Flame retardant chemical found in butter

These cookies won’t catch fire

If you’re like me, you’ve been doing some serious baking lately. So many family gatherings, so many trays of cookies to cart all over town!

Of course, those cookies have something in common — butter. Creamy and rich, it gives my favorite chocolate chip cookies their irresistible texture.

Unfortunately, I just read about a study that has me eyeing those cookies suspiciously, wondering if I hit the wrong number on the butter roulette wheel. (More on that later.)

Environmental researchers at the University of Texas School of Public Health recently pulled some butter off the shelves at local grocery stores to test for contaminants.

And, well, it turns out that the butter is safe from bursting into flame. Good to know, right?

What in the world am I talking about?

Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs).

They’re found in insulation and gadgets. And now…butter. But, of course, they’re not supposed to be in ANY foods. But there they were — in a stick of butter. The level of the chemicals was even higher in the wrapper.

In animal studies, PBDEs have been linked to liver cancer and neurobehavioral changes. The extent of health effects on humans are not fully known.

Other coverage of this contamination is quick to point out that only one stick out of the ten purchased for the study had “extremely high levels” of PBDEs. Hey, that’s 10 percent, though — nothing to sneeze at– and they don’t define what an “extremely high” level is, exactly. I’m not too comfortable with butter having “moderately high” levels, or “somewhat high,” or heck, even “medium” or “low”! This stuff doesn’t belong in food, period.

And then I start thinking about the fact that nobody’s sure exactly how the PBDEs ended up in the butter, and the fact that a 40-pound child would bypass the Environmental Protection Agency’s daily safe exposure level before he’s finished a piece of buttered toast (3 percent of a stick will do it). And I start to wonder what, if anything is going to be done about these findings.

Now, about my “roulette wheel” comment. I know what you’re wondering, because it’s the same thing I want to know — who made the contaminated butter? The only thing the researchers will say is that it came from a large, well-known Midwestern company. They don’t want to point any fingers, they say. How nice.

And of course, the National Milk Producers Federation is saying this is an isolated incident that isn’t representative of butter in general. How exactly they know that — well, I’m not sure.

In the meantime, I’m not into playing the odds. I’m sticking to locally produced organic butter from farms I trust.

P.S. For the dairy industry, butter may be the least of their worries, especially once enough people get wind of how they may be robbing us of our health by keeping a powerful natural medicine out of our hands. How are they doing it? Click here to find out.

Sources:
“Contamination of U.S. Butter with PBDEs from Wrapping Paper,” Environmental Health Perspectives (ehp03.niehs.nih.gov)
“Study: Flame retardant found in small butter sample,” The Chart (pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com)