The Cornucopia Institute – a non-profit food policy research group whose mission is "Seeking economic justice for the family-scale farming community" - has formally requested that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) remove the common additive carrageenan from the US food supply. Carrageenan is used to emulsify, gel and thicken foods and beverages.
Last year, according to the Institute, the FDA rejected a 2008 citizen petition, which presented scientific studies linking carrageenan to gastrointestinal inflammation and disease, including cancer. The petition was filed by Dr. Joanne Tobacman, a physician-researcher at the University of Illinois – Chicago College of Medicine, who has been studying food-grade carrageenan for more than a decade.
Food companies have rebutted the Institute’s claims, pointing out that no new evidence has been provided.
“The FDA’s justification for denial was based on a sloppy and incomplete evaluation of available published research, and it was riddled with overt bias which appears to protect an industry’s profits at the expense of public health,” said Charlotte Vallaeys, director of farm and food policy at Cornucopia.
According to Cornucopia, carrageenan is a highly processed additive extracted from red seaweed that contributes no nutritional value or flavour, but is added to affect the texture of a wide range of foods and beverages.
Scientists have raised concern about its safety for decades, based on research linking food-grade carrageenan in the diet of laboratory animals to gastrointestinal disease, including colon tumours, said the organisation.
According to the Cornucopia Institute’s web site, carrageenan can be classified as low molecular weight, “degraded” carrageenan, or high molecular weight, or “undegraded” carrageenan. Degraded, low molecular weight carrageenan is recognised as a carcinogen in lab animals, and is therefore classified as a “possible human carcinogen” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
Carrageenan processors tend to portray the difference between degraded and undegraded carrageenan as a simple, black–‐and–‐white distinction, and claim that food-grade carrageenan sold to food processors falls entirely in the Undegraded category, the FAQ continues. However, studies (including industry-funded studies) show that food-grade carrageenan is also linked to colon inflammation and colon cancer in animals. The Institute claims that studies have reported that high molecular weight carrageenan can degrade in the gastrointestinal tract to low molecular weight carrageenan.
Moreover, the FAQ concludes, when the industry tested its food-grade carrageenan for the presence of degraded carrageenan, results showed that every sample had at least some degraded carrageenan, with some test results of food-¬‐grade carrageenan showing as much as 25% degraded carrageenan.
