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Gelatin has a wide application and uses in our daily life. As a major ingredient food, you may find it in desserts, candies, gummies, and aspic. Besides, it has found its versatility in other uses in pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals and cosmetics too.
Gelatin is made by boiling collagen derived from animals. Collagen is the single most abundant protein you can find in human body which connects and supports other tissues. It’s available in powder form or as sheets called leaves. A gel can be made by mixing solid gelatin with hot water, the liquid mixture is known as colloid forms. The gelling trait of gelatin grants it a much wide application beyond the kitchen. It's been used to forming capsules for medications, producing skincare cosmetics, hair treatments, and many more.
Although gelatin is widely accepted around the world but its addition to food creates problems for certain people with religious or ethical reasons because it originates from specific animal or animal tissues, for which some plant materials with similar gelling in water trait are developed as a substitute for gelatin, but the taste is just different. Nevertheless, they are good alternatives for those who don't want to use substances obtained from particular animals. Two of the top gelatin substitutes are agar and carrageenan.
Protein is a long chain of amino acids and peptide is a shorter chain of amino acids, gelatin is a mixture of both and contains some amino acids which our body can't produce and must obtain in our diet which is why gelatin is a popular and useful food additive, but it’s not a nutritious source of protein because it lacks some of the essential amino acids.
A Gelatin-water mix is a kind of hydrophilic colloid. The kind of colloid is a mixture in which the particles of a substance are dispersed through a continuous medium. The particles are small but still bigger than those in a solution. They are invisible to us, can't be filtered, and don't settle to the bottom of container no matter the size of it. The word "hydrophilic" means water attraction, when gelatin is added to hot water, the bonds among amino acid which hold them together are broken. The chains then move freely in the liquid and get tangled eventually. As the water cooling down gradually, new bonds are formed by those tangled chains, some of which possesses a triple helix structure with three amino acid chains joined together and become a twisted spiral that traps water within the spaces in between the helices and tangles, hence, forming a gel.
As gelatin is often made with tissue and bones from bovine origin, some are concerned that there is risk of it transmitting the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) prion to humans. Prion is a kind of protein that has an abnormal form which causes disease to human being, a virus. It causes other proteins to alter into abnormality and usually performs a domino effect. BSE is also known as "mad cow disease" since it affects the brain and nerve system of a cow and resulted high mortality rate of cow. The affected brain is filled with holes just like a sponge. When human being got exposed to the BSE prion, they may develop a disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome, it’s a neurodegenerative disease that is usually fatal, unfortunately, at the moment.
The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has concluded that it's safe to eat gelatin produced from cow tissue if the cows have their heads, spines, and spinal cords removed immediately after slaughter so those tissues don't get to contaminate other parts of the cows, and the cows showed no obvious signs of neurological disease before being slaughtered, and the animal didn't come from a herd that contained an animal proven to have BSE.
A small percentage of people are allergic to gelatin but it’s very uncommon, but according to the American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (ACAAI), it does exist. If Anyone’s found with such allergy, he or she needs to follow certain diet habit carefully in order to avoid intaking of it. Package labels shall be read carefully and, if necessary, contact manufacturers to confirm the detailed ingredients of a product. Food served in restaurants or at special events may also possesses a potential risk for someone with such allergy.
According to the ACAAI, a person with a gelatin allergy needs to ask their doctor about the best way to be vaccinated as vaccines might contain gelatin. Yet it doesn't necessarily mean a person needs to avoid a particular vaccine as an allergy specialist should be able to administer the shots in a safe way.
Gelatin in powder is the most common form that is available to consumers on the market. It can last for quite a long time as long as it's kept away from environmental contamination. However, after forming a gel, it should be eaten immediately or to be preserved in cool dry condition and used soon. The gel is an ideal environment for nurturing bacteria. It's sometimes been placed in petri dishes to grow certain kind of bacteria for science experiments.
Cosmetics containing gelatin should be used reasonably quickly. The lids of cosmetic containers should be kept on the containers to reduce the chance of contamination.
Gelatin is a surprisingly versatile and useful substance and it's interesting to see that a protein found in connective tissue can change into such a wide range of substances.
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