Sensitivity To Stabilizer/Emulsifier Ingredients

This article is not for the squeamish. I’m writing it to shed light on an issue that isn’t well known and is awkward to discuss.

I noticed that I periodically had “elimination issues”. Specifically, every so often, my stomach would act up. I would have the constant sensation of needing to have a bowel movement, but I would have incomplete bowel movements and very little would come out. It would also come out unexpectedly, in strange ribbons, little by little. It felt as though my digestive system was a tube of toothpaste with the cap off and a slight amount of pressure on it, causing messy results.

I began to realize that it was something I was eating, and it took a lot of label reading and observing to realize that the culprit was “gums”, the stabilizers and emulsifiers added to commercially produced food. For example, Baskin Robbins ice cream discloses four different thickeners in the below ingredients list. The only way I could consume that would be to offset it with a considerable amount of fibre and water. Instead, I choose ice cream that doesn’t have thickeners in it: There are several Haagen Dazs flavours without them, and Organic Meadows does not contain them. For some reason, the thickeners in Shaw’s ice cream are also tolerable to me.

My theory is that the gums slow down the movement of the cilia in our intestines. The cilia help move the waste along the intestines, and the waste cannot be excreted efficiently, until the gums clear out. The effects seem to last 24 hours.

What has surprised me are the number of foods that contain gums. Unfortunately, my sensitivity has increased with time, and the list has gotten longer. The ingredients to avoid are:

Here are some foods that contain them:

Philadelphia cream cheese (buy Tre Stelle natural cream cheese product instead)

Some Greek yogurt brands contain pectin

Sour cream (buy Gay Lea Gold Premium sour cream)

Lemon juice contains pectin

Most ice cream contains gums

Store bought pudding like rice pudding or tapioca

Some pancake mixes

TicTacs

Chewing gum

Marshmallows

Soft tortilla shells

Nut milk, oat milk, chocolate milk

Flavoured protein powder (buy unflavoured)

Salad dressing almost always contains xantham gum

Some types of orange juice, iced tea, Gatorade

Some medications and supplements (look at the inactive ingredients)

Packaged gravy

Cream (the cream used at Tim Horton’s contains Milk, Sugar, Cream, Sodium Citrate, Disodium Phosphate, Carrageenan, and Locust Bean Gum. I found this out after getting an upset stomach from a small coffee with one cream.

The simple solution is to cook your own food with natural ingredients. If you’re buying prepared food, you must read the ingredients carefully every time. Notice what foods you ate the next time your irritable bowel symptoms act up, and narrow down to the source of the problem, so you can replace that food with a safe option the next time. If you’re sensitive to gums, you will be surprised by how good you feel once you “eliminate’ them from your diet.