Silicon dioxide (E551): What the Sources Found

Silicon dioxide is the additive the food industry lists as E551. 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 EFSA, each one below.

What Silicon dioxide does to a score

A packaged food starts with 33 points for what is in its ingredient list. Silicon dioxide 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.

EFSA Journal 2024;22(10):8880 — doi:10.2903/j.efsa.2024.8880, Re-evaluation of silicon dioxide (E 551) for infants below 16 weeks and follow-up for all population groups
'E 551 does not raise a safety concern in any population group, including infants under 16 weeks'; no ADI derived (MOE approach used) in the absence of a genotoxicity concern; EFSA recommends tighter specification limits for lead, mercury, arsenic and a new limit for aluminium.
EFSA Journal 2018;16(1):5088 — doi:10.2903/j.efsa.2018.5088, Re-evaluation of silicon dioxide (E 551)
No concern for genotoxicity, including studies with nano-sized silicon dioxide; SCF group 'ADI not specified' noted.

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 high. 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.