A leading nutritionist has revealed that a food additive found in everything from cakes to mayonnaise and even sausages has been linked to gut problems including bowel cancer.
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 the packet were a “red flag”.
These are mixed with foods to help bind fats and water, which contributes to improving the texture, appearance and shelf life of foods.
But according to Dr. Amati, they have been shown to break down the protective layer of mucus that lines the gut, allowing harmful bacteria to enter.
This triggers an imbalance in gut microbiomes and inflammation, she added.
Low-fat sweetened yogurt often contains emulsifiers to prevent it from separating, but Greek yogurt does not.
Emulsifiers combine substances or liquids to form creamy emulsions and also help make foods softer and less sticky when eaten, explains Dr. Amati. She says they can be found in sandwich fillings and chocolate.
This inflammation, as a number of alarming studies now suggest, is a trigger for irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s disease and colitis.
And there is now emerging evidence linking emulsifiers to increases in bowel cancer diagnoses, particularly in younger people.
Emulsifiers are found in ultra-processed foods, or UPF, which are now They make up 57 per cent of the average UK diet.
Simple processed foods include canned and cooked vegetables, fish such as tuna, and everyday items such as cheese.
These contain little more than the main ingredient and water, oil, or one of two additional ingredients; you could potentially make them yourself.
However, UPFs are highly processed products that involve factory techniques and contain additives, of which emulsifiers are just one.
An easy sign that a food might be UPF is if it contains ingredients you wouldn’t find in your kitchen cupboard, product reviewers say.
Emulsifiers combine substances or liquids into creamy emulsions and also help make foods feel softer and less sticky when eaten, explains Dr. Amati.
Speaking on Tim Spector’s Zoe podcast (pictured), Dr Federica Amati, a researcher at King’s College London and registered nutritionist, warned that emulsifiers are a “red flag”.
She said: ‘Let’s say you’ve got a sandwich. The filling may contain an emulsifier called guar gum. A sandwich spread may have (one) called xanthan gum.
‘Or you might put cereal in the basket and it might contain stearoyl lactylates. Even the chocolate bar you bought at the checkout probably contains lecithin (which is an emulsifier).’
While 171 emulsifiers have been approved for human consumption in the US, only 63 have been approved in the UK. This includes other agents such as stabilisers, gelling agents, gelling agents and thickeners.
Emulsifiers are usually made from plant or animal sources or from synthetic chemicals.
For example, lecithin found in chocolate can come from soy or eggs, liver, peanuts, and wheat germ.
Xanthan gum is a synthetic emulsifier made through bacterial fermentation. Microbes break down glucose and produce xanthan gum as a byproduct.
Emulsifiers used in bread include diacetyl tartaric acid esters and mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids. These create a softer bread that lasts longer, explains Dr Amati.
He said emulsifiers are often added to yogurt to prevent a watery layer from forming on the surface.
“There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be separated. It’s purely for aesthetics and because we’re used to having this uniform creaminess in our products,” Dr. Amati said.
Manufacturers are not required to record the amount of emulsifiers in each individual food, so we never really know how much we are consuming.
Dr Amati highlighted that a study looked at intake of some additives, including emulsifiers, in the UK, Ireland and France and found that children and adults were exceeding the acceptable daily intake of some emulsifiers, which could be very harmful.
While 171 emulsifiers have been approved for human consumption in the US, only 63 have been approved in the UK, this includes other agents such as stabilisers, gelling agents, gelling agents and thickeners.
An easy sign that a food might be a UPF is if it contains ingredients you wouldn’t find in your kitchen cupboard, such as unrecognizable colors, sweeteners, and preservatives. Another clue is the amount of fat, salt, and sugar hiding inside each package, as UPFs often contain high amounts.
Explaining the damage emulsifiers can cause to the gut, Dr. Amati explains that 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 somehow alters that balance, that separation of the fat layer and the water layer, which we actually want to maintain in the gut microbiome.”
It has been theorized that this damages the stomach lining, leading to bacterial infections.
“We think this process could be linked to bowel cancer,” explained microbiome scientist and gut specialist Dr Alasdair Scott, speaking to The Mail on Sunday earlier this month.
‘There are studies in animals that confirm this, but not yet in humans; in humans it can be much more difficult to prove exactly why a tumor has formed.’
Experts have warned that bowel cancer is affecting more and more young people, and diets high in UPF could be a possible cause.
The incidence of the disease, which kills 17,000 people a year in the UK, has risen by 22 per cent among those under 50 over the past 30 years.
Experts have warned that bowel cancer is affecting more and more young people, with diets high in UPF thought to be a possible cause. The incidence of the disease, which kills 17,000 people a year in the UK, has risen by 22 per cent in the under-50s over the past 30 years.
Consuming this additive also appears to have a “negative impact on our overall health,” warns Dr. Amati.
Other research has linked dietary emulsifiers to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
Currently, most studies on emulsifiers in the gut have been conducted in animals, so experts warn that we cannot assume the effects are the same in humans.
These studies typically focus on one emulsifier at a time, so the effects of consuming a “cocktail” of them at once — that is, the number of times we eat them — are unknown, Dr. Amati adds.
A small trial in 2017 looked at the effect of the emulsifier carrageenan on patients with ulcerative colitis, a type of inflammatory bowel disease that causes abdominal pain and digestive problems.
The results suggested that consuming it increased the likelihood of developing symptoms.
Another study involved giving Crohn’s disease patients a diet low in emulsifiers and found that they had fewer symptoms.
Both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, cases of which have increased in recent years, increase the risk of colorectal cancer by causing chronic inflammation in the colon.
Dr. Amati She said seeing emulsifiers on an ingredient list should be “a red flag”, adding: “If a food contains emulsifiers, artificial sweeteners and there are a lot of ingredients that you simply wouldn’t have in your kitchen, then think about whether you could replace it with something else in your shopping basket.”