Xanthan gum (E415): What the Sources Found

Xanthan gum is the thickener the food industry lists as E415. 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, Peer-reviewed, each one below.

What Xanthan gum does to a score

A packaged food starts with 33 points for what is in its ingredient list. Xanthan gum 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.2017.4909
Re-evaluation of xanthan gum (E 415): no need for a numerical ADI; no safety concern for the general population at the refined exposure assessment for reported uses.
Peer-reviewed PMID 22575248 (Beal J et al., J Pediatr 2012) and PMID 22289705 (Woods CW et al. 2012)
Case series of late-onset necrotising enterocolitis in (predominantly premature) infants following use of a xanthan-gum-containing thickening agent; the reports underpinned FDA's 2011 warning against SimplyThick in premature infants.

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.