Foods Might Serve Up High Levels of Chemicals Found in Plastics

By Carina Storrs

HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Feb. 27 (HealthDay News) -- Bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates, two types of chemicals in plastics that have been linked to a number of health effects, could still find their way into your body even if you avoid foods that are shipped, stored or cooked using plastic materials, new research suggests.

The findings are based on a small study that followed 10 families for five days. Half of the families got catered meals made with fresh, local ingredients that were not stored or prepared with plastics.

The other half got a handout on how to avoid BPA and phthalates in their diet, such as not microwaving foods and drinks in plastic containers and avoiding food in cans, which are often lined in BPA-containing material.

"We fully expected to see reductions in the catered-diet group, and hoped the other group would also have reductions" in their levels of these chemicals, said study author Dr. Sheela Sathyanarayana, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Instead, the researchers found that all but one person in the catered-diet group had a spike in phthalate levels in their urine during the five-day diet intervention, and a more modest increase in their BPA levels. In contrast, the group that got handouts had steady levels of these chemicals over the study period.

The researchers then tested the ingredients in the catered diet to track down the source of phthalate exposure and detected high levels in milk, butter and cream, and also in some of the spices, such as cinnamon and ground coriander.

"Several studies have found that high-fat dairy tends to contain high concentration of phthalates, maybe because of phthalates in the plastic tubing that milk goes through to get to the final containers, and it may be in animal products, such as feed," Sathyanarayana said.

Overall, the more processed the food, the more likely it could come into contact with materials that contain phthalates, and phthalates can easily leach from these materials into food, Sathyanarayana explained. Spices could be one type of highly processed food, she added.

Unfortunately, consumers have no way of knowing which products or brands contain phthalates because manufacturers themselves don't know whether their processing materials contain phthalates, Sathyanarayana added.

Brent Collett and his wife and kids were one of the families that received the catered diet for Sathyanarayana's study. At the end of the study, Collett and the other families received a letter telling them their phthalate and BPA levels and the foods that contained phthalates.

"To have ingredients [such as coriander] that is not a major part of diet lead to this increase was a bit of an eye-opener," said Collett, a psychologist at Seattle Children's Hospital. "There would be no way we as consumers could do any better" than the catered diet in this study at avoiding plastics, he added.

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