Wrapper chemicals could reduce resistance
Douglas Fischer for the Environmenatl Health News
Toxic
chemicals in food packaging – particularly fast food wrappers – weaken your
immune system, leaving you more susceptible to diseases like Covid-19.
Brand,
whose videos regularly get 1 million views or more, treats this as a surprise –
we've all be told throughout the pandemic to wear masks, maintain social
distance. But nobody was talking about how toxics, leaching from food
packaging, are likely to make Covid-19 more deadly.
"Now
I'm beginning to think that certain measures, certain priorities, were
considered important whereas others simply weren't considered," he says.
Brand
cites quite solid reporting from Melissa Kravitz Hoeffner in Nation
of Change and the USA Today.
Endocrine disrupting compounds
But
had Brand been a regular reader of EHN.org, this wouldn't be such a shock. Just
before the pandemic shut down the United States in mid-March, 2020, we
published a report from 33 scientists around the world who
concluded that hazardous chemicals leaching from food packaging harm our
health.
We
followed that with reporting in October showing fast
food from popular chains such as McDonald's, Burger King, and
Pizza Hut contain harmful chemicals linked to a suite of health problems.
And
Brand could have taken his conclusions further. It's not just food packaging
that leaves us more vulnerable to pandemics like Covid-19. It's the food itself: Fast food is linked to
diabetes and obesity, diseases that are exacerbated by toxic chemicals like
endocrine disrupting compounds that leach from packaging.
"Thousands
of scientific papers have been published in the last 20 years linking
endocrine-disrupting chemical exposure to the very comorbidities that increase
the risk of dying from COVID-19," wrote EHN.org chief scientist Pete
Myers in an essay we published in April 2020.
So
while this may be old news to a lot of us, we're glad to see influencers like
Brand tackle this with the alarm and urgency it deserves.
