| Title | Food Emulsifiers Possibly Linked to Inflammatory Disorders | |
| Date | Monday March 02 2015, @05:39AM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the we-are-what-we-eat dept. | ||
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.
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