Hey Francis, the industrial food guys have even invaded the hot sauce business. Not sure if this applies to Avery Island (Tabasco's source), but it sure does to other brands. (I don't have a bottle so can't check the label) Now they've recently started adding Xanthan Gum to many of them, presumably to keep it from settling or just to make it look thicker. Gawd, it drives me nuts. Actually, it's driven me to make my own. Here's a little write-up on Xanthan Gum:
Xanthan gum is considered a polysaccharide in scientific circles, because it is a long chain of three different forms of sugar. What's important to know is that all three of these natural sugars are present in corn sugar, a derivative of the more familiar corn syrup. The Xanthomonas campestris bacteria literally eat a supply of this corn sugar under controlled conditions, and the digestion process converts the individual sugars into a single substance with properties similar to cornstarch. Xanthan gum is used in dairy products and salad dressings as a thickening agent and stabilizer. Xanthan gum prevents ice crystals from forming in ice creams, and also provides a 'fat feel' in low or no-fat dairy products.
Another use for xanthan gum is the stabilization and binding of cosmetic products. One advantage of xanthan gum is that a little goes an incredibly long way. Cosmetic manufacturers add a very small amount of xanthan gum to their cream-based products in order to keep the individual ingredients from separating. Despite the use of bacteria during processing, xanthan gum itself is not generally harmful to human skin or digestive systems, though some individuals may find they are allergic to it. Xanthan gum is often used whenever a gel-like quality is sought.
One lesser-known use of xanthan gum is in the oil industry. Oil companies often use water as a lubricant for oil well pumps, but regular water is not very thick. A natural thickener such as guar gum or xanthan gum can be added to the water in order to increase its viscosity, or thickness. You could think of this as turning tap water into 10W-40 motor oil. The thickened water keeps the drill parts lubricated and displaces more of the natural oil found in the deposit area.
Note that it is not added to anything to improve the
nutritional value.
Here's a little tidbit that I pulled off of wisegeek.com in a forum on food additives, verbatim (and it's not an unusual comment on this subject):
"Guar, xanthan, cellulose and HFCS* should all be avoided. I get hives when I eat them in large quantity and diarrhea in smaller quantities. During stressful times in my life, my reaction to these ingredients would be increased. It took a long time to come to these realizations and now I am happy to say, no more chronic diarrhea after 20 years. It is a lot of work to remove these ingredients from your diet, since they are in most prepared foods." - anon51496
*HFCS = High Fructose Corn Syrup (and it ain't no health food!)
Countryboy, when we lived in Britain, I worked for three years for Food Research Institute in Norwich. We did research into food processing, I was not involved in nutrition.
Our objective was to learn how food behaves during the processing, in the mouth etc. with the view of identifying certain general principles, which would help food industry make a better product.
In that we studied food polysaccharides, particularly Xanthan gum, Carrageenan and Gellan gum.
As the website says, Xanthan is merely the waste product of a microorganism (so is gellen gum, by product of the microoganism psudomonas elodea, give or take a couple of letters). But it does have some interesting properties. Depending upon the condition, its viscosity can change by four orders of magnitude (by a factor of about 10,000). At low viscosity it becomes easy to process, but at high viscosity, it gives the feeling and texture of milk shake or ice cream in the mouth. It is a very useful additive to foods, which gives the same mouth feel as a milk shake at a fraction of the cost. It is used in sauces, ice cream, milk shakes, anywhere where thickness, high viscosity is desirable.
We also looked at Casein as a substitute for milk and cream in ice cream. It works very well (and at fraction of a cost of milk or cream), I think they do use casein as milk substitute in ice cream in some places.
Incidentally, not only it works very well, but Xanthan gum is also very low in calories. Having worked in food research for three years, you would be surprised at things food industry does, to give customer what he wants, a tasty, filling product full of texture at low cost.