United States: Food wrapped in shrink foil, placed on a cardboard tray or packed in paper can contain any of nearly 200 chemical which have been associated with breast cancer according to a new study.
Most food wrappers and packaging have been found to have 189 chemicals that could be linked to breast cancer, researchers said on September 24, in Frontiers in Toxicology.
These hazardous chemicals include PFAS, bisphenols and phthalates; the chemicals can leach into food that come in this packaging and be consumed by people, according to the researchers.
As reported by the HealthDay, “This study is important, because it indicates that today there is a great potential for the elimination of human contact with chemicals that cause breast cancer,” said Jane Muncke, PhD, managing director of the non-profit Food Packaging Forum. “This is why one of the most promising areas in cancer prevention – decrease of hazardous chemicals in our daily experience – remains largely unaddressed.”
Currently, the Food Packaging Forum has collected vast chemical data of food packages, mainly from literature sources that consist of more than thousand studies.
From the database, researchers were able to establish the following: the chemicals within the plastic packaging materials include fifteen (15) phthalates, sixty-three (63) non-phthalate ESTs, and one hundred and forty-three (143) chemicals causing breast cancer, of which 89 were found within the paper or cardboard packaging materials.
Many of the 78 known carcinogens, there is compelling evidence that people are routinely contaminated with at least 76 of those cancer causing chemicals via food, researchers said.
Such chemicals are now being used in food packing yet the U.S, E.U, China, South America among other nations have set measures to restrain the use of such chemicals as stated by researchers.
The authors found that approximately 40 of each of the 76 top cancer-causing chemicals are already found to be hazardous in some form or the other by various international regulators still the food packaging contains these chemicals new research shows this clearly indicates that the existing regulations are not adequate to protect human health.
This particular study comes on the heels of another report published by the same group last week that found that more than 3,6000 chemicals leach in to the food during the packaging process.
Of those, there are almost about 79 chemicals are known to the cause cancer, genetic mutations and the endocrine and reproductive issues and this is according to the report which is published in the Journal of the Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology.