Our parents keep nagging us that we must always eat home-cooked food, as it's not just affordable, but also healthy and more nourishing.
And a recent study has revealed that cooking your own meals can prevent you from toxic chemicals that are linked to cause infertility and cancer.
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The study was conducted at the Silent Spring Institute where they discovered that people who ate home-cooked food more often showed lesser presence of PFAs or polyfluoroalkyl in their body. This chemical is commonly present in fast-food packaging, wrappers etc.
Polyfluoroalkyl was discovered in the 1930s and made possible common household items like non-stick cookware, foam that extinguishes fire etc.
In the study, researchers analysed data from 10,000 American citizens pertaining to their dining habits, as well as blood work, looking for the presence of PFAs, denoting what eating habit results were best and worst with respect to PFA presence in the blood.
They were able to find out that people who commonly dined at restaurants had a surprisingly higher number of PFAs in their body. While the researchers didn't look deep into the packaging the food was brought in, they feel the more contact a food has with the wrappers and packaging, the higher is the PFA levels in it.
Results revealed that people cooking food at home after getting groceries themselves resulted in drastically lower PFA levels.?
APOLLORESTAURANT.US/Reuters
According to Dr Laurel Schaider, a Silent Spring chemist and study co-author, "This is the first study to observe a link between different sources of food and PFAS exposures in the US population. Our results suggest migration of PFAS chemicals from food packaging into food can be an important source of exposure to these chemicals."
While no perfect protection against PFAs exists, by consuming home-cooked food, the chances of it coming in contact with your body reduces gradually.