"What's Flame Retardant Doing in Your Butter?"

"At the same time that you're buttering your morning toast, you also may be slathering it with the tiny amounts of the flame retardant PBDE.

In a study to be published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers found that each of 10 samples of butter purchased at five Dallas grocery stores contained various types of PBDEs.

Although it was a limited sampling and the amounts were small enough to be measured in trillionths of a gram per gram of butter, lead researcher Arnold Schecter said the concentration was the highest found so far in food.

"This is a brominated flame retardant. It should not be in butter at all," said Schecter, professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Dallas."
 
Sandy Bauers reports for the Philadelphia Inquirer December 7, 2010.