A leading nutritionist has revealed that a food additive found in everything from cake to mayonnaise and even sausage has been linked to gut problems, including colon cancer.
Speaking on diet guru Tim Spector’s ZOE podcast, Dr Federica Amati, a researcher at King’s College London, said emulsifiers listed on the back of pack are a “warning sign”.
These are added to food to bind fats and water, improving the texture, appearance and shelf life of the food.
According to Dr. Amati, they have been shown to break down the protective mucus layer in the intestinal wall, allowing harmful bacteria to enter the intestinal wall.
This causes an imbalance in the gut flora and inflammation, she added.
Low-fat, sweetened yogurt often contains emulsifiers to prevent the yogurt from curdling, but Greek yogurt does not.
Emulsifiers combine substances or liquids into creamy emulsions, they also make food feel smoother and less sticky when you eat it, Dr. Amati explains. She explains that they can be found in sandwich fillings and chocolate
A series of alarming studies show that this inflammation is a trigger for irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.
And now there is new evidence that emulsifiers are linked to an increase in colon cancer diagnoses, especially in younger people.
Emulsifiers are found in ultra-processed foods, or UPFs, which are now make up 57 percent of the average British diet.
Simple processed foods include canned, cooked vegetables and fish, such as tuna, and everyday products such as cheese.
These contain little more than the main ingredient and water, oil or one of two additional ingredients. You can make them yourself if you want.
However, UPFs are highly processed, using factory techniques, and contain additives – of which emulsifiers are just one.
According to critics of the products, an easy sign that a food product may be UPF protected is if it contains ingredients you won’t find in your kitchen cupboards.
Emulsifiers combine substances or liquids into creamy emulsions. They also make food feel softer and less sticky when you eat it, Dr. Amati explains.
Speaking on Tim Spector’s Zoe podcast (pictured), Dr Federica Amati, a researcher at King’s College London and a registered nutritionist, warned that emulsifiers are a ‘red flag’
She said, “Let’s say you’ve got a sandwich. The filling might contain an emulsifier called guar gum. A sandwich spread might contain [one] it contains xanthan gum.
‘Or you could put some cereal in your basket and that could contain stearoyl lactylates. Even that bar of chocolate you threw in at the checkout, that probably contains lecithin [which is an emulsifier].
While 171 emulsifiers are approved for human consumption in the US, only 63 are approved in the UK. This includes other agents such as stabilisers, gelling gels, gelling agents and thickeners.
Emulsifiers are typically made from plant or animal sources or synthetic chemicals.
Lecithin, for example, is found in chocolate and can come from soybeans, eggs, liver, peanuts, and wheat germ.
Xantham gum is a synthetic emulsifier made by bacterial fermentation. Microbes break down glucose and create xantham gum as a byproduct.
The emulsifiers used in bread include diacetyl tartaric acid esters and mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids. These make for a softer, longer-lasting bread, Dr. Amati explains.
She said that emulsifiers are often added to yogurt to prevent a watery layer from forming.
“There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be separated. It’s purely aesthetic, and because we’re used to this consistent creaminess in our products,” Dr. Amati said.
Manufacturers are not required to list the amount of emulsifiers in each individual food product, meaning we never really know how much we are consuming.
Dr Amati pointed out that a study was conducted into the intake of certain additives, including emulsifiers, in the UK, Ireland and France. It showed that children and adults exceeded the acceptable daily intake of certain emulsifiers, which can be very harmful.
While in the US 171 emulsifiers are approved for human consumption, in the UK only 63 are approved. This includes other agents such as stabilisers, gelling gels, gelling agents and thickeners.
An easy sign that a food could be a UPF is if it contains ingredients that you wouldn’t find in your kitchen cupboard, such as unrecognisable dyes, sweeteners and preservatives. Another clue is the amount of fat, salt and sugar that is in each package, with UPFs typically containing high amounts
Dr. Amati explains the damage that emulsifiers can do to the gut. The gut biome is made up of layers of fat and water.
‘If we eat a lot of emulsifiers [which bind water and fat] ‘It disrupts the balance, the separation between the fat layer and the water layer, which we want to maintain in the intestinal microbiome.’
It is believed that this damages the stomach lining, leading to bacterial infections.
“We think this process is linked to bowel cancer,” microbiome scientist and gut specialist Dr Alasdair Scott explained in an interview with The Mail on Sunday earlier this month.
‘There have been studies done in animals that confirm this, but not yet in humans. In humans it can be much more difficult to show exactly why a tumor has developed.’
Experts warn that colon cancer is becoming more common in young people, with a diet high in UPFs being a possible cause.
Cases of the disease, which kills 17,000 people each year in the UK, have risen by 22 per cent among people under 50 over the past 30 years.
Experts have warned that bowel cancer is increasingly affecting young people, with diets high in UPFs being blamed. The incidence of the disease, which kills 17,000 people in the UK each year, has risen by 22 per cent in the under-50s over the past 30 years.
It appears that consuming this additive also has a “negative impact on our overall health,” Dr. Amati warns.
Other research shows that emulsifiers in food increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.
Currently, most studies on intestinal emulsifiers have been conducted on animals, so experts warn that we cannot assume that the effects are the same in humans.
According to Dr. Amati, studies typically focus on one emulsifier at a time. The effects of consuming a “cocktail” of them all at once, which is how many of us eat them, are unknown.
In 2017, a small study looked at the effect of the emulsifier carrageenan on patients with ulcerative colitis, a form of inflammatory bowel disease that causes abdominal pain and digestive problems.
The results showed that consuming it increased the chance of symptoms.
Another study involved a diet low in emulsifiers for patients with Crohn’s disease, which showed that they had fewer symptoms.
Both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, the incidence of which has increased in recent years, increase the risk of colorectal cancer by causing chronic inflammation in the colon.
Dr. Amati said seeing emulsifiers on an ingredients list should be “a warning sign,” adding: “If a food contains emulsifiers, artificial sweeteners and there are lots of ingredients that you just don’t have in your kitchen, think about whether you can replace them with something else in your basket.”
