Ingredient
Azodicarbonamide
An additive that became famous for the wrong reason, and whose actual regulatory question is more interesting than the one that made it famous.
- Also on labels as
- ADA, Azoformamide, Azobisformamide, E927a, Dough conditioner
- Found in
- food
Part of Banned elsewhere · Babies and children
Azodicarbonamide is the additive everyone met through a single comparison: it is also used to make foamed plastics, including yoga mats and shoe soles. The comparison is factually correct and it is worth explaining why it settles nothing, because the reasoning error it contains is one of the most common in this whole subject.
What the regulation permits
The US food additive regulation allows azodicarbonamide in two roles, and it is precise about both.
As an aging and bleaching ingredient in cereal flour, “in an amount not to exceed 2.05 grams per 100 pounds of flour (0.0045 percent; 45 parts per million)”. And as a dough conditioner in bread baking, at a total not exceeding the same 45 parts per million by weight of the flour used, including anything already added to the flour.
Forty five parts per million, counted once across both uses. That is the whole permission.
In the European Union it is not permitted as a food additive at all, which puts it in the cluster of ingredients whose status differs by market.
Why the yoga mat is not an argument
Shared use tells you a molecule has a useful property, not that a food dose is dangerous.
Azodicarbonamide decomposes on heating and releases gas. In a plastic that gas makes bubbles, which is what foaming means. In dough it does something chemically different, oxidising flour proteins to strengthen the gluten network. The same instability is useful in both places for unrelated reasons.
Water is used industrially in enormous quantities for things nobody would eat. Salt is used to de-ice roads. The presence of a substance in an industrial process is not information about the substance at the dose you consume, which is the argument made in full on the guide to hazard and exposure.
The comparison worked as campaigning because it produced an image. It is worth noticing that the campaign succeeded, and that it succeeded on the strength of a reasoning error rather than on the strength of the actual regulatory question.
The actual question
The substantive concerns about azodicarbonamide are about its decomposition products rather than about the compound itself, semicarbazide and urethane among them, and about occupational exposure to the dust in bakeries and plants, which is a respiratory sensitiser question entirely separate from eating bread.
The occupational side is well established and it is a workplace matter rather than a consumer one. The dietary side is where the regulators differ, with the US setting a limit and the EU not permitting the use.
That is the honest shape of it. A real regulatory disagreement about decomposition products at permitted levels, which is harder to put on a poster than a yoga mat.
Where it turns up
Commercial breads, buns and rolls, and it has been removed from many of them since 2014, because the reformulation was cheap and the reputational cost was not.
If a US bakery still uses it, the ingredient list will name it. Outside the US you are unlikely to meet it, and inside the US the trend has run one way.
Sources
- 21 CFR 172.806: Azodicarbonamide US Food and Drug Administration, via eCFR · ecfr.gov Permits it as an aging and bleaching ingredient in cereal flour and as a dough conditioner in bread baking, in a total amount not to exceed 0.0045 percent, that is 45 parts per million, by weight of the flour used.