One of the UK’s top diet experts has performed a shocking demonstration to highlight the effects of a potentially harmful ingredient lurking in many of our favourite foods.
In a new video, Professor Tim Spector, founder of the ZOE diet app, showed how additives called emulsifiers form a gel-like clump in our guts.
The clip shows the nutrition expert demonstrating what happens to emulsifiers — used to add bulk to food — in our bowel, by mixing the powder in a bowl with liquid.
The clump it forms, he says, plays havoc with the millions of healthy bacteria that live there and are vital for protecting us from diseases like cancer and heart disease.
Emulsifiers are used in thousands of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) to help bind ingredients that don’t usually mix, like oil and water.
Professor Tim Spector has demonstrated the stomach-churning effect of emulsifiers in the gut
They are found in a range of popular products, including bread, cakes, breakfast cereals and childrens yoghurts.
Some experts have linked increasing consumption of additives like emulsifiers with the rise in early onset bowel cancer.
Nutrition Lead at Imperial College London Dr Federica Amati explained last month the damage that emulsifiers ‘messes up’ the separation between the fatty layer and water layer in the gut.
This, it has been theorised, breaks down the gut lining, leading to bacterial infections.
Last month, microbiome expert Dr Alasdair Scott told The Mail on Sunday: ‘We think that this process could be linked to bowel cancer.
‘Studies done on animals that confirm this, but not yet on people — in humans it can be much more difficult to prove why exactly a tumour has formed.’
In the TikTok video, which has almost 14,000 views, Professor Spector begins his demonstration by mixing a commonly used emulsifier — Carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) — with water.
‘We have never really understood why these chemicals have these effects but I am going to demonsatrate,’ he says.
Misixing the two ingredients shows that the powder and the water bind to create a ‘gluey’ sticky dough.
‘This is what is happening inside our guts. What we think this is doing is that our microbes can’t communicate and they produce abnormal chemicals in response.’
He added: ‘They disrupt the gut lining because we have a careful layer of fat and water in our gut but these emulsifiers are mixing the two.
‘So let’s try and reduce them in our diets.
Simple processed foods include tinned, cooked vegetables and fish, such as tuna and daily products like cheese.
These contain little more than the main ingredient and water, oil or one of two extra ingredients — you could potentially make them yourself.
UPFs, however, are highly processed, involving factory techniques, and contain additives — of which emulsifiers are just one.
They now make up 57 per cent of the average UK diet.
Manufacturers are not required to record the amount of emulsifiers in each individual food item. That means we never truly know how much we are consuming.
Experts have warned bowel cancer is hitting more and more young people, with diets full of UPFs thought to be a possible cause.
Incidences of the disease, which kills 17,000 per year in the UK, have risen by 22 per cent in the under 50s over the course of the last 30 years.
Ultra-processed foods were also linked to an increased risk of heart disease, according to a study published in the Lancet journal last year.
A similarly raised risk has also been found for type 2 diabetes.
