From condiments, to dairy products, gluten-free replacement foods, beverages, medications, and much more; added gums have covertly infiltrated the majority of processed food and medications on the market. The scientific consensus around added GRAS polysaccharide/oligosaccharide gums (generally recognized as safe by the US Food & Drug Administration) is that they pose little to no negative health effects, and are health promoting due to them being soluble fibers. However, recent scientific studies have challenged this belief.

Food manufacturers have extra incentive to add gums to their products in order to increase the soluble fiber content, improve organoleptic properties, lengthen shelf life, and boost consumer satisfaction. These supposed benefits have led to gums being added to virtually every processed food on the market and they now have an annual market value of multiple billions of dollars. There is little incentive to fund research investigating their potential negative health effects, and those few studies that get undertaken will likely be funded by the food industry with a bias towards health benefits. Also, keep in mind that humans evolved eating a diet roughly 1:1 parts insoluble vs soluble fiber. I guesstimate that humans on the Standard American Diet have a ratio of 1:20, that can’t be good! Eat your veggies and fruits people!

Finally, let me add that these gums have little regulation to how much the food manufacturer can add to food products and this is extra concerning since adding multiple types of gums can interact in unforeseen ways; increasing their viscosity and essentially creating a new chemical entity that has not been studied for safety. I hope to finish my review article within the next couple months in order to back up this list further with detailed scientific references showing exactly why I believe some of these gums are disease promoting and should be re-assessed for GRAS status. For now, I’ll just focus on explaining their structures, and how the body’s gastrointestinal system, pancreatic enzymes, and microbiome etc. may interact with them. This tier list is to help myself and others decipher and gain a greater understanding of the long list of esoteric gums that have been approved for processed foods. Without doing the hours of research into their chemical structure, especially the type of glycosidic bond linking the sugar, the type of sugar, and the extent of branching; which I have done; one can easily get confused and lump all gums into the same category. This is far from reality as I show below.

The power is in the hands of the consumer to push back against the deluge of gums added to our foods. Just a couple decades ago, most of these gums had never been used in human foods. The studies showing their safety in humans are all too short-term to see any long term health effects. And maybe most importantly and concerning is that the FDA allows testing of these gums on mice to see their safety status. What they somehow did not think about is that mice have different endogenous enzymes that their pancreas produces vs humans. They have the ability to break some of these gums apart due to this and the negative health effects of full form gums reaching the colon will not be seen. In my opinion mouse models are a poor choice for studying the safety of added polysaccharide gums. Anyways, thanks so much for reading and supporting the blog!

here is the list, enjoy!

1 worst – guar gum