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Anyone else have problems with Carrageenan?

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Posted 1/1/2011 9:47 AM (GMT 0)
By sheer luck I discovered recently that Carrageenan causes me major problems. A quick googling gave me very little information except the SCD diet seems to be carrageenan free.

I'd been eating ice cream to keep up my weight, and all of a sudden the brand I bought started making me uncomfortable. I re-looked at the ingredients and observed that the small company I favored had recently added it to the product.

Upon looking through other ice creams, then looking hard at other products I've realied it's pretty much in everything processed. I don't eat much processed foods, but I'm now finding I have to be super careful.

Anyone else? There are some pretty good studies showing it can cause UC, along with a lot of propoganda from the carrageenan industrying saying it doesn't. Apparently it sits at the FDA filed under "generally recognized as safe". It ain't safe for me and I find it very disturbing it's in practically everything.

I find this both interesting and depressing!! But I'm happy I found a culprit in my diet.

There is very little information about it and how people react to it on the web. Is it just me?
happy new year!
Posted 1/1/2011 11:00 AM (GMT 0)
I've never done the research to see if I have an issue with it, however someone I work with recently had his son diagnosed with Crohn's. They did discover that his son has a real problem with carrageenan. Once they removed it from his diet, the flare quickly subsided. I guess I should start looking closer at what I'm eating again.
Posted 1/1/2011 11:24 AM (GMT 0)
It was luck for me. My diet is pretty regimented, and I was feeling good and then all of a sudden WHUMP. I'd noticed a few months ago that I could not get over Candida, without taking the Carrageenan out of my diet. Within a week or so it was finally gone.

Totally forgot about the issue (although I continued only eating the things which were carrageenan free), never looked up Carrageenan after I noticed the relationship between it and candida, just cut it out.

Then the sudden onset of symptoms and I thought to look at my ice cream, which was no longer carrageenan-free. Whoa.
Posted 1/1/2011 2:31 PM (GMT 0)
I have a problem with it. I figured it out because I used to eat a lot of ice cream and Coffee Mate. After drinking a lot of coffee and thinking it was the coffee mate but not specifically carrageenan, I also found it in my ice cream and then a light bulb went off.

I can only find one brand of ice cream where I am that doesn't have it in it. I think it is creepy stuff!
Posted 1/1/2011 10:16 PM (GMT 0)
This refers to ulcerative colitis but IBD is IBD and perhaps close enough for government work:

Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine by Michael Murray and Joseph Pizzorno, page 593:
"Researchers investigating ulcerative colitis often use carrageenan (a compound extracted from red seaweeds) to experimentally induce the disease in animals. In the initial experiments reported by Marcus and Watt in 1969, one-percent and five-percent carrageenan solutions were provided as the exclusive source of oral fluids for guinea pigs. Over a period of several days, the animals lost weight, developed anemia, had bloody diarrhea, and developed ulcerative colitis. These results have since been confirmed by numerous investigators and in studies involving diverse animal species, including primates."

The only major brand of ice cream that I know of which does not contain carrageenan is Haagen dasz
Posted 1/2/2011 2:07 AM (GMT 0)
Breyer's Ice Cream does not have it either, at least the full fat natural versions. I think some of the lower fat or specialty flavors might have it.

That info above is scary and frightening that it is in so much food these days. It makes sense though because I can trace 2 flares back to times when I was on major coffee consumption and I always used a couple servings of Coffee Mate in every cup! I wonder what percentage solution 3 - 4 cups of coffee with 2 servings each of Coffee Mate in them equals!
Posted 1/2/2011 3:50 AM (GMT 0)
I wonder how much of the success of SCD is due to elimination of carageenan. Certainly some of it.

It's a hard one to diagnose, i found this by chance.

i did a little more reading it also increases the amount of interlukin-8, which is something that aggravates pyoderma gangrenosum, which I deal with - so I'm interested to see if totally eliminating it from my diet helos my healing --It's also stated to cause dyshidrotic eczema, according to the literature.

every single person on this board except the SCD'ers are consuming it I'd guess. Pretty scarey. I spent time at the grocery store trying to work around my dietary restrictions plus eliminating Carrageenan - it was hard.

Alot of posts on the internet referred to having problems with creamers being the way they figured it out!
Posted 1/2/2011 4:15 AM (GMT 0)
Besides eliminating carrageenan I believe much of the SCD diet success is because it is gluten free.
Posted 1/2/2011 4:00 PM (GMT 0)
I eat a little ice cream cup everynight. I looked at it and way down the ingredient list it has a little carrageenan in it. Doesn't cause problems for me at least. I am sure if I ate more it would, but I have been eating this little ice cream cup for years without problems. JMHO
Posted 1/3/2011 4:31 AM (GMT 0)
I'm also gluten free -- I really think just after a few days that really being militant with the anti-carrageenan diet is helping. I'm sure others like Nanners can eat it no problem, but for me it seems to be the difference between having internal swelling and not, which with my strictures is the difference between things getting stuck -- and not! I'm happy. I'll update this in a month.

still hoping to have some others weigh in.
Posted 4/22/2012 4:17 PM (GMT 0)

Yes!  Carrageenan affects me like a poison.  It makes me horribly sick with horrible lower abdominal pain, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting and near shock.  After I finally eliminated it totally from my diet along with all dairy, I'm fine.  But, the carrageenan affects me much worse than the dairy.  On a scale of 1 to 10 for really bad pain, the dairy is a 4 and the carrageenan is a 10. 

The really BAD thing about food labels is that carrageenan isn't always on the label when it IS included the food.  If it's in pie filling, for instance, from manufacturer A - - and manufacturer B buys it from A and uses that filling in his pie, he isn't required to list it on his final ingredient label.  The FDA should require that the A list is carried over to the B list.   Some prople out there who can't handle the carrageenan suffer needlessly when they unknowingly ingest it!  Not to mention the confusion that goes along with thinking that you can trust the labels when you really can't!

Here's an article about it - -

http://www.notmilk.com/carageenan.html

Also - google Dr Joanne Tobacman and read about her research on the subject.

Posted 10/10/2014 9:25 PM (GMT 0)
I was drinking Starbucks green tea soy lattes every morning for a year when I became sick with Crohns. After 3 years I recently found out that the soy milk Starbucks uses has carageenen. I immediately removed all products with this ingredient from my home and my families diet and have not had a flare sense.
Posted 10/13/2014 1:49 PM (GMT 0)
I tried to cut out products with carageenen after reading about all the issues related with it (not just with IBD). If you drink soy/almond milk, Silk is one of the only brands that doesn't contain it.
Posted 10/13/2014 9:55 PM (GMT 0)
I had problems with this a long time ago, back in the early 90's, when dietary information in the UK was an arcane subject and the internet hardly known...
What I discovered, purely by chance, is that carageenan comes in two forms. Depending on what the sea temperatures are (I kid you not !yeah), the seaweed from which it comes, makes either a lighter weight molecule or a heavier, bigger molecule. One has an effect on me, one does not, and from what I could gather, not too surprisingly the manufacturers themselves did not know what they were using. They quite possibly do believe that it is safe, if their tests were done on one type only.
I couldn't work out why I had done an allergy exclusion diet, was checking all the ingredients, and yet I couldn't pin down the culprit. A culprit that only sometimes causes trouble is the answer. idea
Supposedly, the smaller molecule will go through the gut wall - as part of the "leaky gut" thing, I don't know if it is cause or result - and creates havoc in the bloodstream.
I don't know what it was doing, I didn't have pain, but it certainly was noticeable ! Somehow, I don't miss ice cream at all...
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