Don't pack food in newspapers. It can give you cancer!

Street food vendors often use scrap newspaper for wrapping food because it is cheap. In fact, most of us also use newspaper at home to remove excess oil from deep-fried items. However, doing so can give you cancer!

Yes, you heard it right. Newspapers use a special ink that contains hazardous chemicals that could affect the quality of food and can cause serious health problems like digestive disorders, toxicity, cancer, failure of vital organs, and weakening of the immune system.

In fact, just recently, the Chhattisgarh government asked vendors and consumers to avoid using newspapers for packing food items. The state Food and Drug Administration (FDA) department official told PTI that if despite warnings, a vendor continues the practice, a complaint should be registered with the FDA.


This is not the first time, though, that such a warning has been issued.

In 2019, officials in Chennai prohibited the storage, distribution and sale of food items packaged in printed newspaper.

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) had earlier also warned that the printing ink contains cancer-causing agents that can cause severe health issues. "Indians are slowly being poisoned due to newspaper being widely used as food packaging material by small hotels, vendors and also in homes in lieu of absorbent paper," FSSAI had said in a 2016 press statement.

"Foods contaminated by newspaper ink raise serious health concerns since the ink contains multiple bioactive materials with known negative health effects. Printing inks also contain harmful colours, pigments, binders, additives, and preservatives. Besides, chemical contaminants, presence of pathogenic microorganisms in used newspapers also pose potential risk to human health," FSSAI had warned.

As per FSSAI, newspapers and recycled papers may have mettalic contaminants like mineral oils and harmful chemicals like phthalates which can cause digestive problems and also lead to severe toxicity.