Mannitol (E421): What the Sources Found

Mannitol is the sweetener the food industry lists as E421. In our table it is no risk identified: it takes no points off a product's score for a child.

In short

No risk identified. No regulator finding we score, so a product keeps all 33 additive points.
No child flag. Nothing below is written about children specifically, so the class is the same at every age.
2 citations from FDA, EFSA, each one below.

What Mannitol does to a score

A packaged food starts with 33 points for what is in its ingredient list. Mannitol takes no points off a product's score. Scan the pack in Sito and the score you get is the one for your own child's age, with this additive named in the reasons. How we score has the whole method.

What the sources found

Every classification in our table comes from the citations below, and nothing else. They are quoted as the source wrote them.

FDA 21 CFR 180.25 (govinfo CFR-2024-title21-vol3-sec180-25)
Mannitol is permitted 'on an interim basis pending additional study' with per-category limits (98% pressed mints, 31% chewing gum, <2.5% other foods) and a mandatory 'Excess consumption may have a laxative effect' statement where foreseeable daily intake reaches 20 g — a lower laxative trigger than sorbitol's 50 g.
EFSA Call for data on genotoxicity data on sweeteners (2021-06-30) and Europe PMC EFSA Journal query (2026-08-10)
E 421 is not named in EFSA's 2021 genotoxicity data-gap call, and no re-evaluation opinion for mannitol has been published; its EU status remains the pre-2009 SCF acceptance with no numerical ADI.

Why this class

Clean current EFSA and FDA status. These rows exist so that an unfamiliar additive is never treated as a bad one: a missing row costs a product nothing, and a clean row says so with citations.

Our confidence in this row's classification is medium. Medium or low does not mean the evidence is weak; it means something about the row is still being pinned down, usually a regulatory status confirmed from one source rather than two.