EAFUS: A Food Additive Database
This information is generated from a database maintained by the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Food Safety and Applied
Nutrition (CFSAN) under
an ongoing program known as the Priority-based Assessment of Food
Additives (PAFA). PAFA contains administrative, chemical and
toxicological information
on over 2000 substances directly added to food, including substances
regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as direct,
"secondary"
direct, and color additives, and Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS)
and prior-sanctioned substances. In addition, the database contains
only
administrative and chemical information on less than 1000 such
substances. The more than 3000 total substances together comprise an
inventory often
referred to as
"Everything" Added to Food in the United States (EAFUS).
The EAFUS list of substances contains ingredients added directly to
food that FDA has either approved as food additives or listed or
affirmed as GRAS.
Nevertheless, it contains only a partial list of all food ingredients
that may in fact be lawfully added to food, because under federal law
some
ingredients may be added to food under a GRAS determination made
independently from the FDA. The list contains many, but not all, of the
substances
subject to independent GRAS determinations.
For information about the GRAS notification program please consult the
Inventory of GRAS Notifications. Additional information on the status of Food and Color Additives can be obtained from the Food Additive Status List or the Color Additive Status List (formerly called Appendix A of the Investigations Operations Manual).
The list below is an alphabetical inventory representing only
five of 196 fields in FDA/CFSAN's PAFA database.
Definitions of the labels that are found in the inventory are:
