intake limit. The only thing most people need it for is the allergen line: soy lecithin must be declared.
Citric acid is the additive people most often flag as suspicious and the one with the least behind that suspicion. It is a normal metabolite of human cells. Frela rates it as no known risk — with one genuine caveat about teeth.
Frela reads the ingredient list and scores the whole product — additives, nutrition, processing and organic certification together.