> I think what's changed most is our standards.
PFAS didn't exist 75 years ago. Now we've almost permanently contaminated our environment and atmosphere with it, that's quite a big change.
PFAS didn't exist 75 years ago. Now we've almost permanently contaminated our environment and atmosphere with it, that's quite a big change.
From Wikipedia:
> Chlormequat has not previously been registered for use on food crops in the United States. In April 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed allowing the use of the chemical on food crops such as barley, oat, triticale, and wheat. The EPA’s human health risk assessment indicated "no dietary, residential, or aggregate (i.e., combined dietary and residential exposures) risks of concern." No risks were identified by EPA to aquatic species of invertebrates, vertebrates, and plants in addition to terrestrial plants.
So probably not coated in it.
... unless you regularly eat more than 85,000 tons of oats.
Between muesli in the summer and oatmeal in the winter I'm averaging close to that, but I exercise a lot so I got that going for me.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-024-00643-4
"Chlormequat was detected at low concentrations in samples from 2017 through 2022, with a significant increase in concentrations for samples from 2023. We also observed high detection frequencies of chlormequat in oat-based foods. These findings and chlormequat toxicity data raise concerns about current exposure levels, and warrant more expansive toxicity testing, food monitoring, and epidemiological studies to assess health effects of chlormequat exposures in humans."
...
"Despite being approved for use on crops in Europe and parts of North America, chlormequat exhibits concerning toxicological properties, as documented in historical as well as more recently published laboratory animal studies. In the early 1980s, the impacts of chlormequat exposure on reproductive toxicity and fertility were first described by Danish pig farmers who observed reproductive declines in pigs raised on chlormequat treated grains [4]. These observations were later investigated in controlled laboratory experiments on pigs and mice, whereby female pigs fed chlormequat treated grain exhibited disrupted oestrus cycling and difficulty mating compared to animals on a control chlormequat-free diet [4]. Additionally, male mice exposed to chlormequat via diet or drinking water during development exhibited decreased fertilization capacity of sperm in vitro [5]. More recent reproductive toxicity studies on chlormequat show delayed onset of puberty, reduced sperm motility, decreased weights of male reproductive organs, and decreased testosterone levels in rats exposed during sensitive windows of development, including during pregnancy and early life [6,7,8]. Developmental toxicity studies also suggest that chlormequat exposure during pregnancy can dysregulate fetal growth and metabolism [9]. Other investigations did not find impacts of chlormequat on reproduction in female mice, male pigs, or a subsequent investigation of fertilization capacity in male mice developmentally and postnatally exposed to chlormequat [4, 10, 11]. Equivocal evidence in the toxicological literature on chlormequat may be due to differences in doses tested and outcomes measured as well as selection of model organism and the sex of laboratory animals. Consequently, further investigation is warranted."
Thanks for making me aware of this. I've been trying to make a point of avoiding PFAS, but it seems to be everywhere.
> The study found that women who flossed with Oral-B Glide floss had higher levels of a chemical called perfluorohexane sulfonic acid (PFHxS) in their blood than women who didn’t use that type of floss.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/dental-fl...
Another one is nitrites in processed meat. All the fancy "health conscious" brands proudly state "NO NITRITES!", but then those ass hats put in a bunch of celery salt...which is just nitrites with a different name.
Note: For anyone curious, trader joes actually does sell a bacon with no nitrites of any form. First and only time I have seen it.
Marketing that takes into accounts biases of particular target group. That particular case is, I think, becoming common: since large fraction of the population is irrationally afraid of anything that has numbers in its name, whether as digits or words in any language, the companies look for whatever plant they can pull that specific substance from, and use that in production process - possibly compromising quality and efficiency, but allowing them to write ${good natural plant} in the ingredient list instead of evil E-number or satanic 6-6-hexa-whatever.
I'm conflicted about this practice. On the one hand, I hate pulling wool over other people's eyes; on the other hand, I also hate reflexive fear and anti-intellectualism of our society.
To wit:
People used to do all sorts of self-harming things not knowing any better and now we do fewer of them.
The Romans used to sweeten their wines with powdered lead. The ancient Chinese alchemists used to make elixirs of immortality out of mercury compounds and feed them to their wealthy.
I'm not saying things are good now and that we shouldn't push for them to be better, not by any means.
Rather I am saying that as we take further steps towards optimal human health, aligning our common environmental encounters with our biology, we should remember that the effort people have put in to get us this far is only going to take us half as far the next time, and half again the time after.
And that is all well and good, progress is progress, right?
However, does it not seem like the smaller the flaw we find the more we get upset about it?
I believe this phenomenon is caused by a continuing delusion that we were once ever perfect, that we ever lived in harmony with nature, that there is some paradisian SI Garden of Eden unit we can measure our present environment against, and that the current state of events is the face of our fall from grace and must be destroyed like the monster it is.
I believe the truth is things have never been better in hundreds of ways, and they're going to keep getting better as we repent of our past mistakes and learn more about what mistakes we are still currently making, and that the world 25 years from now will be as different a world as the world of today is to the world of 1999.
That collective handwringing (set in eternal struggle as it is with financial greed) is what got us here, and it's what will get us the next 50% and the 50% after that. Wink and enjoy the ride.
My personal ability to influence these things is so small compared to the vast swathes of the ignorant who just go with the flow of the mainstream.
Any energy I spend trying to influence things outside of my control is wasted.
Therefore, I will only endeavor to control that which I have the ability to control.
"God grant me the serenity", if you will.
/s
Non-reactive also means doesn’t interact chemically with other chemicals, which is a desirable thing in a plastic that might be ingested. While maybe not awesome that it sits in silt not reacting to the end of time, if it also doesn’t react with anything in your body, it’s safe to take into your body, no?
The problem with some PFAS is they don’t readily degrade but they’re biologically reactive and interact with the bodies chemistry. That’s not a great feature. But it’s a huge class of chemicals, all of which are chemicals stable due to their carbon fluorine bonds - one of the most stable bonds in nature. But that doesn’t mean they can’t react in ways that don’t break the molecule apart, or form other chemicals that maintain the integrity of the C-F bond.
But it also doesn’t mean that they DO react.
Life isn’t so simple it can be reduced to a mantra like “plastic bad” or whatever. PTFE has a lot of very useful characteristics, and its lack of reactivity in the body isn’t the least of them.
Whenever this topic of Glide being toxic comes up they cite this article :
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/dental-fl...
Which is written based off this study:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-018-0109-y
Which is based off blood samples drawn in 2010-2013, which is at the time PFOA was being phased out of the PTFE production process due to lawsuits around the PFOA toxicity, which DuPont was aware of. The new process using GenX (seriously), which is known to cause problems too but at a lesser extreme than PFOA. However the issue with PTFE was with the residuals of PFOA which you don’t find in commercial PTFE for GenX.
And yes, PTFE is widely used in medical implants and devices.
To emphasize, I think that point is very debatable, but I don't know enough about the real harms of PFAS to comment. But I do think it's valid to have a substantive debate on the true harms of PFAS, even if the other side of that debate is that comparing ourselves now to a time when the majority of kids died is the wrong yardstick.
However, statistically the things that are most likely to prevent you from passing on your genes are:
1. Not making enough money.
2. Anxiety/depression
3. Drug overdoses
4. Car accidents
5. An unhappy family life
6. Swimming pools
Everything on your statistical list looks right, and can probably be proven by a stack of peer-reviewed scientific studies from medicine, sociology, psychology...
And yet as an argument, it's worthless. Worse... it's dangerous.
Because in your schema, the impact of climate change, pollution and other threats that will end this species each rank as zero! You get to "pass on your genes" merely to consign a few hundred of your descendents to a miserable death.
This is the tyranny of instrumental reason that you so cleverly use against the goal (reproduction of genes) that you purport to champion.
I think the point is 100-300 years (maybe longer?) from now things might reach a tipping point.
That's kinda my complaint here. Imagination is more important than knowledge. If we started much earlier in education explaining to kids how remarkable and fragile our existence is, how intricately interconnected we are with nature, birds, bees, mushrooms and microbes, then maybe Hollywood disaster movie plots wouldn't seem like the only route to the end of humanity.
Not saying this will be a pleasant experience. Billions may starve. But that still leaves billions, and the purely mercenary reality is that money is what puts you on one side of that dividing line or the other.
In a "purely mercenary reality", what you need to survive is not wealth, but peace, and that is something you cannot buy with many of the futures we're now looking at.
In a funny way, PFAS is a great metaphor. Forever chemicals have now been found in places nobody would ever have predicted. Bad things have a way of spreading in ways you won't see until they're at the gate. It might not be a good idea to bet the farm on isolationism and exceptionalism.
That helps, but there are more participants in traffic than just you.