March 30, 2011
By Emily Main
A new study shows that avoiding canned food, and foods packaged in plastic, leads to a significant drop in the levels of possibly harmful chemicals in your body.
Excerpt: Lately, scientists have found that food packaging leaches everything from flame retardants to petroleum-based mineral oils into your food. And that's just in the stuff that comes wrapped in paper. It's long been known that foods wrapped in plastic or packaged in cans can leach chemicals like bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates (plasticizers that keep cling wraps and other plastics flexible), both of which are endocrine disruptors, chemicals that interfere with your body's reproductive hormones.
However, just how much of all those chemicals actually get from your food into your body has never really been clear. Today, researchers from the Silent Spring Institute, a nonprofit devoted to studying chemicals in our environment that have been linked to breast cancer, are releasing a study that, for the first time, looks at how much BPA and phthalates we actually ingest from foods wrapped in plastics. By putting families on a strict diet free of canned food (cans are lined with an epoxy resin made with BPA) and any foods wrapped, stored, or cooked in plastic, they were able to measure the exact reductions of those chemicals in people's bodies—and, not surprisingly, found that people who avoid packaged foods have fewer chemicals in their bodies.
"The good news is that now we have an estimate of how much food packaging contributes to our overall exposure," says Ruthann Rudel, director of research at the Silent Spring Institute. "And we know how to significantly reduce our exposure—for many chemicals, we don't know that."