Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumOf 14,402 Chemicals Known To Be In Food Packaging, 3,601 Have Been Detected In Human Blood, Placentas, Urine, Hair, Milk
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Food processing equipment, storage containers, packaging, and serving bowls all contain chemicals that can bleed into your food in tiny amounts. When you eat your soup, every noodle, vegetable, and protein picked up these food contact chemicals along the way. Researchers knew people ingested chemicals like bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates with their food, but the full scope of this exposure was unclear.
To create such a catalogue, a team of public health specialists based in Switzerland compiled the results of three databases of molecules found in the human body, five biomonitoring programs, and hundreds of studies. They found that among the 14,402 known food contact chemicals, 3,601 more than 25 percent are present in human blood, urine, hair, umbilical cords, placentas, and breast milk. Eighty of those chemicals cause cancer, decrease fertility, cause birth defects, or are toxic to humans. An additional 59 do not yet have safety information, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology.
The team only expected to find signs of the few hundred food contact chemicals screened in biomonitoring programs like the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. But when they expanded their search to other databases and scientific studies, they found thousands.
It surprised us that we found so many more chemicals in these big databases, said lead author Birgit Geueke, senior scientist at the Food Packaging Forum Foundation in Zurich, Switzerland. Many plastics use synthetic antioxidants, but their presence in human exposure studies is rare because these compounds degrade easily. I found that really surprising because its such a widely used chemical group, said Geueke. Oligomers, side products of plastic production, also are difficult to trace in humans because they vary in length. There should be some analytical methods developed that easily allow the quantification [of oligomers], or at least their detection and migration, Geueke added.
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https://news.mongabay.com/2024/11/thousands-of-chemicals-from-food-packaging-found-in-humans-a-major-study-reveals/
Sea Turtle
(73 posts)I am all for RFK fling after the cancer in our food. That is one thing I agree with him about.
bronxiteforever
(9,492 posts)Most food packaging is petroleum based. Trump wants an oil based economy.