Amaranth (E123)

Names on a label

• E123
• E 123
• Amaranth

Labels outside Europe often print the number on its own, without the E.

What regulators and scientists say

• EFSA set an acceptable daily intake of 0.15 mg per kilogram of body weight per day (June 22, 2010). For a 70 kg (154 lb) adult, that’s about 11 mg a day.¹
• IARC classifies it as not classifiable as to its carcinogenicity to humans (Group 3, 1987).²

An acceptable daily intake is, in EFSA’s words, “an estimate of the amount of a substance in food or drinking water that can be consumed daily over a lifetime without presenting an appreciable risk to health.”³

IARC’s groups “indicate the strength of the evidence as to whether an agent is capable of causing cancer,” but they don’t measure how likely cancer is at a given level of exposure.⁴