On 6 May 2021 the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the agency of the European Union (EU) that provides independent scientific advice and communicates on existing and emerging risks associated with the food chain, updated its safety assessment of the food additive titanium dioxide (E 171), following a request by the European Commission in March 2020.
The updated evaluation overturned the outcome of EFSA’s previous assessment published in 2016, since the Panel concluded that titanium dioxide can no longer be considered safe as a food additive and the experts could not exclude genotoxicity concerns after consumption of titanium dioxide particles. Genotoxicity describes the property of chemical agents that damages the genetic information within a cell causing mutations, which may lead to cancer.