The Role of Carrageenan and Carboxymethylcellulose in the Development of Intestinal Inflammation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although the exact pathophysiology remains unknown, the development of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is influenced by the interplay between genetics, the immune system, and environmental factors such as diet. The commonly used food additives, carrageenan and carboxymethylcellulose (CMC), are used to develop intestinal inflammation in animal models. These food additives are excluded from current dietary approaches to induce disease remission in Crohn's disease such as exclusive enteral nutrition (EEN) using a polymeric formula. By reviewing the existing scientific literature, this review aims to discuss the role that carrageenan and CMC may play in the development of IBD. Animal studies consistently report that carrageenan and CMC induce histopathological features that are typical of IBD while altering the microbiome, disrupting the intestinal epithelial barrier, inhibiting proteins that provide protection against microorganisms, and stimulating the elaboration of pro-inflammatory cytokines. Similar trials directly assessing the influence of carrageenan and CMC in humans are of course unethical to conduct, but recent studies of human epithelial cells and the human microbiome support the findings from animal studies. Carrageenan and CMC may trigger or magnify an inflammatory response in the human intestine but are unlikely to be identified as the sole environmental factor involved in the development of IBD or in disease recurrence after treatment. However, the widespread use of carrageenan and CMC in foods consumed by the pediatric population in a "Western" diet is on the rise alongside a corresponding increase in IBD incidence, and questions are being raised about the safety of frequent usage of these food additives. Therefore, further research is warranted to elucidate the role of carrageenan and CMC in intestinal inflammation, which may help identify novel nutritional strategies that hinder the development of the disease or prevent disease relapse post-EEN treatment.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".