Your food may be safe. Its packaging is another story.

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A sweeping new study shows why you should ditch plastic food wrapping whenever possible.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Most people decide if it’s safe to eat an old tub of yogurt in the fridge or canned tuna in the back of the cupboard by checking its sell-by date. But no label indicates that pesticides, phthalates, PFAS, or other hazardous chemicals could be seeping from those containers into your food.

Of more than 15,000 chemicals that come in contact with food, a new peer-reviewed study found that 1,222 pose serious health risks such as cancer and reproductive harm. And the vast majority — 87 percent, or more than 13,200 — lack enough accessible information to even estimate their risks.

The fact that there’s not enough publicly available information for independent scientists to assess the safety of chemicals that can contaminate food is “the elephant in the room,” said study co-author Jane Muncke, managing director at the nonprofit Food Packaging Forum Foundation, which led the research, published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Consumers trust that when regulators allow chemicals in products like food packaging, it’s because it’s been through safety testing, Muncke said. “But that’s not the case,” she said. “And it doesn’t make sense.”

The team has done a “very, very good job” highlighting how little is known about the risks of substances that affect everyone, said Maricel Maffini, an independent chemical safety and regulation expert who was not involved in the study but has collaborated with Muncke in the past.

Because the study focused on a list that people in industry and regulators regard as reliable, it’s looking under the proverbial lamppost, Maffini said. While there’s plenty of information suggesting that many of these chemicals should not be on the market or should have stronger regulations, she said, there’s so much information beyond that list that’s missing.

In previous work, Muncke and her team identified more than 15,000 chemicals used in food processing or packaging from lists of substances approved by regulators in the United States, China, Japan, and countries in Europe and South America or that had been identified in studies. In the new paper, they analyzed that “jaw-dropping” number of chemicals, Muncke said, to flag the most problematic.

To maximize the utility of their priority list, the team used only data obtained from governmental and regulatory agencies linking a chemical to human health hazards such as cancer, reproductive harm, or ability to concentrate in the body.