EFSA Safety Data: What 'Acceptable Daily Intake' Actually Means

Yuka says an ingredient is “hazardous.” A wellness influencer tells you to avoid it at all costs. But how much of it would you actually need to consume for it to be harmful? A pinch? A tablespoon? Fourteen cans of Diet Coke?

That last one is not a joke. It is the real answer for aspartame. And the gap between “this ingredient exists in your food” and “this ingredient exists in your food at a dangerous level” is where most food safety apps completely fall apart.

What Is Acceptable Daily Intake?

Acceptable Daily Intake, or ADI, is the amount of a substance that a person can consume every single day for their entire lifetime without any appreciable health risk. It is set by scientific bodies — primarily EFSA (the European Food Safety Authority) and JECFA (the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives).

This is not a marketing number. It is not set by the food industry. It is the product of years of toxicological research, animal studies, and systematic safety evaluations by independent scientists. When EFSA sets an ADI, they are saying: below this threshold, the evidence shows no harm.

How ADI Is Calculated

The process is more conservative than most people realize.

Step 1: Find the No-Observed-Adverse-Effect Level (NOAEL). Researchers conduct long-term animal studies, feeding the substance at various doses. The NOAEL is the highest dose at which no adverse health effects are observed.

Step 2: Divide by 100. This is the critical safety margin, and it comes from two uncertainty factors multiplied together:

• 10x for species difference — because humans might be more sensitive than the test animals
• 10x for individual variation — because some humans (children, elderly, those with health conditions) might be more sensitive than others

So when EFSA sets an ADI, they have already built in a 100-fold safety margin below the level where even animals showed no effects. You would need to exceed the ADI by a very large factor before approaching the doses that actually caused problems in studies.

Real Numbers That Put Things in Perspective

Here is where the abstract becomes concrete. These are real ADI values from EFSA’s published assessments, calculated for a 70 kg (154 lb) adult.

Aspartame: 40 mg/kg/day

For a 70 kg adult, that is 2,800 mg per day — or about 2.8 grams. A can of Diet Coke contains roughly 200 mg of aspartame. That means you would need to drink approximately 14 cans of Diet Coke every single day, for your entire life, before reaching the ADI. And remember, the ADI already has that 100-fold safety buffer built in.

When an app tells you aspartame is “hazardous” without mentioning dose, it is leaving out the most important part of the science.

Sodium Nitrite: 0.1 mg/kg/day

This one tells a very different story. For a 70 kg adult, the ADI is just 7 mg per day. That is remarkably low. A single serving of processed deli meat can contain 10-15 mg of sodium nitrite. Eat a sandwich with ham and a hot dog for dinner, and you may well be pushing past the ADI.

This is an ingredient where the concern is genuinely warranted — not because sodium nitrite is poison, but because the margin between typical consumption and the safety limit is narrow. The dose matters in both directions.

Sucralose: 15 mg/kg/day

For a 70 kg adult, that is 1,050 mg per day. A single packet of Splenda contains about 12 mg of sucralose. You would need to go through roughly 87 packets of Splenda per day to reach the ADI. Even heavy users of sucralose-sweetened beverages rarely approach a fraction of this level.

Carrageenan: 75 mg/kg/day

The ADI here is 5,250 mg per day for a 70 kg adult — over 5 grams. Carrageenan is used as a thickener in small quantities, typically 0.1-1% of a product’s weight. You would genuinely struggle to eat enough carrageenan-containing foods in a day to approach this limit. The internet panic about carrageenan in almond milk is, by the numbers, disproportionate to the actual risk.

What “No ADI” Means

Some ingredients in our database have no ADI assigned. This often alarms people, but it should not. “No ADI” typically means one of two things:

1. The substance is so safe that setting a limit is unnecessary. Citric acid, for example, has no ADI — not because it is dangerous, but because it is a normal component of human metabolism. Your body produces it naturally. EFSA determined that no restriction is needed.

2. There is insufficient data to set a precise number. This is rarer and does warrant attention, but it still does not mean “dangerous.” It means “we need more research.”

The distinction matters enormously, and most food apps do not make it.

”The Dose Makes the Poison”

Paracelsus, the 16th-century physician, said it five hundred years ago: “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.”

Water can kill you if you drink enough of it. Oxygen is toxic at high concentrations. Vitamin A causes liver damage in excess. The question is never simply “is this substance in my food?” The question is always “how much, and does that amount matter?”

Why Most Food Apps Ignore Dose

The honest answer: because dose-based analysis is harder. It requires real toxicological data, not just a list of “bad” ingredients. It requires understanding ADIs, typical consumption patterns, and the difference between a substance being present and a substance being present at a meaningful level.

It is much easier to flag every additive as scary. Fear drives downloads. Nuance does not go viral.

But nuance is what keeps you actually informed rather than merely anxious.

What GradeMyLabel Does Differently

GradeMyLabel shows EFSA safe limits for 76 ingredients in our database. When you scan a product, you do not just see whether an ingredient is “good” or “bad.” You see the science: the ADI, the genotoxicity assessment, the regulatory status across six countries.

We have EFSA safety data for 105 ingredients total, including genotoxicity assessments for all 105 of them. This is the same data that European regulators use to make their decisions — and we put it directly in your hands.

Because the question is not whether your food contains additives. The question is whether it contains additives at levels that actually matter. And answering that question requires data, not fear.

Download GradeMyLabel and see the real science behind every ingredient. EFSA safety limits, genotoxicity data, and dose context — not just red and green circles.