'Safe' Levels of Pollution in Food Could be Impacting Your Health

Pollution may be having more of an impact on your daily life than you might think. Scientists have discovered that even though you may be eating better and exercising regularly, pollution in what you're eating could be affecting your health.

Contaminants in the form of chemicals and other compounds seep into our food supply. Although these levels are kept low in accordance with regulations, they could still impact health in the long term--or at least that's what this study claims. In order to find out exactly how contaminants could affect us, the researchers turned to mice.

The scientists used two groups of obese mice. Both groups were fed a high-fat, high-sucrose enriched diet. One group, though, received a cocktail of pollutants at a very low dosage from pre-conception to adulthood. While researchers didn't see toxicity or excess weight gain in the group receiving this cocktail, though, they did see a deterioration of glucose tolerance in females. This suggested that there was a defect in insulin signaling.

"This study adds evidences for rethinking the way of addressing risk assessment especially when considering that the human population is widely exposed to low levels of thousands of chemicals, and that the health impact of realistic mixtures of pollutants will have to be tested as well," said Brigitte Le Magueress-Battistoni, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Indeed, one pollutant could have a different effect when in mixture with the other pollutants. Thus our study may have strong implications in terms of recommendations for food security."

This isn't all that the researchers discovered, though. The findings also suggested that the mixture of pollutants the mice were given reduced estrogen activity in the liver through enhancing an enzyme in charge of estrogen elimination. In addition, the males showed some changes in liver related to cholesterol synthesis and transport.

The study reveals that more care should be taking when evaluating food contaminants. Since various pollutants can mix with each other and have varying side effects, even "safe" levels could impact our health over time. That said, more research needs to be conducted to assess the impact on human health before any conclusions are drawn.

The findings are published in The FASEB Journal.