The new international report on chemicals used along the food supply chain speaks clearly, and does so with a firmness that leaves little room for doubt. For decades we have built an entire production system on the promise of making food safer, longer lasting, more “convenient”. Yet those very synthetic compounds that have greased the wheels of agriculture and the food industry are presenting an astronomical bill: up to 2.2 trillion dollars a year in healthcare costs, a figure that almost equals the profits of the hundred largest listed companies in the world.
In the document, signed by dozens of scientists from institutions such as the Institute of Preventive Health, the Center for Environmental Health, ChemSec and US and British universities – from Sussex to Duke – a disturbing photograph emerges. Pfas, pesticides, phthalates and bisphenols, compounds omnipresent in our foods and the objects that surround them, are impacting public health with a burden that no national budget can ignore. Tumors, neurodevelopmental disorders, infertility, obesity and endocrine imbalances are just some of the most painful chapters on the list. And that’s not all: even ecosystems, already undermined by decades of exploitation, are paying the price of massive exposure to these substances.
The long shadow of “forever chemicals”
A theme emerges in the report that cannot be understated: when it comes to PFAS and pesticides, we are not faced with a banal collateral risk, but with a toxic legacy that will affect human health and ecological stability for generations. The impact on ecosystems, although difficult to quantify, is estimated at an additional 640 billion dollars if only agricultural losses and the adaptation of safety standards for contaminated water are considered.
The demographic perspective is no less alarming: according to the authors, if current levels of exposure to endocrine disruptors, such as phthalates and bisphenols, remain unchanged, between 2025 and 2100 we could record between 200 and 700 million fewer births. Not due to a conscious choice, but due to a slow and silent biological sabotage that begins on our plates.
Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and professor of global public health at Boston College, calls the report a “wake-up call.” His message is clear:
The world needs to wake up. Chemical pollution is as serious a problem as climate change.
According to Landrigan, the progress made in the fight against infectious diseases has been canceled out by the surge in non-communicable diseases, driven by daily exposure to synthetic substances that surround especially the little ones.
It’s not just health that is affected. Since the Second World War, global chemical production has increased more than 200 times, with more than 350,000 synthetic compounds on the market today. And, as scientists from the Stockholm Resilience Center point out, we have exceeded a “planetary threshold”: a limit beyond which natural balances no longer guarantee the stability that has made our civilization possible over the last ten thousand years.
The problem is aggravated by an industrial practice that seems to come from another century: unlike drugs, chemical substances are placed on the market without solid safety checks, almost in a gigantic planetary “experiment” carried out without consensus. And the after-effects often become a bill that society must settle with delay, when the damage is now chronic and widespread.
In this context, Pfas and pesticides represent the tip of the iceberg. The former soak baking paper, trays, popcorn bags, food containers; the latter are the engine of intensive agriculture, which sprays thousands of liters of substances on the fields to keep yields high. Finally, phthalates and bisphenols live in the plastics that continually touch everything we eat, from disposable gloves to packaging.
All these compounds have a common thread that unites them: they interfere with hormones, alter brain development, increase the risk of tumors, modify metabolism, pave the way for an epidemic of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. A silent cocktail that accompanies human beings since they are born.
Landrigan confesses that he fears above all the damage to children’s brains, damage that takes away creativity, intelligence and future possibilities. And then endocrine disruptors, capable of creeping into every stage of life, altering the functionality of the liver, causing cholesterol to soar and slowly eroding the metabolic balance to the point of causing strokes and heart disease.
When asked if the four groups analyzed would be enough to describe the problem, Landrigan responds brutally:
They are just the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands of substances we know nothing about. And we will continue to expose ourselves until one causes damage so obvious that it cannot be ignored.
A future that, it seems, we can no longer afford to observe distractedly.
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