Consumer Reports finds 'widespread' presence of plastics in food
reuters.com
reuters.com
If you're optimistic, this will usher in easy measurement, widespread awareness and consumer enlightenment.
But realistically, we will spend decades over confusion as to whether a high PCI really makes for poorer health or not, where are the double-blind trials, decade long cohort studies and meta-analyses etc. until enough human sacrifices have been conducted to appease the plausible deniability of these companies.
The best one I can think of to start with is avoid processing. The more processed a food is the more opportunities it had to potentially be contaminated. Contamination can happen with raw ingredients too, but at least that's fewer opportunities strictly speaking.
So, for example, in order from most dangerous to least:
French fries from a restaurant
French fries pre sliced in a bag but you bake them
Raw whole potatos you yourself slice up and fry in oil you purchased
Raw whole potatos of random origin, baked
Raw whole potatos of known origin, baked
It's very similar idea to eating lower on the food chain to avoid bioaccumulated toxins.
Just a heuristic but can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Happens to coincidentally also be a good way to eat healthy in general even ignoring contamination.
PS: if anyone has any other ideas for heuristics I want to know them!
Huh. You know, I've heard for a long time "avoid processed foods", but this is the first time I've seen a "why" for that. Makes sense! Thank you
> the results from the studies on health outcomes show plausible, significant and graded associations between the dietary share of ultra-processed foods and the occurrence or incidence of several non-communicable diseases, including obesity and obesity-related outcomes, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, breast and all cancers, depression, gastrointestinal disorders, frailty in the elderly, and also premature mortality.
It's a different level of cause and effect, but the main reason I've read is that people consume a higher amount of calories in processed food to attain the same level of satiety attained from non-processed foods. This is in large part due to added sugar and salt, as well as the removal of fibre and other nutrients during the refinement process.[2]
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...
[2] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/what-are-ultra-processed...
Indeed, because restaurants generally source their food from better sources than a regular consumer can (many times, straight from the farm), restaurant food is arguably safer than "raw" food you can cook at home.
Thus, french fries from a restaurant would be at least as safe as french fries you eat at home.
Another paradox that would violate your heuristic: frozen fruits and vegetables are more nutritious, and cleaner, than "fresh" fruits and vegetables in the grocery store.
As an idle heuristic, i'd tend towards French Fries in restaurants being made cheaply though.
But anyways: the number one operational cost that kills restaurants is leasing costs, not supplies or employee wages, because those latter costs can be managed based on the amount of business, time of year, etc.
And the truth about "high quality" versus "low quality" ingredients is that at the restaurant scale, the price difference isn't that large; excepting meat, it can be as low as 10% (and in some cases, at least in SoCal it can be cheaper to buy organic produce than nonorganic). I' still close friends with a number of food purchasers and suppliers in the SoCal area, and you would be absolutely shocked at how little restaurants have to pay for their produce and fish. Consequently, their isn't much of an incentive for a restaurant to use the lowest-quality ingredients because their isn't a significant cost savings but there is a huge risk associated with using lower-quality ingredients. (However, the calculus is different for food manufacturers, who sell their products at wholesale prices and so have significantly smaller potential margins.)
Heuristics arent' meant to be perfect so finding edge cases isn't some kind of gotcha. Wikipedia has a good definition of the word if need be
Personally, I’d rather try to avoid or minimize ingesting endocrine disrupters when possible
Pictures of reverse osmosis filters show a lot of plastic containers with plastic tubing between them.
[1] https://waterfilterguru.com/how-to-remineralize-reverse-osmo...
Or just measure them and publish test results. Naming and shaming works in the consumer packaged goods market.
Then you require that companies test and report some metric associated with the issue, just like they report calories and ingredients.
Then you require and fund the government to spot-check the reported amounts.
Eventually you could even require minimums.
You can't fit a model without data. Consumer Reports did some random spot tests and found phtalates where we didn't expect them. That means we need more broad-based data to be able to predict what is and isn't likely to be contaminated.
An easy first step would be "plastic packaged products" - test and see if there's a correlation there.
Plastic or no, these coatings almost contain some type of PFAS. Which might be the larger underlying issue here.
The same, of course, holds for other hot food products, like fried chicken, consumed in such containers.
Of course, the overall discussion is about microplastics in grocery store foods, but I think the above is what the thread OP meant.
[1]likely the vast majority of french fries in the world are consumed in this manner
Kinda hilarious that people would be like "omg McDonald's is bad for you?"
So it's not really a cultural thing? It's definitely a global phenomenon.
>omg McDonald's is bad for you?
Now you're just being dense on purpose.
I'm going to be generous and give you the chance to clarify or edit your comment.
indeed, the Supreme Court's agreed to hear a case next year which they may use to dismantle the entire legal basis for all the US govmt's regulatory agencies. arguments in that case begin on Jan 17th
[1]https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/467/837/ [2]https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/loper-bright-ent... [3] https://cafe.com/insider-podcast/cafe-insider-1-2-do-agencie...
And you need a Plastic Ingestion Index for ranking foods and consumables that are more directly ingested as well.
I’m not familiar with this. Can someone elaborate or post a link with more context?
Here's an article about it:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/08/wirec...
However, I think that they did a better job than, e.g. the NYT would have done - and they actually did lab tests themselves!
I'm hoping that I can convince some friends and family to not just get a CR membership, but also write to them and ask them to editorialize less, change the way they review certain products (like cars), etc.
> We found [phthalates] in all but one food (Polar raspberry lime seltzer).
A very grim lol.
Does that capability even exist? How can food manufacturers actually control microplastics in their products? The report said even canned products have microplastic, so I think it’s more than just the final packaging.
I think the capability exists (we had cans and jars before we had these chemicals), but both industry norms and likely consumer expectations must shift. E.g. suppose you had new processes which could cool food in a sterile environment before filling cans -- then could cans do with an organic wax liner?
https://ekko.world/plastic-lining-on-beverage-food-cans/2267... https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/aussie-study-finds-ph...
>> Yet some products had much lower levels than others. A serving of Pizza Hut’s Original Cheese Pan Pizza, for example, had half the phthalate levels of a similar pizza from Little Caesars. Levels varied even among products from the same brand: Chef Boyardee Big Bowl Beefaroni pasta in meat sauce had less than half the level of the company’s Beefaroni pasta in tomato and meat sauce.
This is also surprising, seeing how Chipotle will prepare the food in front of you.
>> Chipotle Chicken Burrito (aluminum foil)20,579ng
Other notable:
>> Juicy Juice 100% Juice Apple (cardboard box)2,260 ng
>> Land O’Lakes Butter Salted (paper wrap/cardboard)581 ng
>> Trader Joe’s Ground Pork 80% Lean 20% Fat (plastic wrap)5,503 ng
>> Annie’s Organic Cheesy Ravioli (can)53,579 ng
FTW! BBQ all day.
>> Sweet Baby Ray’s Barbecue Sauce Original (plastic)22 ng
I try to buy only end products in glass jars, but I know full well that the ingredients and even final product can be stored in plastic all along the way before it is packaged in its final form and sent to the store. Still, I try to buy in glass jars because I haven't fully given in. I figure something that might sit on the shelf still for months could in fact get worse by being in plastic instead of glass, so I will still go for the glass.
We should have some data on environmental plastics since the 1960s/70s. Would be interesting to see a graph.
The original source article covers some of the sources, and has data tables for the things they tested.
https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/the...
I'm totally fine with this. Maybe the FDA is toothless, I don't know, but EFSA do not kid around.
First, don't worry about it...
Then, some is ok...
Wait! Less than some is ok...
Wait again!! Next to nothing is ok...
Fuck!!! Avoid this shit at all costs.
No. Demographics can show you with extremely small error bars the aggregate health effects of smoking and (heavy) drinking. If there was an effect of that magnitude from other variables, we'd know for sure. Microplastics and pthalates and other related contaminants are real, and deserve study. But let's not get ahead of ourselves with the doomerism.
We surely don't know the whole story, but we know pretty well that the effect is less than smoking/obesity/etc. because it would be there in the data if so.
I don’t see how one can be confident about the presence or absence of population-level effects.
Just once, I'd like to sacrifice consumerism at the altar of my and my family's internal organs, versus the other way around. We're a few decades late to finally be putting full product lifecycle accountability in the laps of manufacturers everywhere.
Because to be blunt, and even to adopt your inflammatory frame, "recklessly dumping substances into the ecosystem" has been Generally Accepted As Safe for literally thousands of years. For everything particular you want to shout about, there are thousands or tens of thousands of human impacts that went just fine. We have 8 billion of us out there, demanding zero impact just isn't going to happen.
So... do you freak out about watering your garden with a well? Ever use fertilizer or lime? Eat food at a restaurant with a grill? Buy a cut of meat wrapped in wax paper? Use anything made of smelted metal? Use a refrigerator? I mean, just think about the crazy alien cultures going on in that sourdough starter in that fridge! Everything impacts the environment. Everything leaks.
You square this by measuring impacts and doing the science, not by shouting on the internet. I'm sure that's not as satifying, and tends frustratingly not to have the villains you clearly want to see. But it's the only way that actually works.
For hundreds of thousands, substances that have negative effects (eg human corpses) were disposed of far from populations, precisely because humans learned that consequences quickly. Humans have been cognizant of causation, when they could detect it, for longer than thousands of years. Yes the black plague took awhile to figure out. As we saw with cigarettes, society is always trending to keeping the status quo. Often, to society's own detriment over the short term, along the span of human existence.
> We have 8 billion of us out there, demanding zero impact just isn't going to happen.
That's not relevant.
Which is exactly my point. Things like corpse burial and fecal sewage management and plague isolation and smoking regulation were all done because the evidence of their effect was clear and measured! They did the science.
All the freakouts in this subthread might be true, but right now they are sitting just above the noise floor. All I'm saying is that we should recognize that and not apply moral reasoning that ignores the distinction.
It is almost certainly not true that the pthalate linings on your bean can or whatever is as bad as the black plague (we started with smoking, but sure, let's go where you took us). And arguing as if it were is hurting the discourse and making a solution less likely. To wit: please be serious about this stuff.
Remove all PBDEs: "Why are you putting my family in jeopardy?"
Use PBDEs: "Why are you putting my family in jeopardy?"
Finally, as with many other issues, the unseen element is cost. It's possible to use materials that don't require PBDEs to keep them from igniting rapidly, but will people be willing to pay that premium for their homes and their furniture? The rising popularity of "dollar stores"[2] and TEMU suggests that they won't. And making things more expensive through regulation has the side effect of empowering political forces that would gladly obliterate any kind of regulatory protection for consumers - making things worse, not better.
[1] https://www.ecohome.net/guides/2223/flame-retardants-in-furn...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/more-wealthy-people-shopping...
The terrifying thing is that phthalates in mothers not only cause developmental issues in the reproductive systems of their offspring, but the offspring then carry the same risks to _their_ offspring, even if they have reduced phthalate exposure post-birth, meaning you need 2 "clean" generations to clear out the contamination properly.
I think a lot more studies are starting to look at this and I predict we're going to see a rapid increase in regulation of plastics once the generational impact becomes clearer.
Is that actually confirmed or were the studies just not long enough to determine whether the effects persist for more generations?
How can you be so confident that a) the effects would be so clear, and b) we'd know for sure the cause of those effects was microplastics?
We have an increase in early onset cancer, since the 1990s, more than can be explained by just earlier detection: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-022-00672-8
and "There is a mysterious epidemic of kidney disease called chronic kidney disease of unknown etiology (CKDu) that is occurring in many parts of the world. Unrelated to known risk factors such as diabetes and hypertension, CKDu mostly affects the young and middle-aged" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8437007/
and "Driven principally by aging [...] For most of human history, Parkinson has been a rare disorder. However, demography and the by-products of industrialization have now created a Parkinson pandemic" - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30584159/
And the obvious ones like heart disease - if you can claim a group of diseases are caused by "old age" and another group by "obesity and bad diet" - would we know if microplastics were a cause, an exacerbator, a trigger?
As always, xkcd makes the point best: https://xkcd.com/882/
The world isn't falling apart. You're just digging around to find enough "maybes" to P-hack your way into believing it.
[1] About the right order of magnitude for smoking all by itself.
There's nothing doom-tastic about being smart and practical. Furthermore, due to the ubiquitous nature of these chemicals we'll never be able to be certain of their ill effects. There will be no way to rule out other things so their assumed innocence will persist. Why so much risk?
Broiling, frying and baking makes food more toxic. There's absolutely no getting away from that fact. As soon as you apply high heat to a food, you're performing a poorly-controlled chemical synthesis that produces all sorts of toxic stuff - acrylamide, acrolein, heterocyclic amines, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, you name it. The risk isn't particularly high, but it's real.
Most people have perfectly reasonably decided that they are willing to take that very modest risk in preference to exclusively eating raw foods. Some people aren't willing to take that risk and it is their right to do so, but anyone proposing a ban on the sale of cooked food on public health grounds would be rightly dismissed as a lunatic.
The plastics that we use (within and without the food industry) aren't significantly toxic and they're incredibly useful. Without plastics, the food available to you would be more expensive and much less varied. A lot of work has gone into minimising the harms and maximising the benefits of plastics and other synthetic chemicals and that work continues.
The villainisation of plastic is based on prejudice, not science. Some people have decided to hate or fear plastics and are trying to concoct an argument that they are devastatingly dangerous, but that effort has yielded little other than rumour and guilt-by-implication.
Yes, we produce a lot of plastic, because it's very useful. Yes, some of that plastic does get into the environment and can in some cases bioaccumulate. Yes, some species of animals have been meaningfully harmed by plastics, primarily because they are unable to distinguish macroplastics from food and actively seek out and eat pieces of plastic that they then cannot digest. No, there is no evidence that the levels of microplastics or free plasticisers in the environment are significantly harmful to human health or ecosystem health, nor any plausible mechanism by which that could be true or become true in the foreseeable future.
Plastics are not the next CO2 or the next tetraethyllead. They are far too well-studied to hold any significant surprises. Many, many researchers have spent their careers actively trying to prove that plastics are terrible (by fair means or foul), all to no avail.
Maybe that's not so bad? The modern consumer has access to a wide variety of hyper-processed food that is nutritionally bad anyway, the microplastics are just the toxic sprinkles on top.
> No, there is no evidence that the levels of microplastics or free plasticisers in the environment are significantly harmful to human health or ecosystem health, nor any plausible mechanism by which that could be true or become true in the foreseeable future.
What about the xenoestrogens angle, the hypothesis that invasive microplastics are behind the drop in fertility?
This statement is absurd. The vast majority of research is (1) funded by industry, (2) focused on how plastic can be used in industry, and (3) not focused on biological aspects.
The actual research on endocrine effects of plastics show it has a clear negative effect [0].
> EDCs are chemicals that disturb the body’s hormone systems and can cause cancer, diabetes, reproductive disorders, and neurological impairments of developing fetuses and children. The report describes a wealth of evidence supporting direct cause-and-effect links between the toxic chemical additives in plastics and specific health impacts to the endocrine system.
[0] https://www.endocrine.org/news-and-advocacy/news-room/2020/p...
To reiterate my original comment, I trust the judgement of the EU regulators. I don't know enough about US regulators to comment. I don't know if that report is just scaremongering about known issues that have already been addressed, or if it's still relevant because the EPA and the FDA are asleep at the switch. It certainly doesn't scare me, because the concerns it raises are ancient history from where I'm sitting. If the US government allows companies to sell you products that contain harmful levels of known toxins, then I don't see how anyone could reasonably conclude that the real problem is that some of those known toxins happen to be added to plastics.
So when is enough? Will it be 2100 when an avalanche of garbage floods a city?
The First half argued plastics are useful yet they might be somewhat poisonous.
The second half then suddenly insisted we cannot believe plastics are poisonous.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-10-246
> Because GRAS notification is voluntary and companies are not required to identify nanomaterials in their GRAS substances, FDA has no way of knowing the full extent to which engineered nanomaterials have entered the U.S. food supply as part of GRAS substances. In contrast to FDA's approach, all food ingredients that incorporate engineered nanomaterials must be submitted to regulators in Canada and the European Union before they can be marketed.
Great for profits. Nots so good for everyone and everything else.
Call it what you want, but the FDA is too often a paper tiger.
Innocent until found guilty.
They know. We know it. Big Inc knows it. That's a foolish - at best - way to approach public health and ecological health. Tho', of course, it's great for profits.
Remember, personal attacks are not allowed here.
One doesn't have to work for the FDA to realize that the prioritize profit over health in a lot of cases. Case in point is sunscreen. How many years did the FDA allow sunscreens that didn't protect against UV-A exposure, knowing that UV-A was the primary cause for sun damage related skin cancer.
Even when they did decide to require protection against UV-A, the enforcement was delayed for several years, explicitly to not cause financial harm to sunscreen makers. I remember back in college, enforcement was delayed over a year to permit sellers to move through existing stock of sunscreen.
This is far from the only example. FDA very much prioritizes protecting companies bottom lines.
The FDA almost certainly has at least a dozen folks much smarter than the user calling them 'clueless'.
And all regulated organizations, in total, certainly have many hundreds much smarter responding to the FDA.
It's very likely that at least a few thousand actual bonafide geniuses interact substantially, in some way, in any given year.
If smart was all that is necessary, we wouldn't need the likes of the FDA. If smart was all that is necessary, the world wouldn't be the clusterfuck that it is.
History is clear...relying on smart is a stupid idea. Ignoring history? Even worse.
I don't have to work at the FDA to see that it's compromised. Somebody already figured it out.
https://www.science.org/content/article/fda-s-revolving-door...
1. That's the current tolerable levels of xenoestrogen chemicals per agencies. However it's not clear whether there's a safe level of plastic ever established by these agencies.
2. These "Safe levels" are adjusted all the time. There no reason to presume that in the future the current safe levels won't be reduced.
I tried to look up the regulations, but whatever the value of EU regulations may be, readability and simplicity are not their strong points. Picking on DEHP because it's one CR mentions, I found these secondhand references:
* https://www.foodpackagingforum.org/news/16th-amendment-to-eu... * https://www.foodpackagingforum.org/news/efsa-updated-risk-as...
The first says that the "specific migration limit" for DEHP had been lowered to 0.6 mg/kg. I assume that's the amount that ends up in the product. The second refers to Tolerable Daily Intake based on body weight, of 50 µg/kg.
So we're talking about, in one measure, the limit being 600000 nanograms in a kilogram of food. The serving size of Annie's Original Organic Cheesy Ravioli is 242g. So the allowable amount of DEHP in that serving would be 2,479,338 nanograms. They found 53,579, or around 2% of the acceptable amount.
Looking at it from TDI, Wikipedia gives a low bound on the average adult body weight of 60 kg. That's 3,000,000 nanograms, which brings it down to 1.8%.
Consumer Reports has not been a reputable publication for many years, and they continue to trade on their name as many Americans at least have it in their head that CR is some kind of unbiased arbiter of quantitative information about what's good or not. What they actually do is clickbait to sell subscriptions. This became clear to me when I realized that any time they write about a product category I have a lot of experience with, their recommendations make no sense. Thinking that they actually provide useful information but only about the things I don't have the ability to fact-check them on is a form of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.
German government research estimates that around 1% of the population consumes more than the TDI (according to another federal government press release from 2013[1]). According to that source, kids' exposition to DEHP is half from food, and half from other sources like toys and the overall environment, and the typical exposition is between 15-44 ug/kg (i.e. below the TDI).
[1] https://www.bfr.bund.de/de/presseinformation/2013/13/weichma...
To give them a modicum more credit: I missed the link to this PDF the first time, which at least discloses the testing methodology and has a page listing the applicable safety standards. https://article.images.consumerreports.org/image/upload/v170...
There's something I find very interesting in there: they added phthalates and phthalate replacements together and reported it as phthalates. Phthalate replacements are also known as "non-phthalate plasticizers", which as the name implies, are not phthalates, and are used in products that want to be "BPA and phthalate free". To what extent are those reported numbers actually coming from DEHA in pthalate-free polyethylene wrappers? To me, this crosses the line from simple clickbait to dishonesty.
I don't have a horse in this race apart from being the kind of person who just wants to know what is actually true. Industry will absolutely lie and poison us to make a buck, but at the same time, everything is chemicals, and many "natural" substances are incredibly toxic. Ultimately it is farcical to think that any of us are in a position to do or even properly evaluate research and we rely on experts and reputation to try to make sense of these technical fields. CR publishing it doesn't make it untrue, but unfortunately I think it's a mistake to rely on them either. At best it's a pointer that there may be something interesting and worth seeing if anyone else has done a better job.
I'm curious what the implication in not having a lining is. If it isn't needed, why have it on the other cans? I'm assuming it has a decreased shelf life?
Edit: I'm a little confused on the reading real quick. I am seeing that most cans are now BPA free, but it seems they are still lined with a plastic?
We solved this many decades ago with a cheap, safe, abundant, recyclable material: glass.
Centralized factories and the associated transport and breakage costs ruined it.
To the best of my knowledge, all can coatings are phthalate free. I should also note that not all phthalates are created equal - terephthalates and trimellitates are of considerably less concern than ortho-phthalates.
I don't want to start doomerism. I was just somewhat personally surprised at how many things have plastic linings. I do want companies testing, but I don't think it is good for mental health to get alarmed at all possibilities.
From the article.
I’d prefer it if my food didn’t contain these substances, wouldn’t you ?
Plastic straws
Plastic Lilly sticks
Plastic tie-wraps
Basically anything that someone might chew on!
Although, licorice roots are okay to chew on... I guess. :-)
Licorice can be toxic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8962506/
If these things break down in unknown/unpublished ways we're all fcked.
AFAIK this makes sense. Asbestos is really dangerous only in the lungs, so you need to inhale a "friable" form of it somehow. Putting it in your stomach won't do anything.
Death finds a way.
Well, that's never actually been proven so you can make a name for yourself by investigating this topic, if you feel so inclined.
I actually tracked down the original which has charts of how much was found, and is what should have been linked to in this post. https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/the...
Frankly it's frightening to consider the implications.
I try to stay up to date with scholarly research regarding microplastic dangers to humans, and so far there is no conclusive evidence that they do anything harmful to us.
Just know that you are exposed to many hundreds of actually harmful chemicals in your daily life -- but remember that it is the dose, not the presence of a toxin that causes harm. Even water will kill you if you drink too much of it.
Until there is a smoking gun regarding these particles and human health, it would do good to focus on things you can control that are known to be harmful, rather than something you can't that is only scary sounding.
That said, it is a good opportunity to use this to advocate for far less single-use plastics in society. We should not be using nearly as much plastic for nearly as many things as we do, and it needs to be drastically reduced.
Are you (or someone else) aware of any indices of how harmful various substances are and how pervasive they are? It'd be nice to know, for instance, how damaging one substance is versus another so that I can prioritize my concerns better.
- I imagine that the quantity that someone consumes or is exposed to plays a role. It'd be interesting to see an index of how easily the toxic threshold can generally be hit via conventional sources.
A list of harmful chemicals people could be exposed to in daily life shouldn't be difficult to compile if there isn't one already, but is relatively useless because as I noted exposure itself is not the problem in almost all cases.
However taking that list and trying to compare the harm on some sort quantitative level is going to be difficult.
I wouldn't worry about it -- I was speaking more about 'stay mindful of things around you that you can control, like wearing PPE when necessary or staying away from off-gassing plastics which have a characteristic smell' rather than 'make a list of everything you are exposed to and plan your life around it'.
I suspect plastics will be similar. Nothing has evolved to eat them, so nothing does.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/14/bugs-acr...
> commonly used hand sanitizers, as well as other skin care products, contain mixtures of dermal penetration enhancing chemicals that can increase by up to 100 fold the dermal absorption of lipophilic compounds such as BPA.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
https://www.motherjones.com/food/2013/12/cow-feed-chicken-po...
I have searched for to know what happened with that facility, but the only article that I've been able to find, and that it is showed as first result in the search engine, is from fayobserver[1], labeled as USA Today Network, saying a "do not worry".
Legal or not, it's an outrage. Did the FDA allowed this in the end?
From their web[2] << Headquartered in Smithfield, Virginia, Smithfield Foods is an American food company dedicated to producing Good food. Responsibly.® >>
[1] https://fayobserver.com/story/news/2022/05/05/nc-pig-feed-pl...
[2] www smithfieldfoods com
> Plastic particles can also contaminate food crops directly. A 2020 study found microplastics and nanoplastics in fruit and vegetables sold by supermarkets and in produce sold by local sellers in Catania in Sicily, Italy. Apples were the most contaminated fruit, and carrots had the highest levels of microplastics among the sampled vegetables.
> According to research by Willie Peijnenburg, professor of environmental toxicology and biodiversity at Leiden University in the Netherlands, crops absorb nanoplastic particles – minuscule fragments measuring between 1-100nm in size, or about 1,000 to 100 times smaller than a human blood cell – from surrounding water and soil through tiny cracks in their roots.
However we can also demonstrate that water is good for you in moderate doses. We have yet to demonstrate that any amount of plastic is good for you.
That's not a good excuse not to bother at all. It's an argument for periodic reassessment of common additives.
nope, tons of evidence of harm
https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/the...
Perdue Ground Chicken Breast (foam tray with plastic wrap) 9,985
Trader Joe’s Ground Pork 80% Lean 20% Fat (plastic wrap) 5,503
Stop & Shop Ground Beef 80% Lean 20% Fat (paperboard with plastic wrap) 2,729
And dairy:
Tuscan Dairy Farms Whole Milk (plastic) 10,932
Land O’Lakes Butter Salted (paper wrap/cardboard) 581
These numbers are much lower than some of the others, but they are not only in processed food.
Meat and dairy are heavily processed foods, and plastics are likely the least concerning thing about consuming them.
I would consider ground beef less processed than that, since it does not require a detox step (though it may be wise to cook it before consumption)
Processing means stuff being added and/or removed. Cows, or as they are euphamistically known as "beef", have all sorts of vitamins, growth hormones and other disgusting shit (often literally) added to their diet and bodies. It also has to be cooked, usually in oil, which generates even more Maillard reaction, and thus cancers, etc.
Almost all animal products can be considered ultra-high processed. It's on an entirely different level than whole fruits and vegetables.
They're not "ultra-processed" or "ready to eat", but they're definitely processed foods.
https://youtube.com/shorts/mQRPvst0BvM
For example, I don't personally know anyone who uses a credit card for things they can't afford, and that seems like a very US thing to do.
a pressure cooker cuts time considerably. a slow cooker allows you to multitask
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/17/dark-w...
It says there's ways to reduce the levels in food, but doesn't say what those methods would be.
lol
bmw's seem to have been improving