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The Ars reports of an interesting study published in Nature about a possible link between food emulsifiers and inflammatory disorders.
Emulsifiers are used in processed foods, drugs, vitamins, vaccines, soaps, and cosmetics. They hold ingredients that generally don't like to be together, like oil and water, in a stable union. They are found in everyday products ranging from mouthwash to ice cream to salad dressing and barbecue sauce.
When emulsifiers first came into vogue, they were classified by the government as GRAS—"generally regarded as safe"—because in animal studies designed to detect acute toxicity and/or carcinogenic properties, they exhibited neither. But their consumption in the Western world has risen dramatically over the late twentieth century, largely in tandem with inflammatory disorders like colitis and metabolic syndrome, a collective suite of obesity-associated diseases. That connection has prompted more refined safety studies on emulsifiers and other food additives.
Although further work is obviously needed to assess the effects of emulsifiers on human health, the authors suggest that emulsifiers may have contributed to the enormous increase in inflammatory bowel disease and metabolic syndrome that has occurred over the last half century. However, the researchers note that "this hypothesis does not dispute the commonly held assumption that excess caloric consumption is a predominant factor driving the metabolic syndrome epidemic."
Maybe it's not entirely our fault that we've been eating everything in sight; by messing with our microbiome, the emulsifiers made us do it.
Original found in Nature, 2014. DOI: 10.1038/nature14232. Of course, correlation is not causation, but the results do suggest there is link between gut health, inflammatory disorders, and what's in the food we eat.
(Score: 5, Informative) by SlimmPickens on Monday March 02 2015, @06:38AM
Nice topic, but IMHO the summary should have included this paragraph which tells us we're not talking about lecithin (egg yolk...mayo, hollandaise) and soy lecithin (lot's of things including pharmaceuticals) and also that it's more than just the association of junk food with IBS and metabolic syndrome.
Normally, the bacterial residents of the intestine are separated from the intestinal wall by a layer of mucus. But when mice were given two emulsifiers, polysorbate-80 and carboxymethylcellulose, the distance between the bacteria and the epithelium was reduced by half because the mucus wall was thinner. Some bacteria were pressed right up against the epithelium, and a few even adhered to it. The emulsifiers also changed the composition of the microbiome, reducing levels of Bacteroidales (species generally considered to be good guys in terms of the host's health) and increased levels of species that degrade mucus.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday March 02 2015, @12:59PM
This is a good point, and another area of interesting further research is emulsified foods themselves not just the emulsifier.
You can buy canned (bottled) real mayo, and it'll be made of soybean oil, eggs, and vinegar, mostly.
Its interesting that before processed mayo and fake mayo, people probably didn't eat as much soybean oil or vinegar. I like a nice vinaigrette dressing on a salad once in a while, or the occasional pickle, but there's people out slathering a quarter cup of mayo or fake mayo every single day on a sandwich, for example. Surely not just the egg is changing their gut biome and digestion etc if you double someones egg intake while hundred-tupling their soybean oil and vinegar intake.
That's before you get into secondary effects, like the presence of mayo making sandwiches taste better resulting in increased intake of sliced mystery meat or whatever.
I would guess they aren't correcting for food intake in the analysis, making test subjects drink a quarter cup of soybean oil and a few teaspoons of vinegar very day would probably drift into cruel and unusual punishment territory.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday March 02 2015, @11:49PM
Pickled foods (either vinegar or fermented foods with lactic acid) were probably even more common due to the lack of refrigeration. Likewise, extracting oil is a good way to store nutritional value from a food that might otherwise spoil.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2015, @03:57AM
A quarter cup of mayo is hardly enough for "slathering" ... ;)
*burp* ... 'scuse me ...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday March 03 2015, @05:46PM
IBS should *always* be investigated as a symptom of acute-phase Hashimoto's thyroiditis. In fact per an article I read in the Journal of Endocrinology, IBS is considered *definitive* for Hashimoto's, even without the initial presence of thyroid antibodies.
From the bit you quoted here, it sounds to me like what's happening in their studies is that the natural mucus is also being emulsified, which obviously is going to mess things up because it's basically the layer of protective goo. I'm guessing this didn't really become a problem until the low-fat craze (given cholesterol's role in cellular structures). I'd like to see their results on a normal-fat vs low-fat/low-cholesterol diet.
BTW, a realworld example of what I mentioned above re soy proteins: Dogs develop natural antibodies to roundworms by the time the dog is about a year old, which then naturally expel any remaining worms. But dogs fed a soy-based diet will still tend to be wormy. Why? Because soy protein stimulates excess gut mucus, which protects the roundworms from antibodies. The same applies to some pathogenic bacteria.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.