Give up plastic as one of your New Year’s resolutions? Maybe you should have, but if you didn’t, you have a real reason to do it now. All those leftover holiday treats, late night snacks, and junk food in general needs to take less of the blame. Believe it or not, plastic has joined the fat shame game. New research found a series of chemicals in everyday plastic products known to interfere with your metabolism.
Researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology looked at 34 different plastic products — everything from single-use plastics to shampoo bottles — to see which chemicals they contained. They found more than 55,000 different chemical components in the products and identified 629 substances, 11 of which are known to be metabolism-disrupting chemicals. In even better news, about one-third of the plastic products were found to contribute to fat cell development in lab experiments, and these substances can even reprogram other cells to become fat cells that reproduce to accumulate even more fat.
“Our experiments show that ordinary plastic products contain a mix of substances that can be a relevant and underestimated factor behind overweight and obesity,” said Martin Wagner, an associate professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, in a release of the peer-reviewed study. We’ve talked about BPA and phthalates leaching from containers here many times before, pointing to the risk of infertility and developmental problems from these endocrine-disrupting chemicals, but this information crosses into new territory.
“It’s very likely that it’s not the usual suspects, such as Bisphenol A, causing these metabolic disturbances. This means that other plastic chemicals than the ones we already know could be contributing to being overweight and obesity,” said Johannes Volker, the first author of the study.
It's no secret that we all could stand to drop a few pounds, but you know just ditching your drink bottle probably won’t make a good excuse, right? The Department of Health and Human Services estimates nearly one in three adults in the U.S. are overweight and more than two in five adults are considered obese. That carries serious risk for all of us. Not surprisingly, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention says obesity is associated with poorer mental health outcomes and a reduced quality of life. Obesity is also associated with the leading causes of death in the U.S., like diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and cancer. Oh, and being overweight also increases susceptibility to infectious diseases, like well, Covid, as just one example.
For a long time, we’ve blamed the growing problem of obesity primarily on genetic factors or lifestyle issues like diet, exercise (or lack thereof), not getting enough sleep, and basically the ills of just getting older. But new evidence like this suggests that is not enough to explain the magnitude and speed of growth (literally) of the obesity problem in the U.S.
Not to give you the scaries, but a little deeper dive into this new study does produce some fear of the unknown. Considering how complex plastic consumer products are, bisphenols and phthalates may be only the tip of the iceberg. Coming out of the manufacturing process, a plastic product often consists of one or more polymers, multiple intentionally added substances, like fillers or additives, but also has some unintentionally added substances, like residues from the process. Based just on regulatory disclosures, over 4,000 substances are associated with plastic food packaging alone, and over 10,000 chemicals are known to be used in plastics. The baseline here? Hundreds, and possibly even thousands of chemicals in plastic consumer products remain unknown — and there is no question that they can leach into what you are eating and drinking. Let that sink in, or leach in if you will, for a moment.
The solution to plastic chemicals contributing to weight gain is the same as the other issues we’ve discussed concerning these “forever chemicals.” Scale back the use of plastics, of course. The summary from the researchers says it best, “considering our constant contact with a multitude of plastic products, a shift toward chemically less-complex plastics represents a way forward to a nontoxic environment.”
Let’s do this. We can work together to make a true difference in the products we’re sourcing for our clients, and the products we are using ourselves at home. There’s no better time than now to start working on it.