A common ingredient in ice cream, other dairy, and many natural foods may be attacking your gut. Carrageenan — an additive harvested from red seaweed — is linked to dangerous gastrointestinal inflammation and even cancer, scientists find.
“Thousands of carrageenan feeding studies have been performed in animals,” says Joanne K. -Tobacman, MD, University of Illinois associate professor of medicine. “Many of them showed that carrageenan causes intestinal neoplasms [abnormal growths] resembling colon cancer.”
Not everything that comes from a plant is good for us, notes Charlotte Vallaeys, director of farm and food policy at the Cornucopia Institute, a nonprofit agricultural education organization, which published a report on the health hazards of carrageenan in March. “Think about tobacco, poison ivy, or poisonous berries,” she says. In fact, carrageenan has been used in scientific laboratories for decades to cause inflammation and to test anti-inflammatory treatments, says Tobacman.
Carrageenan serves as a thickener and binder in foods such as yogurt, deli meat, and infant formula. It contains no nutritional value; it simply saves us the trouble of stirring or shaking our foods and drinks and makes lower-fat items taste “fattier.”
While the FDA is keeping carrageenan on its list of approved food additives, some companies are voluntarily removing it from products. To find out if your favorite brand is carrageenan-free, visit the Cornucopia Institute’s online guide (www.cornucopia.org).
FYI…the diatribe written by Debbie Young is nothing but cut-n-paste from talking points off of her employer’s website. She works for Ingredients Solutions, Inc. (ISI), the world’s largest supplier of carrageenan! This woman is a paid company shill with no interest in your health. She is paid to go to websites that question the safety of carrageen as a food ingredient & “debunk” it. A paid spokes-hole, defending her company’s cash cow on any news site, blog or forum you can find that mentions carrageenan is questionable. Don’t believe me?? Google it.
Carrageenan, a Versatile and Safe Food Ingredient
Let Science and Facts Guide You
Carrageenan has become an essential ingredient in a wide variety of foods we consume every day such as flavored milks, stabilized milk substitutes such as soy, processed deli and fresh meats, and as a vegetable-based gelatin replacer.
Carrageenan has a number of positive attributes in today’s food environment. Carrageenan can be used in foods labeled Organic and is considered Natural. Ingredients Solutions Inc. has carved out a niche in the US market by being the leading marketer of Natural Grade (Semi-Refined) carrageenan, a minimally-processed type of carrageenan. Natural Grade carrageenan is lower in cost than the highly refined types but equally effective in the applications noted above.
The fact that carrageenan is a seaweed extract gives it a certain cache among those consumers seeking “green” and “sustainable” products. Seaweeds grow in seawater without the need for fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides. The predominant seaweed types producing carrageenan (Kappaphycus and Eucheuma spinosum) grow naturally on tropical reefs. To augment the natural harvest these two seaweeds have been farmed by coastal fisherman predominantly in Philippines and Indonesia for the last forty years. As fishing in these areas has declined, seaweed farming has become the principal income for this population. So, there is a social-economic empowerment associated with the carrageenan industry.
Let’s return to carrageenan’s attributes as a food ingredient. Carrageenan from the two tropical seaweeds noted in the previous paragraph give a wide range of textures or “mouth feel”. These textures range from rigid to elastic gels and in suitable blends with other gums can have the texture of salves or pastes. If carrageenan from cold water seaweeds are added to the mix free flowing viscous solutions can be formulated.
Another attribute of carrageenan is its ability to bind water. Syneresis control is important in processed meats. Without carrageenan in the mix of gums used in processed meats, controlling package purge would be an even bigger problem than it already is. Syneresis control also plays a role in fragrance release in air fresher gels an important application for carrageenan. While not a food application it is worth mentioning. Carrageenan is also a synergistic gum. That is, it can be formulated into blends of gums to make stronger gels than with a single gum. Blends can also be formulated with lower syneresis than can be achieved with a single gum.
Probably the most unique property of carrageenan is its ability to interact with proteins, a special type of synergistic behavior. Milk protein forms a particularly strong bond with carrageenan. Suspending the cocoa in chocolate milk requires only a few hundred parts per million while also imparting a whole milk-like mouthfeel in a low fat milk. Protein synergy in meat is less than in milk, but it still plays a role in enhancing the sliceability of deli meats. Carrageenan is also gaining use in fresh meats to improve juiciness and reduce cook loss.
Turning to the safety of carrageenan, there has been an amazing amount of unsubstantiated blogging about carrageenan being unsafe as a food ingredient. In spite of this misinformation, carrageenan continues as the safe food ingredient it has always been. If it were not, the principal regulatory agencies of the world (US FDA, FAO/WHO JECFA, EU EFSA, and Japan Ministry of Health) would not continue to approve its use, and all of them give the necessary approvals for use in all the applications noted above. The only application restricted as a precautionary measure is stabilizing liquid infant formula. Definitive toxicology is about to be published that is expected to remove this restriction. One fact very much in carrageenan’s favor on the safety front stems from very low use levels. Furthermore, being a relatively expensive ingredient it is only used in applications where its unique functionalities justify its use.
Why all the concern about the safety of using carrageenan in foods? Starting in the 1960s there have been research studies showing that if excessive doses of carrageenan are consumed in animal trials inflammation can be induced in the small intestine. Likewise, inappropriate methods of introducing the carrageenan into the animals can create a similar inflammatory response, i.e. feeding carrageenan to the animals in their only source of drinking water. However, there has never been a validated inflammatory response in humans over the seventy plus years carrageenan has been used in foods. The anecdotal “upset tummies” reported in blogs as coming from consuming a food containing carrageenan are hardly reliable sources of toxicological information on the safety of carrageenan.
Inflammatory responses in animals only occur when carrageenan can cross the blood membrane barrier of the small intestine. This only occurs when the extreme feeding conditions mentioned above are employed. Normal feeding regimes induce no such response.
Over the last decade a group of molecular biologists at the University of Illinois at Chicago lead by Dr Joanne Tobacman have explored the in vitro interaction of carrageenan with various genes involved in inflammatory diseases. They concluded that carrageenan can cause inflammation in the gut via a binding mechanism involving TLR-4 receptors. This group also concluded that carrageenan degrades in the gut and the degraded carrageenan can permeate the membrane barrier. Recent studies sponsored by the carrageenan industry (in press) provide scientific evidence refuting both of these claims. The industry-sponsored studies also raise the caution that in vitro studies may not be a good model for in vivo events in the GI tract after a carrageenan-containing food has been consumed.
There is no scientific evidence known to Ingredients Solutions Inc. that would require your company to abandon using carrageenan in your product because of safety concerns. Likewise, there is no reason for you or your company to stop developing new products with carrageenan as an ingredient based on safety issues. Of course consumer concerns, no matter how ill-founded, must be considered, and the carrageenan industry is trying to get ahead of the bloggers with a positive PR program.
SO MUCH FOR THE MYTHS
CONSIDER THE FACTS ON CARRAGEENAN FOR A CHANGE
Q. What is Carrageenan??
A. Carrageenan is a naturally-occurring seaweed extract. It is widely used in foods and non-foods to improve texture and stability. Common uses include meat and poultry, dairy products, canned pet food, cosmetics and toothpaste.
Q. Why the controversy?
A. Self-appointed consumer watchdogs have produced numerous web pages filled with words condemning carrageenan as an unsafe food additive for human consumption. However, in 70+ years of carrageenan being used in processed foods, not a single substantiated claim of an acute or chronic disease has been reported as arising from carrageenan consumption. On a more science-based footing, food regulatory agencies in the US, the EU, and in the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization/World Health Organization (FAO/WHO) repeatedly review and continue to approve carrageenan as a safe food additive.
Q. What has led up to this misrepresentation of the safety of an important food stabilizer, gelling agent and thickener?
A. It clearly has to be attributed to the research of Dr. Joanne Tobacman, an Associate Prof at the University of Illinois in Chicago. She and a group of molecular biologists have accused carrageenan of being a potential inflammatory agent as a conclusion from laboratory experiments with cells of the digestive tract. It requires a lot of unproven assumptions to even suggest that consumption of carrageenan in the human diet causes inflammatory diseases of the digestive tract. The objectivity of the Chicago research is also flawed by the fact that Dr Tobacman has tried to have carrageenan declared an unsafe food additive on weak technical arguments that she broadcast widely a decade before the University of Chicago research began.
Q. What brings poligeenan into a discussion of carrageenan?
A. Poligeenan (“degraded carrageenan” in pre-1988 scientific and regulatory publications) is a possible carcinogen to humans; carrageenan is not. The only relationship between carrageenan and poligeenan is that the former is the starting material to make the latter. Poligeenan is not a component of carrageenan and cannot be produced in the digestive tract from carrageenan-containing foods.
Q. What are the differences between poligeenan and carrageenan?
A. The production process for poligeenan requires treating carrageenan with strong acid at high temp (about that of boiling water) for 6 hours or more. These severe processing conditions convert the long chains of carrageenan to much shorter ones: ten to one hundred times shorter. In scientific terms the molecular weight of poligeenan is 10,000 to 20,000; whereas that of carrageenan is 200,000 to 800,000. Concern has been raised about the amount of material in carrageenan with molecular weight less than 50,000. The actual amount (well under 1%) cannot even be detected accurately with current technology. Certainly it presents no threat to human health.
Q. What is the importance of these molecular weight differences?
A. Poligeenan contains a fraction of material low enough in molecular weight that it can penetrate the walls of the digestive tract and enter the blood stream. The molecular weight of carrageenan is high enough that this penetration is impossible. Animal feeding studies starting in the 1960s have demonstrated that once the low molecular weight fraction of poligeenan enters the blood stream in large enough amounts, pre-cancerous lesions begin to form. These lesions are not observed in animals fed with a food containing carrageenan.
Q. Does carrageenan get absorbed in the digestive track?
A. Carrageenan passes through the digestive system intact, much like food fiber. In fact, carrageenan is a combination of soluble and insoluble nutritional fiber, though its use level in foods is so low as not to be a significant source of fiber in the diet.
Summary
Carrageenan has been proven completely safe for consumption. Poligeenan is not a component of carrageenan.
Closing Remarks
The consumer watchdogs with their blogs and websites would do far more service to consumers by researching their sources and present only what can be substantiated by good science. Unfortunately we are in an era of media frenzy that rewards controversy.
Additional information available:
On June 11th, 2008, Dr. Joanne Tobacman petitioned the FDA to revoke the current regulations permitting use of carrageenan as a food additive.
On June 11th, 2012 the FDA denied her petition, categorically addressing and ultimately dismissing all of her claims; their rebuttal supported by the results of several in-depth, scientific studies.
If you would like to read the full petition and FDA response, they can be accessed at http://www.regulations.gov/#!searchResults;rpp=25;po=0;s=FDA-2008-P-0347