CARRAGEENAN HARMFUL TO INFANTS and Adults

Please help my granddaughter 16 months old get off of Almond/Coconut Milk.  Inspite of my calls to the CAS and appeals to her parents, she has been consuming these toxic products for at least 4 months at a rate of 6 - 7 bottles per day.

 These products both warn that they are not to be used as an infant formula and not to be given to children under the age of 5. She is not getting the essential nutrients required for her growth and development from this milk. In fact it has been scientifically proven that long term consumption of this milk can have serious health complications including but not limited to nutritional rickets and autoimmune thyroid diseases. Furthermore, Carrageenan a key ingredient in this milk has been found to cause serious health problems also.  The Joint FAO/WHO expert committee on food additives states that, "based on the information available, it is inadvisable to use carrageenan or processed eucheuma seaweed in infant formulas”. There is also evidence from studies performed that it may cause ulcerations in the gastro-intestinal tract and gastro-intestinal cancer. Medical officials would not advise this developing infants;

• Carrageenan is derived from red seaweed.

• Carrageenan can be classified as low molecular weight, “degraded” carrageenan, or high molecular weight, or “undegraded” carrageenan.

• Degraded carrageenan is recognized as a carcinogen in lab animals, and is therefore classified as a “possible human carcinogen” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

• Degraded carrageenan also causes inflammation in the colon in rodents, which resembles ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory bowel disease.

• This inflammatory property of degraded carrageenan is not in dispute, especially since the medical research community has used degraded carrageenan for decades to induce acute inflammation in experimental trials conducted with lab animals, to test anti- inflammation drugs.

• Carrageenan processors claim that food-grade carrageenan sold to food processors falls entirely in the undegraded category. However, studies (including industry-funded studies) show that food-grade carrageenan is also linked to colon inflammation and colon cancer in animals.

Please help me get my granddaughter on to whole milk which provides all of the nutritional requirements and fatty acids for brain development and help bring a stop to the use of cancer and tumour promoting ingredients in all of our foods.  Carraggeenan is also used as a "Aircraft De-Icer"!

Thank you,

Gramma.