You already eat seaweed but probably don’t know it. Seaweeds are multicellular macroalgae used as functional ingredients, a food additive. Hydrocolloids derived from seaweeds provide texture and structure, prevent the melting of frozen foods, providing edible coatings or other desirable properties to foods as different as ice cream, apples, and bread. No longer considered just an additive, seaweed is poised to enter the US market as a whole food due to its nutritive attributes, potential economic benefits, and unique cultivation requirements.
food additives
A new study links propionate, a food preservative, to alterations in our metabolism, increasing the production of glucose, at least in one mammal: mice. The evidence of an effect on humans is based on 14 lean humans and two meals.
C-diff is a bacterium that causes a life-threatening infection. Though the bacterium can infect healthy individuals, it is of particular concern to those who are hospitalized or are taking antibiotics.
Introduction
Food safety is a matter of great interest and serious concern to consumers in the 1990s. But today's media, armed with red-flag words such as "toxin" and "carcinogen," often report alleged health hazards in the American diet as fact. This has led many consumers to believe, erroneously, that our modern food supply is inherently dangerous because it contains such synthetic chemicals as food additives and pesticide residues.
The overriding goal of federal policies governing the use of chemicals in agriculture and food processing is-and should be-consumer safety. One would hope that food safety regulation would be driven by the best scientific and medical knowledge. But instead, much of the American food supply is held hostage to the misguided absolutism of what is known as the Delaney clause, a nearly 40-year-old, 55-word quirk in the law. It reads, in its entirety: