University College of Conventional Method, Faculty of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Pakistan
Abstract
Food additives are not recently discovered, humans used food additives from ancient times.These food additives enhance the color and taste of food but also, kill harmful pathogens andkeep food safe for a long time. Ancient people used salting, smoking, jugging and many moretechniques to preserve food but in modern times, lifestyles changed, and people used advancedtechniques like ultra-sonication, vacuum packing, electro plasmolysis, bio preservation,nanotechnology, etc. There are many natural compounds extracted from plants like caffeine,anthocyanin, turmeric, saffron used as food additives. Similarly, many synthetic additives canbe used in food for example ampicillin, benzoic acid, tetrazine and many more. These syntheticadditives are more dangerous as compared to natural additives; therefore, many additives arebanned in the world. These additives are given E codes (European union numbers) and INS(International numbering system of food), but E code is used more commonly and labelled onall food items like chips, biscuit, pharmaceutics, cosmetics etc. In this review, we summarizesome traditional and modern food preservation techniques and give some most commonly usedfood additives with E codes
