Day 039 - 20 Oct 94 - Page 42
1 and a partly decomposed version of that called degraded
2 Carrageenan.
3
4 Most of the tests which have been conducted in this field
5 have been conducted using degraded Carrageenan rather than
6 of the native form. Some serious adverse effects have been
7 shown in animals from degraded Carrageenan, but to a far
8 lesser extent from Carrageenan itself. Therefore, the
9 debate focuses, understandably, on the question of to what
10 extent, if at all, does Carrageenan degrade in the human
11 digestive tract?
12
13 Various claims have been made in this area suggesting that
14 Carrageenan gets degraded to a relatively slight degree.
15 However, in the most recent report from the Scientific
16 Committee for Food of the European Community, there is a
17 statement, a rather enigmatic statement, about Carrageenan
18 which is not graced by any references, but it suggests that
19 there might be problems. My response was to contact the
20 scientific sector.
21
22 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Can you refer me to where that is in your
23 statement? I have your point about ---
24 A. Final paragraph.
25
26 Q. -- what JECFA said and your comment on that. Where are you
27 now?
28 A. The final paragraph on page 32 starting: "In work
29 recently mentioned". Right? I contacted the Scientific
30 Secretariat and asked for all the references that the SCF
31 were reviewing. But, so far I have only been told of two
32 and that is the work by Ekstrom and Ekstrom and his
33 colleague, both cited there at footnotes 110 and 111.
34
35 What these gentlemen have done was to attempt to model as
36 accurately as they could the conditions within the human
37 stomach, acknowledging the variations that there are within
38 different people in terms of the degree of acidity and
39 other relevant parameters.
40
41 They have found, as I say in my statement, that under their
42 simulated conditions of the human stomach, Carrageenans did
43 degrade in ways which resulted in the formation of
44 potentially hazardous materials. They point out in their
45 paper, particularly the 1983 paper, published
46 in Carbohydrate Research on page 94, that you can start
47 from well-defined materials of high molecular weight of
48 undegraded Carrageenan uncontaminated with degraded
49 material. These may be broken down in the digestive tract
50 to form undesirable fragments of low molecular weight of
51 the kind that produce ulceration in the digestive tract of
52 some laboratory animals.
53
54 MR. MORRIS: Do you want to refer us to document 110?
55 A. I would like to but it is not here. This is blank
56 here.
57
58 MR. RAMPTON: I have not got 110.
59
60 MS. STEEL: I think that they are in under 111 and 112 actually
