In some of the worst news in human history, it turns out that pizza boxes are toxic to humans and have the potential to cause cancer and birth defects.
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration imposed a ban effective January 4th on the use of certain chemicals used in pizza boxes and other similar products. This came in response to a petition filed by various bodies, including the National Resources Defence Council, the Centre for Environmental Health and the Centre for Food Safety. They’ve been pushing for this since 2010, meanwhile the rest of us have been tucking into pizza boxes like everything’s all fine and dandy.
The three types of “perfluoroalkyl ethyl” specified in the petition are:
Diethanolamine salts of mono- and bis (1 H, 1 H, 2 H, 2 Hperfluoroalkyl) phosphates where the alkyl group is even-numbered in the range C8-C18 and the salts have a fluorine content of 52.4 percent to 54.4 percent as determined on a solids basis; pentanoic acid, 4,4-bis [(gamma-omega-perfluoro-C8-20-alkyl)thio] derivatives, compounds with diethanolamine (CAS Reg. No. 71608-61-2); and perfluoroalkyl substituted phosphate ester acids, ammonium salts formed by the reaction of 2,2-bis[([gamma], [omega]-perfluoro C4-20 alkylthio) methyl]-1,3-propanediol, polyphosphoric acid and ammonium hydroxide.
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All those words don’t mean anything to me either, but what you need to know is that the chemicals act as a sealant to protect pizza packaging from being soaked with oil/water/pizza juice during transport. In addition to some pizza boxes, the chemicals can also be found in microwave popcorn bags and other foods packaged for both humans and animals.
So yeah, that’s a bit shit. I mean it’s bad enough that pizza itself is bad for you but now come to find the packaging it comes in is bad for you too. In the past week I’ve eaten pizzas (plural), burgers (plural), Chinese and popcorn so I guess that’s me completely screwed.
P.S. Is this news going to stop anyone from ordering pizza? Nah, thought not. Get involved with our free Pizza giveaway on Twitter every Sunday.
