New Study Finds More Additives in Plant-Based Foods, Here’s What Gets Left Out

A new analysis published in the journal Food Additives & Contaminants has found that plant-based products sold in a UK supermarket contained roughly twice as many food additives as the animal-based products they were designed to replace, a finding that has circulated widely online over the past week, often without the context the study’s own authors attached to it.

Researchers from the UK paired 71 plant-based products with comparable animal-based equivalents sold by the same retailer, then classified each ingredient using the UK Food Standards Agency’s additive list. The plant-based range used a combined 199 food additives across all products compared with 100 in the animal-based range, and contained 39 distinct types of additive against 31 in the animal-based set. The gap was widest in dairy, meat, and fish alternatives, where additives are typically used to replicate texture, colour, and mouthfeel. Notably, the animal-based dairy products in the sample used no additives at all.

Researchers say the number alone says little

Senior author Joseph Whittaker, a lecturer at ION, was explicit that the additive count does not translate to a health risk. “However, even though we found that plant-based products had more food additives this does not necessarily mean an increased health risk,” he said

“First, we only analysed one product range so we can’t make generalisations to all plant-based products. Second, we didn’t assess the quantity or concentration of food additives used, nor how much or how often people eat these products, so, essentially, we don’t know the level of exposure of food additives from these products. And last, all food additives used in these products have passed UK food safety regulations.”

What the additive count leaves out

The comparison measures formulation only, not the wider profile of either food category. Additive counts do not factor in other variables associated with animal agriculture, such as antibiotic use linked to antimicrobial resistance, and the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies processed meat as carcinogenic to humans and red meat as probably carcinogenic. Such factors fall outside the scope of an ingredient-list comparison.

The study also does not address overall dietary patterns. Plant-based and vegan diets are not defined solely by consumption of meat or dairy alternatives; for many who follow a whole-food, plant-based diet, staples such as beans, lentils, grains, vegetables, and fruit make up the majority of intake, and these foods carry no additives by nature. Processed plant-based alternatives are, for many consumers, an occasional addition rather than a dietary foundation, comparable to how processed convenience foods function within an omnivorous diet. A study measuring additive counts in matched convenience products does not reflect overall dietary composition for either group.

The authors of the study note that their findings are limited to a single supermarket range and call for further research across other retailers and countries before any broader conclusions are drawn.