14,000 Chemicals in Food Packaging, 3,601 Enter Our Bodies

A new study this week gives us pause for concern about the chemicals entering our body from food packaging. Some of them are endocrine disrupting chemicals that can alter the way our body stores fat.

Researchers inventoried a total of 14,000 chemicals in contact with food from packaging and found evidence for 3,601 of them being measurably present in human bodies. They identified 100 of these chemicals that have hazard properties of high concern for human health. Birgit Geueke and colleagues published their findings in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology.

So could it be that exposure to these chemicals is playing a role in the correlation between ultra-processed foods and obesity risk that has captured the public imagination?

A Risk Out of View

Thomas Zoeller is an emeritus professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He was not involved in this study, but he told the Washington Post it shows this subject needs more attention:

“We don’t think about how the (mostly) plastic packaging adds chemicals to our food, but it’s an important source of human exposures. This is an early indication that harmful chemicals – largely unregulated — are making it into the human population.

The authors conclude their paper with a call to action:

“This evidence base supports policy and decision-making and highlights the urgent need to ban the most hazardous chemicals shown to migrate from food packaging and other types of food contact articles into foods, to protect human health.”

FDA Re-Assessing

The FDA is convening a public hearing next week as a step toward developing a better monitoring for these chemicals. Zoeller and former NIEHS director Linda Birnbaum write that this re-assessment is past due:

“While it largely flies under the public radar, the FDA’s neglect to update its testing to reflect modern science and modern food chemical hazards is a decades-long crisis that impacts all of our health,”

Indeed, the hazard of endocrine disrupting chemicals seeping into the food supply deserves our full attention.

Click here for the Geueke study, here, here, and here for more about it. For information on the FDA hearing next week and how to submit your comments, click here.

Tupperware Display, photograph by RageZ, licensed under CC BY 2.0

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September 21, 2024