Common food additive linked to colon cancer and intestinal inflammation

Thursday, December 01, 2016 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
Tags: emulsifiers, cancer, inflammation

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(NaturalNews) They're a staple ingredient in many processed foods, helping to maintain a food product's texture and consistency while extending its shelf life. But chemical emulsifiers like polysorbate 80 and carboxymethylcellulose appear to be major driving factors in what many experts now admit are escalating rates of gastrointestinal disease and bowel cancer all around the world, a shocking new study has found.

For their study, researchers from Georgia State University evaluated the metabolization of some of the more popular emulsifiers used in processed foods to see how they affect mammalian gut microflora. They tested these chemicals on mice at appropriate levels similar to what a human would encounter in common foods like baked bread, margarine, and dessert pastries.

What they found is that the mice fed the chemicals experienced major changes to their internal microbial terrain, which resulted in a low-grade inflammation that precipitated the formation of cancer cells. A corresponding increase in "bad" bacteria offsetting the proper balance of "good" bacteria further created conditions hospitable to cancer cell growth and proliferation.

With Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, and other forms of inflammatory bowel disease on the rise, these findings have strong implications for the role that diet plays in exacerbating the colorectal cancer epidemic. The fourth most commonly diagnosed type of cancer after breast, prostate, and lung, colon cancer is a serious problem, and emulsifiers are at least partially to blame.

"The incidence of colorectal cancer has been markedly increasing since the mid-20th century," stated Dr. Emilie Viennois, lead author of the study, in conjunction with its publishing in the peer-reviewed journal Cancer Research. "A key feature of this disease is the presence of an altered intestinal microbiota that creates a favourable niche for tumorigenesis."

Vaccines often loaded with cancer-causing emulsifiers

While food is probably the most significant source of exposure to chemical emulsifiers, vaccines are a close second. Polysorbate 80, for instance, is a common vaccine ingredient that's used as a surfactant to reduce the surface tension between two or more liquid substances while increasing their solubility – in other words, like with food, it's used to create a unified homogenous substance out of otherwise non-homogenous components.

As explained by Health Impact News, polysorbate 80 is a key ingredient found in popular vaccines like those for DtaP (Infanrix), Influenza (Fluarix), Tdap (Boostrix), and Meningococcal (MenB-Trumenba). It poses many of the same risks as it does in food, and possibly even more due to the nature of its injection rather than ingestion.

"Polysorbate 80 is used in pharmacology to assist in the delivery of certain drugs or chemotherapeutic agents across the blood-brain barrier," explains pediatrician Dr. Lawrence Palevsky, M.D.

"What viral, bacterial, yeast, heavy metal or other vaccine containing ingredient needs to pass into the brains of our children? Do they belong in the brain? Is that part of the needed immune response to protect our children from disease? Do vaccine materials pass across the blood-brain barrier with the help of Polysorbate 80? If so, are there complications from being in the brains of our children?" he asks.

So while oral intake of emulsifiers like polysorbate 80 pose a direct threat to gut microbiota, intramuscular and/or intravenous intake of polysorbate 80 via vaccines poses a direct threat to the brain. In both cases, avoidance of this and other similar chemical emulsifiers seems prudent and necessary to mitigate potentially permanent damage to the body.

The importance of maintaining a healthy ecological terrain in the gut for cancer prevention is now more evident than ever. And avoiding emulsifiers is clearly an important part of doing this, as is avoiding vaccines.

Sources for this article include:

DailyMail.co.uk

MedicalXpress.com

HealthImpactNews.com