According to a Norwegian study, plastic packaging – including that for food – contains chemicals that can promote weight gain. The problem: Everyone comes into contact with them several times a day.
The shower gel bottle in the morning, the yoghurt pot for breakfast, reaching for the sponge in between and of course the PET plastic bottle on the desk. Everyone comes into contact with plastic packaging countless times every day – and they may be partly to blame for weight gain. As Norwegian researchers have now found out, the plastic chemicals massively interfere with the human fat metabolism. For the scientists, this is another signal to society to find a different way of dealing with the environmentally harmful flood of plastic.
Laboratory analysis brought the knowledge
A research group from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) examined 34 plastic products that everyone comes into contact with every day. Including food packaging and other everyday objects. Of the 55,000 chemical components they discovered, they identified 629 of the substances. From eleven one already knows that they are so-called metabolism-disrupting chemicals, i.e. they interfere with the human organism, says in the «Environmental Science & Technology“ publish study.1
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Plastics enter the human body through the skin
For a long time, science assumed that most plastics would remain in the material. This study shows that this is not the case. Many substances are very well able to “leak” when touched and can get into the human body simply by touching them, i.e. through the pores. In a laboratory study, the team discovered that a significant number of the chemicals studied promote the development of human fat cells. The substances in these products reprogrammed progenitor cells into fat cells, which multiplied more and thus accumulated even more fat. So this could mean that all the plastic that surrounds us indirectly promotes weight gain.
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Does plastic contribute to the global problem of increasing obesity?
«It’s very likely that it’s not the usual suspects like bisphenol A that are causing these metabolic disorders. This means that plastic chemicals other than those we already know could be contributing to overweight and obesity,” explains Johannes Völker, first author of the study, in a university media release.2 Around two billion people in the world are overweight, and the problem grows. About 650 million people are considered obese. While the reasons for this are varied, the chemicals in plastic packaging may be a factor in increasing weight gain that has not previously been considered.
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What chemicals to avoid
According to the researchers, the particularly problematic chemicals include phthalates and bisphenols. However, the exact ingredients of plastic are not on any list of ingredients. So we don’t know what we’re holding in our hands. On top of that, the scientists suspect that there are many more substances that have not yet been identified that trigger the problematic effects mentioned.