Troubling chemicals found in wide range of fast-food wrappers | Hacker News Reader

Troubling chemicals found in wide range of fast-food wrappers

theverge.com

Let's hear both sides before we rush to any judgement about these so called facts about these so called "chemicals". Maybe some people like fluorinated chemicals?

Who needs regulations? Everyone can run their own independent tests in their own privately funded home labs and determine if the chemicals are troubling to them or not.

Not everyone can run their own independent tests, that's the point of regulations. 80% of people have neither money, expertise, knowledge nor perspective to have those tests be run for them.

Take away the regulations and you'll have polluted water, Beijing-style air, dangerous chemicals in all kinds of devices, all of it the result of greed, because dangerous is usually cheaper.

I'm certain notadoc was joking.

I think that your parent commenter had tongue firmly in cheek when writing that.

No, we should let the market decide. If the customers at fast food place x all die from fluorinated chemicals then that company will go out of business!

How about thermal printer receipts? Most are coated with BPA. How many are in your pocket right now?

How about the fact that most McDonalds grill their burgers on grills that are covered with disposable teflon sheets? They don't tell the public that.

> How about thermal printer receipts? Most are coated with BPA.

BPA on thermal paper is indeed a worry (and of course most those "BPA-free" bottles use a different bisphenol plasticizer, just not bisphenol-A).

> How about the fact that most McDonalds grill their burgers on grills that are covered with disposable teflon sheets? They don't tell the public that.

But a teflon sheet? Teflon is so tightly linked that it is inert that is why it's non-stick! Yes, its production process is quite toxic, and of course if you heat it to the point of breaking it down you'll get toxic byproducts the will kill birds (with their hyper efficient gas exchange systems...that we don't have). I seriously doubt they heat their grills to 400 F.

I once swallowed some strips of teflon tape (settling an argument with a friend...) and they were bright white and intact (sharp edges where cut were still sharp) on the way out.

> if you heat it to the point of breaking it down you'll get toxic byproducts the will kill birds (with their hyper efficient gas exchange systems...that we don't have).

Strange comment. Those fumes are rather unfriendly to humans, as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_fume_fever

The key word is "kill". While it may cause this fever in humans, it won't kill them. However, it will kill birds, because of "their hyper efficient gas exchange systems...that we don't have". That's my takeaway, at least.

It is hard to find data, but it sounds like the grill temp could range as high as 425 F.

Recipes vary, but many go up to 375F (at least in this McD engineering document)

https://www.filepicker.io/api/file/9dQcRSZ8TMeeM7Y8Lx6w

I want to believe that teflon is indeed totally inert until 500F, but somehow I just don't trust that. It's the low-temp PFOA leakage into the product I'm looking at here, not the fumes released at higher temps.

If the wrappers are doing it at ambient, what's happening at cooking temperatures?

Why not? Given the number of people paranoid about teflon, I'd expect someone would have demonstrated the danger at lower temperatures by now if it exists.

That's we thought about the wrappers.

3M agreed 15 years ago to phase out PFOA. We know (and knew) these chemicals were dangerous. Teflon has been heavily studied and widely used and we still don't have any evidence that it's dangerous.

Absolutely, don't trust it. The fact of Teflon's extreme toxicity at temperatures commonly encountered in cooking is undisputed. Quoting from http://www.ewg.org/research/canaries-kitchen/teflon-offgas-s...:

> The lowest temperature at which nonstick coatings have been reported to kill birds in a peer-reviewed study is 396°F (202°C)

That website offers a lot of evidence regarding Teflon's toxicity in other animals as well, but birds seem by far the most sensitive.

Granted now, birds ain't humans. In particular, our unusually massive and efficient livers protect us from a lot of things that readily kill other animals (e.g., aflatoxin, which we withstand in much higher doses than most other creatures).

But this just tells us that our bodies are somehow coping with the poison enough to allow our survival. It doesn't tell us the poison is harmless to us, and IMO fluorocarbon toxicity in humans has been woefully understudied.

> The lowest temperature at which nonstick coatings have been reported to kill birds in a peer-reviewed study is 396°F (202°C)

If you want to be fair, you should also quote some numbers for oil. Most oils will kill birds at much lower temperatures.

Which makes Teflon safer than oil.

LOL, safer than oil? Read up on it a bit, and if you think cooking oil emits anything nearly as poisonous as fluoroacetic acid, show me a citation.

Then it should be fine since teflon doesn't start releasing dangerous fumes until about 575, which McDonalds grills probably don't reach even if you try.

The breakdown products of Teflon are also toxic to the prostate, as I found out personally once by eating lots of eggs scrambled in a Teflon skillet. I avoid it now.

How much breakdown would really occur? If the whole point of Teflon is not to stick or react at all, I would expect that if you eat a brick of Teflon, you crap a brick of Teflon.

Would you mind saying more about what happened to you?

I don't remember exactly how long I had been using this skillet for my eggs -- a couple of months, perhaps, no more. I started having urinary difficulties, went to my doctor, and was diagnosed with Benign Prostate Hyperplasia. He didn't identify any specific cause nor prescribe any treatment, but somehow I got the idea that it might be the Teflon and stopped using it. The problem, which I had never had before, went away and has not recurred.

It's possible this particular skillet had been overheated at some point, though I certainly wasn't using high heat to scramble eggs. But still, why take the chance? The ceramic non-stick surfaces you can get these days work well enough and are much safer (AFAIK, anyway).

Interesting, thanks.

Sorry, but that's pretty much impossible. The breakdown products of Teflon don't show up until temperatures at which your eggs would be charcoal.

Teflon will not break down until temperature above 500F 260C - and if you were cooking your eggs that hot you were doing it wrong.

> I once swallowed some strips of teflon tape (settling an argument with a friend...) and they were bright white and intact (sharp edges where cut were still sharp) on the way out.

Oh god, thank goodness it didn't cut up your insides on the way out.

How do you know it didn't?

Ha ha! When I said "sharp" I meant "clearly defined" -- i.e. not broken down or visibly affected by the digestive process.

We implant medical devices containing components entirely made our of teflon. If the FDA has deemed that low risk, I'm OK eating food that been cooking on it.

Not to mention a ton of non-stick pans have telfon coatings.

> Schaider was surprised to find that some [food containers] contained PFOA, a type of fluorinated chemical that U.S. manufacturers had agreed to phase out of food packaging by 2011 and altogether in 2015. The containers may have come from old inventory or from China, where production has continued unabated.

Even with regulations, the government doesn't seem to follow up and ensure adherence.

There's a lot of valid discussion about "security theater" at airports. And, with stories like this, I sometimes think we have a kind of "safety regulation theater" in the US too.

Laws are passed banning a poisonous substance or a dangerous industry practice of some kind and everybody celebrates the righteous victory.

But then the government stops paying attention and we still have these banned chemicals leaching into our food.

A lot of us seem to believe that simply passing a law solves the problem, end of story.

At home I cook on cast-iron pans with metal utensils.

Once they are seasoned well they are remarkably non-stick and easy to clean with just hot water and a stiff brush.

I tried cast-iron (mostly for pancakes) but found that it heated very unevenly (to the point of burning food in the center and not cooking food at the edge).

I've found success with a multi-clad stainless steel skillet. Heating it to the Leidenfrost point [1] ensures that nothing sticks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leidenfrost_effect#Leidenfrost...

Disclaimer: I am an avid cast iron user.

It seems like cast iron fails on electric cooktops, or in the case of much of the thin modern cast iron cookware. In an effort to keep weight down to compete, they ruined the product. Gas flame mostly solves this, but is increasingly uncommon.

Avid cast iron user here as well... I've been using heavy cast iron skillets and pots on an electric stove for over a decade and enjoying it with no issues.

Could it be an issue with an induction-type electric cooktop? I never tried cast iron on one of those.

An induction stove would work several times better than a standard electric stove with cast iron, as well as heating the whole pan more evenly.

Can confirm this, my previous house had a conduction cooktop and it worked perfectly with my cast iron skillet.

I'm sure part of my problem is that the pan was a large square, and I was trying to use it on a smaller round electric element.

I cook with cast iron frequently, but I have been unable to find any recently-manufactured cast iron cookware that is actually worth buying. I think I last checked around 2006, so maybe the quality of available product has improved since then. I do know that "pre-seasoned" pans are just a complete waste of time, because you have to remove that spray-on crap before seasoning it properly.

So I pretty much just use the one Wagner pan, manufactured before 1996.

The nonstick PTFE coatings on my other cookware has always come off after a few years of use. I can't refresh the coating in my own kitchen, so the pan is basically useless after that. So I'll stick with the polymerized vegetable oil seasoning, even though the cast iron cookware is not as idiot-proof as more modern cookware construction. I like being able to keep something for 20 years, and not have to continually discard and replace crap that's not even 5 years old.

It would be nice if I could laser-sputter AlMgB14 + TiB2 onto a 12" round BAs wafer, and cook on that, but that's not likely to happen in my garage--or anywhere else with an oxygen atmosphere.

Think about how these cast iron pans need to work. They have a high thermal mass so once hot will have a nice uniform temperature...but you will have to wait for that to happen. A thinner pan will heat much faster but will be liable to hot spots.

I prefer a thinner pan myself[+] but I understand why people like the cast iron.

[+] one thing about those pans: the idea of a "seasoned" pan, with old, rancid oil molecules stuck in the nooks and crannies simply creeps me out. However I haven't heard of anyone actually getting sick (or suffering any olfactory effects either) so I'm sure it's all in my head.

"old, rancid oil molecules"

the seasoning process polymerizes those double bonded molecules into a plastic polymer. Some people cook on a painted film of semi-toxic teflon polymer plastic, you're cooking on a film of olive oil polymer plastic. I wonder if anyone's ever cooked on a sheet of kapton plastic? It should take the heat... Then again given how well hot PLA and ABS stick to hot kapton maybe its not so much fun.

>A thinner pan will heat much faster but will be liable to hot spots.

No, it won't (unless you're talking about a thinner cast iron pan). Cast iron has terrible thermal conductivity. A thinner pan made of a better metal, such as aluminum or copper, won't have hot spots.

IMO, the best pans are stainless steel, with plates of copper and/or aluminum in the bottom for even heat distribution. Stainless steel looks nice (unlike cast iron) and is easy to clean with steel wool or even oven cleaner if you have something really stuck in there, and with the conductive layers inside has superior performance.

Yes, I meant thinner cast iron pans, as that had been brought up in the post I was replying to. Apologies for not being clear.

Perhaps I wasn't patient enough, but I waited a long time for that stupid pan to heat evenly. The thermal conductivity was just too low. And in the meantime, the excessive temperature in the center would burn the seasoning off.

Whereas with stainless steel, it reaches the Leidenfrost point in a matter of minutes.

That's why you pre-heat them in the oven. This freaks people out who've never done it. Whaa ... you're sticking a pan in an oven thats turned on? Because if you do that to a cheap stamped steel and plastic pan, the plastic handle will melt off. There's a reason CI pans have expensively attached solid cast iron handles and not bolted on plastic handles...

You seasoned the pan by heating it to 400F in an oven till it stopped smoking... by definition putting it back in a 400F oven isn't going to hurt it... Also you can't accidentally overheat to 1200F and burn the seasoning off in a 400F oven, unlike preheating on a stove top. The stove top is used to hold to a constant temp not heat it up.

Leave the oven at 400F while you're cooking on the stove top... finish cooking, wipe/scrub the pan, apply a very light coat of oil, toss back in the 400F oven, turn the oven off, by the time the oven finally cools off you just massively strengthened the seasoning layer. Depending how fast your oven cools off I guess.

WRT SS there is no free lunch, you spend about as much time re-seasoning cast iron as you do scrubbing stainless steel with barkeepers friend powder.

If I'm generating a sauce, like say making fried Italian sausages with grapes and a nice white wine sauce, its stainless all the way, but I don't generate sauce when I'm making plain breakfast sausage, for example.

If you know the setting on the stovetop that holds the pan at the temp you want to cook at, you probably won't burn the seasoning by putting the burner modestly higher than that.

Heating my oven up to use a pan on the stove seems ridiculously inefficient. Also I don't sear at 400. That seems way to low for most things I'd cook in cast iron.

Also, I've not once used barkeepers friend on my stainless. It tends to clean up fine with a scotchbright pad. But I mostly use teflon pans these days.

Oh I donno most of the energy going into stovetop ends up as air currents rising to the ceiling and the insulation is pretty good in my sealed oven. Also its very cheap to heat air (compared to water or iron) so it doesn't take much energy to heat that enclosed well insulated oven. I have the EE gear to do it and I'm almost tempted to figure out which takes more KWh, in my infinite spare time.

I season my CI to 400 and as you raise the temp more smokes off so I'd have seasoning problems taking CI to red heat. CI is cheap, cheaper than disposable teflon pans, so owning an unseasoned (probably rusty) one for 1500F steaks and one with glassy seasoning for my wife to cook her eggs is totally realistic. I have SS for high heat.

If you ever need help cleaning stainless, the powder helps. The thing with scotchbright pads is endless news released explaining that after the first use they have more bacteria than a truck stop bathroom...

Teflon is super expensive in the sense of my not being rich enough to shop at walmart. I've been cooking a long time and after throwing out 10 to 20 formerly non-stick pans I bought lifetime SS and CI. So lemme get this straight, I've been buying $50 non-stick pans roughly every year for 20 years thats $1000 of pans sitting in landfills, yet I can buy stainless alclad for only $150 that will last my descendants until at least the year 5000 if not longer? Sign me up! I'm too poor to buy $50 pans I can only afford the $150 pans.

> Oh I donno most of the energy going into stovetop ends up as air currents rising to the ceiling and the insulation is pretty good in my sealed oven. Also its very cheap to heat air (compared to water or iron) so it doesn't take much energy to heat that enclosed well insulated oven. I have the EE gear to do it and I'm almost tempted to figure out which takes more KWh, in my infinite spare time.

But you're going to use the oven and the stove, so this seems really inefficient to me. There's also a lot of stamped steel and metal racks inside my oven that has to get to temperature. The oven pulls a lot of electricity into large heating elements and still takes 15 or so minutes to fully pre-heat. I'm not at all sure that heating, say, 20 pounds of steel to 400 degrees is an efficient way to heat a pan.

> If you ever need help cleaning stainless, the powder helps. The thing with scotchbright pads is endless news released explaining that after the first use they have more bacteria than a truck stop bathroom...

I guess I don't believe that. I squeeze my sponges out so they fully dry, and I occasionally send them through the dishwasher. I'm not very concerned about the sanitation of my sponge, especially since I'm cleaning with soap, which should carry any germs off the dishes when I rinse. I'm also not clear what the alternative is. I'm going to scrub my dishes with cotton cloths?

> Teflon is super expensive in the sense of my not being rich enough to shop at walmart. I've been cooking a long time and after throwing out 10 to 20 formerly non-stick pans I bought lifetime SS and CI. So lemme get this straight, I've been buying $50 non-stick pans roughly every year for 20 years thats $1000 of pans sitting in landfills, yet I can buy stainless alclad for only $150 that will last my descendants until at least the year 5000 if not longer? Sign me up! I'm too poor to buy $50 pans I can only afford the $150 pans.

My only problem with teflon durability is other people. I've had $25 teflon pans last for a decade. I've also had $50 teflon pans get ruined after a week from people using metal utensils on my new pans. :(

I have plenty of stainless cookware that I use when it feels appropriate (e.g. searing). I have cast iron as well, but while I'd like it to work well, I've generally not had much luck. I can get it seasoned, but I have trouble getting it clean without destroying the seasoning. I also haven't found it to be nearly as nonstick as teflon unless I use a lot of oil (which I don't actually mind, but my wife does).

"getting it clean without destroying the seasoning"

I've had excellent luck with a nylon bristle brush from the dishwashing aisle. Looks like it would work as an elephant handler's toothbrush (giant toothbrush for the elephant, not the handler).

Hot pan cleans a lot easier than cold pan. About a cup of water helps. Probably I'm slowly clogging my drains with grease by doing this, but it cleans up so well.

Hm, I had never thought to do this. (I no longer own the pan.) Granted, that would require me to get up a lot earlier to wait for everything to heat up :)

No reason to go cast iron anymore. They rust, they heat unevenly, you have to care for the seasoning. You can get the same sear with better heat distribution with multi-ply stainless. Much lighter and easier to care for.

For eggs I have a small carbon-steel pan.

Cast iron? Pah!

Tinned heavy-gauge copper with brass handles works the best (for me, ymmv). There are drawbacks - they need re-tinning every now and again, and you have to be careful with metal utensils, but the heat distribution and evenness of cooking is amazing on a 3mm copper pan.

Do we have any estimates on how many actual deaths (or sicknesses) occur due to the use of these chemicals? I care because if we can't positively attribute death or sickness to the use of these chemicals, it seems unfair to tarnish them.

That's too low a bar. A lot of the worst environmental mistakes used that approach and it has gotten less sensible as our knowledge of chemistry and biology has advanced.

I understand the desire to eliminate all health hazards, but that is not economically feasible. Does it not seem reasonable to state that if you cannot find any death or illnes in a chemical, when used for a specific purpose, that is it not reasonable to simply eliminate the chemical?

This isn't really abotu advancing chemistry or biology, either. We have a pretty good understanding that these contaminants need to be consumed repeatedly, at high exposure levels, to have a detectable effect. Epidemiology would be more likely to create a compelling for or against case than additional medical research.

I mean, I'd have an easier time if you could show at least a compelling argument that harm has been done.

Sure it is economically feasible to leave the PFOA related chemicals out of fast food wrappers, the big consequence is that the wrappers will be greasier (I guess this might bug people that eat their fries with a fork).

I'm not proposing that the safety of all chemicals be proven before they are used, I realize that it is logically impossible. I'm saying that spraying tons of stuff that is chemically similar to known problematic compounds out into the environment to see if it is bad is the wrong approach.

Stuff that isn't chemically similar to known problematic compounds? Take a more relaxed approach.

What do you mean by "chemically similar"? I am not aware of this having a meaningful definition when working with toxins, and ... well, I have a PhD in the field.

Stuff like having functional groups in common, participating in similar reactions.

Why do you think that matters? Many things have common functional groups, and in many cases, there are no similar molecules. Functionality doesn't transfer that way (it's a highly non-linear process).

As for similar reactions- well, that's nice, but again, just seeing that a molecule participates in some chemistry has little to no predictive ability for health outcomes.

They're certainly worth tarnishing. Knowledge of PFOA and PFAS is not without science and evidence of it's harm already established. Here are two sites where the chemicals have contaminated groundwater and caused illness in communities.

http://healthvermont.gov/response/environmental/pfoa-drinkin...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/13/nyregion/military-base-co...

The first link shows contaminated well water at very high concentrations. That's bad.

The second link mentions more contaminated water supply, and mentions cancer.

I am asking if anybody can directly demonstrate that using this in food liner has an even detectable rate of harm.

If it doesn't then there is no reasonable basis, just fear, to remove the chemicals from the liners.

Could there be harm from removing these particular chemicals?

If not, isn't the precautionary principle good?

I guess this highlights how poor humans are at identifying and thinking about risk.

removing the chemicals would make the food liners not work anymore. then the people who make the liners will find something else. It's not clear there is anything else that works as well, or is as safe.

in this case it's almost certainly true that food liners do not contribute enough of the toxin to have an effect- below a certain dosage the body simply mops up all the toxin and there is no cumulative harm. On the other hand where people are exposed to massive amounts, they develop obvious and clear health problems.

The problem with these chemicals is that they very easily penetrate through your skin straight into the blood. [1] (Their super low molecular weight might be the reason for that.)

So even your jacket may be a significant route of exposure, too.

[1] Dermal Penetration Potential of Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA) in Human and Mouse Skin http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15287394.2011.615...

Not to mention the primary source of BPA usually being cross contamination from thermal receipts.

I do put my lunch at work on paper 2 plates, then take the lower one and cover the plate hence covering the food, put it into fridge and go to gym. lunch after gym.

When I come from gym, there is not much food left anymore in our cold buffet, by far the healthiest food I can get there).

after reading this, not so sure I want to touch those paper plates anymore, although there is no alternative at work...

Feel free to bring your own!

The government started the drug war to keep drugs from "destroying" our bodies.

Surely big daddy government keeps bad chemicals out of the products we all use since he is so interested in keeping us healthy and safe. Yup we are all in safe hands.

"Repeal food safety laws, let the Free Market sort it out"?

My comment is more to point out the hypocrisy of having a war on drugs but allowing shitty chemicals in the things we use.

But I'm glad the comment was not deleted and I forgive the downvoters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com