Genotoxic safety of synthetic food colours. Review

Abstract

Food additives and food colours, in particular, are becoming more widespread in all countries. The review is devoted to a least studied problem of synthetic food colours safety assessment approved for use in the Russian Federation – to an analysis of their genotoxic effect (mechanisms, methods of determination and results of studies on various living objects). Results half-century study of the synthetic food colours genotoxicity demonstrated among studied colours there were none of them for which unambiguous research results were obtained, what allows us to conclude about the possibility of their real mutagenic and/or carcinogenic danger. It is shown that the problem of dose range selection for genotoxicity test, the associated problem of impurities control as well as approaches to test systems and selection of test objects are the key to ensure genetic/carcinogenic safety of food colours. These problems are aggravated by the fact that in the Russian Federation there is no any unified system for food colours genetic safety assessment. So, the main task of this publication is to prove an urgency of this system elaboration and to outline a group of main problems associated therewith.

Keywords

food colours / azo dyes / genetic safety