CSPI’s Chemical Cuisine is the web’s definitive rating of the chemicals used to preserve foods and affect their taste, texture, or appearance. Besides titanium dioxide, the group recommends avoiding artificial sweeteners like aspartame, acesulfame potassium, and sucralose, as well as synthetic food dyes like Yellow 5 and Red 3. CSPI and others have recently asked the Food and Drug Administration to ban the latter dye in foods and ingested drugs because the FDA has already determined that it is a carcinogen unsafe for use in cosmetics.
The report also provides detailed information related to the lithopone manufacturing process flow and various unit operations involved in a manufacturing plant. Furthermore, information related to mass balance and raw material requirements has also been provided in the report with a list of necessary quality assurance criteria and technical tests.
TiO2 comes in many different forms. However, only a few of these forms are considered food-grade (acceptable to be added to food). Many studies that raised concern about the safety of TiO2, including the concern for genotoxicity, used forms of TiO2 that are not considered acceptable for use in food and have different properties than food-grade TiO2. Other studies did use food-grade TiO2, but took steps to break the material down into smaller particles than what would normally be found in food.