Is aluminum foil for pharmaceutical use harmful to our health?

Aluminum foil has now become our daily necessities, and you can see aluminum foil materials widely in kitchens or drugstores. Some people may wonder, isn’t aluminum foil metal? Will it be harmful to our health? Today, Huawei Aluminum will answer your doubts in this regard.

First of all, it is certain that aluminum foil will not be harmful to our bodies. Including the pharmaceutical foil, alu alu foil, and pharma foil that we often see oil medicine packaging and others.

However, as a daily precaution, strong acid products or foods containing a lot of salt should not be stored in aluminum foil. Acid or salt-for example from sliced ​​apples, pickled cucumbers, cheese, or sausage meat-can release aluminum ions from the foil, which may migrate to the food. The manufacturer clearly pointed out this aspect on the packaging. The purpose of this is to ensure that the limit of 5 mg per kilogram of food set by the European Council as a preventive measure is not exceeded.

“If you follow certain rules, it is completely safe to use aluminum foil as a packaging material.” -Dr. Ulrich Nehring.

The magical place of aluminum foil packaging

The use of aluminum foil is an indispensable feature of pharmaceutical factories: it provides effective protection against light, oxygen, moisture and bacteria. Due to its characteristics, aluminum foil prolongs the shelf life of medicines, thus making a significant contribution to avoiding waste of medicines. For this reason, aluminum foil is also often used as one of many components in a composite packaging system, for example, from the familiar material used to package UHT milk. Here, the thickness of the aluminum foil can be only 0.006 mm, in other words, even thinner than a human hair.

However, according to current scientific research, aluminum intake does not cause health hazards to ordinary healthy consumers: According to the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA), from a physiological point of view, it is safe to consume one milligram of aluminum per kilogram of body weight. For people weighing 70 kg, the limit for aluminum is 70 mg per week. A person with healthy kidneys quickly eliminates 99.9% of aluminum through the kidneys.

Moreover, according to recent scientific research, the WHO Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) has increased the tolerable absorption limit of aluminum to 2 mg aluminum per kilogram of body weight, which means that we can completely avoid worrying about the impact of aluminum foil products on our health. What’s the bad effect.