According to a Norwegian study, plastic packaging – including food packaging – contains chemicals that can promote weight gain. The problem: Everyone deals with them multiple times a day.
A bottle of shower gel in the morning, a bowl of yogurt for breakfast, and reach for the sponge between the PET plastic bottle of course on the desk. Everyone comes into contact with plastic packaging countless times each day – and that may be partly to blame for their weight gain. As Norwegian researchers have now discovered, plastic chemicals greatly interfere with human fat metabolism. For scientists, this is another signal for society to find a different way to deal with the flood of environmentally harmful plastic.
Bring laboratory analysis knowledge
A research group from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) examined 34 plastic products that everyone comes into contact with daily. Including food packaging and other daily things. Of the 55,000 chemical components they discovered, they identified 629. Of the eleven people already know that they are called chemicals that disrupt the metabolism, that is, they interfere with the human organism, he says in “Environmental science and technologyPublish the study.1
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Plastics enter the human body through the skin
For a long time, scientists assumed that most plastics would remain in the material. This study shows that this is not the case. Many substances are well able to “leak” when touched and can enter the human body by simply touching it, that is, through the pores. In a lab study, the team discovered that a large number of the chemicals studied promoted the growth of human fat cells. The substances in these products reprogrammed the progenitor cells into fat cells, which multiply more and thus accumulate 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 obesity problem?
“It is very likely that it is not the usual suspects such as BPA that are causing these metabolic disturbances. This means that plastic chemicals other than those we already know can contribute to weight gain and obesity,” explains Johannes Volker, first author of the study, in a statement University journalist.2 About two billion people in the world are overweight and the problem is growing. About 650 million people are considered obese. While the reasons for this are varied, the chemicals in plastic packaging may be a factor in weight gain that was not previously taken into account.
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What chemicals should be avoided
According to the researchers, particularly problematic chemicals include: Phthalates and bisphenols. However, the exact components of the plastic are not included in any list of ingredients. So we don’t know what we’re holding in our hands. Moreover, scientists suspect that there are many yet to be identified substances that cause the mentioned problematic effects.
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