This is Your Food on Drugs

Our food supply's got a serious drug problem. We're talking A&E Intervention-level kind of addiction. Edibles from seafood to veggies are experimenting with both prescription and over-the-counter medications. Our foods need help, and fast.

According to an NPR story, shrimp are the latest to develop a drug habit. Alex Ford, a scientist at England's University of Portsmouth, found that the presence of Prozac in water is making shrimp act recklessly. As NPR reported, "When a drug like Prozac bumps up a shrimp's serotonin levels, the crustacean is much more likely to abandon shadowy, safe water and swim towards the light, where it makes a tempting target for predators." While Prozac acts as an antidepressant in people, it causes shrimp to act pretty suicidal.

Fish meddle with medications, too. A study conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey found that fish like largemouth bass are exposed to chemicals and hormones from drugs like birth control pills. These hormones actually cause fish to become "intersex," with male sex organs producing immature female eggs.

The drug use isn't just occurring in waterways, either. As I recently wrote here on Change.org, scientists at Ohio's University of Toledo found that soybeans can absorb pharmaceuticals and other chemicals from irrigation water. If soybeans can suck up drugs from water, it stands to reason that other crops can, too. Shrimp, fish, produce — this widespread pharmaceutical use in the food world makes 1980s' nightclubs look like convents.

But like most addictions, food's drug problem stems from another source — namely, us. People take a host of medications on a daily basis, everything from birth control pills to aspirin to antihistamines to a variety of prescription drugs. Residues from these drugs get excreted and flushed down the toilet along with, ahem, other waste.  A sewage treatment plant cleanses the crap out of this water (literally), sending it back into waterways. Bacteria and other harmful compounds get removed during the treatment process, but pharmaceutical residues stick around. Scientists are just beginning to discover how those drugs may impact wildlife, our food supply, and human health.

I don't know how we can get drugs out of the water supply — in fact, people way smarter than I are pretty stumped by this conundrum, too. But it's clear that properly treating wastewater requires more than the status quo. More research needs to be done to really get a handle on the problem, but for our sake — and the sake of our food supply — I hope scientists can come up with with a 12-step solution.

Photo credit: somegeekintn via Flickr