Looking at a food label, we can see that many ultra-processed foods are high in salt, sugar,

and calories, and low in nutrition, and may contain food additives with questionable safety.

Missing from the label are contaminants from processing that I talked about in my last video,

as well as contaminants that migrate into the food from the packaging materials.

Bisphenols like BPA, plastics compounds like thallates and microplastics,

as well as mineral oils.

Evidently the mineral oils come from the printing inks from recycled

newspapers used in paperboard packaging, which can then migrate into the food and then

accumulate in human tissues to levels that have been found to be harmful in a certain strain of rats.

But the relevance to humans has been questioned, since apparently we can't even extrapolate

the results from that strain of rats to another strain of rats.

Plastic materials that contact our food may contain thousands of different molecules,

in which more than 300 have been considered as potentially risky, including phthalates,

which along with bisphenols

may have hormone-modulating effects, have people switch from packaged foods to fresh foods

for even just a few days, and evidence of exposure to the measured bisphenols and thalates

based on urine samples drops significantly. The packaging is certainly not limited to ultra-processed foods.

If we look at the association between the consumption of ultra-processed foods and how many

phthalates and bisphenols are flowing through our system, researchers found higher levels of

four-thallites and BPF associated with higher consumption of ultra-processed foods,

but there was a lack of association with the most common ones,

D.E.H.P. and BPA, and an inverse association for BPS,

...