PLANT NATURAL PIGMENT COLORANTS-HEALTH BENEFITS: TOXICITY OF SYNTHETIC OR ARTIFICIAL FOOD COLORANTS

This literature review paper highlights about health benefits of plant natural pigment colorants and toxicity of synthetic or artificial food colorants. Fruits and vegetables are colourful pigment-containing food sources. Natural food colours or biological pigments originate from a wide range of sources like vegetables, fruits, plants, minerals and other edible natural sources. These natural pigments are essential secondary metabolites, which play multiple roles in the whole life cycle of plants and are characterized by powerful medicinal properties. Owing to their nutritional benefits and phytochemicals, they are considered as functional food ingredients, capable of providing additional health benefits, like prevention or delaying onset of chronic diseases, as well as meeting basic nutritional requirements. Colour additives are widely used by the food industry to enhance the appearance, as well as the nutritional properties of a food product. Synthetic colours are added to foods to replace natural colour lost during processing to reduce batch-to-batch variation and to produce products with consumer appeal where no natural colour exists. However, some of these substances may pose a potential risk to human health, especially if they are consumed excessively and are regulated. Synthetic colorants become toxic after prolonged use, causing health problems such as indigestion, anemia and allergic reactions as asthma and urticaria, pathological lesions in the brain, kidney, spleen and liver, tumours and cancer paralysis, mental retardation, abnormalities in offsprings, growth retardation, carcinogenic effect and eye defects resulting in blindness.