Hidden Chemicals: The Toxic Kitchen Mistake Almost Everyone Makes

0:03Darin Olien:Welcome to Super Life with me, Darin Olien, a podcast where we explore, discover, and share solutions that promote a healthier life and a better world. Together, we'll ignite possibilities, inspire change, and build sovereignty, creating a roadmap towards a super life for you and for all. Get ready to start living your super life.

0:34Darin Olien:By 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. Over 500 toothpaste tubes have been thrown away since I've started this ad. You don't think of these small little things, but they add up a lot over time, and we can do something about it. That ends up to be over a billion plastic toothpaste tubes a year alone that ultimately end up in our environment and in our waterways and ultimately ends up in the ocean. Do you want to add to this or do you want to do something different? Plus, maybe that exposure to that plastic, getting the plasticizers and the endocrine disruptors and then putting that toothpaste in your mouth also is not a good idea.

1:23Darin Olien:There's some great solutions. You can DIY stuff. I've got many of these in my fatal conveniences. But the easy ones that I use every day and I'm about to travel a lot more and the traveling makes them really easy, I go to bite. I bite down on a little tablet, which is not interacting with any plastics because it's in a glass bottle. And it's refillable and reusable and sustainable. And there's no unwanted toxic fluorides, flow agents, and solvents in my mouth. So my favorite is this Bite Toothpaste. 100 % home, compostable pouches, subscription models. You don't even have to think about it again.

2:09Darin Olien:You're helping you by putting clean products in your mouth, and you're helping the environment because Bite Toothpaste is one of the best companies I've seen looking at all aspects of their supply chain and their refillable, reusable, sustainable, regenerative practices. So Bite is offering you, all my listeners, 20 % off your first order. Go to trybite.com, T-R-Y-B-I-T-E forward slash Darren20 or just use the promo code Darren20, D-A-R-I-N, and you can get 20 % off your first order with a great new toothpaste without using the tube. So you just pick up dinner. The warm bag is in your hand. There's a little grease that's starting to darken on the paper or at the bottom of the corner.

3:00And there's a translucent stain that you see. But you've seen this a thousand times. But this time, it stands out. You set it on the counter, you open the box, steam rises off the food, and the plastic clamshell or container is a little fogged from the inside, and that's a little condensing. But it's not just water. Right now, in that 15-minute window between the kitchen and your table, heat and fat are doing something to that packaging. And these molecules that were never meant to be eaten are moving out of the plastic, out of the coating on the paper, into the oil, into the sauce, and then into you as you eat it.

3:53This is the episode where we talk about the wrapper, the wrapping, the packaging. Because, listen, we're always obsessed over what we're eating. We should be. We should be more so because of processing and all that stuff. However, I want to raise more of your attention. I'm enrolling you to understand what your food is packaged in. Because we focus on ingredients and calories and sourcing and superfoods and all of that stuff. And that's important, yes. However, we completely ignore some of the processing and certainly the container that is actually sitting in. the thing that's touching your food what is it made out of what is it how did it get to whatever the hell shape it is how did it push away grease how did the food not stick to it it goes on and on and on today there's finally a piece of federal legislation trying to do something about it i do get exhausted over federal regulations trying to do something i love it when there's a win however I love it better that you take control, that you take your sovereignty back.

5:11However, this new legislation is called the No Toxins in Food Packaging Act. That should tell you something. This is not conspiracy. There's stuff, chemicals, toxins in packaging that's getting into your food. So I want to walk you through exactly why it's there. what it's doing its function for sure why it had to be written also that this act this new federal act is there in the first place and what the actual science says is happening on the cellular level because we're not talking about that as we reheat it as we shove it in as we take it home as takeaway as we have leftovers so today i want to give you something to think about something to take action on, protocols to use so that you can eliminate, change, transform this fatal convenience.

6:10So the convenience we've all ignored is that there's packaging. It's lightweight, it's cheap, it's greaseproof, it's waterproof, damn PFAS. It's microwave safe. I'd never use a microwave. it's durable it lasts it has oxygen barriers so it's all to get you the door dash damn food quick easy effective so you can eat this hot food that you just click some buttons for there itself is an issue but i digress it's how it was designed it's not inert it's not just a thing that's sitting there having no influence. To get plastic to be flexible or paper to repel oil or a can lining to resist corrosion of a liquid, manufacturers add chemicals that never chemically bonded into the material.

7:10They're not permanently in the material. They're on the material. They're just physically blended into it. Plasticizers like orthophthalates, endocrine disruptors. Resin components like bisphenol A, another endocrine disruptor. Fluorinated grease blockers, PFAS. You've heard me talk about it. It's carcinogenic. None of these are locked in place on these containers in these packaging. They are by their very chemistry engineered to migrate under stress. The heat, the fat interaction, the time, the contact, these are the types of stress that help it migrate off of the packaging and into the food.

7:59So this fatal convenience isn't takeout per se. It isn't even plastic directly, specifically. It's the unexamined assumption that if something is legal to sell, it must be safe to eat or to eat from in this case. That assumption is the biggest fatal convenience. That assumption is what we're talking about in this episode. And it's the assumption Congress now has on and in their paperwork trying to walk back because it's an issue. On June 9th, 2026, a group of federal lawmakers introduced the No Toxics in Food Packaging Act, H.R. 9231, in the House, led by representatives Jan Schawowski and Rosa DeLaro and S.

9:024724 in the Senate, led by Senator Richard Blumman. Lumenthal with nearly a dozen co-sponsors. I don't even like talking about just a full disclosure. I don't even like talking about federal stuff because I have very little faith that they're going to act on this stuff. But this bill, and there is wins, and it is important to push back. It is important that there is movement. This bill, what it actually does is deceptively simple. It amends the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to explicitly deem 15 chemicals or chemical classes to be unsafe for use as food contact substances, meaning they could no longer legally touch food during production, during the processing, the packaging, transport, or reusable serving ware.

10:00This is amazing. The headline names are the ones you'd expect, or the phthalates, the bisphenols, the PFAS, the sterene, all a bunch of stuff that you don't even know. Trioxides. So these representatives are leading this, citing liver disease, hormone disruption as documented outcomes of this exposure. This is not the bill's first attempt. A narrower version was introduced back in 2023. This version is broader, covering more chemicals. So this is great. One detail worth sitting with, this bill does not preempt state law. It's on the floor, not a ceiling. States can still go further on their own.

10:51Our community can push for our states to do more. But right now, without it, there is no federal floor at all. So what happens? The migration of these chemicals in your food is not hypothetical. It's measured. Didn't come from the manufacturers. It came from us pushing for it. Let's start with a mechanism because I don't want this to be abstract, right? A 2025 systematic review in the Journal of Reviews on Environmental Health pooled 67 separate studies, more than 5 ,300 food samples, not a small amount, specifically testing for phthalates, bisphenols, PFAS, actually migrating out of the packaging and into the food.

11:45The findings were unambiguous. Phthalates, bisphenol, all migrated from packaging into the food across all the studies reviewed. And the researchers identified the exact conditions that made it even worse. Higher temperatures, so think about a hot soup in plastic and you're taking home to eat. Horrible idea. Longer exposure sitting in there had higher and higher. Higher fat contents pulled more toxins out. More acid foods pulled more toxins out. Those details matter more than almost anything because you could do something about it. Phthalates and bisphenols are lipophilic. So they love fat. They love it.

12:35So when there's fat in the food, most food has a level of fat, they don't dissolve much in the water, but they dissolve readily into the oil. So the foods most likely to pull these chemicals out of the packaging are precisely the foods we most often put in the packaging. Greasy resistance packaging, meat cheese fried foods sauces anything that's swimming around oil and in contact with food packaging is getting a huge amount on a molecular level of the phthalates and the plastics and all of that stuff it migrates faster in these hypo lipophilic foods so heat doesn't just accelerate migration. It multiplies it.

13:32Here's where it gets more urgent. A widely cited 2023 study published in the Environmental Science and Technology found that just three minutes of microwaving a plastic container could release as many as, hold on to your britches, 4.22 million microplastic particles and 2.11 billion nanoparticles from a single square centimeter of plastic surface. Take that in for a second. A single square centimeter into the billions and billions of microplastics and nanoplastics. Before we continue the pod, I want to share something.

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15:53Darin Olien:Go to manavitality.com. That's M-A-N-N-A vitality.com. Use the code DAREN20 and you get 20 % off your order. This isn't about health. It's about living in harmony with your greatest and highest potential. Greenpeace International's 2026 review of 24 peer-reviewed studies on the exact question referenced reinforced it from another angle. Microwavable containers release dozens of intentionally added chemical substances, plus over 100 additional non-intentional added substances into the food. It stimulates this from the heat. In real food, not lab stimulants, researchers found the same patterns, plasticizers and antioxidants migrating out of the heat packaging into meat and veggie.

16:51In one particularly unsettling finding, a UV stabilizer additive in the plastic actually reacted with starch in the food during microwaves. I can go on and on. And one more number worth remembering, polypropylene and polystyrene containers that had been stored in the fridge or freezer were then microwave releasing somewhere between 100 ,000 and 260 ,000 microplastic particles in that single heating session. Cold storage followed by hot reheating migrated more. The label microwavable safe does not test for any of this. So that's completely misleading to you, the customer. PFAS deserves their own section altogether because they behave differently than phthalates, BPAs.

17:57They're not added for flexibility. PFAS was added specifically to make paper, paperboard packaging, greaseproof and water resistant. That's why you can buy something that looks like cardboard, put food in it, and it doesn't completely fall apart. That's not a miracle. That is a miracle of science of PFAS. An early Silent Spring Institute study found PFAS in nearly half of the paper wrappers and roughly a fifth of the boxes tested across 27 fast food chains. A follow-up study from the same group found something even more direct. People who ate more fast food, more takeout, and pizza had measurably higher plus levels in their blood than people who cook and eat at home.

18:53I think you can add all of that up. If you eat food at home, it's cheaper, it's better, it's healthier, and it doesn't have a bunch of chemicals. The FDA did announce in 2024 that manufacturers had voluntarily phased certain FOS grease-proofing agents out of the U.S. market. That is real progress, but there's thousands and thousands of different types of PFOS. But we need to push more. So what? You've heard me talk about this. What does this do in the body? So what actually happens once the compounds are ingested? Bisphenol A is structurally close enough to estradiol, your body's primary estrogen.

19:37That is nuts and crazy just to think that a chemical being used in plasticizers is mimicking that of primary estrogen. It can bind to these estrogen receptors. It can mimic or interfere with hormone signaling in your body. your master communicator of your body. That's the textbook definition of an endocrine disruptor, a chemical that hijacks the signaling system of your reproductive and metabolic health. Just take a beat on that. This is, again, not meant to be a Debbie Downer. This is meant to wake up and make another choice. These studies just continue and continue. And then there's cancer. The Environmental Defense Fund analysis cited directly in support of this bill found that the FDA currently allows eight known human carcinogens and 17 probable human carcinogens to remain approved for food contact use.

20:47not eight chemicals that were approved decades ago and forgotten, eight and 17 that are still very much active, still legal, still touching your food today. How is that even possible? Why would that be so possible? That gap between rising incidence and absence of genetic explanation is exactly where the environmental and dietary exposures like these become impossible to ignore. Now, here's the part that made me the most angry. If you don't already know, I'm passionate about this stuff. Because it explains why we need an act of Congress instead of just trusting the agencies that are underfunded, undermanned.

21:37Since 1958, new substances added to food have technically required the FDA to review as food additives. But there's a separate category, grass, which is generally recognized as safe, that was originally meant for things like vinegar, black pepper, ingredients, so long established that formal review would be pointless. Their food, their herbs. But in 1997, the FDA opened a side door. Companies could self-affirm. There's also some good stuff with that, some substances out in the wild that we didn't use before, but it's a side door for other things. An environmental working group analysis found that between 2000 and 2024, companies voluntarily notified the FDA about 863 new substances through generally recognized as safe.

22:33While in that same 24-year window, the FDA's formal food additive review process approved only seven new substances, seven through the door, an unknown uncounted number through the side door because self-affirmation. Environmental working groups estimate nearly 99 % of the new food chemicals have entered the market through this loophole. Not tested, not supported, and in fact, quite dangerous. This isn't hypothetical. This isn't a hypothetical risk. In 2022, tar flour, a self-affirmed grass ingredient nobody had notified the FDA about it, was linked to nearly 400 people becoming seriously ill with liver injury.

23:25So this stuff is going on. This is precisely why this piece of legislation, like the No Toxins in Food Packaging Act, period, has to name specific chemicals explicitly in the statutes rather than trusting the existing very incompetent review process to catch them because it's not working. And you are not waiting for Congress. Either am I. The bill may take years, but I wanted to let you know about it. the immediate transfer that you can do, the single highest leverage habit in this entire conversation in this episode, the moment takeout crosses your threshold. Before you sit down, before your hunger and impatience kicks in, transfer the food out of the package, out of the plastic, out of the grease-resistant paper as quickly, as powerfully as you can and put it in glass and ceramic.

24:28That's even if you're eating this takeaway, most of it being junk. But I understand. Some of you do it in a pinch. Get it out of the plastic containers because contamination builds up over time. Every single time, all the time, when the food is hot and it's sitting there for a long period of time, it adds the accelerant of more and more of these chemicals getting in the food, which is then getting in your body. Never microwave in plastic. Full stop. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever. These are takeaways. Eliminate plastics that are stamped number three, number six, number seven from your kitchen entirely.

25:09Get rid of them. Throw them away responsibly. You can recycle codes three, six, and seven. Recycle them. Get rid of them. Stop trusting the words microwave safe. Full stop. Stop doing it. It doesn't exist. Retire old, scratched up, cloudy plastic containers immediately. Get rid of them. They're no good unless you're putting nails or screws or whatever you are in your home improvement closet. Treat grease resistant paper the same as plastic. That paper, all of that takeaway paper is PFAS riddled. You don't want those forever chemicals in your body. Default to glass, stainless steel, pure, pure, pure silicone for anything that touches food, especially when it's hot and fatty food.

26:00Keep a couple of glass containers with lids in your car. So if you are grabbing these, you can go to your trunk, put those directly in the glass containers so that you don't have this for further exposure and for your kids. And use your voice. This bill needs public support survival. The 2023 version didn't have it. That's why I'm telling you about it. Contact your representatives, support the organizations backing this legislation and realize and know that some of them are not backing. Don't buy their food. Phthalates, bisphenols, PFAS are not chemically bonded into packaging. Remember that. They are designed to migrate.

26:43and heat, fat, and time are exactly what triggers that migration. You can do something about it. Just three minutes in a microwave can release millions and millions and millions, if not billions, of nanoplastic particles into your food. PFAS and grease-resistant wrappers correlates directly with higher PFAS blood levels And we still don't know the massive ramifications of a lot of metabolic issues with PFOS. It's dangerous. It's carcinogenic. It's causing a lot of issues. And it builds up in the body. The FDA currently allows eight known and 17 probable human carcinogens to remain approved. So those packaging are not safe.

27:32Your protocol tonight, transfer every takeout meal to glass ceramic immediately. Buy them, invest in them, have them with you. Never microwave in plastic ever. Eliminate number three, number six, and number seven plastics from your world entirely and retire them immediately. Here's what I want you to walk away with. Power, sovereignty. This isn't about fear. This is about the freedom of your choice. If you don't know, you don't know and you can't make a choice. That's kind of life. The more awareness you have, the more choice you have. Take back a decision that's been made for you silently by regulatory systems, by food manufacturers, by wrapping horrible things and touching your food.

28:18You can do something about that. You don't need to wait for the bill to pass. You need a way to transfer that food. Obviously, cook your own food. That's the number one takeaway. Cook your own food. Put it in glass containers, ceramic, stainless steel, and you don't have to worry about it. But you can do something about it. If you are buying these foods, you can transfer them. If this episode moved you, good. If it annoyed you, okay. Then you get to look at that and make an improvement in your life. That's what we get to do. So keep in mind, I'm always going to be a beacon for this for you. There are people doing it.

28:55There's a company. I don't even know if I can tell us, but I am. There is a company that I know, I know them personally, that are moving into this field, in already moving into this world of food packaging, but they have an algae-based, clean product that performs like PFAS, but it isn't PFAS. There is hope. There is change happening. That company is called Tarum Labs. Big shout out to them standing for something different and then making it so that it can be scalable. And it also doesn't cost more. So there's no reason these manufacturers need to use this toxic material anymore. Innovation is there.

29:37Awareness is there. Let's push back. Let's create a safe home. Let's create safe food and let's live our super life. This is super life. Waking up to the reality of where we're at so that we can change something else. I'm Darren O 'Lean. Please take care of yourself and take a good look at what actually is touching your food so that you can do something about it. Peace. I love you. Bunch of notes in the show notes, bibliographies. You can check out all the research. It's there for you. Pass this episode on so all the moms, all the people controlling the household can be empowered. Share this wide and we make change.

30:18Peace.