All About Carrageenan

Overview

This is a kind of food ingredient that has multiple uses like;

• Helps in the suspension of chocolate inside chocolate milk hence the prevention of separation.
• It keeps hold of moisture in most cooked meats.
• Can act as an alternative to gelatin in the preparation of desserts.
• It aids meals to stay desirable and delicious for a longer period thus preventing food wastage.

Carrageenan is obtained from the natural growing seaweed. Seaweed is usually praised for their general health benefits but rarely do people realize that it also contains Carrageenan. It is obtained from red seaweeds where it undergoes a low heat boiling inside a non-acidic broth. It is then totally filtered and milled into a super fine powder for packaging.

Safety

From the information available online, television shows and research, it is difficult to determine if it is safe or not. It is, however, significant to point out that none of these sources are reliable. From proven scientific research, it has been found that food-grade carrageenan has zero negative effects on human health.

It was realized that the confusion regarding this ingredient was due to poligeenan previously being known as carrageenan. The one used as an additive is undegraded carrageenan which is just extracted from the red seaweed and not passed through any processing. Poligeenan is the degraded carrageenan and is not safe to consume.

Poligeenan cannot get mixed up with carrageenan due to the difference in making the two. Poligeenan is initially washed in more than one hundred and ninety-four degrees fahrenheit for about six hours and in a strongly acidic bath. Carrageenan requires natural extraction thus the facility to make the two is completely different. Human being acidity is substantial to create poligeenan but the internal temperature cannot get anywhere near one hundred and ninety-four degrees fahrenheit.