23/05/2025
CITRIC ACID and ASCORBIC ACID WARNING.
Mass-produced citric acid and ascorbic acid or vitamin C, have had hidden GMO ingredients since the early 1900s, as the black mold Aspergillus niger has been used to ferment starches to derive citric acid.
Citric acid is often praised for its ability to bring out the pucker-inducing and tangy tastes in popular foods.
It is increasingly celebrated for helping to bring a balance of “all five flavors” to countless restaurant dishes and prepackaged processed foods – indispensable to even celebrity and TV contestant chefs.
What they don’t tell you is that citric acid is known to cause physical symptoms in people that are rather unpleasant. Those who experience allergic reactions and who have food intolerances to citric acid have symptoms such as stomach pain, diarrhea, vomiting, cramping, and hives.
Food manufacturers leave out that citric acid is derived from genetically modified black mold grown on GMO corn syrup. The USDA and the FDA still allow it to be used despite it being a known hidden GMO. Companies continuously capitalize on an ignorance-based market.
Citric acid and ascorbic acid are both known accomplices to the creation of benzene, a human carcinogen, inside food and drink products alongside sodium benzoate.
Studies proved that the creation of benzene could happen right inside the drink containers, while in transport, on store shelves, or waiting for consumption in consumers’ homes.
However, the FDA still allows them to continue using this dangerous mixture of ingredients, despite clear data on the matter.
Citric acid is found in virtually all manufactured foods because it’s a flavor enhancer and preservative. It is even found in organic foods, which is why it is so important to read the ingredients in the products you buy and be knowledgeable about how the ingredients are created.
Many people are under the impression that the citric acid in today’s food comes from fruit. Citric acid does, in fact, occur naturally in citrus fruits like lemons, oranges, grapefruits in significant quantities, it is even present in most living things. But the industry would find it simply too costly to derive their preservative ingredient that way.
Are you still consuming these dangerous ingredients? And if you are is knowing how it’s made and what effects it could have on you enough to bring about a change and deter you from indulging
Citric acid production has become a refined and highly prized industrial process. Numerous scientific studies discuss revisions and improvements to efficiency. But there are definitely some constants to this often competitive and secretive process:
• Engineering the mold: Aspergillus niger is a naturally occurring black mold that commonly appears on fruits and vegetables, as pictured on the onion above (source: S.K. Mohan, Creative Commons license). However, significant modification of A. niger has taken place over the past several decades to increase production of citric acid and decrease the production of unwanted byproducts. This has resulted in countless generations of genetically modified mutant variants, now specialized for industrial-scale economics. Two of the main types of modification are:
• Gamma radiation has been used to modify strains of A. niger mutants, resulting in multiplied or increased production through genetic improvement.
• Further genetic modification in the lab has taken place through the engineering of the glycolytic pathway, resulting in a metabolic-streamlining that facilitates greater citric acid production from sugar while shutting off side avenues of glycolysis.
Further genetic modification and “improvement” of A. niger are an object of ongoing study and industrial practice.
• Producing the Sugar Medium: Nearly all industrial citric acid begins with a highly processed glucose corn syrup that is derived from corn wet milling (other parts of the corn residues go to other processes). Other industrial sources include beet sugar and cane molasses, and occasionally also fruit waste.
But it’s hard to beat the economics of subsidized corn – the vast majority of which is the unlabeled, genetically modified, high starch (yellow dent #2) variety – that can synergistically contribute to ingredients like citric acid as well as ingredients like high fructose corn syrup, dextrose (corn sugar), maltodextrin, corn oil, cornmeal, ascorbic acid (labeled as Vitamin C), MSG and other free glutamates (such as ‘hydrolyzed vegetable protein’), malic acid, baking powder, vanilla, xanthan gum and perhaps hundreds of others. Oftentimes, hydrochloric acid is employed in the corn-conversion process.
After wet milling corn to separate the starch, the production of many of these ingredients then involves a bath in strong bases, where lyes are used to break down the plant material further. Sometimes this means autolysis, when yeasts or bacteria ferment the material, and other times hydrolysis is used – which vary depending upon the type of additive and the most efficient and cost-effective established processes.
As with other common food ingredients, there is an ongoing issue with mercury cell technology – an outdated model still used in several major chlor-alkali plants – that have a known issue with mercury contamination during the application of caustic soda (to neutralize work with acids). Among hundreds of food ingredients that are potentially contaminated by mercury, studies show the three most common are high fructose corn syrup, sodium benzoate, and, yep, citric acid.
A 2009 study published in Environmental Health analyzed the level of mercury contamination from the chlor-alkali process, resulting in numerous grabbing headlines warning about the mercury content in high fructose corn syrup.
https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1476-069X-8-2
Although citric acid didn’t make the news, it too is processed in the same way:
“Mercury cell chlor-alkali products are used to produce thousands of other products , including food ingredients such as citric acid, sodium benzoate, and high fructose corn syrup. High fructose corn syrup is used in food products to enhance shelf life. A pilot study was conducted to determine if high fructose corn syrup contains mercury, a toxic metal historically used as an anti-microbial. High fructose corn syrup samples were collected from three different manufacturers and analyzed for total mercury. The samples were found to contain levels of mercury ranging from below a detection limit of 0.005 to 0.570 micrograms mercury per gram of high fructose corn syrup.”
HerbAL MEDia recommends to not consume any food / product which was touched, laced or even kept close to Citric and Ascorbic Acids !
