Research links the controversial food ingredient carrageenan to gastrointestinal inflammation, including higher rates of colon cancer, in laboratory animals.
Yet it is still found in many foods, including some certified organic foods.
Cornucopia’s report,Carrageenan: How a “Natural” Food Additive is Making Us Sick, compiles scientific studies pointing to harm from consuming food-grade carrageenan.
Why is Carrageenan in Organic Food?
At the USDA’s National Organic Standards Board meeting in May 2012, Dr. Joanne Tobacman, a physician-scientist at the University of Illinois College of Medicine and the nation’s foremost independent expert on carrageenan,presentedher research and urged the NOSB to remove carrageenan from organic foods.
The carrageenan trade lobby group fought back hard, and found allies in companies like Group Danone (Stonyfield), CROPP (Organic Valley), Dean Foods (Horizon and Silk), Hain Celestial (Earth’s Best, Rice Dream and Westsoy) and Smucker’s (Santa Cruz Organics and R.W. Knudsen).
Their lobbyists convinced enough corporate-friendly NOSB members, including employees of Whole Foods, Organic Valley and Driscoll’s, to ignore the disturbing findings of dozens of independently funded and peer-reviewed studies, including several that found higher rates of colon cancer in lab animals given a diet containing food-grade carrageenan.
For decades, most organic food companies considered the seaweed-based “natural” food additive to be safe. The carrageenan industry lobby group had been effective in suppressing research. But since May 2012, no one in the organic industry can claim that they are not aware of disturbing research tying the food additive to serious potential health problems.
Choose Organic Products Wisely
Cornucopia developed aguideto help consumers avoid foods with carrageenan.
Some companies, like Tofu Shop Specialty Foods and Straus Family Creamery, unlike many of their competitors, have always offered foods without carrageenan.
In February 2013, the organic yogurt maker Stonyfield Farm announced it would remove carrageenan from the few products that contain it (Squeezers™, ultrapasteurized whipping cream and caramel Oikos yogurt).
In doing so, it joined companies Eden Foods, Kalona Supernatural, Clover Stornetta and Natural By Nature, which have committed to removing carrageenan.
Take Action – Protect Your Health
Given its effect on gastrointestinal inflammation, Cornucopia urges anyone suffering from gastrointestinal symptoms (irritable bowel syndrome/IBS, spastic colon, inflammatory bowel disease, chronic diarrhea, etc.) to consider completely eliminating carrageenan from the diet to determine if carrageenan was a factor in causing the symptoms.
If you have eliminated carrageenan from your diet and have found relief from gastrointestinal symptoms, please let us know the results by filling out aquestionnairedeveloped in collaboration with medical researchers.
Your participation in this questionnaire will help scientists better understand the severity and degree of carrageenan-related gastrointestinal disease in the general population. Experimenting with a carrageenan-free diet has already resolved uncomfortable conditions for many, so if you suffer from gastrointestinal symptoms, cutting out carrageenan is certainly worth a try.
'Carrageenan: Research links the controversial food ingredient carrageenan to gastrointestinal inflammation, including higher rates of colon cancer' has 1 comment
June 4, 2014 @ 9:50 am Ingredients Solutions
Regarding the safety of carrageenan, there has been an amazing amount of misinformation being blogged 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 approve its use, and all of them give the necessary approvals. The only application restricted as a precautionary measure is stabilizing liquid infant formula and a definitive toxicology is about to be published that is expected to remove this restriction.
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, i.e. in the animals’ only source of drinking water, have induced an inflammatory response in the small intestine. 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 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 been exploring the in vitro interaction of carrageenan with various genes and conclude 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 refute both of these claims, and furthermore this recent research questions the validity using in vitro studies to mimic the in vivo events in the GI tract when a human consumes a food containing carrageenan.
The bottom line on the safety issue is that in spite of all the efforts to downgrade or question the safety of carrageenan, particularly by bloggers, carrageenan is a safe food ingredient in all of the major regulatory jurisdictions of the world.