Potassium nitrite (E249)

Names on a label

• E249
• E 249
• Potassium nitrite

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

What regulators and scientists say

• EFSA found that nitrite from its use as a food additive did not exceed the acceptable daily intake for the general population, “except for a slight exceedance in children at the highest percentile.”¹
• EFSA set an acceptable daily intake of 0.07 mg per kilogram of body weight per day (April 5, 2017). For a 70 kg (154 lb) adult, that’s about 4.9 mg a day.¹

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.”²