Researchers Find Alarming Link To Dangerous Chemicals in Fast Food

Critics of the fast food industry have long warned about the perils of our addiction to processed food. Big Macs and Whoppers might taste good, but put too many of them in your body and it will expand as Violet Beauregard's did in "Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory."

The evidence is decades in the making. The rise of processed food, after all, has coincided with an alarming growth in the size of our gut.

Researchers at George Washington University have linked fast food consumption to the presence of potentially harmful chemicals, a connection which they argue could have "great public health significance." Specifically, the team found that people who eat fast food tend to have significantly higher levels of certain phthalates, which are commonly used in consumer products like soap and make-up to make them less brittle, but have been linked to a number of adverse health outcomes, including higher rates of infertility, especially among males.

The danger, the researchers believe, isn't necessarily a result of the food itself, but rather the process by which the food is prepared. The findings were published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a journal funded by the National Institutes of Health.

"We're not trying to create paranoia or anxiety, but I do think our findings are alarming," said Ami Zota, an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University, and one of the study's authors. "It's not every day that you conduct a study where the results are this strong."

The first thing the researchers found was that roughly one-third of the participants said they had eaten some form of fast food over the course of the day leading up to the urine sample collection. That proportion, high as it might seem, is actually in line with government estimates. In fact, more than a third of all children and adolescents living in the country still eat some form of fast food on any given day, a number which hasn't budged in decades, according to the CDC.

The second thing the researchers found is that those participants who said they had eaten fast food in the last 24 hours tended to have much higher levels of two separate phthalates-DEHP and DiNP. People who reported eating only a little fast food had DEHP levels that were 15.5 percent higher and DiNP levels that were 25 percent higher than those who said they had eaten none. For people who reported eating a sizable amount, the increase was 24 percent and 39 percent, respectively.

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