Should you cover foods with aluminium foil?

Aluminium foil has become an irreplaceable part in our life, and a huge amount of foil waste is produced every day. On the one hand, household aluminium foil brings about convenience that we never enjoy before. On the other hand, however, we are more and more seized by a terror that excessive usage of aluminium tin foil in cooking might push us into an abyss of serious diseases. Reports say that adults naturally take in on average 1 to 10mg aluminium daily through through water, processed foods, and contamination through cookware and utensils. It’s also reported that consuming higher than average levels of aluminum may be linked to nervous system, brain, bone diseases, and puts you at risk of anemia, especially when your kidneys aren’t able to filter it out of you in time.

While doctors advise not to use aluminium household foil in your cooking too much, experts believe that there’s no health risk as long as you use it properly. Acidic foods should not be wrapped by it because they corrode the foil. These foods include tomato ketchup, tomato sauces, lemon slices, things with lots of vinegar and so on. Some people tries to avoid taking in aluminum by adding a layer of plastic cling wrap inside aluminium tin foil before cooking foods, which is not recommendable, for plastics tend to bring about greater health risks. Experts say plastics is a continuous carrier of organic toxic pollutants and hundreds of thousands of ocean animals die from plastic pollution. Although there’s no definite research proving connection between human diseases and plastic pollutants, the health risk of plastics has been universally acknowledged.

The best way, maybe, is to avoid using both aluminium housed foil and plastics. This benefits ourselves and the coming generations. Environmental protection has been a critical problem for decades, and continuous development will be the only solution.