Phthalates continue to contaminate Americans’ food, decades after scientists recognized their dangers.
CARY, N.C. — Earl Gray was astonished by what he found when he cut into the laboratory rats. Some had testicles that were malformed, filled with fluid, missing or in the wrong place. Others had shriveled tubes blocking the flow of sperm, while still more were missing glands that help produce semen.
For months, Gray and his team had been feeding rats corn oil laced with phthalates, a class of chemical widely used to make plastics soft and pliable. Working for the Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1980s, Gray was evaluating how toxic substances damage the reproductive system and tested dibutyl phthalate after reading some early papers suggesting it posed a risk to human health.
Sitting on a screened porch on a humid summer day more than 40 years later, Gray recalled the study and the grisly birth defects. “It was in enough animals, so we knew it wasn’t random malformations,” said Gray, 80, who retired after nearly 50 years with the agency.
Gray and other scientists were awakening to the potential dangers of phthalates, which were making their way into nearly every human being on the planet as plastics became a way of life in the 20th century.
Yet even as the dangers became more evident, the Food and Drug Administration, the EPA and other regulators made only piecemeal efforts to limit their use over the next 50 years. This inaction allowed companies to continue to churn out millions of tons of phthalates for plastics manufacturing, leading these “everywhere chemicals” to become pervasive.
Today, most people are exposed to phthalates when they eat. Although industry has largely eliminated their use in food packaging — once one of the most common uses — phthalates are used in factories that make food, accumulating at high levels in ultra-processed foods. They also enter the environment through products including medical equipment, vinyl flooring, cars, cosmetics and cheap plastic goods like shower curtains.
A large body of science has linked phthalates to a variety of serious health conditions, including premature birth and infertility. Studies have also tied the chemicals to neurodevelopment issues like ADHD. In April, a study led by New York University attributed 350,000 deaths from heart disease globally to phthalates exposure. And a University of Miami study linked phthalates’ disruption of hormones to breast cancer, a leading cause of death for women globally.
The costs to society are huge. A 2024 NYU-led study that catalogued health effects from phthalates exposure in the United States — including contributions to diabetes levels and infertility — estimated that dealing with phthalate-related diseases cost $66.7 billion in a single year. That is triple the economic impact of health impacts from “forever chemicals,” another class of chemicals widely implicated in disease. Treating all cancer, by comparison, costs the U.S. $209 billion annually, according to one estimate by the government-run National Cancer Institute.
The sporadic attention regulators have paid to this issue has allowed far more of these chemicals to circulate than what many experts consider safe. Many scientists say phthalates should have been banned or severely limited two decades ago and compare regulators’ slow response to delays in protecting the public from cigarettes and asbestos.
Read the full story: Phthalates - How these chemicals went everywhere and threatened our health (NYT)