I searched this article for specific evidence of PFAS-related harms. What I found was
- PFAS increases liver and kidney weight of rats (in unspecified conditions)
- PFAS can kill monkeys (in some unspecified large dose)
- A baby was born with birth defects near a DuPont plant manufacturing PFAS (no further information, just this n=1 coincidence)
- PFAS was associated with a decrease in post-vaccination immune response to certain vaccines (in one small observational study? how did they come up with this, I thought it was disrupting the liver? smells of HARK-ing and p-hacking.)
All the rest of the article's words are devoted to theoretical speculation and background, much of it entirely unrelated (e.g. the Faroe Islands mercury studies, which seem to have provided much stronger evidence of harm than they have for PFAS). The article suggests that, if you believed all the research about the harms of PFAS, you would think they were a sort of all-powerful super-contaminant. This sounds suspicious to me rather than credible.
Clearly we need more research, and I'm philosophically opposed to contaminating the environment with weird forever chemicals as much as anyone else. But I'm struggling to understand what we know now that scares us so much. Could PFAS concerns be partly some kind of enviro-moral panic?
The first 3 links are press releases by an academic PR office publicizing a recently published paper. They literally link to the scientific paper they reference, and being the second step in the science news cycle (https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174), their representation of the contents of the paper is usually fairly accurate. This is not a valid criticism of the GP.
PFAS non-sticking cookware is quite deadly for pet birds[0].
Teflon themselves have an article acknowledging it[1].
Now I know that our respiratory systems are much more resilient than those of birds, but out of precaution I'd still rather not be the one to test the long-term effects of cooking with those on humans.
> out of precaution I'd still rather not be the one to test the long-term effects of cooking with those on humans.
At this point that experiment already happened on previous generations, yah?
I want further research and restrictions on these things, because even the marginal effects on populations of billions means millions of people harmed, but we're so many decades in that "only beginning to understand" seems a bit overstated - if the effect size was hugely toxic wouldn't we have seen it by now (like cigarettes). Life expectancy plateauing or starting to tail off is not great, but there are a lot more obvious causes for a lot of that, and it's not critical yet.
I would rather be more proactive about new stuff in general than focused retrospectively on PFAS.
Chocolate (Theobromine), Coffee (caffeine) and Candies (Xylitol) can kill a dog [0]. That doesn't indicate that they are bad for humans, so I would be careful to draw conclusions. It is called "canary in the coal mine" because birds are extremely sensitive to gases, luckily we aren't.
The point is to have an early warning in a situation where gas concentration potentially increases from harmless to dangerous levels, as in a mine shaft, where ventilation is limited. Something that is harmful in low doses to a bird isn't necessarily so to us, until it is too late, which makes the bird useful as an early warning signaller so people can get out early when the dose is still harmless and thus not easily detectable.
Caffeine overdoses are too common among people and I've known friends that have died or almost died from them. (I'm strongly on the never side for caffeine pill usage as the risk of an OD from coffee is much lower and involves a lot more liquid sitting on your bladder.)
Theobromine in chocolate (and tea and other places) is a Caffeine relative that in us humans has a 1/10th to 1/100th the efficacy on our caffeine receptors. In dogs that relationship is reversed and theobromine is their caffeine and death by chocolate is their caffeine overdose.
People can overdose on theobromine too, it just takes much higher quantities still than caffeine.
Which yes, aligns with your point that doses matter, but the other thing useful thing to note about the Theobromine/Caffeine relationship is that subtly different but related chemicals have wildly different effects on different metabolisms. It's not just dose that matters, but also exploring the repercussions of entire families of chemicals (and the products they break down into) because you also need to know if a "cousin" chemical has larger efficacy at lower doses in people. (Results on small animals are still an early warning sign, the directions they may warn about aren't just exposure time or dosage amount, but also related chemicals and receptor paths and many other things.)
We are in agreement then - the dose makes the poison, and animals reacting much more sensitively than humans doesn’t mean we can’t safely consume something, since at some point, everything is a poison, be it water or oxygen.
Isn't this a false equivelance fallacy? Genuine question, I am not an expert on fallacies.
In any case, would it not be safer to assume the possibility of harmful impact of Chemical X until more concrete data is gathered? Granted, the fear mongering in the media needs to pump the brakes, but err on the side of caution, and all that.
Then again, where does the burden of proof lie; on PFAS not being harmful? That doesn't sound right either.
Thinking of poisons in binaries is false - the dose makes the poison. You are eating "poisons" every day, and it is impossible not to. Plants create poisons to defend their seeds against herbivores, but you don't die when eating nuts or grains, because your body has adapted. Water will kill you if you drink too much of it. So the question is not "is this a poison", but "at what dose is this a poison".
You could argue that with food, there is a necessary trade-off, but with PFAS there isn't, because we don't need it to survive. But that is true for most of modern civilisation, and what you then end up with is the "this substance is known to the state of California to cause cancer" on basically everything.
You are right that this becomes a difficult problem of epistemology. Basically, it is impossible to prove "this is safe", only the opposite, and often it is not easy to prove conclusively. I'm not sure where the right balance lies, either.
> Thinking of poisons in binaries is false - the dose makes the poison.
This is true, but by itself this model presents an incomplete picture for assessing the risk of PFAS. Two additional models are important: bioaccumulation and half-life.
PFAS stick around (pardon the pun) in the environment. They are biomagnified upwards through the food chain. If we are releasing them into the environment at a greater rate than they are degrading, then the biosphere is building up a reservoir of PFAS whose acute effects in humans will lag their release into the environment.
Additionally, it is hard to assess the lethal dose of something over a lifespan vs. an acute exposure. This is because slow poisons tend to pick up correlations and interactions with other illnesses as they progress over time (e.g. someone who struggles to get out of bed because of a persistent infection will also get less exercise and sunlight). So the long-term effects of things on the body tend to be less tractable research questions and thus have a negative bias in the scientific literature, which can easily be mistaken for "evidence of absence". This is why the precautionary principle is important for anything that is as pervasive as PFAS.
Bioaccumulation is a good point, but then its just the question of dosage viewed over time.
Agree with long-term effects - this is really hard. The precautionary principle is dangerous in that you could justify the most draconian COVID measures like lockdowns with them, which in hindsight were unwarranted and unprecedented over-reach, having no positive effect at all.
I don’t think there is a recipe that can be easily followed, you have to have very good people, both intellectually and ethically, and even then its still hard.
All cooking can cause cancer regardless of the method used.
"Total concentrations were 1.9-5.3 times higher during cooking than in the background air but, for some compounds, differences of tens or hundreds of times were registered. PM10 from grilled pork was found to contribute to non-negligible cancer risks and to be very toxic, while samples from other dishes were categorised as toxic."
From your link, a specific PAH called benzopyrene _may_ cause cancer in low amounts. It's a pretty extraordinary claim to say that we should be concerned about carcinogens from cooking with cast iron, which has been used long before our current high rates of cancer. I could see that being an argument against certain oils, but contrast that with the corresponding increase in cancer rates after the proliferation of teflon and PFAS in cookware/durable goods/clothing/lubcrication.
Be careful there. It's difficult to know historical base cancer rates, given recent advances in cancer detection. It's likely lots of cancer deaths in the elderly were simply chalked up to old age.
Also, every time DNA is copied, you roll the dice with cancer. Live long enough and you'll eventually get cancer. As people live longer, one expects cancer rates to increase, all else being equal. (Yes, there have been recent dips in life expectancy in the US, but over the time frame I'm presuming you're comparing with "our current high rates of cancer", the trend is still positive.)
Now, maybe cancer rates have increased due to increases in environmental carcinogens. However, it's not obvious to me that's the case.
Cancer rates have been dropping for the last 20 years. PAHs from cooking are known carcinogens where PFAs is possible carcinogen that in animals models, results are inclusive and observational studies the data is unreliable. What would you take the risk with? PAHs, which there are studies showing increased cancer rates in restaurant workers and show to cause cancer in animals models, or PFAs which the there is no reliable studies showing cancer risk.
I think your point is valid, but also keep in mind that we just generally live longer than all our ancestors did, and they did a bunch of things we now consider not very good (e.g. working fields without sunscreen) because they generally didn't live long enough to develop cancer at the rates we are seeing with our current life expectancies.
To further your point, there is shockingly little education to the general public about cooking oil smoke points. I've cooked more or less exclusively with grapeseed or safflower oil since learning about it, but so many people use low smoke point oils (olive oil mostly, thanks health craze) for high-temp purposes and there's nothing to indicate to them that there is a problem
This can be exaggerated though. Obviously you don't want to deep fry things in olive oil, but some people say ridiculous things like "olive oil should only be used as a condiment and not as a cooking oil" ignoring that people in the Mediterranean, following a diet that seems to be one of (if not the) heathiest diets on the planet, routinely cook with it.
It's a panic because we have blanketed the world and exposed the entire population to synthetic chemicals which we do not understand the effects of. It could be fine, but it could be the cause of a large increase in terrible diseases and suffering in the future. It's the not knowing which makes things worse.
I think we should try to believe things because they are true, not because they reinforce our sense of feeling bad about ourselves for contaminating the environment with industrial processes.
Here is something that I believe to be true -- it is bad to contaminate the environment with industrial processes when we do not understand the consequences of said contamination.
It isn't about feeling, it is about rolling the dice with the future of everyone's health, and inadequate steps being taken to stop this process.
It's not about philosophical opposition. It's about applying correct cost-benefit analysis in the face of uncertainty. When the harms of a substance are uncertain, the rational analysis actually requires you to assume a wider distribution of risk, and thus calculate a higher potential cost. That's why insurance companies can charge lower premiums when they have lots of data about a particular form of payout, and higher premiums when they have less data: uncertainty adds cost.
For some reason humans have a weird, irrational quirk where they miscalculate uncertain risks by assuming that the outcomes will fall on one side of the distribution until it becomes overwhelmingly obvious that they won't. It's a reflection of the same miscalculation that makes running a casino extremely profitable.
I agree with all that. If you have the idea that philosophy is irrelevant cloud-talk, that is not my intention or usage of the term. To me it's about the principles you bring to a topic, including principles of risk and cost-benefit analysis.
I think we should be transparent as to the reasons why we're going after this risk. If we don't know very much but feel the potential implications are sufficiently grave, let's be honest about that. Rather than latching onto alarming but potentially low-quality studies as providing us the truth, which leads to whiplash, loss of scientific credibility, and polarization, as we've seen during the COVID pandemic.
>> For some reason humans have a weird, irrational quirk where they miscalculate uncertain risks by assuming that the outcomes will fall on one side of the distribution until it becomes overwhelmingly obvious that they won't.
And this quirk may be the end of us - e.g. don't react to AIs getting smarter and smarter until it's too late to do anything.
We use water for processes other than residential drinking water. Eventually, PFAS contamination will reach a level where additional filtering will be required to prepare water for industrial uses. Given the difficulty of removing PFAS, it's likely that this filtering will come at a high cost. These higher costs will be propagated through the economy.
I don't notice any difference, nor do I accept that I have given such an impression objectively, although I regret that some many have gotten that impression from their standpoint.
I merely think we should separate our principled opposition to contamination from our assessment of what we actually know scientifically about the effects of said contamination.
I did not. Feel free to peruse the other replies in this thread to see what I actually say.
I'm talking about the difference between epistemology and prudence. We can be honest that we don't really understand the risks of these chemicals, and at the same time take prudential action to mitigate the risks we don't know about.
I think that just throwing chemicals out and assuming they’re okay unless (and until) we can prove otherwise is obviously negligent and no intelligent person would believe there wouldn’t be a price to pay in human lives for at least some of them.
In the legal cases, it came to light that chemical companies had themselves documented a wide and significant amount of damages to humans and animals, including a large amount of assembly line workers involved in the production of Teflon, who died or suffered significant illnesses.
I don't try to decrease the necessary reaction to the PFAS themselves but I understand that their production involves more and more dangerous chemical compounds. What kills a worker in that plant or a cow where dupont dumps the waste, is not the same chemical as I am eating right?
I think it’s the state of the chemical that’s the biggest issue. I know for sure that PTFE is highly toxic to basically all life when it’s airborne, which happens when you heat your non-stick pans to over 450°F/233°C. There usually is not enough chemical in the air to kill humans, but it’s absolutely releasing toxic fumes, and I don’t know that we heal from the damage they inflict. Maybe if you burned enough pans, it’d be deadly to you. I stopped using them because an overheated pan will kill our birds in seconds, and they’re really not needed. I cook eggs in cast iron all the time.
I’ve read about concerns of PTFE poisoning from flakes, too, which are super common because some people fucking love to use metal utensils on their non-stick cookware.
Long story short, you’re definitely getting toxic chemicals sent to your home. The level of exposure seems variable based on your use.
It's easier to watch the movie :). The specific chemical has been connected to several classes of diseases (if memory serves me well, 6), in a very large research that was part of the legal case(s).
The problem is there's a historical record of the companies withholding or burying evidence when they find it. It's happened enough times that it's entirely understandable for the public to be a little jumpy.
Besides being false, the problem with making the scientific certainty the bar for whether to ban these chemicals is that the default action is to keep them, harming people for decades before science catches up.
The bar should be for proving safety, not proving harm
My sister's kids both have birth defects on the eyes - my father worked at Dupont in research at the time (n=3? Or just coincidence?) Sorry, but it's quite obvious that data has been thrown under the rug systematically.
Watch the documentary The Devil We Know about TEFLON and DUPONT/DOW.
Its disturbing to say the least.
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Here is my own personal theory based on observations through travelling a lot in South East Asia ;
There are a lot of pesticides and fertilizers that are over-used in rural famring areas of the china, philippines, malasia, thailand, laos, myanmar etc...
These chemicals "turn the frogs gay" - while seen as a 'conspiracy' trope - the fact is that the endocrine systems of mammals amphibians and (perhaps) reptiles are impacted heavily due to these chemicals.
The reason why we see a f-ton of "lady-boys" in places like thailand, philippines and other rural asian communities where rice is the staple of not only the diet - but a large part of the economy (the philippines has a national rice management department as they state that its the right of every family to have rice on the table (source, my ex-brother-in-law worked for this department)... we see that in the rice paddies they advertise which pesticides/fertilizers they are using, and they are coaxed into over-use of the chemicals...
These leech into the aqua-sphere and it affects the endocrine systems of the pregnant, young and developing people...
It results in a switch from high testosterone to higher estrogenic development, which results in more femininely expression in males...
So there are a lot of Asian countries that eat rice everyday. Including india. I can't even try to come up with anything in those countries that comes close to what's there in Thailand or Philippines.
Assuming everything you said is true your last sentence about how hormone production somehow switches. That needs to be backed up by some source. It's a big leap in conclusion if those fertilizers you talk about does not mimic estrogen
yeah, I grown immune to media's "this thing is secretly killing you! and we dont know much about it!"
We are stressing over so much crap that may have some impact on our lives, but there are huge 'low hanging fruit' that make it inconsequential. like inactivity and too much sugar.
> But I'm struggling to understand what we know now that scares us so much.
Fear about health (read: self-preservation) is a basic instinct. That aside, it's not fear of the known, it's fear of the unknown. Again, pretty natural. Unknown and fear go hand in hand.
The sad fact is, we willingly introduced "variables" into the environment without having a clue about the impact any of them might have. Worse, is what happens when they mix in the wild.
Given the track record of Big Chem, there's no reasonable reason to remain calm. Big Chem is a known, and fear is not inappropriate when profits come before all else.
The "killing monkeys" is at least mildly relevant. How does this happen?
I say interesting, based solely on your bullets and not having read the article, because monkeys are similar enough primates to humans that when something affects them like that, we likely should be worried. We can't make ethical studies that result in death in humans (let alone debate the ethics on killing monkeys), so what's the scoop?
This is why I switched from french press to pour overs, it reduces the amount of the shimmery film that ends up in the cup. In my mind if it kills monkey at high dose it has a likelihood of being bad for humans at a low (but daily) dose. The problem is that our scientific tools for studying human toxins are not very good. If it increases the chance of some disease by 1% we probably will never know.
I think that film is just oils from the coffee beans. Acrylamide is soluble in water, so why would it float on top? Anyway, a single coffee bean is probably enough to kill someone if you grind it up and inject it into the wrong part of them.
So not everything has a perfect linear dose response relationship especially in the body when there are multiple feedback loops that may make things better or worse
Then there is the liver whose job is to filter out said toxins. It might not be able to do it's job if the concentration is 1000x but at 1x it should be fine(assuming the liver can recognize and clear the toxin in the first place)
You are right that we cannot reliably detect an increase in 1% risk but if the initial overall risk was just 0.5% does that increase even meaningfully contribute to anything?
I haven’t checked lately, as cars have become better at crashing, but it was my understanding that putting on a helmet while driving/riding in a car is actually a really good idea, as car accidents are a leading(#2 in the below report, after falling) cause of head trauma.
Six liters of water consumed within three hours killed a human among other notable water intoxication deaths, so most anything in large enough quantities will kill you.Toxicity levels need to be confirmed and established [1].
1097: During the First Crusade, according to at least one chronicle, many crusaders died after drinking too much from a river while marching to Antioch.[16]
1991, Andy Warhol: Five years after his death, Warhol's family publicly accused the hospital where he had his gallbladder removed of causing his death by water intoxication administered post-operatively. A claimed autopsy weight of 68 kg (150 lb), with his weight being 58 kg (128 lb) when admitted, was cited as evidence that too much fluid had been given.[17]
November 16, 1995: Leah Betts, a British schoolgirl, died as the result of drinking too much water, though in the media her death was mistakenly attributed to taking an ecstasy tablet at her 18th birthday party.[18]
2003: British actor Anthony Andrews survived a case of water intoxication. He was performing as Henry Higgins in a revival of the musical My Fair Lady at the time, and consumed up to eight litres of water a day. He was unconscious and in intensive care for three days.[19][20]
February 2, 2005: Matthew Carrington, a student at Chico State University in Chico, California, died as a direct result of a fraternity hazing ritual involving forced water intoxication.
January 12, 2007: Jennifer Strange died after drinking nearly 2 gallons (7.6 liters) of water in an attempt to win a Nintendo Wii.[21] The KDND radio station's morning show, the Morning Rave, held an on-air contest entitled "Hold Your Wee for a Wii," in which contestants were asked to drink as much water as they could without urinating. The DJs were made aware of the dangers but did not inform the contestants. KDND's parent company, Entercom Sacramento LLC, was subsequently ordered to pay $16,577,118 in damages to Strange's family.[22][23]
March 11, 2020: Zachary Sabin, an 11-year-old child, died after being forced to drink almost three liters of water in just four hours by his parents. They thought his urine was too dark, so they made him drink water until he threw up.[24]
July 4, 2023: A 35 year old Indiana woman died after consuming too much water while on vacation with her family. [25]
> But I'm struggling to understand what we know now that scares us so much. Could PFAS concerns be partly some kind of enviro-moral panic?
I will tell you what scares me:
- I think covid has maybe a 10-20% chance of leaving a large portion of the population partially disabled (with small but significant effects like lead)
- We have new diseases coming out all the time. This is pretty new, and specific to humans living with the density and travel we have today. Most serious human diseases are <10,000 years old. I think this is >20% risk.
- I think PFAS are also in a 10-20% chance range.
- I think there are a half-dozen similar things currently in the environment.
- Toss in some reasonable probability for biological superweapons (which can now be made at many university labs by a clever undergrade).
- Add in thermonuclear war, which was very possible during the cold war, and seems increasingly possible now.
- Global warming. I think it's overblown, and I'd also toss it in the same 10-20% range of being a civilization-ending crisis.
- AI apocalypse
... and so on.
Modern humans have been around for (big-O) 100,000 years. Prior to 200 years, we had zero ways to cripple or end or all human life (or all life) on the planet. Today, we have literally dozens. I don't think any individual one is that likely, but I am increasingly concerned that we might have reached:
I'd like for us to invest the resources to take each of these seriously and address them. That's really where I'd like a big chunk of my tax dollars spent. Right now, we're spending big-O zero resources on serious crisis mitigation.
FEMA is maybe 0.01% of our GDP.
That's not really a fair way of looking at it, since military, CDC, etc. aren't part of FEMA, and play similar roles, but the point is that I'd like us to have a holistic infrastructure for:
- understanding risks
- mitigating them
- having big projects to eliminate them (like we had with getting rid of many diseases like smallbox a half-century ago)
- leading and coordinating globally
- having food stores, medical supplies, shelters, and access local manufacturing capacity
- having emergency capacity (e.g. producing all the artillery shells Ukraine needs, or all the respirators we thought we needed during the acute phase of covid).
... and so on.
If that takes up 10-30% of our GDP, I think that's money well-spent. I actually don't think that would take that big of an increase in spending, since a lot of our existing capacity could be generalized. For example, the military could train for a lot of domestic disaster relief and coordination as well. We could give small subsidies to e.g. manufacturing plants if they maintain more general capacity and excess capacity. Etc.
> I think covid has maybe a 10-20% chance of leaving a large portion of the population partially disabled
I struggle to understand why people believe this. Every person I’ve met has had covid at this point, and I’ve never met anyone with any kind of disability from it.
When you look at the randomized control studies, long covid (excluding those intubated) basically doesn’t exist.
> Every person I’ve met has had covid at this point
I know a half-dozen people who have long covid at a level it impacts daily life. I believe all were immunized before. For myself, I definitely have reduced lung capacity (e.g. how far I can swim underwater is significantly reduced). I'm not an athlete and it doesn't matter, but if every time I catch covid reduces this by a similar amount, it definitely will add up to where it does matter.
> When you look at the randomized control studies, long covid (excluding those intubated) basically doesn’t exist.
References? We must be reading different studies. As a footnote, there's no such thing as a "randomized control study" here (unless we were willing to intentionally randomly infect people with covid), which suggests you might not be qualified to read studies....
Most studies I see show long covid in the low double-digit percent range.
“ 1645 articles were screened but no randomised controlled trials were found. 16 observational studies from five countries (USA, UK, France, Italy, and the Netherlands) were identified that reported on 614 392 patients”
and say “ which suggests you might not be qualified to read studies....”
I apologize. I was wrong in implying that you can't just read scientific studies. You're not qualified to read or write basic English, and appear to have about the reasoning power of GPT2.
You claimed "When you look at the randomized control studies, long covid (excluding those intubated) basically doesn’t exist." I pointed out RCTs don't exist. You post a quote backing up my claim, with "derision and mockery."
I am done here. I expect more derision and mockery, but I would strongly suggest a middle school level remedial class in basic source-based writing.
Perhaps after decades of being told "trust us, these random concoctions we whipped up in the lab are perfectly safe, we spent 30s thinking of how this might instantly kill you and didn't come up with anything, therefore they are harmless" only to find out later that they cause major problems, people are finally starting to do the sane thing and not trust the shockingly stupid position of "prove harm or we'll permeate the world with it, actual consequences be damned".
It's less some new finding about the specific compounds and more a shift in default position.
The "Chemical Hunger" hypothesis suggests that PFAS are a prime candidate for triggering the obesity epidemic.
They started being introduced to the environment in large quantities just as obesity rates started to rise in the late 70s and 80s, the health effects are poorly understood but seem to have an impact on weight and the endocrine system, and they can be carried downstream (obesity rates are globally higher at lower altitudes).
The other best candidate is lithium grease, which has the same distributional attributes but has also been proven to increase weight and explains some of the occupational discrepancies in obesity.
As an alternative, there is no one single cause of the obesity epidemic. People are made of confounding factors, and the world is very complicated. The world does not owe you simple explanations.
Two books have helped me understand the obesity epidemic:
The best candidate is corn syrup and other high-calorie foods and drinks combined with an massive expansion of the road networks and the number of people working desk jobs, so fewer people are being active daily.
We don't need some magic explanation for people being sedentary and fat.
Look at any old cookbook and you'll see that the calorie content in a typical "healthy" meal has gone down not up, people used to load up every dish with tons of fat, sugar and syrup, and still struggled to gain weight.
Mechanics, cops, security guards, firefighters, janitors, handymen, and personal service workers are twice as likely to be obese as high school teachers, professors, natural and social scientists, cooks, programmers, and lawyers. How can that possibly be if the principal factor is activity level?
Why is obesity higher at lower altitudes if it's just about the availability of cars?
Treating obesity as a cultural problem of personal moral failing is ignoring the cold hard facts: the epidemiological contour of the obesity epidemic points to a chemical contaminant that some people are exposed to more than others, not a cultural shift.
Cookbook recipes are a bad metric for this. First of all, eating habits have broadly changed - way more eating out and delivery, way less cooking. Second, many of those jobs listed have become more sedentary - there is more driving, computer work, standing in elevators, and more work done by machines compared to 50 years ago, way fewer calories are burned. Third, portion sizes have changed - restaurants serve a ridiculous amount of food per person.
> Why is obesity higher at lower altitudes if it's just about the availability of cars?
In my experience people who live at altitude (e.g. Denver) tend to be more active as a rule, so lets say cultural forces. Could be because they burn more energy surviving too.
> the epidemiological contour of the obesity epidemic points to a chemical contaminant that some people are exposed to more than others, not a cultural shift.
Yeah, it's sugar. To be clear, I'm not ruling out the possibility that phthalates or something else do have an affect, but we can solve most of the problem right now by removing sugar and corn subsidies and redirecting the money toward community gardening and youth sports programs.
Read it again. The statements are not in conflict because the culture reacted to the increasing obesity, not the other way around.
If modern cookbooks had more fattening recipes, then I would be wrong and obesity would be explainable by culture, but they don't. Modern cookbooks are leaner than old cookbooks. In decades and centuries prior to the 1980s people ate more sweets and fats, not less.
Modern cookbooks have leaner recipes because obesity is a problem now. Obesity is not a problem now because cookbooks have leaner recipes (how would that even work?)
Do you not see how that's circular? Cookbooks in the old days were just as calorie dense as McDonalds is today. People used to eat tons of sugar and butter in everything, including things that were home cooked or marketed as healthy.
Having lots of high-calorie foods available has never caused people to get fat until recently, when it suddenly started happening all over the world all at once, especially to people who work with heavy machinery. You can't just blame McDonalds for that.
You don't need magic, but you do need something that also explains why lab animals are getting fatter even when they've been on controlled diets and their activity levels haven't changed.
The thing is we've introduced so much pollution into the environment that it's now incredibly difficult to see what's going on. We really need to put limits on introducing new chemical compounds into the environment.
Interesting, but i'd really like to see some figures on fast food growth in the 70s onwards. Not only growth in fast food, but some sort of metric of quality of ingredients (probably doesnt exist).
People are quick to blame fast food, but it doesn't really make sense. Fast food is as old as society, before there was hamburgers there was fish and chips, waffles, pies, pastries, fried chicken, doner, kebab, and curry, many of which can be more calorie-dense than modern fast food burgers. Ready-to-eat food restaurants were even common in ancient rome, and drive-thru burger chains blew into the mainstream in the 1920s and 1930s, but obesity didn't start rising until the 70s and 80s.
It's not like sweets and calorie-dense foods were rare before the reagan administration. Just look at an old cookbook, tons of sugar and fat everywhere. Despite the availability of calorie-dense foods many people struggled to raise their weight above 23 BMI because their bodies naturally made them eat fewer calories, to the point that most weight-management pharmaseuticals were geared towards helping people gain weight. You can't explain that with fast food and food culture alone.
The PFAS situation is at an annoying crossroads of 1) we have tests that can detect it at super low levels, so we’re finding it everywhere. 2) We don’t have great ways to clean it up, and 3) We don’t really know what concentration of this stuff is actually dangerous. Thus everyone is freaking out but without a clear plan or knowledge of it we should be hiding under the covers or not.
On the toxicity, standard table salt is extremely toxic you if you eat enough in one go. So the challenge is not “is it toxic” but rather at what quantities and over what exposure. Thus these studies along the lines of “we fed some lab animals a ton of this stuff and they died” aren’t super useful in figuring out if we have a big problem or not.
I’m all for taking a cautious approach here given the unknown unknowns, but like a lot of emerging science the truth is it’s messy and takes time to figure things out. This public and press are not well equipped to navigate and communicate on that reality.
The ceaseless proliferation of polluting substances like forever chemicals, plastics, and pesticides stands as an unequivocal testament to humanity's reckless disregard for the wellbeing of our planet and its inhabitants.
I have no idea why you’re implying economic growth isn’t possible without pollutants and toxic chemicals. The agricultural revolution and trading of food has lifted all those people out of starvation levels not selling plastic toys.
Small farms (non industrial, non monoculture export crops etc.) are much more productive in terms of nutrition per sqkm. Small farms also feed more of the world even on an absolute scale. It's a pernicious myth that we need industrial agro to "feed the world".
I am interested in a source comparing small farms versus non-industrial farms in terms of nutrition per sqkm. That's a very interesting concept I've not heard before. How is nutrition per sqkm being calculated here? Would this reduce the availability of diverse produce by comparison?
I'm willing to bet you're one of the people that doesn't believe we are hurdling towards a mass extinction event even while the oceans are boiling. Once the mass famines start, I will be starkly in the "the costs are greater" side.
Sure, industrialization has had some benefits, but it is also full of bad actors who internalize profits and externalize their effects. Example: These chemicals we KNOW are bad and unsustainable, but whose use we do not change because it is cheaper so someone at the top can keep making money.
Plastics leeching toxic chemicals/compounds into food and water, especially when being heated, is a known thing. It's especially bad for the endocrine system. The disruption to the hormonal balance is noticeably affecting people.
Parent probably intended to say silicone, which is a plastic polymer. Silicone rings are commonly used even in stainless steel kettles or glass bottles for sealing the cap or lid.
"Technically, silicone could be considered part of the rubber family. But, if you define plastics widely, as we do, silicone is something of a hybrid between a synthetic rubber and a synthetic plastic polymer. Silicone can be used to make malleable rubber-like items, hard resins, and spreadable fluids.
We treat silicone as a plastic like any other, given that it has many plastic-like properties: flexibility, malleability, clarity, temperature resistance, water resistance."
It's a little misleading to just call silicone plastic with no disclaimers. That site is also called "life without plastic", so I'm not sure it's the most neutral source.
Strictly speaking, "plastic" simply refers to the physical property of "plasticity". Though it's also used as a general term for "all polymers", which would therefore include silicone (polysiloxane) too. However people also use "plastic" to mean "organic polymers" specifically, thus drawing a distinction between plastics and silicone.
I get the sense that people on the internet believe silicone to be more safe (e.g. for sous vide cooking or baby products) for whatever reason. Maybe because it is more chemically stable or decomposes to sand or whatever. But really you can't draw many conclusions about any synthetic material unless there has been thorough research. A given polymer species can have very different properties depending on the additives used, and those can be the most dangerous to health. And the same material between different manufacturers could have different chemistry and health risks. It's a big complicated world...
This is a non-sequitur. Something can be harmful(i.e significant population-level health effects) without it necessarily being acutely toxic at higher doses.
It’s the additives that leach from plastics, this is now common knowledge. And yeah chromium and nickel are bad for you too. Aluminum is bad for you too but it forms a stable oxide layer. Cast iron is the way.
Can we stop the whataboutism or are we all smokers here too?
Ethics teams would never let you conduct a scientific study of giving some unknown chemical in the food and water of unknowing people to see what effect it had on them.
But if you do it anyway and don't record the results, then it isn't a study, so you don't even need to ask the ethics panel!
Don't forget to do a 2 week study on 6 rats, prove that none of the 6 rats die, and then send those results off to the government to get the chemical approved for use in everything.
Then, if later it does cause harm, you can shield yourself behind the fact you were just following government guidelines and the government approved it.
"By 1965, DuPont had indication that PFAS increased the liver and kidney weight of rats.
In the late ’70s and early ’80s, the companies were seeing alarming signals in their animal studies — in one study, monkeys exposed to extreme levels of PFAS died — and among their employees. In 1979, DuPont observed that workers who had contact with the chemicals appeared to have higher rates of abnormal liver function."
So, in other words we've known since BEFORE we landed on the moon and, still, nobody cares.
Scientists will study this while nothing changes and then perhaps some treatments will be released at exorbitant cost (of course, sighting the research and development costs of the treatment as the reason without any acknowledgement of costs to the people for unwittingly being exposed to this garbage in the first place).
Are we even making forward progress as a civilization anymore?
A relatively comprehensive look into PFAS can be gained by reading the Draft state of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) report published by Health Canada. [1] The Existing Substances Risk Assessment Bureau at Health Canada (which assesses risks of chemicals that are in commerce in Canada), is increasingly moving towards new analysis techniques broadly characterized as New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) (see section 6.2.5 and 7.6 in the report). So, to my understanding, part of the apparent gap in research is being plugged by the application of models which infer chemicals properties, interactions, and effects without needing to study each of them individually to gain at least an initial idea of how they might harm organisms and environments.
See:
> The evolving landscape of chemical production has rendered toxicological testing using traditional models (i.e., live animals) impractical, and advances in science coupled with ethical concerns have resulted in government agencies, including the United States (US EPA 2021b), European Union, and Canada (Bhuller et al. 2021), committing to reduce, refine, and potentially eliminate the use of mammalian models from certain regulatory testing requirements, where scientifically justified. New approach methodologies (NAMs) are broadly described by the international risk assessment community as any technology, method, approach, or a
combination of these that can be used to reduce, refine, or replace animal testing and allow more rapid and effective screening of chemicals. These methods may include the use of computer models or assays with biological molecules, cells, tissues, or organs as well as exposure measurement approaches. [1]
This obviously is an interesting subject useful to study, yet I take it philosophically: both life expectancy and health span are much bigger nowadays than when we had no PFAS so practically PFAS are Okay.
