Copyright 2012 -Kris Heeter, Ph.D.

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If you are like me, you may not have realized that nanoparticles have been added unknowingly to many of our consumer products and materials that food comes into contact with.

Engineered nanoparticles (ENPs) have been one of the fastest growing markets in the last decade. Nanomaterials can occur naturally, they can be produced unintentionally, e.g. some exhausts, and they can be created or engineered.

ENPs are now being used or will soon be used in everything from computers, medical products and procedures, food, and consumer products.

How small these engineered particles?

Nanotechnology has been defined by the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative as: "the understanding and control of matter at dimensions of roughly 1 to 100 nanometers".

To put the size further into perspective:

a red blood cell is roughly 7,000 nanometers wide

a human hair is roughly 80,000 nanometers wide

a sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick



