What Are The Side Effects of Carrageenan for your Health and Body?

You might want to learn what are the side effects of carrageenan before you start to consume food that contains this substance. Actually it is inside similar category as polysaccharides. And it is taken from edible variation of red seaweed by extraction method. Most of the time, the extract is used as one of the ingredient inside the food product. This might be the reason why people ask about the side effect of this substance. Especially, when those people is highly concern about everything that they eat, whether the food has good effect for their health or not.

What Are The Side Effects of Carrageenan?

But before you know about answer to question what are the side effects of carrageenan, first you should be more informed about the substance itself and how it is created. To create this substance, first you will need to have the raw material which made from red seaweed. Of course, only edible variation is taken from the sea for this purpose. Afterwards the seaweed is dried to remove any water content from inside. Then it will be grind, sift as well as washed to get rid any impurities which broad by the red seaweed. Now this red seaweed is ready to be used as raw material to create the carrageenan.

When used as raw material, it will be soaked using alkali liquid and the one usually used is potassium hydroxide. Next is to increase the temperature of this raw material which will create the carrageenan from within the raw material together with some cellulose. Then the filtration process as well as centrifugation process is done in order to remove the cellulose from the substance with mechanical processes. Next the substance will be evaporated so only the carrageenan that reminds and the water content can be eliminated. What is left is only to ground the leftover to make it into carrageenan powder which is the end product that you want. This end product is the one used by food industry as one of the ingredient in their product.

After you know the method used to create this substance, now it is time to answer your question about what are the side effects of carrageenan. But you should know that there are good effect and bad effect that you can get from this substance.

Actually you should not be afraid to consume product that contains carrageenan as one of the ingredient since the molecular weight of this substance make it not possible to be metabolized by your body so your body would not even absorb it. When you consume any product that contains this substance, the carrageenan itself will only flow back out from your digestion system in the feces as it is a type of fiber. Furthermore it would never affect your body absorption on other substance inside the food thus there is no bad effect that you will get.

You would not even question what are the side effects of carrageenan if you consume this substance within 5% of your diet. But even when you already exceed that number, the bad effect that you will get is only soft stool as well as diarrhea since it is the common effect that you will get when you consume too much of non-digestible fibers.

Moving on the good effect that you can get is because the carrageenan is created from seaweed, it also contains antioxidant. This antioxidant is important since it can help your body in fighting the free radical that enters your body. The free radical itself is very abundant since it is not only comes from the food that you eat but also from the air that you breath. Thus it is important to protect your body from its bad effect. Then what are the side effects of carrageenan as fiber? The carrageenan is non digestible fiber thus it will be able to help your digestion system in regulating the bowel movement.

Those are pretty much all the answer that you can find on question what are the side effects of carrageenan. As you already know that it does not have bad side effect now you do not need to be afraid when finding it inside any carrageenan product and consume it easily.