More than 3,000 chemicals from food packaging have infiltrated our bodies

Shrink-wrap sealed around a piece of raw meat. Takeout containers filled with restaurant leftovers. Plastic bottles filled with soft drinks.

A new study released Monday shows the chemical toll of all that wrapping – and how it might affect the human body.

Researchers from Switzerland and other countries discovered that of the roughly 14,000 known chemicals in food packaging, 3,601 – or about 25 percent – have been found in the human body, whether in samples of blood, hair or breast milk.

Those chemicals include metals, volatile organic compounds, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS, phthalates and many others known to disrupt the endocrine system and cause cancer or other diseases. The study, published in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, didn’t directly examine the link to these illnesses. But the researchers say their inventory of chemicals can help future research into health risks.

“There are known hazardous chemicals that are known to be linked with adverse human health outcomes,” said Jane Muncke, the chief scientific officer of the Food Packaging Forum and one of the paper’s authors.

To conduct their analysis, scientists made an inventory of the chemicals known to be in food packaging or food processing equipment, and then searched global tissue databases for evidence that the chemicals had been found in the human body.

“We don’t think about how the (mostly) plastic packaging adds chemicals to our food, but it’s an important source of human exposures,” R. Thomas Zoeller, an emeritus professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who was not involved in the research, said in an email. “This is an early indication that harmful chemicals – largely unregulated – are making it into the human population.”

Most of the chemicals leaching from food packaging come from plastics, but not all of them. “Probably the worst one is recycled paper and cardboard,” Muncke said. “And I know that’s a hard one to stomach.”

Scientists say that there is a need for better testing of food packaging and further regulations on what is considered safe to put food in. “We need to be thinking about constructive ways forward, how we can ensure the safety of these materials,” Muncke said. “What worries me a lot is that’s not happening.”