More Than 1,200 Food Packaging Chemicals Can Pose Serious Health Risks
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Most people decide if it’s safe to eat an old tub of yogurt in the fridge or canned tuna in the back of the cupboard by checking its sell-by date. But no label indicates that pesticides, phthalates, PFAS, or other […]
More than 1,200 food packaging chemicals could potentially cause serious health issues like cancer and reproductive harm, according to a new peer-reviewed study. Of the 15,000 chemicals that come into contact with food, only 1,222 have been identified as posing serious health risks, with 87 percent lacking sufficient accessible information to estimate their risks.
The study, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, was conducted by the Food Packaging Forum Foundation, which found that consumers often rely on sell-by dates to determine food safety, but no label indicates the possibility of hazardous chemicals seeping into food from packaging. The vast majority of chemicals used in food processing or packaging lack enough data to assess their safety, according to study co-author Jane Muncke, a managing director at the nonprofit.
The study analyzed the "jaw-dropping" number of chemicals to flag the most problematic ones, ranking them into four tiers based on evidence of human exposure from food-contact materials. Tier 1, the highest priority, includes 94 chemicals known to seep into food and detected in human samples such as breast milk and blood. These chemicals include PFAS "forever chemicals," styrene, phthalates, and bisphenol A. Muncke expressed concern about babies' exposure to plastic chemicals in food pouches, as her team found over 330 chemicals leaching from these pouches, including nearly 80 hazardous substances.
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