According to a study, those who eat seafood often may be more likely to be exposed to harmful “forever chemicals.”
The study, which was published on Friday in Exposure and Health, found that fresh lobster and shrimp from a market in coastal New Hampshire had the highest worrying concentrations of these PFAS chemicals out of all the species studied.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl compounds, or PFAS, are discharged into the environment by a number of sources, including as everyday household goods, firefighting foam varieties, and industrial waste.
These artificial substances have poisoned the country’s water supplies and the animals that live in them, and they have been connected to multiple cancer kinds.
The authors of the study pointed out that although scientists have long been evaluating the presence of PFAS in freshwater fish, seafood has received less attention up to this point.
“Most existing research focuses on PFAS levels in freshwater species, which are not what people primarily eat,” corresponding author Megan Romano, an associate professor of epidemiology at Dartmouth College’s Geisel School of Medicine, said in a statement.
The scientists combined the findings of a statewide study of eating practices in New Hampshire with an examination of PFAS contents in fresh fish to get their conclusions. The authors pointed out that nationwide studies have demonstrated that New England is one of the top seafood-consuming regions. The researchers examined samples of the most popular marine foods in the region, including cod, haddock, lobster, salmon, scallops, shrimp, and tuna, to determine the concentrations of 26 distinct PFAS species, of which there are hundreds.
According to the study, even though they bought the seafood fresh from the coastal New Hampshire market, it came from different parts of the country.
They discovered that PFAS concentrations were generally lower in other forms of seafood, but the local market basket shrimp and lobster consistently had the highest amounts.
The scientists then used a ratio of the ingested daily dose of the chemicals to their respective federal or state safe consumption levels to assess the risk of exposure to three specific PFAS offenders: PFOS, PFNA, and PFUnDA.
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