April 12, 2024 – Creamy, thick and velvety: Without Emulsifiers, your favorite ice cream or muffin may not taste the identical. But research warns that these substances have a dark side, from polysorbate-80 to carrageenan. Proof combines emulsifiers with disturbed intestinal microbiome, inflammationand several other conditions, of Heart attack to breast cancer.
What's more, EmulsifiersDon'It shouldn't be necessarily synonymous with junk food. Such substances are present in many foods which might be often considered healthy, equivalent to some low-fat Greek yogurts, trail mix bars or oat milk.
There are over 100 different emulsifiers which may be added to foods. They prevent the separation of oil and water and thus improve the feel. A Study 2023 found emulsifiers in as much as 95% of British supermarket pastries and cakes, 55% of breads and 36% of meat products.
Certain goods containing emulsifiers may not fit neatly into traditional dietary categories. An excellent example is reduced-fat dairy products Benoit Chassaing, PhD, microbiologist on the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM). “If [producers] If you remove fat, you need to replace it with something else. “So when you buy fat-free or low-fat cream or cream cheese, they are often loaded with dietary emulsifiers,” he said.
From a health perspective, this is bad news. In 2024, Chassaing and his colleagues published one study Based on 92,000 French adults who provided detailed records of the foods they consumed, including brand names. The results showed that people who consumed the highest amounts of emulsifiers had a significantly increased risk of cancer. For Carrageenans, which are emulsifiers obtained from algae, the risk of breast cancer increased by 32%. Another type of emulsifier, mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids, increased the risk of prostate cancer by 46%. A related one Study 2023 linked dietary intake of emulsifiers to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Among the worst offenders were mmicrocrystalline cellulose and carboxymethylcellulose (CMC), which can be found in ice cream or processed cheese.
While population studies suggest a link between food emulsifiers and poor health, they do not prove that the additives directly cause the negative health effects. What can help are laboratory studies. For such experiments, researchers often use a human intestinal simulator, a machine that can do this resemble a row of old-fashioned milk bottles connected to a telephone exchange via tubes. The bottles contain gut microbiota from human stool, to which scientists add various emulsifiers (admittedly, it can smell pretty bad in the lab). In one such study published in 2024Researchers from Belgium showed that polysorbate 80, a synthetic emulsifier commonly used in dairy products and salad dressings, increased the number of friendly gut bacteria such as: Faecalibacterium prausnitziiwhile the number of people associated with inflammation is increasing.
Andrew Gewirtz, PhD, a microbiologist at Georgia State University, said emulsifiers have long been considered safe for consumption because many of them are not absorbed. “It can therefore be assumed that they cannot possibly do anything negative,” he said. This view began to change as we recognized the importance of the gut microbiota in health. The fact that emulsifiers can reach the intestine almost unchanged now makes them “prime suspects involved in disrupting the microbiota,” said Gewirtz.
When you eat something that contains emulsifiers, the nutrients and water in it are absorbed through your digestive tract. However, various additives remain relatively intact. “We think they can reach a higher concentration in the gut,” Chassaing said. Once this is the case, some emulsifiers can do this alter the composition and function of the microbiota, which causes gut bacteria to release pro-inflammatory molecules. This in turn could lead to a variety of chronic inflammatory diseases diabetes To Cardiovascular disease.
One of the strongest arguments for the negative effects of food emulsifiers came from a trial in 2022 carried out from Gewirtz, Chassaing, and their colleagues. For this experiment, 16 volunteers were randomized to receive either a diet without emulsifiers or a diet with high doses of CMC. For eleven days, participants were housed in a local hospital and given an identical diet, with one exception: some of them were given desserts containing CMC. The results showed that consumption of the emulsifier was associated with more complaints of abdominal discomfort as well as loss of health-promoting metabolites released by gut microbes, such as short-chain fatty acids.
“It confirmed the idea that emulsifiers influence the gut microbiota and change the species composition.” Gewirtz said.
Things got particularly bad for two of the participants – their gut bacteria invaded the normally sterile inner mucous layer of the intestines, a condition that can lead to Crohn's disease or other diseaseslcerative inflammation A follow-up study for 2024 revealed that this was likely due to the composition of the two participants' gut microbiomes.
They had “microbiota that were very sensitive to the disturbance,” Chassaing said. If you transfer intestinal bacteria from such patients to mice, “you possibly can cause very severe colitis,” he said. However, the process was small and how Aaron BancilMD, a Gastroenterologist At King's College London, participants were given quite high doses of CMC: 15 grams per day. While some people may actually consume these types of doses with their regular diet, “it's not going to be something that's consumed ceaselessly,” he said.
Other research now suggests that emulsifiers can have a direct impact on the human intestine. When researchers from Italy applied dietary emulsifiers to human cells from colon cancer, they found found that it accelerated the proliferation of such cells. This may indicate a role for emulsifiers in gastrointestinal cancers and confirm the results of the French population studies. Emulsifiers could also serve as a gateway for other potentially harmful chemicals. In Experiments Conducted on both human cell lines and rats, polysorbate 80 damaged the mucous barrier in the intestine, resulting in an increase in the mucus barrier permeability – the infamous “Leaky Gut”. This helped phthalates, chemical compounds often added to plastics that can be converted after ingestion into endocrine disruptorsto be more easily absorbed by the body.
Animal studies show that consuming emulsifiers can also lead to anxiety. Mice given CMC and polysorbate 80 showed changes in the Areas of the brain responsible for stress reaction, such as the amygdala. And when emulsifiers are fed to mice during pregnancy, such effects can also be passed on to their offspring. Bancil says animal models are informative, but “we can’t fully translate these things to humans.”
In addition, not all emulsifiers are equally harmful. With Chassaing, Gewirtz and their colleagues tested 20 common food emulsifiersThey found that some, such as Carrageenans, Guar gum and xanthan gum, had strikingly harmful effects, while others, such as lecithin, were less harmful. Lecithin is a natural emulsifier commonly derived from eggs and soy. Therefore, according to Gewirtz, it does not enter the intestine unabsorbed, as is the case with synthetic emulsifiers. On the other hand, “Polysorbate 80, Carrageenans“And also a lot of gums, xanthan gum, guar gum – these are really, really aggressive to the microbiota,” Chassaing said.
There may be ways to protect the gut microbiome from the harmful effects of dietary emulsifiers. When researchers fed mice mucus-strengthening bacteria, Akkermansia muciniphila, It prevented the damage caused by consuming CMC and polysorbate 80. However, Gewirtz cautioned that this does not mean we should all rush to get supplies AKkermansia pills, as such supplements “just aren’t really well tested.”
The safest way to keep your gut healthy is to eat homemade foods and avoid emulsifiers entirely. However, Bancil said this can be difficult for some people, especially those with busy lifestyles. So looking at the labels might be a better approach. “Very often there is an alternative,” said Chassaing. “Ice cream accommodates many dietary emulsifiers, but there are some brands that make ice cream without emulsifiers,” he said.
Counter-intuitively, cheaper foods sometimes contain fewer emulsifiers than more expensive options. “There could be a branded ketchup, and it could be a supermarket’s own brand. The branded product, which may be more expensive, may contain emulsifiers, but the store brand may not contain emulsifiers,” Bancil said.
The same goes for foods marketed as healthy, he said Megan Rossi, PhD, Nutritionist at King's College London. “Let’s just be careful and not automatically assume they’re better for us,” she said.
But studying labels is not without its challenges. That's because “emulsifiers could also be called various things,” Bancil said. So carboxymethylcellulose could appear on a label as CMC, cellulose gum, modified cellulose or in Europe as E466. Carrageenan could be called Irish mossEucheuma extract or E407.
According to Gewirtz, given the results of animal and in vitro studies, as well as the first human trials, the food industry should be encouraged to look for safer alternatives, particularly to synthetic emulsifiers. Chassaing hopes that “in the long run we are going to give you the option to pick and favor additives which might be significantly better tolerated by the microbiota.” However, he said, “This shouldn't be the case yet.”