Can Food Additive Silica be Absorbed by Animals?
Understanding the Benefits of Silica Food Additive for Powdered Food: Enhancing Flowability, Preventing Clumping, and Boosting Dispersibility in Food Products - Your Source for High-Quality Food Additives
Silicon dioxide, when used as a food additive, is primarily employed to avert the aggregation and caking of powdered food. It serves as a favorable flow enhancer, and the amount utilized in food is rather minimal. In the human body, when ingested as an additive, silicon dioxide remains unaltered and unabsorbed in weakly alkaline cavities, highly acidic stomach acid settings, or weakly acidic intestinal milieus. Eventually, it is expelled from the body via feces, thus presenting no harm to human health.
Purpose and Function
- Firstly, it precludes powdered food from clumping and augments its flowability, thereby safeguarding the appealing appearance of powdered food. This is chiefly attributable to its remarkable attributes: it possesses a high specific surface area, enabling it to envelop the surface of powdered substances, function as a spacer among powder particles, impede adhesion, and foster the free flow of powdered food.
- Secondly, it exhibits robust adsorption capabilities, which soak up the oil and moisture on the powder surface, diminishing the adhesion between powders and rendering granular food more friable.
- Thirdly, it demonstrates strong dispersibility. In powder systems, due to the minute particle size and elevated surface energy of gas-phase silica, it can adhere to the surface of coating powders and form a surface layer thereon, enhancing the dispersibility and flowability of the powder and warding off agglomeration.
- Fourthly, gaseous silica is an extremely fine nanoscale amorphous silica with a diminutive particle size, a uniform particle size distribution, a large specific surface area, and high surface activity. When gas-phase silica is incorporated into a liquid system, hydrogen bonds are established between the silicon hydroxyl groups on adjacent particles, which subsequently evolve into a three-dimensional network structure. This restricts the motility of liquid particles and boosts the viscosity and stability of the liquid. Additionally, gas-phase silica is non-toxic, odorless, pollution-free, and white in color, which can enhance the clarity of beer and prolong its shelf life.