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Sodium citrate: Sodium citrate is a melting salt—a white powder that facilitates the melting of old cheeses. It makes possible marvelous melters like Velveeta and American cheese.
It's also used to keep those little half-n-half portions at restaurants homogenized. And they put it in plasma and other blood products to inhibit clotting factors. It's also infused into the saline that Oregon decided all female plasma donors were required to receive after a donation--again, as a clotting inhibitor, because back when I was donating they centrifuged the blood and returned the red blood cells to the body after separating out the plasma. They eventually threatened to ban me from donating because the saline goes in at room temperature (about 70F), and since I'm tiny that means it did not warm up on its way to my heart. They thought I was convulsing or seizing when I kept explaining that if you dump a pint of 70-degree liquid into a vein less than 18 inches from the heart, the shivering is BAD until that junk warms up!
I never used restaurant half-n-half again after finding sodium citrate listed in the ingredients...
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