"Are Emulsifiers Like Carboxymethylcellulose and Polysorbate 80 Safe"
Today, when grocery shopping, unless you’re sticking to
the produce aisle “[it’s] nearly impossible to avoid processed foods,
particularly …” if you’re eating the standard American diet,
characterized not only by insufficient plant foods and too much meat,
dairy, and eggs, but also lots of processed junk;
and along with that, an “increased exposure to [food] additives…”.
For example, the artificial sweetener sucralose, sold as Splenda,
can disrupt the human gut microbiome and “induce glucose intolerance”—
in other words it can make your blood sugars worse instead of better.
It’s relatively easy to avoid artificial sweeteners,
but “it may be … more difﬁcult to avoid ingestion of emulsiﬁers…
because they are commonly added to [so many] foods.”
In fact, “emulsifiers are the most widely used food additives”,
and “most processed foods contain one or more [of them]”.
We now consume emulsifiers by the megaton every year,
thanks to a multibillion-dollar industry.
You’ll commonly find emulsifiers in fatty dressings, fatty spreads,
baked goods, mayonnaise, salad dressing, candy, and beverages.
Why do we care? “Like all authorized food additives,
emulsiﬁers have been evaluated by risk assessors,
who consider them as safe.”
However, there are growing concerns among scientists
about their [potentially] harmful effects on
[our intestinal barrier]” in terms of causing a leaky gut,
as well as their effects on our microbiome.
Moreover, they could possibly “increase the absorption of …
environmental toxins” present in the food.
We know that the consumption of ultra-processed foods may be
a contributor to weight gain, for example.
Healthier, longer-lived populations don’t just have low meat intake
and high plant intake, but they are eating minimally processed foods.
Maybe the emulsifiers found in processed foods could be
playing a role, based on a number of preclinical studies.
But who cares if “emulsifiers make rats gain weight”?
When you read that “emulsiﬁers can cause striking changes in the
microbiota”, they’re not talking about within human beings
Mice are often used to study diet’s impact on the microbiome,
but we only share “a few percent of … bacterial genes” in common.
Even the gut flora of different mouse strains can be considerably
different from each other, so if you can’t even extrapolate
from one type of mouse to another, how are you supposed
to translate results from mice to human beings?
“Remarkably, there has been little study of the
potential harmful effects of ingested ...emulsiﬁers in [us].”
For example, lecithin, perhaps best known as a key component
of egg yolks, was found to be worse than
polysorbate 80, in terms of allowing bacteria
to leak through the gut wall into the bloodstream.
But whether lecithin consumption in humans causes
the same problem is yet to be determined.
“There is certainly a paucity … of human trials [on] the effects
of emulsifiers in processed foods”, but we at least
have data on human tissue, cells, and gut flora.
“Dietary emulsifiers directly alter
the [composition of the human microbiome] …
ex vivo … potentiating intestinal inflammation”.
Ex vivo means outside the body.
Researchers inoculated an artificial gut with fresh human feces
until they had a nice stable culture going,
and then added carboxymethylcellulose or polysorbate 80
and got a boost in proinflammatory potential starting within
one day with the carboxymethylcellulose,
and within the first week with polysorbate 80.
“This approach revealed that both [emulsifiers] acted directly
upon human gut [bugs] to increase [their] proinﬂammatory potential”.
If you then test the effect of these emulsifiers
on the protective mucus layer in petri dish cultures
of human gut lining cells, you will find that they can
partially disrupt the protecting layer.
The green staining is the mucus,
and both emulsifiers cut down the levels.
But both this study and the last used emulsifier concentrations that
were far in excess of what people might typically get day-to-day.
This is probably the study that raised the greatest potential concern.
The researchers surgically obtained not just cells
but actual intestinal wall tissue and found that polysorbate 80
could double the invasion of E. coli through
the intestinal lining tissue, whereas adding fiber
(in this case, fiber from plantains)
could seal up the gut wall tissue twice as tight.