One BBC reporter spent the day eating as many e-number filled (e-numerous?) foods as possible in order to make a point about the widespread fears attached to their consumption.

By the end of the day I felt like a balloon of slurry on the verge of bursting. I’d eaten 50 different E numbers, but have I eaten enough to poison myself?

No, said my GP, Dr Jonty Heaversedge, who explained that the basic toxicology principle for safe consumption was a 100-fold safety margin.

Scientists work out how much of any E number an animal can eat on a daily basis before having any ill effects, divide that by 10 (in case humans are more sensitive than animals) and then divide by 10 again, just to be safe.

He concluded that one shouldn’t discriminate against food that contains E-numbers:

Are these actually bad for you? Words like “preservative”, “emulsifier” and “stabiliser” sound bizarre and scary for something you put in your mouth. But lemon juice is an antioxidant preservative, also known as E330 (citric acid), egg yolk is emulsifier E322 (lecithin) when added to oil to make mayonnaise, and stabilisers include E460, or cellulose, which comes straight from plants.

One commenter on the BBC website notes:

And E300 is vitamin C! Most people think Es is a classification system for chemicals instead of a multi-language labelling scheme.

All the same, I understand why people are hesitant to eat food whose ingredients are obfuscated with code.

The Day I Ate As Many E-Numbers As Possible @ BBC News. (Photo by Flickr user RuneT)