Carrageenan, a naturally occurring seaweed extract, is widely used in foods and non-foods to improve texture and stability. Common uses include meat and poultry, dairy products, canned pet food, cosmetics and toothpaste. Recently, self-appointed “consumer watchdogs” have produced numerous web pages condemning carrageenan as an unsafe food additive for human consumption. However, in 70+ years of carrageenan being used in processed foods, not a single substantiated claim of an acute or chronic disease has been reported as arising from carrageenan consumption. On a more science-based footing, food regulatory agencies in the U.S., E.U., and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization/World Health Organization (FAO/WHO) repeatedly review and continue to approve carrageenan as a safe food additive.

            The misrepresentation of the safety of this important food stabilizer, gelling agent and thickener is attributed to the research of Joanne Tobacman, an associate professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She and a group of molecular biologists accuse carrageenan of being a “potential inflammatory agent” based on a few <I>in vitro</I> cell studies using cultured digestive tract cells. At this stage, even to suggest a link between consumption of carrageenan and inflammatory diseases of the digestive tract is at best an unproven assumption. The objectivity of the Chicago research is seriously flawed by the fact that Tobacman has tried to have carrageenan declared an unsafe food additive on weak technical arguments she broadcasted a decade before the University of Chicago research began.

            It should be noted that poligeenan (“degraded carrageenan” in pre-1988 scientific and regulatory publications) is a possible carcinogen to humans; carrageenan is not. The only relationship between carrageenan and poligeenan is that the former is the starting material to make the latter. Poligeenan is not a component of carrageenan and cannot be produced in the digestive tract from carrageenan-containing foods. The production process for poligeenan requires treating carrageenan with strong acid at high temperature for six hours or more, converting the long chains of carrageenan to much shorter ones: ten to one hundred times shorter. In scientific terms the molecular weight of poligeenan is 10,000 to 20,000; whereas that of carrageenan is 200,000 to 800,000. Concern has been raised about the amount of material in carrageenan with molecular weight less than 50,000. The actual amount (well under 1%) cannot even be detected accurately with current technology and presents no known threat to health.