At the end of a long day, you might sit down with friends or family to eat a bowl of hot noodle soup. A savory scent fills the air as you bring the broth to your lips. Whether that meal is homemade udon or canned chicken noodle soup, you will also unwittingly swallow chemicals that leached into the ingredients from everything they touched on their way to your table. Different types of food packaging contain multiple classes of chemicals that can leach into food. Credit: RISheehan on Wikimedia Commons 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…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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