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fresh food diet reduces levels of hormone disruptors BPA,DEHP after 3 days
New study shows fresh food diet reduces levels of hormone disruptors BPA and DEHP
[Silent Spring Institute]
There are plenty of reasons to avoid processed food and to include more fresh fruits and vegetables in your diet. That list just got a little longer.
Silent Spring Institute researchers teamed up with Breast Cancer Fund to investigate whether levels of the hormone disrupting chemicals BPA and the phthalate DEHP in people's bodies could be reduced by switching to a fresh food diet that avoids canned food and plastic food packaging.
The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health Perspectives, shows that food packaging is the major source of exposure to BPA and DEHP in children and adults, and a fresh food diet reduces levels of these chemicals by half, after just three days.
The good news is that this study provides evidence that replacing these chemicals with safer alternatives in food packaging would significantly reduce our exposures. And it provides information you can use now to play it safe and reduce your exposure.
OPEN ACCESS: Food Packaging and Bisphenol A and Bis(2-Ethylhexyl) Phthalate Exposure: Findings from a Dietary Intervention
[Environmental Health Perspectives]
Background: Bisphenol A (BPA) and bis(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) are high-production-volume chemicals used in plastics and resins for food packaging. They have been associated with endocrine disruption in animals and in some human studies. Human exposure sources have been estimated, but the relative contribution of dietary exposure to total intake has not been studied empirically.
Objectives: To evaluate the contribution of food packaging to exposure, we measured urinary BPA and phthalate metabolites before, during and after a "fresh foods" dietary intervention.
Methods: We selected 20 participants in five families based on self-reported use of canned and packaged foods. Participants ate their usual diet, followed by three days of "fresh foods" that were not canned or packaged in plastic, and then returned to their usual diet. We collected evening urine samples over eight days in January 2010 and composited them into pre-intervention, intervention, and post-intervention samples. We used mixed effects models for repeated measures and Wilcoxon signed rank tests to assess change in urinary levels across time.
Results: Urine levels of BPA and DEHP metabolites decreased significantly during the fresh foods intervention (e.g., BPA geometric mean 3.7 ng/mL pre-intervention and 1.2 ng/mL during intervention; MEHHP geometric mean 57 ng/mL vs 25 ng/mL). The intervention reduced geometric mean concentrations of BPA by 66% and DEHP metabolites by 53-56%. Maxima were reduced by 76% for BPA and 93-96% for DEHP metabolites.
Conclusions: BPA and DEHP exposures were substantially reduced when participants' diets were restricted to food with limited packaging.
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