There's Formaldehyde in Your Food Packaging, But That's Probably OK

Scare stories abound following a commentary published in the British Medical Journal’s Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health that plays up to a common dinnertime paranoia: that what you’re eating is giving you cancer.

Specifically, the scientists suggest that synthetic chemicals in food packaging could be leaking into our food and posing long-term health risks. They explain that “food contact materials”—usually plastics—are often regulated, but are not legally considered food contaminants, which means anyone who eats packaged foods is “chronically exposed to low levels of these substances throughout their lives.”

Of course, that’s pretty much everyone, which is why the authors want to see more research into the relationship between food packaging and diseases like cancer, obesity, and diabetes. “Since most foods are packaged, and the entire population is likely to be exposed, it is of utmost importance that gaps in knowledge are reliably and rapidly filled,” they wrote.

But other scientists have rejected the idea that chemicals in packaging are any real cause for concern, and criticised the alarmist nature of the call.

For a start, we get a lot more of some of these chemicals from actual food than from package-leaching in the first place. One of the substances the report noted was formaldehyde; a known human carcinogen you’re probably familiar with as an embalming fluid, or the stuff Damien Hirst preserves dead sharks in.

While the idea of eating it might therefore be a little disconcerting, it’s something we all do. According to the World Health Organisation, formaldehyde is found in fruit and vegetables, milk porducts, meat, and fish, not to mention cosmetics and, in negligibly small amounts, the air you breathe and water you drink.

Quoted in the Guardian, Ian Musgrave, senior lecturer in the medicine faculty at the University of Adelaide, put the extra risk posed by formaldehyde in food packaging into perspective. “To consume as much formaldehyde as is present in a 100g apple, you would need to drink at least 20 litres of mineral water that had been stored in PET [polyethylene terephthalate] bottles,” he explained. “Obviously the concern about formaldehyde from food packaging is significantly overrated, unless we are willing to place 'potential cancer hazard' stickers on fresh fruit and vegetables.”

It’s not just formaldehyde that has people worrying, however; the scientists also singled out “endocrine-disrupting chemicals,” which disrupt hormone production. But here too, other experts disagreed there was any real need for alarm. As one put it to the BBC, it's true in principle that small amounts of any of the chemicals mentioned could be harmful—“But can these effects really be anything other than modest at worst when few have been recognised to date?”

Even if we decided to look into a potential causality between long-term exposure to chemicals in food packaging and health effects, we probably wouldn’t get far, because pretty much everyone would have been exposed, so where could you get a control group from?

And if we’re really worried about what we’re eating causing us health troubles, there are probably better targets to focus on; things we actually know contribute to conditions like obesity, cancer, and diabetes (and which coincidentally are often found lurking in the processed foods wrapped in the plastic packaging that’s under fire here), like high levels of fat, sugar, and salt.

Bottled water and apples are probably the least of our worries.