Sorbitan monostearate (E491): What the Sources Found

Sorbitan monostearate is the emulsifier the food industry lists as E491. 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 Sorbitan monostearate does to a score

A packaged food starts with 33 points for what is in its ingredient list. Sorbitan monostearate 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 10.2903/j.efsa.2017.4788 (PMC7010202)
Re-evaluation of sorbitan esters E 491-E 495: group ADI of 10 mg/kg bw per day expressed as sorbitan; under the refined non-brand-loyal scenario 'the mean and the 95th percentile level did not exceed the ADI in any of the population groups'; no safety concern at reported use levels.
EFSA 10.2903/j.efsa.2017.4788 (maximum-level scenario tables)
Under the regulatory maximum-level scenario, toddler exposure was 26.1-88.9 mg/kg bw per day at the mean and 80.1-211.2 at P95, and children 21.4-78.4 mean / 54-183.4 P95 - above the group ADI, but EFSA judged this scenario not the relevant one.

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.