It’s raining PFAS: rainwater is unsafe to drink even in Antarctica and Tibet
su.se
su.se
We need to do a better job of regulating what is allowed to be sold to consumers. We're likely going to see a a whole host of rare medical conditions become common when my generation gets older. Not to mention that on top of destroying human health we're destroying the planet too. I don't know what to do about any of this but I feel powerless to make an impact.
Trying to keep track of what is safe and isn't is basically impossible for an individual.
I tried for years to avoid PFAS and friends, only to discover my sofa was covered in it.
What's the point.
But the problem here is that we just don't know. We know about a few worrisome problems and signs, but we don't have a clear picture like we do with lead or asbestos.
We could switch from "allow by default" to "deny by default", but I'm not even sure that would help. Often problems are hard to find even once its widespread.
We also don't want to foster a "chemicals are bad" attitude more than it already exists.
I think the right answer is more funding for long-term rigorous studies. That way we know.
There's no heuristic shortcut for actually learning about the subject. Without doing the homework, all we can say is that it seems plausible that there might be a problem.
But if you don't learn anything then you're just another person saying their opinion on the Internet, like the rest of us.
I don't see why so many people these days need to reduce everything to this type of false dichotomy.
And it's also a question of how much concern is enough? I would argue that currently the threshold is set far, far too high.
It's a choice we make all the time. For anything you read about, are you curious enough to investigate it further, or are you going to let it go by?
You work with what you have right now.
While emerging evidence should be used to change guidelines, we should not be at the mercy of corporations wishing to increase their profit margins with unknown chemicals.
You don't have to work with what you have only just invented and don't understand.
You're talking about bottles and pans. We have managed with bottles and pans for a thousand years before pfas.
Cast iron, steel, glass, ceramic
We have thousands of years of evidence that these things are safe
Edit: traditional? That's not even what that means anyway. Old?
Yes, but it's certainly possible to rule out entire classes of harms by asking the right questions before putting a product on the market. Maybe 100% safe is impossible but 99% is still a pretty low bar/standard when it comes to health/pollution risks.
The problem is in the current situation, corporations push toxic products on everyone that they either know to be toxic or really don't want to find out. Then we wait for people to get sick and die, then finally after it becomes a too big scandal for corporate PR and government regulators to pretend they didn't see, they start to maybe study the problem and issue guidelines.
This timeline is so broken and we see the same thing in the medical world where substances we'd known to be harmful for years/decades kept on being marketed and prescribed to unknowing patients. I personally have no faith in governments (who created or benefited from these abuses), but if you're a believer in regulations, the bare minimum they can do is publish 100% of toxicity claims/studies without any delay from submission (public inbox).
This could help in that whistleblowers are often coming forward with such claims (such as the EDF nuclear whistleblower lately) but it's hard for them to find a platform, and for the public to get informed.
One aspect we have, is defense materials being mass-produced for potentially large-scale warfare, then really raking in the bucks when a consumer application can be found. That way everybody wants some, not just soldiers. And if it's consumable, so much better since that calls for continuous mass-production. And where's it all going to end up? What part of the environment? Well, that's diferent for different materials.
Sometimes a material itself is highly disruptive, other times it's the vast quantities that end up being mass-produced.
Even then the risk of an unforseen toxic outcome has always been underestimated.
There's always some risk left no matter the rigor of testing. Shouldn't keep us from doing our best.
Slightly off topic: The recent movie starring Mark Ruffalo, Dark Water, is excellent. It covers PFAS and one lawyer’s fight to bring it to light. Very similar to the excellent “A Civil Action” starring John Travolta in the 90s or early 2000s (obligatory: the book is far better than the movie).
I dunno, I kinda think we do want to foster that.
Why don't we want to foster this? If some compound is unknown, it seems prudent to assume its a risk until proven otherwise. Then you can calculate whether or not the possible miniscule or nonexistent benefit is worth the potentially miniscule or catastrophic downside.
Some might respond that this would hamper progress, but really it would just hamper sales. You can continue to learn things without testing on the general public. And if you can't, then maybe that's no excuse to test it in prod.
Thats not what you mean, right?
That's some serious woo and you just pulled it right out of your ass. Infant botulism. Anthrax. Cyanide. Belladonna. Poisonous mushrooms.
Without some heavy qualification, this seems unlikely to be true.
Maybe if you restrict it to things that have successfully gone through some sort of heavy trials, but even then there are plenty of things that get through with a tiny upside (like the recent alzheimers drug that made headlines). And most things don't make it through trials.
If you open it up to any concoction that humans have discovered or whipped up in a lab, hoo boy.
Edit: my running definition here would be any kind of compound that we've isolated and attempted to sell.
Does it fully degrade in soil and/or seawater in a reasonable time. If it does not, are the components that remain high-molecular-weight polymers or are they small molecules?
What happens to it in a mammal body? Does it accumulate or is it excreted or otherwise eliminated?
Does it contain harmful elements (which inherently cannot degrade)?
Does aging or UV exposure change the answer to #1?
Does it contain contaminants that are problematic as above?
By these standards, PFOA would massively fail. PTFE might pass by itself but might fail the contaminant test. Historical industrial discharges from fluorochemical plants would fail.
And just to be clear I'm not the least bit in the laissez-faire camp of "allow anything and let the market decide what's safe" either. Regulation is critical, but it has limits and we (as in taxpayer-funded research facilities etc.) should be regularly reexamining whether the benefits outweigh the downsides for all industrially produced chemical substances.
Suppose that there was no evidence that PFOA was harmful. Should we allow unlimited use of it?
It's not the pure economic harm I'm worried about. Such a molecule might well be a key part of a genuine solution to reducing GHG emissions.
When populations reach the point where they start genuinely thinking being dead or never being born is better than contributing to the problem they stop having kids, and start looking at suicide. Maybe you're at that point already, and if you made the choice to die in order to help, or by way of example, I wouldn't fault you for it, but your feelings on the matter should never become someone else's problem and it should never justify the actions of someone causing, or allowing someone to cause, large numbers of people to suffer.
Because already people
1. Have profound misunderstanding of what is a "chemical"
2. have profound Ignorance of how very very few things in life are "provably knowingly completely safe"
It's not that we would "eliminate a few bad chemicals" with that approach, it's that we would eliminate virtually everything. And let's not start with "let's use natural stuff" and get into silly argument as to how do you define it and how do you prove it safe (as people are also profoundly ignorant on what is "natural" or how provably safe it is).
Everything will kill you. You will die. Note that I am not advocating nihilistic approach of "anything goes" / rampant markets / zero oversight, but I'm also not advocating nihilistic approach of "nothing goes". Human body and interactions are mind numbingly complex and I don't know how you demonstrate, conclusively, anything without testing in prod or even then, for given value of "conclusively". I doubt we would leave apples for sale if we tried to decompose them and prove all compounds within it conclusively safe.
I mean it's snark, but it's as legitimate as "if we evolved from apes, why are there still apes" and you hear that all the time.
I ask people to point at something not made out of chemicals.
5% of time there's enlightenment.
95% of the time I get a testy "you know what I mean", to which 70% of the time I manage not to respond with "yes, but do you?? "
The things that have been around for generations and we haven't yet discovered deal breaking issues in should obviously get a pass (unless something is eventually found of course).
When a company comes out with a flashy new product that has a novel use of a compound, we should be skeptical by default, especially if it is something that eventually makes its way onto or into our bodies somehow.
I'm not asking for complete safety. I'm just suggesting that we don't presume "safe enough" by default.
Apples are fine. When you do some novel shit to that apple before it gets to me, no thanks, I'll wait and see. Whatever the benefit is, its probably not for my sake (it's probably good for margins though), and if it is it's probably not that much better than a plain old apple.
Sunscreen is regulated by the FDA unlike all other cosmetic products, and is considered a cosmetic in Korea, Japan, Canada and Asia. The end result is that there are a lot of new sunscreen formulations no one wants to put through the FDA process despite several attempts at simplification by the FDA and Congress; a new sunscreen chemical hasn’t been approved since the turn of the century.
The problem is that the already approved 15 or so chemicals either have side effects of their own, or have bad cosmetic properties (bad texture, bad mixing, leaves white color on skin, etc.). We may actually be exposing people to more risk from skin cancer due to the lack of products that people actually want to apply to their skin daily.
It’s not like the FDA requires studies to be done in USA, so it’s hard(er) to argue that this is a case of regulatory capture.
It sounds like the evidence base for the non-FDA products isn’t there beyond “people in blank have used it and we can confirm they didn’t immediately die but otherwise we don’t really know”.
Meanwhile, I can’t just import a European car and register it, even though it has met almost entirely overlapping safety standards.
In that time frame some of these ingredients like bemotrizinol have been available to hundreds of millions of people. If there was a risk of something like thalidomide babies here, it would’ve been observable by now.
History of usage doesn’t make something safer than the tested options. And a lot of potential issues aren’t immediately obvious.
Sunscreen is not a cosmetic product, the intended effect of the product is not cosmetic. It makes perfect sense to regulate sunscreen as a drug. I'm really glad if they aren't letting people in the US lather up their faces with sunscreen lotions that can't demonstrate themselves to be "generally recognized as safe and effective". People are using sunscreen more than ever these days.
If the products were so good that everyone would buy them over our tired old sunscreen formulas, and if they don't poison people or the planet, then someone will take the time and pay the money to meet that standard and they will make back their investment very quickly as they put every other sunscreen company in the US out of business. If no one has done that yet and you are so confident in these new sunscreens why not take a shot yourself?
I mean, what is the working definition of "cosmetic"? Toothpaste and moisturizer are considered cosmetic by the FDA even though they certainly have health applications.
> they will make back their investment very quickly
The key words here are very quickly. According to the GAO, the process is anything but: https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-18-61-highlights.pdf
> Return on investment. The testing FDA requested is extensive, would cost millions of dollars, or take several years to conduct, according to sponsor representatives. Some stakeholders and sponsor representatives said that sponsors are currently working to develop newer sunscreen ingredients and are therefore reluctant to invest in the testing FDA requested for the older ingredients covered by the pending applications.
So it's unclear that this process is worth it when the foreign cosmetics companies can just sell to the other 7.6B people not covered by these requirements, and the products might no longer be manufactured by the time they are approved for use in the US. Also, no ingredient has successfully made it through in the past 22 years, so it's not clear that spending all that money will actually result in actually being able to sell the ingredient.
In addition, according to the same GAO report, the FDA requires animal testing. It is a really big movement right now in consumer cosmetics that the consumers who are paying for premium products also want cruelty-free products, so the required FDA testing may actually make the products unmarketable.
> if they don't poison people or the planet
To be clear, the approved ingredients don't necessarily do this either. Only two ingredients of the approved 16 are deemed to be GRASE (generally recognized as safe & effective) by the FDA. Two are just not safe, and the remaining 12 do not have enough data. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/understanding-over-counter-medicin...
Similarly, some PFAS compounds are now known to interact with certain receptors involved in lipid metabolism. So it can also be determined as biologically active in vitro.
There's just so much more that can be done about this on the regulatory side than is done currently.
It's not like the companies developing these chemicals don't know that they're likely to have the same activity. It's just pharmacology. Similar structures tend to have similar activity.
I definitely second GPs suggestion of having the burden of proof reversed like that. It would greatly reduce the work required by researchers, too.
Interestingly, BPA was actually known to have estrogenergic properties in the 30s shortly after it was first isolated, and was first researched as a potential estrogen replacement. With the right regulation this could have been caught close to a century ago...
You're right we're not completely certain, but I think it would be prudent to immediately cut back on all PFAS except scenarios where no viable alternative exists since they are so hard to remove from the environment. As nice as non-stick PFAS pans are, they need to go for now until we know more.
Many of these things we don't know are because it would be unethical to do the experiment to give some people PFAS and some people no PFAS and see if the PFAS group get more diseases.
Instead, we allow PFAS to be used indiscriminately, and then afterwards regret it.
Experimentation of potentially harmful things on people should be allowed if the alternative is giving the same potentially harmful thing to everybody with no experimentation done.
Yet the changes are really obvious by now. I've been on a hike in the northern Alps a few days ago. I know the mountain quite well, and it should be teeming with life this time of the year, insects, birds, but it was eerily quiet across the whole altitude range. The river in my hometown should carry yearly floodwaters from snowmelt, but this year there was not a hint of a flood. The all-time temperature record was shattered (again), though. Forest fires in areas that never saw any just decades ago. Clean windshields in mid-August. Either no rainfall for months, or several 1000-year floods, nothing in between. Silence where there have been annoyingly loud crickets and frogs since forever.
I guess we're running a deeply, deeply dangerous experiment on the biosphere and I'm not convinced anymore that it's going to be fine. I have a feeling it's going to be very, very much not fine at all.
I think there are other significant factors to consider as well.
In the US at least I think regulation, in our current day, has failed in many areas due to 1) the slowing down of decision makers to become informed and make decisions (see congress for stagnation in passing legal regulations) 2) industries or large industry players have waged effective influence campaigns in mainstream and scientific communities to push a friendly agenda or inject uncertainty which has nock on affects when it comes to funding (see pesticides like neonics and glyphosates, oil and gas companies with respect to global warming and plastic recycling, tobaco companies and smoking causing cancer, …), and 3) a certain degree of capture in regulatory agencies by industry (industry players later work for the regulatory agency or the reverse, as well as other tactics). 4) the politicization of regulation (not sure how much this can be helped though).
It’s a mess.
> We could switch from "allow by default" to "deny by default", but I'm not even sure that would help.
There may be a middle ground here. As a chemic becomes more widely used that could trigger required enhanced testing by a regulatory agency as well as research grants looking into their safety.
And as a chemical becomes ever more widely used rigorous long-term studies could be required.
I’m not sure what the right long term answer is but I can’t help but think there is some fundamental mismatch of top down regulation by regulatory bodies in a market based system where companies are innovating and also creating these harms / negative externalities. In the former regulators are slow, reactionary, and often substantial harm must have already occurred for a regulation to be passed. The latter is a dynamic and fast moving system where companies are ruled by a fitness function which is often myopic and locally greedy.
It seems introducing another market for regulation could offer a solution by using one dynamic system to regulate another. Carbon credits is an example of this. However two or more interacting systems will make things much harder to reason about and may have their own significant flaws if not designed well (for example trees are planted but then die earlier than expected or are later harvested after the carbon credits have been sold).
The book was published over a decade ago, so news travels slowly sometimes, even to regulators.
[1] Slow Death By Rubber Duck https://www.amazon.com/Slow-Death-Rubber-Duck-Everyday/dp/15...
People, people. Why do you all expect regulation to work in the presence of corruption?
All regulations break down with high enough stakes. We are in this mess right now, because we made the mistake of thinking that regulations will be good enough to stop it.
I too had no idea. Pisses me off.
After trying a handful of alternatives, I settled on bamboo floss.
For all I know, bamboo floss contains arsenic and midi-chlorians.
> ...whole host of rare medical conditions become common when my generation gets older.
You mean like how leaded gasoline caused populate wide cognitive and behavioral problems?
There is enough evidence to suggest it's unsafe.
Or it used some other long fluoropolymer with a similar biological effect as PTFE but can claim to be "PTFE free" because on paper no PTFE was used.
https://www.fjallraven.com/ca/en-ca/customer-service/care-re...
Literary every plumbing system in the last 20 years or more has all your water inlets lathered in PTFE along every joint of the pipework.
Chemically, ethylene is the gaseous hydrocarbon monomer that is polymerized to make the common polyethylene plastic, like so many milk jugs and other items needing a cheap plastic are made of.
Tetrafluoroethylene (TFE) is the fluorocarbon monomer which is the fluorinated analog of the common ethylene. It's really rough and wants to spontaneously react with itself (or any number of other things) to form a bit of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) polymer with somewhat explosive force under not-fully-predictable conditions. So nobody really wants to handle TFE.
Instead extensive research at places like 3M and DuPont came up with a number of different alternative starting molecules that were less self-reactive but could still be coerced into forming PTFE as a final product.
The PTFE was intended be a forever plastic like no other, but a variety of fluorinated starting materials and byproducts were also obtained some of which had interesting properties themselves. For instance some acidic PFAS compounds are not very inert on their own, one end of the molecule will firmly bond to some natural products like canvas or leather, which largely neutralizes their further reactivity. So after that those molecules aren't going anywhere until degradation of the substrate occurs. And the other end of the molcules possess the perfluorinated inert feature, forming an invisible coating which repels water like people had never seen.
So it's all this other stuff, and the final degradation products (of those PFAS that have a decomposition pathway), that ends up in the environent eventually, many with a physical propery of self-dispersal. OTOH the PTFE is a solid plastic and just sits there permanently inert, no decomposition pathway, with little tendency for further environmental spread unless incinerated or microscopically pulverized, which disperses it as a byproduct gas, or very tough microplastic, respectively.
have you ever taken apart half of those joints?
people love going overboard with the tape, when the threads are overloaded guess where the excess gets squished?
Between 1986 and 2011, lead free plumbing can contain up to 8% lead per EPA standards. After 2011, lead free plumbing may now only contain 0.25% lead.
Incidentally, before Teflon tape became affordable enough for plumbing use, most plumbers were using a type of traditional "pipe dope" instead.
Maybe this is another application where it might be a feature if "dope sells itself".
That’s the traditional way of sealing joints. No chemicals, just hemp and your own saliva (you usually don’t have running water nearby when doing plumbing).
Sometimes chemicals are safer.
Call me paranoid but I've taken them apart remove all the mangled PTFE tape and sealed the thread with hemp.
In connections that do use tape, like old galvanized steel pipe, the tape is entirely within the joints, because it's a lubricant.
(Just checked with my uncle who's a plumber)
But, either system will have often have PTFE at any terminations where transitioning to other fixtures via threaded fittings. [0] And occasionally there are brass fittings in the middle of these systems which are threaded and those will use PTFE as well.
Yeah, rather than just the joints now the entire pipe is leeching toxic compounds
PFOA-free PTFE guidewires suffer higher risk of delamination, i.e. flaking of the ptfe coating which becone an embulus in your bloodstream.
The FDA does an amazing job at keeping us safe but the more evidence we have about the effects of novel substances the more I am biased to applying a cautionary principle.
In my pipe fixtures at home I will stick to hemp to seal the threads. If in the future I happen to need a stent, then I'll worry about it when I cross that bridge. :)
Synthesized fluoropolymers have been around for about 60 years with an overall poor track record for Health and Safety.
If we apply a moderate cautionary principle towards novelty and also consider the minor life quality improvements that these 3M innovations bring (fluoropolymers only make things slightly less incovenient they are not ground breaking in my life), then it really is a no brainer decision.
Sadly, we are.
This system is broken beyond repair.
I'm not holding my breath for humans to fix this.
I have my money on an alternative.
These people live life with heads in the sand while the world burns. They won't wake up even once their torso is rotisserie.
I just don't understand the "woe is me" nihilistic narrative so many intelligent people are deeply fond of. Recycle, turn off the lights, vote with your conscience. Get a wife, make some kids, live a happy life, try to make a positive difference in the world. It's not hard.
More Kitchen Nightmares less “The end is near!”
History is full of instances of people not taking concerns seriously because “I’ve done things this way for years and I’m not dead yet”, only to find out a 30 years later, that in fact, it was something that causes a chronic disease.
There is an amount of attention appropriate to give risks, but many people really overdo it and turn it into a kind of religion and obsession.
It also doesn't help that most popular cinematic futurism is post-apocalyptic now. I remember RedLetterMedia pointing to the success of Independence Day as the turning point and I can see some validity in that.
It's one thing to worry about the planet and the animals, and people dying directly due to climate events (floods and storms, heatwaves and drought) etc. I am far, far more worried about what we will do to each other when the 3 billion of us who are vulnerable to climate change want to move somewhere else.
Let's not be "doomers", but let's not ignore emerging risks of catastrophic outcomes, either.
Playing Russian Roulette a few times and getting away with it doesn't make it safe.
And plenty of stuff that would have been really bad has been stopped by diligent response by people and governments considering those risks.
If we keep making the same mistakes and exposing consumers to toxic things, and lacing the entire environment with them... maybe there's some processes that need to improve instead of just shrugging and saying "well, that's how we do it 'round here!"
Some possible regulations come to mind. For instance, maybe a ban or very strict regulations on the widespread use of compounds like PFAS that have no known biological or other natural path of degradation. Because it's become very clear that such compounds are inevitably going to end up spread all over global ecosystems.
Edit: So I did some more research. Not only are BPS and BPF not known to be safer, they are already known to have many of the same problems as BPA. To make things worse BPS and possibly BPF are even less degradable than BPA. So they may even be worse. This is not even a little surprising. Their structure is identical except for the linkage between the phenol groups. From pharmacology it's well known that highly similar structures tend to have similar pharmacodynamic properties. So they're not even remotely likely to have been good replacements before the growing mountain of evidence to the contrary appeared. Clearly this blatantly irresponsible behaviour from industry needs to be stopped.
Because you put your finger on the sociological problem at hand here. It's just cheaper to do the wrong thing right now. I always think that capitalism has this evolutionary nature where inevitably the biggest coroporations will be the ones that are maximally unethical within(or just enough outside that lawyers can handle it) the confines of the law. And you don't have to look far to find evidence of that. I think regulations need to be designed more with this evolutionary model in mind. It seems lost on most politicians currently.
For carbon emissions, I think the case for a tax is fairly clear, since we _can't_ just outright ban emissions, the harm is 100% known, and we can even estimate the cost of reversing the emissions through carbon capture.
For these chemicals, it seems much less clear. The uncertainty is so great I don't think I could estimate an appropriate tax rate. The danger is that the alternatives presented are a ban, and a low tax that wouldn't solve the problem. Vested interests would push for the second option and present the problem as solved.
Making corporations more accountable for external costs is maybe the great challenge of our time. I think markets and capitalism are necessary. I can't help but think there must be some more fundamental selective pressure that can be applied that will lead to corporations that take externalised cost into account being more successful over time. I have no suggestions. I'm not sure anyone does. But I can't quite get it out my mind lately. I even caught myself considering going off to study evolutionary economics. The 25 year old me would stare at me in incredulity upon hearing this. I feel like the social sciences have a ways to go still before being able to answer questions like this.
While good regulations are good, companies are made of people, and the people need to act like it
I wouldn't. It may be simplistic but I think that the judiciary applying firm measures designed to protect the public and the biosphere, is the best approach.
It also depends though. Which government? I would have far lower credence in trusting the US government with this compared to some European governments that came out of a healthier democracy than the US. But that also goes for the regulations necessary for your less radical approach.
Ultimately most CEOs are probably psychopaths. What would be useful is banning psychopaths from there positions as they lack empathy.
Not sure if we can reliably tell who is a psychopath but it’s always going to be an issue.
I could see that working in some areas, like military suppliers. Most of the time though it'd be bad to give the government any opportunity to generate profit from law enforcement actions. It could incentivize terrible behavior.
It's pointless to dissolve a corporation, as new ones can be formed. A corporation is just a formal name and structure we give to a group of people working together.
The way to destroy means is to seize assets.
Maybe limit culpability to SEC Form 3 filers - easier to prove sufficient leverage and potential motive if not for criminal matters, then at least civil matters.
Sure I could buy all metal products but I still don’t because I still like plastic and I’m well aware that it’s destroying the world, but plastic enables my current lifestyle and I currently enjoy my current lifestyle
…As well as billions of other people.
It’s not an issue of “companies being bad.” It’s because we all love our current way of life and no one really wants to stop the companies because most of us still want the products
That's one of the main issues here: you don't avoid it just by avoiding the consumer goods in your post.
"we don't have statistically significant evidence this will kill you yet, but we're also not looking very hard for it"
Following a plant-based diet and trying alternative modes of transit to the car make a pretty great impact!
Your time is coming. The rest of the hard engineering disciplines have had their failures and now we have licenses and accountability.
The amount of damage one bridge can do is limited, but the amount of destruction caused by endocrine disrupting chemicals and authoritarian enabling surveillance tools is unlimited.
The civil engineer will be held to account for his failures. Hopefully, soon, the same will be true for the likes of your professions
There's chemists who make the world better and chemists who make the world worse, like with every other profession.
I personally didn't get that from the parent comment. It's just really weird (from an outsider/alien perspective) that in many sectors of the corporate mafia like in the chemical/IT industry obvious and sometimes intentional malicious schemes (which result in actual deaths) are either rewarded or ignored... when in many other branches harmless errors can get you kicked from your job (eg. in restaurants/shops).
It's not contempt to point that out. If you believe in the idea that there should be a social contract by which we are bound, the social contract must apply to everyone fairly. So why does it often not apply to cops, judges, landlords and some sectors of the engineering community?
> There's chemists who make the world better and chemists who make the world worse, like with every other profession.
True, but like in every other profession, it's very hard to make money if you're really trying to make the world better, and i do mean any money (as in find a job at all).
Read it. We made those engineers accountable and should have done the same for the others.
Please review what it means to make a threat, as nothing stated is remotely a "threat". Sounds weakly middle management, BTW.
It is a notice that soon there will be accountability.
If you are an engineer making the world a better place, then there won't be much to account for will there?
So some mid level manager/engineer gets to be the fall guy and all the executives gets away scot free?
Engineers make the world. Be accountable to yourself and your fellow man. We can deny the CEOs of the world our knowledge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_International_Universi...
search jail : 0 found
I'm tired of software companies that just go hire another shmuck.
But I will add that professional chemist licensing should be required and revocable
So yes, it is a valid analogy. Just as it would be equally valid [read: not valid at all] to damn the software engineering profession for the sins of AutoDesk, or whomever your villain du jour is.
My statement is intended to denounce those among you that have no concern with what their work will wrought in the world. If you can stand behind your actions then you aren't the target.
Side note: most of software is written by hacks (read: google copypasters) that don't deserve the title engineer and do a disservice to actual programmers. No one cares about Autodesk other than Architects. The concern is Palantir, Facebook, Google, Cellebright, NSO Group
Licensing for many professions is bullshit. Licensing for engineering requires mentorship and certification by non-government societies in the US. They determine the amount of rigor to join their group and hold the status as a professional engineer.
Everything after that is just registration, which confirms you have evidence of the the prior
you maybe need to go talk to chemists who make this. ChemE just mass produce what the chemist makes. but the chemist just makes what the business needs and the business you makes what the consumer wants.
so oh wait, this is on you for being an irresponsible consumer. don't buy it and we won't make it.
also, north America and the west have already done impressive reforms contrary to Asia which really needs to learn environmentalism
Great, love that for you. When your company is ruining the world you should take a stand.
> ... irresponsible consumer...
No. Won't accept that shirking of responsibility. Consumers expect that the product isn't poison. We expect that planes fly and cars don't explode. It isn't reasonable to say that consumers want nonstick poison. They were sold a product that was "better" than the alternatives. They believed that would include not being poison.
In other words, the sky is not falling, we've just adjusted the definition of where the sky starts.
https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/drinking-water-health-advisories-pf...
Alot of money and research is exploring the topic, not surprisingly, guidance changes as knowledge gets refined.
Also, I'm curious if there will be legal implications from this: Will literally the whole planet be able to pursue lawsuits against 3M and peers for making our rainwater 'unsafe'?
The only good thing is that making non stick pans with this stuff has already been banned in US and EU for a good while.
Can't we just finish stopping the C8/CFC/Pesticide/whatever before we try to stop everything all at once with some nebulous, all-inclusive climate change plan that mostly causes people to only focus on oil use?
Yet we have a few billion people on the earth. I think we can spare a few thinking about other problems.
Most of this comes down to figuring out what's harmful and regulating it. We can't outlaw "chemicals". And, of course, there's the whole cooperation in other jurisdictions problem, which affects the next point...
> some nebulous, all-inclusive climate change plan that mostly causes people to only focus on oil use?
Look, uh, the climate change thing is bad. Really bad. And avoiding burning stuff is really hard. We can live without PFAS and glyphosate if we decide we really should. Avoiding burning stuff for energy is really hard.
The chemical harms are complicated: there are some that are long-standing risks, but most of our concerns do not raise to the level of something that screws up climate, agriculture, etc, for centuries.
I'm tired on hearing entitled little sh1ts like you that have lived incredibly pampered lives and don't have a clue of what is like to have to live without a refrigerator, hvac or modern medicine.
This is what Daniel Quinn calls "living in the hands of the gods". We are not really fit to do anything else. Humans have survived for hundreds of thousands of years living off what the land provides them in its natural course. Civilization will probably not make it much past ten thousand years, if that.
So tell me again which is the bigger nightmare: living and dying according to the whims of nature, being one small part in a society that adapts and harmonizes to nature; or the death of billions, and the extermination of considerable amounts of other life, all because we wanted to rule in place of the gods and never learned not to shit where we eat.
If you go by that logic we are only fit to live in tropical savannahs in Africa where modern humans originated.
What I find supremely arrogant, though, is any Westerner who, while living in comfort and safety amidst high technology, proposes that everyone in the world should just be content with not having the comforts they are currently using (including some, like vaccines and modern medicine, which arguably have vastly less negative effects than PFAS and burning fossil fuels).
Anyone actually serious about this philosophy should try as much as possible to make their lifestyles like what they want for everyone. It probably wouldn't convince everyone, but it would certainly earn them a lot more respect.
It is the biggest environmental threat facing civilisation, but if only the climate warriors would give up in the face of powerful vested interests and economic intertia, perhaps they'd have time to plant a few wildflowers? /s
I would argue PFAS isn't about damaging the environment either. It's about human health. Same goes for CFCs.
It is getting problematic that 'being green' these days can either be caring about the environment and biodiversity like green-peace. Or it can mean 'doing whatever is needed to stop climate change and keep harmful (to humans) chemicals out of the environment'.
Those are actually two very different thought processes with different people who support them. Sharing the term is not working out very well.
Because then the conversation will just be dominated on focusing on a smaller issue, with a similar impasse. Just because a bully gets outraged when somebody stands up to them is not a reason to stop standing up to them, and the same folks opposing environmental protection will fight just as hard on other issues.
FWIW, this was understood quite a long time ago. Consider that the EPA "SuperFund"[1] program began in 1980. And it's not like that was the first time anybody understood that some chemicals have very harmful impacts "in the wild."
/every s
How? Why limit it to substances? Social media is unsafe What point in time were we only using safe substances so we can use that list of substances as the baseline and then somehow only allow new substances to be used when their long term safety has been demonstrated somehow?
Yes, we should take new chemicals and study them for a significant time frame prior to extensive global use. The bar can be set higher.
Don't conflate social science with hard science.
Social media is great at steering populations, generating useful propaganda and generating useful profiles of individuals.... Why would governments want to restrict that?
what is a new chemical?
who will study them?
how long is significant?
what does safe mean?
who will limit global use?
The answer to that is no, it is impossible for any vaccine to be included in that list, which gives rise to the more general point: modern scientific studies are so heavily agenda-polluted, that skepticism and conservative adoption are prohibited. That a handful of short-term (<100 years) studies are sufficient for rolling out unprecedented technologies to the entire world. That an absence of evidence of long-term effects is taken to mean evidence of absence.
Whether it be DDT, GMO's, or PFAS, if the science to date can't detect harm, then there of course cannot possibly be harm - throw caution to the wind and roll it out 100% the world over, from Antarctica to Tibet.
It does a great job presenting your argument in mathematical format as well as rebutting usual criticisms you may encounter
You missed the problematic last step.
We take technical innovations to a societal scale, discover a really harmful effect, and then stubbornly do the square root of bugger-all about it.
It's expected that harms, especially through complex side-effects take time to emerge. We can't see the future, nor can we exhaustively test everything in advance.
The problem comes with the response. A certain amount of market inertia is to be expected. Recalling and replacing products is expensive.
But what is absolutely inexcusable, and ripe for immediate radical global action to address [1], is the disgraceful, blatantly criminal behaviour of large corporations who move to suppress science, discredit researchers, silence critics and bury bad news.
Many problems concerning at-scale blow-back turn out to have been known about decades in advance of their impact.
[1] https://goodmenproject.com/the-good-life/the-corporate-death...
EDIT: A better link on the idea of the "corporate death penalty" (actually quite a good read in itself) [2]
[2] https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/08/its-time-bring...
(At least one side is willing to acknowledge that the problem exists. That’s worth something but maybe not very much.)
We have no way of getting rid of these chemicals except possibly to spread more chemicals, which then would need to break apart only those specific molecules AND capture their fluoride ions in some inert matrix to prevent them from forming other compounds as well as directly affecting the environment and our bodies.
We’re pretty much SOL and the only thing we can do is STOP using fluoride chemicals permanently, which we can’t entirely do, because things like uranium enrichment are dependent on teflon.
So, I state that while CFCs are mostly banned right now. They're still an issue, and it took far too long to regulate. It is seriously not nonsense.
> and then stubbornly do the square root of bugger-all about it.
That's nonsense. There's a world of difference between "we do nothing about environmental problems," and "I think some particular action should've taken five less years go do," and when you retreat to that position it's a different point entirely.
As to whether it took "too long" to regulate CFCs, what's your measure for that? Is it just vibes? If we had started the process of banning CFCs five years earlier, what's your assertion for the harm mitigated compared to the factual?
Certainly some, probably low level employees, didn’t feel they had the luxury of questioning their company’s ethics and looking for work elsewhere, but what about all the more senior people who presumably sat in boardrooms and spun ways to continue pouring shit into the environment with reckless abandon? What am I missing?
Fictionalised, quite accurately perhaps, Michael Cristofer as Phillip Price and Bruce Altman playing Terry Colby in Sam Esmail's "Mr Robot" both do an outstanding job of capturing the shrugging banality of evil at genocidal scale. The feeling I got from that (Esmail is a first class writer) was of those inside accounts of the Nuremberg trials with Eichmann laughing
The banality of evil is that murdering a million people is just something you do on a nondescript Wednesday afternoon over wine and canapés while everyone is watching the clock to get out to the golf course.
There is no "rationalisation". No moustache twisting or maniacal laughter. No drama. No thought at all. It is the "amorality", the total absence of moral thought that is horrifying beyond anything Colonel Kurtz could conjure up at the dark end of the river.
Excellent points, well worth thinking about more.
I don't think there was anything remotely close to a scientific consensus, or even a respected minority view, that fossil fuels would cause dangerous global warming in 1912, but correct me if I am wrong.
While creating a ton of new ones, which is sadly in the nature of most solutions; They tend to create new problems.
The question is how much "environmental capital" do we have left trying to figure out something actually long-term sustainable.
Agreed it's harder now with increased misinformation, corporate capture, and failed political systems.
Okay, but isn't "corporate death penalty" equivalent to a fine that exceeds the value of the company? If we're having trouble fining companies for even 1% of their market value, then demanding a 100% fine seems a bit premature. The whole situation feel like people wanting to reduce wealth inequality by demanding a communist revolution, rather than something more reasonable like higher tax brackets.
I don't necessarily agree with the "corporate death penalty" (for the same reasons I don't sanction individual death penalty - that organisations like individuals are not necessarily coherent and unified systems with clear intent and culpability) It's potentially a vast destruction of wealth unrelated to the crime.
BUT: It's a good example of radical action that's needed right now, so that's why I put it out there. The one thing that I vehemently disagree with you about is that it's in any way "premature". We are in the last seconds before midnight, and we ought to have the will put anything remotely effective on the table, before the crazies do, because they will soon have the will, the means, and the moral justification to go way beyond mere "corporate death penalties".
E.g. is the radioactive dust we are all exposed to from global coal plants unsafe? High levels of pm 2.5 from steel plants making your vehicles and roads? Low cost subsidized sugar making half the population obese?
We all die in the end, trying to balance where to act is a hard problem because time is zero sum.
It's not that the concentration of these chemicals increases past what we thought was safe, what changed was our knowledge of his dangerous they are, making current levels unsafe.
Any notion for "objectively" deciding these things has to account for unknown information, which means assigning subjective risk to these unknowns. I don't find an "objective" framework a coherent concept because of that. Ignorance of the world must be confronted head on and taken into account, and those that do not incorporate that risk directly into their cognitive models will perform worse at achieving their goals.
Since it was considered to be perfectly safe when they used it, and they stopped 20 years ago (presumably when they discovered it was unsafe), I don’t think there’s any legal ground to stand on.
But we're all guilty of buying products created with those substances and driving cars so.. the fault lies with each of us on an individual level.
What breaks my heart is that the people with all of the money and power actively prevent the rest of us from inventing better solutions. They've created an entire economy around dead end service jobs instead of automation, to keep us distracted and disillusioned so we can never catch a breather and disrupt their meal ticket.
If it were up to me (it will never be up to me), I'd work towards creating open source alternatives for all resources necessary for life. I'd make a wiki of everything people work for (food, water, housing, incidentals) and make each one sustainable and as close to free as possible. Money would be optional and used for aspirations beyond necessity.
It would be kind of a Jetsons solarpunk future where a backyard robotic hydroponic garden grows all non-animal macronutrients. Eggs and kefir would largely replace meat. The house would be made of 3D printed hempcrete and recycled materials. Power and HVAC would come from free (7 year amortized) photovoltaics and passive solar-thermal heat pumps connected to the buried irrigation system.
This stuff is honestly so easy that I can only blame conspiracy for lack of adoption. Or maybe extreme laziness. Whatever the reason is, it's defeatist.
So I'm trying to deprogram myself and incorporate these solutions into my own life. So far I've only succeeded in buying a used electric car though. It's just too hard to save the $10,000 to fix each problem one by one, so I pay out more than that to be a consumer and stay trapped in the matrix. Where are the loans for these solutions? Where's the political will?
Cigarettes, sugar, asbestos, hydrogenated vegetable oil, "clean" diesel cars...
No individual manager at any corporation involved in this has a KPI that says: “Terminate the entire category of industry on which our profits are based.”
This is the problem, and governments these days are just an extension of the same broken system.
Chasing after profits will lead humanity off the edge of a cliff.
Luckily, ‘unsafe’ here, for now, means a relatively small increase in the risk to get some diseases.
⇒ Apart from trying to buy less stuff that contains these chemicals, I think it’s not worthwhile to worry about the health impacts on our individual lives, as it’s an as good as unavoidable risk now (eating only food grown using melting ice caps or millennia old aquifers would work, but has other disadvantages. Filtering PFAS out of all water used in agriculture seems infeasible)
https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2022/04/ewg-forever-c...
> EPA’s health advisories, which identify the concentration of chemicals in drinking water at or below which adverse health effects are not anticipated to occur, are: 0.004 parts per trillion (ppt) for PFOA, 0.02 ppt for PFOS, 10 ppt for GenX chemicals, and 2,000 ppt for PFBS. Health advisories are non-regulatory and reflect EPA’s assessment of the best available peer-reviewed science.
0.004 ppt is also more commonly known as the number zero. It's probably just the currently best limit of detection for PFOA in water.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/american-scandal/id143...
There is also a less dramatic version in book form, called Exposure by Robert Bilott, the attorney who prosecuted DuPont.
I drink mostly bottled tea or soda but that's usually in plastic which has bpa... There's really no getting away from this shit unless you literally carbonate or maybe your own organic teas using highly filtered water and maybe live in a bubble that catches and filters unhealthy particles.
I have two toddlers and I'm saddened they have to face this world. I honestly feel the last decent decade to be a kid was the 90s. I grew up in the 80s graduated in 98, and maybe it's just nostalgia but it just feels like the world is much darker and less safe.
I mean we could run all over town when I was 7, no worries.
We'd be dropped off at the swimming pool, or video arcade, etc... Or just ride our bikes exploring.
Now that's child abuse. I'm glad my kids are safe in their child harness but I'm also glad I only had to worry about seat belts as a kid, after 3 or so. Now it's like 8 or older...
And don't get me started on how weak Halloween is compared to the glorious 80s. Beggars night was an entire community affair, now there is no community anywhere that really gives af.
I'm reminded of the Queen song "is this the world we created" or when the children cry by white lion... Two excellent songs that sum up the world we're leaving our kids... It's beyond sad.
It makes me so angry some people benefiting at the expense of millions of others, under regulatory nose.
Also makes me wonder how much similar hubris exists with other topics; Afaik to this day there is still no medical scientific consensus weather damage from radiation is actually cumulative or not.
By now we have myriads of other compounding factors, particularly for cancer, that make it increasingly difficult to filter the actual signal, of what causes these issues, from all the environmental "noise" we keep creating by changing our one and only habitat in such massive, and lasting, ways.
But since remediation is now part of the way of doing things, ironically nobody has an incentive to learn more.
> I just don’t think the science that led to its installation is rigorous. It’s a basement not a coal mine.
Can you explain this thinking? What you've said so far sounds like an argument from incredulity, not backed up by anything.
Radon testing is fairly straight-forward, the nuclear science behind it is all rigorous and well understood; radon gas decays into radioactive "radon daughters" that, not being gases, settle as dust in places where there is poor airflow. You can test for radon in a building by either sampling the air in the building, or by leaving a filter there for a while and then testing the filter for radon's daughters. If you do this testing, you find that radon is prevalent in some areas and a non-issue in many others. Do you think this testing was never done, or the results mistaken for some reason?
> “second biggest cause of lung cancer”
Maybe you're incredulous because you heard this claim out of context? Smoking is said to be the cause of 80-90% of lung cancers; the "second biggest cause" is just the scraps, under 20%.
Both can be true.
Because PFAS are so widespread and they have been around so long, if they were really bad we would be seeing massive issues. However, we are not.
Likely they do cause some harm if you have enough statistical power, but likely below the threshold that we live with (for example birth control, going to the beach, driving a car, red meat, and maybe even cooking itself).
Isn't the entire reason these things are unsafe that they bioaccumulate over long periods of small dose exposure?
1. They really haven't "been around so long". Not even a single human lifetime.
2. Plenty of other things cause cancer, endocrine disruption etc. Red meat and the beach are here to stay, but why should I be ok with some unaccountable corporation dumping additional pollutants into my environment?
But, by all means, continue to avoid a rational, cautious mode of decision making. It's probably not that harmful in my opinion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32438368#32442794
Here is my comment:
This is actually very poor statistics. Take a look at the actual study:
https://www.jhep-reports.eu/article/S2589-5559(22)00122-7/fu...
And look at table 3. They are testing 6 different types of PFAS, and only 1 is statistically significant. They need to be using the Bonferroni Correction because they are checking multiple hypothesis. To do that, you divide the required p-value (0.05) by the number of tests (6). If you do the Bonferroni Correction, none of the PFAS is statistically significant.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/882/
Thus the real conclusion is that the study did not find any statistically significant link between 'forever chemicals' and liver cancer.
Given your comment I was expecting something like 5 patients per group. But they had 50 cases and 50 controls. In this context, an uncorrected pvalue of 0.02 is pretty solid.
https://illinoisnewsroom.org/pfas-can-still-be-incinerated-i...
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/pentago...
https://earthjustice.org/news/press/2020/department-of-defen...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/company-linked-to-toxic-forever...
Before the 1930's we were able to live lives without plastic, now, we have plastic in our lungs and blood because of technological progress and convenience. The very things that were designed to help us are now responsible for quickening our demise.
Why don't things change? Because everyone is too addicted to this modern lifestyle and will not do what is necessary to reduce plastics and contaminents in our life.
Just look in your house, how much you have of these contaminating technologies....if you feel so stongly about it, try to eliminate all but the most essential.
…Wut?
Like, I get that the values are still ‘bad’, but there must be a different way to present that.
I’d also like specifics on exactly how bad ‘bad’ is, because these agencies tend to present their 0.5% increase of lifetime risk of cancer as something exceptional, when you can also get such a thing from, say, eating too much cheese.
That's one way to put it, yes. Another way is that recent scientific studies have shown these chemicals are way more harmful than we once thought. Should we not adjust recommendations accordingly? Seems rather obvious and undeserving of a "Wut?".
How bad is bad? Check out how they calculate the HA values here: https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2022-06/technical...
Radium used to be sold in patent medicine tinctures because it wasn't considered dangerous. [1]
I don't know about you but 0.5% increase in lifetime risk of cancer is not something I'm comfortable taking on, and it's not fair that I don't have any say in the matter.
Cancer sucks.
My point was rather that there’s probably a variety of things you do in daily life that have exactly that effect, but nobody is excited about those.
Probably because cheese is tasty and random chemicals in the air aren’t.
Global trends are difficult to accurately capture as we’ve seen with Covid. Most countries don’t have the infrastructure to get accurate and good statistics from.
These companies have our govnement officials in their pockets but they live on the same planet. They have no conscious even for themselves or their children.
The reason I am conflicted is our vendors got rid of PFOA but replaced it with something similar to it but not the same.
Effectively, we now have 2 "forever" chemicals in the environment. rinse repeat.
I don't know what the answer is unless we make a conscious decision to forego the performance benefits these chemicals provide to our products. waterproof shoes and sofas, dental floss, med dev, etc.
Either by consuming all the nutrients, or so polluting the dish with their metabolic waste that they can no longer survive.
Adulterating our entire ecology with hyperpersistent, novel, toxicologically dubious chemicals is bad. This should be self-explanatory and completely obvious. The benefits of PFAS and friends do not outweigh the downsides.
Additionally, even in the US, the guidelines by the individual states vary between 13 to 1000 ppt. [2]
[1]: https://www.canada.ca/en/services/health/publications/health...
These generalizations make conversations about them useless.
Lumping a hundred chemicals under a label and then claiming that any time ANY of them are found that they are harmful, is dishonest.
1 µg/L = 1,000,000 ppt
1 ng/L = 1,000 ppt
You can find the figures here:
https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/questions-and-answers-drinking-wate...
Rain water and ocean spray already exceed these limits by hundreds of thousands to several million times.
I don't think so. See here (the green box in the upper right corner of page 2): https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-09/documents/ep...
> nanograms per liter (ng/L) = parts per trillion (ppt)
Or alternatively: https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/circ1133/conversion-factors.html
https://www.google.com/search?q=1+ng%2FL+in+parts+per+trilli...
If you check the second search result (https://www.llojibwe.org/drm/environmental/content/concentra...), it also corroborates what I'm saying:
> 1 nanogram/liter (ng/l) = 1 ppt
Technically speaking, ppt/ppb/ppm should be used for dimensionless quantities, but the convention used here is kinda contrary to that. The argument for the convention is something like this: 1 L ~= 1kg of water, so 10^-12kg of something per 1 L of water can be considered as dimensionless, since the kg and the L cancel out.
You could argue that it's still wrong though, in the sense that the website is in English, and currently the short scale is used in all main Anglosphere countries. [1]
P.S. I just realized that even the short/long scale thing doesn't explain the endmemo.com claim. It's probably just a mistake. In the short scale, a trillion is 10^12, while in the long scale it's 10^18. So, if we were to use the long scale, 1 ppt would a smaller unit by a a factor of 10^-6 (not 10^-3), and equal to 1 fg/L (femto is the SI prefix for 10^-15, while nano is for 10^-9).
In other words, 1 ng/L = 1,000,000 part per long scale trillion.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Short_...
Can we get a citation on this? I’m not a chemical engineer, but distillation seems like a pretty good way to get rid of virtually everything.
Same story with any particulate emissions, like soot, dust, tires, etc.
For example it is not possible to completely separate ethanol and water with distillation.
A quick internet search seems to indicate PF* can be separated with distillation.
When I searched on half-life, the results that came up mostly seemed to discuss the half-life in the body, not the half-life in an environmental sink such as the ocean.
Yah, there's a lot of data on "serum" or "elimination" half lives.
What you care about is "atmospheric", "aqueous abiotic", and "aqueous biotic" half lives.
So, e.g. for PFOA, atmospheric half lives are about 130 days... https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/jp036343b
I can't come up with a link to share for PFOA in aqueous solutions, but it looks like 90-150 years.
Your same link notes that the majority of PFOA is not broken down in the atmosphere and points to "wet and dry deposition" mostly, which sounds like it's being dropped down to Earth remaining as PFOA.
That's an interesting paper. If so, multiply the atmospheric time by 2-4.
> Your same link notes that the majority of PFOA is not broken down in the atmosphere and points to "wet and dry deposition" mostly, which sounds like it's being dropped down to Earth remaining as PFOA.
Yes. That doesn't affect the "half life" here.
In the end, not much PFOA ends up in the atmosphere in the first place, and most precipitates out to less convenient places where it lives longer. Of the stuff resident in the atmosphere, it does break down on human timescales, at least...
I bet that the butter itself is worse for your health than the minuscule PFAS you are getting from your pan.
Except it isn’t. Try letting melted cheese, or pretty much any starch (pasta, rice, oatmeal, etc) sit in stainless for a while and then see how non-stick it is. It will glue itself to stainless but on non-stick it will slide right off.
I’m not arguing in favor of non-stick, and avoid it when possible, but we can’t also be making inaccurate claims either.
Also, cast iron, even when seasoned, would still stick quite a bit in the above scenario (and I can’t imagine any scenario where I’d want to cook starches like that in cast iron).
Also, vegetable oils are incredibly high in omega-6's which compete with omega-3's for the same enzymes. In general the literature suggests we should be consuming about a 4:1 ratio for Omega-3's to Omega-6 fatty acids. Corn-based oil, for example, has a 1:60 ratio
I think avoiding excessive vegetable oil intake is still a good idea
It dumbs down discussion, as well taking it off topic and turning it nasty. Important topics deserve better than that. Unimportant topics too, actually.
How is the meaning different? The plateau bit?
I'll never forget washing my hair in the water closet, and with a rainwater rinse, having a better hair day than I ever had on the mainland.