Category: Food Additives

A few hours ago I accidentally stumbled across this thickener again and am just getting over the very unpleasant and painful side effects. Funnily enough when I checked my last blog entry on this substance it was almost a year ago (give a few days) that I first discovered I had an allergy to carrageenan – the only allergy that I have to anything. Hubby bought some ‘strawberry smash’ yoghurt pottles last week when our little niece was staying with us.

It’s a very nice tasting product with jelly on top of quite thick yoghurt. It came in a pack of six and as niece only was allowed one of them we had leftovers – one of which I sampled today.  After a few hours the allergic effects made themselves felt and sure enough when I checked the container there it was amongst the three thickeners that are in it – 1442, 407 and 415. I guess it goes to show the dangers of letting hubby shop without me!

Growing up I remember my mum boiling condensed milk for 2 hours to turn the milk into gorgeous caramel for my favourite pudding. I had never made the pudding myself because I don’t have the patience to watch something for 2 hours. So I was really excited when Nestle brought out Highlander Caramel – no more boiling required! My mum made it the first time, the second time I made it and both turned out great. However after the second time I realised there was obviously something in the caramel that didn’t agree with me after spending hours in the bathroom on both occasions – I’ll leave the details out. Checking the product the ingredients listed milk, sugar and carrageenan. I didn’t have a clue what that was so I went searching. It’s a thickening agent produced from red seaweed. There seem to be a number of people on the internet with allergies to it. Up to now I haven’t been an allergy person so I’ll do a bit more searching for the products that carrageenan is in – E407. I couldn’t find it in any of the products I have in the cupboard but that may be because we don’t have to list ingredients as specifically as some other countries. In the USA it seems to be in an awful lot of products. There is lots of discussion on the internet regarding long term negative health effects but that’s OK as I will be trying to avoid it as much as possible as the short term effects are pretty harmful for me. Position papers discussing that carrageenan is not harmful can be found on MARINALG WELCOME and Carrageenan Consumer Info: Global Food Committee reports that there is no concern regarding human consumption of carrageenan