Food preservatives are safe?

Imported foods.. I was told that it has a lot of preservatives... But I don't know what subtances are used as a perservative. Perplexity helped me out to get an answer for that. In fact, I tried Wrtn, but it doesn't provide search results even though I used AI search option. GenSpark was good, but the answer was in Korean and no list of chemicals in the answer.
 
My question: are preservatives used too much in imported food products?
I got four preseratives used in the food.

Preservatives in food

 

According to the food category that each preservative is used, benzoic acid is the one I take most out of four. Wikipedia confirms that benzoic acid is a food preservative. To prevent food from spoiling, growth of microorganisms should be inhibited. Presumably, preservatives make an effect by inhibiting growth of microorganisms in the food product. Wikipedia also gives the structure information. This structure is needed in an artificial intelligence model to predict toxicity. Benzoic acid is a substance that occurs naturally in some plants. Most of people think of synthetic chemicals as harmful and natural products as healthy, but there are many examples of natural products that can be synthesized in laboratories. A classic example is aspirin. It is synthesized and produced in laboratories, but was first found in willow trees. 

Benzoic acid

 

If you want to know more about safety and toxicity information of benzoic acid, PubChem can be a good place to look into. Evidence of human and animal toxicity is reported in the database. Particularly, animal study results reported exact dose that caused death of animal in the study. That doesn't necessarily mean that the substance is harmful to human. What does that mean?

 

In animal testing, high doses are intentionally given to animals. They may be fed, applied to the skin or eyes, or inhaled. This is done in order to find the maximum dose that can be given to human. You might feel sorry for the animals, but unfortunately, we don't have any other alternative at the moment. (Many researchers are working on it, but animal tests are not entirely replaced yet. Some of animal tests are considered to be replaced.) But if you look closely at the cases where animals have had problems, it's usually because they've been given too much substances. And with this information, we can find a safe dose for humans. 

 

Toxicity is a matter of dosage. For instance, drinking 5 liters of water at once can be mortal to anybody. Does that make water a poison? Not really. No one drinks 5 liters of water in one sitting. (I remember reading about a man in the desert who had been suffering from thirst for a long time, saw water and suddenly drank a lot of it and died.) Cyanide is  definitely a poison, because even a small amount accidentally ingested can be life-threatening. 0.2 grams of cyanide is a lethal dose. I looked up how much 0.2 grams weighs as much as a toy gun bullet like a small plastic bead. Too much of anything is bad even if it is a healthy food. The problem is when you accidentally eat a small amount and it's deadly.

Animal testing is usually done on rodents, which are much smaller than humans. Normally mortal doses were measured in rats and mice, and that's the values in the database in most cases. In case of a rat, females weigh between 250-400 grams and males weigh between 300-800 grams on average. In case of a mouse much smaller that the rat, females weigh between 18 and 35 grams and males between 20 and 40 grams on average. Therefore, the toxicity values measured in animal tests are expressed in mg/kg bw (body weight). This is how much was given per kilogram of body weight. Some animals are heavy and some are not. If animals in different sizes were given the same amount of substances, heavier animal takes relatively lower amount compared to the other one when body volume was considered.. This is why dosing by weight is important information. (For the same reason, when you go to the pediatrician, you need to know weights of your child, because the amount of medicine they need to take depends on their weight.) For example, if a rat (body weight: 1kg) was died after 20 g/kg bw was given, you have to convert it to human weight. If the dose given to the mouse was converted based on my body weight, it is 1400 grams. 1.4 kilograms. That is a weight of one pack of bleach. Taking that much of substnaces at once is not a good idea. Even vitamin of that much might threaten your life. If a chemical kills an animal at 20 g/kg bw, that means the chemical is safe for humans because there is no way that you will take that huge amount of substances in a normal situation.

 

The next important part is the route of administration. There are many different scenarios when a substance enters the body. It could be ingested on an empty stomach, ingested with food, on the skin, injected (there are even different types of injections), inhaled, etc. The same substance in the same amount will produce different results in each scenario. If you put it on your skin, it may not be problematic, but if you eat it, it may cause a huge problem. So when you check animal test results, it's important to look at the administartion route. Thus, animal testing results should be understood based on the background information.

 

If this information is too difficult, I strongly encourage you to ask about it to GenAI tools like copilot, perplexity, or genspark. They will be a good friend of you to understand such tricky information.