Parents take notice – METAL in every cheese single, M&M and Oreo cookie
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96 food items currently on US grocery shelves contain unlabeled nano-metal ingredients. Examples include Dannon Greek Plain Yogurt, Silk Original Soy Milk, Rice Dream Rice Drink, Hershey’s Bliss Dark Chocolate, and Kraft’s iconic American Cheese Singles, all of which now contain nano-size titanium dioxide. Radically miniaturized particles are attractive to the food and textile industries for their novel properties. Nano-size titanium dioxide, for example, is used as a color enhancer—it makes white foods like yogurt and soy milk whiter, and brightens dark products like chocolate. But what unintended effects might it have According to the Friends of the Earth report, nano-laced food products are “entering the market at a rate of three to four per week.”
All of which raises the question of safety, and there’s real evidence that the small stuff poses significantly higher health risks. For example, in 2011, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) looked at the lung cancer risk faced by workers exposed to air containing various forms of titanium dioxide dust. The agency recommended sharply lower exposure limits for titanium dioxide in its nano form—the stuff they’re putting in yogurt and soy milk—reflecting “greater concern for the potential carcinogenicity” of the nano particles, because “as particle size decreases, the surface area increases (for equal mass), and the tumor potency increases per mass unit of dose.”
Of course, breathing in nano-size titanium dioxide isn’t the same as ingesting it in yogurt. But making stuff really tiny changes the way it behaves in our bodies—and the FDA should respond to its own concerns by making the food industry sweat the safety of the small stuff, before they feed it to us.