FDA denies petition against use of phthalates in food packaging | Hacker News Reader

FDA denies petition against use of phthalates in food packaging

fda.gov

160 pointsDoubleDerper188 comments

I was surprised to learn that some of the highest concentrations of phthalates can be found in alcoholic beverages in glass bottles (Table 3: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7460375/ )

This occurs due to the plastics used in producing the alcoholic beverages combined with ethanol (alcohol) acting as a solvent to liberate the phthalates

I was equally surprised to learn that the food industry was already moving toward using fewer phthalate plasticizers already. More recent sampling efforts have actually found fewer or sometimes no phthalates at all in tubing, whereas decades ago it was ubiquitous.

Insurance companies already track whether you smoke, drink, or do recreational drugs. I wonder how long until they start to ask questions that indicate your risk based on chemical \ microplastic consumption.

Perhaps the blood tests will/already do include this analysis. Asking people about their behaviours/habits/diets is usually a very poor data source. Not only do people have poor memories, but they are motivated to recall only positive behaviours, etc.

Many studies on health interventions (diet, exercise, sleep) have had to handle these problems and usually have to resort to much more controlled studies to demonstrate the effect beyond the "very large numbers, very long time" post-hoc analyses.

In this specific case, I doubt a significant number of people would have any idea what would be "positive" in the context of risk related to phthalates...

This reminds me of a banking software company I used to work at. One of their products was assessing risk for loans, too many purchases for fast food or restaurant categories on your bank statement could cause you to not get a loan.

I could see insurance companies purchasing your rewards accounts from data brokers to see what your habits are.

That’s a fascinating thought.

Our digital footprints are becoming more telling of our real lives, as more of our lives are mirrored digitally.

And in many ways that’s great - not only is booking a flight easier but my eating habits when combined with millions of others can reveal what epidemiology of yesteryear could only dream of

But I think this is where the privacy debate falls down - privacy is not real (secrecy is real, privacy is the politeness of our neighbours). What is concerning is what do others do with our information - and I think the best answer is the medical ethics answer - nothing unless it is in the individual’s best interests.

Yes there is a lot of wriggle room in those words but still

This is why we need real ownership and control of data about ourselves. It should be totally unacceptable for a bank to pull what OP described. Banks and loan underwriters should not have access to this kind of data about us in the first place, let alone use it to discriminate for/against people. Insurance companies should not have access to this kind of data either. We should be able to control access to these data and companies should not be allowed to discriminate based on whether or not they can obtain consent to access it.

This is a legal problem and not at all a technical one.

It can be achieved today with current tech under the right legal framework, and it will never be achieved regardless of what tech exists without that legal framework.

As the OP I think I agree with you - the privacy problem (and the surveillance opportunity) is a legal problem - the right framework we get enormous benefits, evenly distributed and minimised downsides. The wrong framework and the benefits are concentrated in the wealthiest and the rest of us get the predatory downsides.

> what do others do with our information - and I think the best answer is the medical ethics answer - nothing unless it is in the individual’s best interests.

How is saving money not in an individual’s best interest?

You have person A who chooses to consume known carcinogens and excess carbohydrate, and person B who abstains from them and exercises control for their diet.

Why is it ethical for person B to have to subsidize person A?

Similarly, person A chooses to spend more money on less nutritious fast food meals, and person B makes quinoa salad at home and takes it to work. A lender may conclude person B exhibits behavior that indicates they have a lower probability of default, so why should person B have to subsidize person A’s lifestyle?

If the counter argument is that person A is poorer, had poorer parents, had a worse upbringing in a worse neighborhood with worse influences, then the correct way to subsidize person A is via government spending (cash, education, raising the floor on pay to quality of life at work ratios).

In plenty of countries, there is already a tax system to punish "bad consuming choices": e.g. tobacco, alcohol, and in some places even products with excess sugar are taxed more than other products. In Europe, we call it "soda tax" or something. If you want to get academish, you can call it a Pigouvian tax.

I think it's perfectly OK. Peeping on someones digital data is not OK.

None of us are perfect.

But we have this perfect expectation of how we should and could be in our heads - thinner, fitter, more sensible with money, happier with friends. But we all fail. We just tend to fail in different ways.

Some of us are luckier, their satiety levels are lower, their kidney disease markers are low, no bowel cancer, no mental illness.

Those people won’t need high insurance premiums. But the point of insurance is not to reward the lucky ones, the whole point of insurance is that the lucky ones do subsidise the unlucky.

And please do not think “that person pays into a well researched health plan because they are more intelligent,more handsome, more like me”

If paying into a good health plan is important then simply make everyone do it.

The term is social insurance.

After staring at it for a while it’s the only thing that makes sense.

And then you can use that social pressure for useful things

The whole premise of insurance is that a large group shoulders the burden of the few that need to use the insurance. If outcomes can be predicted this whole concept goes away. People would apply for insurance and if they were not denied they'd know they don't need insurance and drop it. Everyone else would be denied or priced out of the market, and that would be the end of the insurance business and nobody would be insured.

This data would only be useful if it was accurate and predictive. I dont see it getting there on either front.

Yeah, microplastics seem to be systemic. I don't know that we actually have good data on this, but many sources claim that most microplastics are from polyester (a plastic) clothing and industrial nylon fishing nets. If true then wearing and washing a tacky shirt could be more hazardous that drinking from tons of plastic bottles and that would make such questions hard to ask in a predictive manner.

That doesnt say anything about accuracy or predicative power.

What questions are you expecting them to ask? "Do you eat chipotle"? "Are you alive"?

Those prior ones are binary lifestyle classifications whereas your exposure to microplastics is ubiquitous and the results are probably dose-dependent.

I personally use stainless lunchware and cotton clothing but if we’re to run an analysis of variance on my ingestion the effect is likely nil compared to walking on office carpet or drinking from aluminum cans or brushing my teeth.

Like refinery operators and gas station workers are exposed to benzene at different levels. But what about people who buy or lease new cars every two years.

There’s too much noise vs signal for insidious risks like these not well understood factors.

> I was equally surprised to learn that the food industry was already moving toward using fewer phthalate plasticizers already. More recent sampling efforts have actually found fewer or sometimes no phthalates at all in tubing, whereas decades ago it was ubiquitous.

IMO this is one of the more valuable comments here. Can you find any sources to cite on this?

I'd love to see more comments on the progress industries make via self-awareness rather than yet-another-villain-in-the-shadows.

And here I thought the gynecomastia was caused by just the beer ...

Which plastics could and should be replaced with other materials?

"How Do You Know If Buckets Are Food Grade" https://epackagesupply.com/blog/how-do-you-know-if-buckets-a... :

> Buckets made of HDPE (number 2) are generally considered the best material for food storage, especially over the long term. A vast majority of plastic buckets that are sold for food storage purposes will be made of HDPE. It’s important to note that not all HDPE buckets are food grade; to be sure, you’ll want to look for the cup and fork logo (described below) or other indication of “food safe” or “food grade” materials.

> Cup and Fork: Elsewhere on the bottom of the bucket, some food-grade buckets will have a symbol consisting of a cup and fork on them. There may also be markings like “USDA approved” or “FDA approved.”

> was surprised to learn that some of the highest concentrations of phthalates can be found in alcoholic beverages in glass bottles

Well, this fun fact ruined my day. Alcohol is itself an endocrine disruptor already. I just want to be able to poison myself with wine without being poisoned from the epoxies used in storage tanks or the hoses during bottling!

Anyone got a list of "clean" wineries that aren't selling contaminated product?

According to the paper, the ratio in glass bottled wines compared to soda, fruit juices, tea is small, so at least that’s something.

Do you have a source for the tubing thing?

A bunch of comments here are roughly "there's not great evidence that these are harmful" -- but is that the right standard? Or should there be an obligation to provide evidence that something is "safe" in order to use it in some consumer applications (like food packaging)? It's tempting to say that we should conclusively establish that something isn't harmful before we use it absolutely everywhere ... but what standard of evidence would be both achievable and ethical?

Because generally people aren't getting acutely ill after eating food from a plastic package, we're left with the possibility that accumulative impacts over years might be harmful -- but it doesn't seem feasible to run long term studies where a treatment group is exposed to plastics for decades and a control group is not. It hardly seems achievable to do correlation studies, because you often don't know what's been in the packaging for all the food you've consumed, which may not even be in your control.

How do you propose proving a negative?

With modus tollens

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

I think the civil burden of proof should apply here. Upon the preponderance of the evidence. Given so many studies that exhaustively show correlative effects of phthalates with metabolic and endocrine disruption, especially strongly during developmental stages, I think even that burden of proof is met.

Sure, you can't prove something doesn't exist, but you can make a reasonable determination that given exhaustive study, given correlative negative effects can be ascribed to no other known cause, and given that this is natal and pediatric health especially at stake, we should say until such time as a causative link is proven to lie elsewhere these chemicals should not be used in consumer goods out of an abundance of caution.

The redirection of that claim would be "these profits are more important than moving to protect bodily health especially for those unable to protect themselves, given what we currently know."

Honestly, no knowledge is perfect, but upon the balance we must rest our sacrosanct right to health.

Your second paragraph is a very good argument against requiring that everything used in food packaging be shown to be safe before it can be used.

Can we reasonably run such a study to prove that wax paper is safe? What about plain paper? Do we just require all food producers to use no packaging at all until these controlled longitudinal studies are completed? If we allow them to use packaging, how do we define in a principled way what packaging is allowed while there are still unknowns?

One possibility would be to say that if something is currently widely used in some significant (think 5%) portion of the industry then we allow it, but that has two problems: First, it wouldn't exclude phthalates anyway, so it doesn't address the current concern. Second, it might exclude future packaging materials that we think might be safer than our current materials but which have yet to be tested.

> One possibility would be to say that if something is currently widely used in some significant (think 5%) portion of the industry then we allow it,

We could say "if it was used in the ancestral environment for similar purposes, and is not known to be harmful". Much of that stuff is bad, but our bodies have mitigations for it. (e.g. tannins leached from wooden bowls: harmful in principle, but we can metabolise them so it's fine)

Ideally rigorous testing should happen before something becomes common, but it isn’t the only option. Nothing stops you from a temporary ban say 20 years to allow for testing. Doing this for every chemical at the same time is impossible, but we can also cycle through existing chemicals.

Hypothetically, if phthalates exposure was responsible for 5% of cancer deaths that’s 30,000 dead Americans per year and we might not notice without a ban. It’s unlikely for this specific chemical to be that bad, but we don’t know.

Cellulose and algae are considered safe for human consumption and are also biodegradable; but is that an RCT study?

CO2 + Lignin is not edible but is biodegradable and could replace plastics. "CO2 and Lignin-Based Sustainable Polymers with Closed-Loop Chemical Recycling" https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adfm.202403035

What incentives would incentivize the market to change over to sustainable biodegradable food-safe packaging?

> Can we reasonably run such a study to prove that wax paper is safe?

We don't need to. We have a "Generally Recognized as Safe" standard that is well known and widely applied.

> widely used in some significant (think 5%) portion of the industry then we allow it

How about we just label things so consumers know whether or not the packaging contains phthalates? That way the market can decide if they want it in their package or not.

Labeling isn't bad, but it doesn't scale. It works for e.g. allergens because people who are allergic are aware of the rather rapid harm done if/when they consume allergens.

> but it doesn't scale.

Why not?

You don't even necessarily need to put all disclaimers directly on the package. Just put some kind of reference number on there, like an MSDS number, and let users go look up all the packaging information online if necessary.

The manufacturer has this information. They must in order to produce the product. The requirement would be they just have to publish it now when used to wrap food.

How does that not "scale?"

It doesn't scale in the sense of "How can I determine which of the 27 things on the label are likely to be bad for me?"

I'm not convinced labeling regulations work. Producers don't label accurately, and consumers aren't realistically in a position to make the choice being described. I live in California, where we have Prop 65 warnings on everything. The motivation there was quite similar -- people should be aware if a product or space is exposing them to substances which can cause serious harm. But I have never met a single person who refuses to enter a space with a Prop 65 warning because you basically couldn't function in society that way. When you buy a product with a Prop 65 warning, it's generally not actually feasible to know which chemical(s) (if any) prompted the warning. (Some companies may put the warning on all of their products even if only some of them actually contain such a substance.) Further, labeling for the nominal presence of some substance is not enough to make decisions -- you need to know what your actual exposure is likely to be. The system ends up being pretty useless.

In addition to what others have said, note that companies already voluntarily label their products as "phthalate free", so the market is already positioned to decide.

In the absence of concrete evidence of harm from phthalates I'm not convinced mandating yet another label would do more good than harm—it would potentially just further reduce the signal that labels provide by watering it down with yet another mandatory compliance label.

1. It's a lot harder to prove something is 100% assured safe then the other way around

2. Every substance/material/etc that is investigated and banned incurs overhead on taxpayers and industry directly.

What you're asking for would be extremely prohibitive to getting anything done at all.

To be clear, I'm not asking for anything. I'm raising a question, because I'm genuinely conflicted. It seems intractable to test everything for long enough to know that it's safe. On the other hand, the 20th century had some good examples of cases where we understood that something harmful only very long after it was in the environment (e.g. leaded gasoline).

Also to be clear, at no point did I say 100% about anything. Please do not attempt to put words in my mouth, or to fight a straw man. We can all acknowledge that empirical studies don't give 100% certainty about anything.

But it does also seem fundamentally problematic for us to make substances or materials ubiquitous in our environments faster than we can study them. We then also arrive at a methodological problem, where, for example we cannot meaningfully study whether long-term low-level exposure to PFAS are causing impacts on fertility in part because there is not a population that hasn't already had that exposure.

It doesn't seem like there's really a right answer. There is such a wide spectrum between "yolo everything into the market and find out later whether it is dangerous" and "don't do anything unless it's proven safe." I personally feel we can afford to throw innovation under the bus a little more than we do today, in exchange for more safety assurances, but reasonable people can disagree about it.

I think a lot of people might look at this kind of regulatory intervention and think it might be overstepping because of a lack of evidence. Like, are they acting prematurely? The answer is a definitive, no. Feasibility is irrelevant. It’s about scale. Once a substance is handled and consumed by no less than 100% of the population, with no viable way to replace these substances without a ton of work, it’s way too late.

There are legitimate scientific concerns that we are currently damaging the human gene pool.

Good regulations work well. It took a global effort to ban the CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer, and it’s completely repaired now.

I don't know why this got down-voted so much. Maybe scaling up too fast is the biggest part of the problem.

Perhaps, putting it in a framing familiar to tech folk, if we have a new version of some important component of our application, "push it to 100% in prod before doing any data analysis because it hasn't been proven to be harmful to engagement" or whatever, probably wouldn't be acceptable to most of us. Maybe you do an A/B test and initially launch the new version to 5% and watch some stats, and if it does well, you scale up from there, incrementally expanding the audience and doing more data analysis. But that analysis depends on their being a population which you know hasn't received the new version.

The problem happens when a switch to selling stuff in plastic/plastic-lined packages is driven by parties who don't have the interest or the ability to release to only a slice of the population, collect the data or do this analysis (and to roll back when the data shows a negative impact).

You can't prove things are safe, at best you can say harm hasn't been observed under these test conditions. In particular things with accumulative impacts may not show any signs of danger until millions of people have been using them for years. The only valid approach is to collect data as we go and make iterative changes as our understanding improves, we can not count on getting things right at the outset.

> You can't prove things are safe, at best you can say harm hasn't been observed under these test conditions.

Are we doing that?

Yes.

For me, the standard is: if the material was used pre-industrial age, it's far more likely to be "safe".

Any person could overintellectualize this point and find exceptions. But it's just common sense.

I agree. I'm reminded of "the naturalistic fallacy" which asserts

> Things are not necessarily safe just because they're natural

Whatever "natural" means. It's not wrong exactly, but I think it distracts from some adjacent, non-fallacious inductive/anthropic reasoning:

> Things that have not harmed your ancestors are less likely to harm you than a novel thing which your ancestors did not come in contact with.

The former (safer) thing is more likely to end up with the label "natural" than the latter, newer thing. So "natural" ends up correlating with "safe" more often than chance would have it.

Why do we think our ancestors were not harmed? do we have any reason at all to think that?

Because we exist. Admittedly, "healthy enough to procreate" is not a high bar, but it's pretty good in comparison with no bar at all.

Yeah, there are cases where they were unaware of the harm--like lead. We should absolutely be finding better ways to identify and mitigate harms of that sort. But in the absence of reliable information from such efforts, natural==safe is a viable heuristic.

And I'd say that our scientific establishment is not sufficiently hardened against attempts by companies to tamper with scientific consensus in cases where that consensus might be bad for business--so an absence of reliable information is indeed our reality.

I think natural==safe is a terrible heuristic for the exact reason you said.

Healthy enough to procreate is a low bar, and many natural things provide a benefit in terms of procreation but detrimental to health. Almost everything in nature is a trade-off between how much it'll harm you and how much it'll help you procreate.

This reminds me of how whales get the Bends from diving despite 50 million years of evolution. People question whether it causes them pain, and it stands to reason that it would cause them pain to prevent them from diving more than necessary. Nature isn't inherently kind, it is results oriented.

You can make a valid argument that avoiding something entirely is usually safer than something, as few things provide a protective effect. However, when you talk about substitutions, all bets are off.

> many natural things provide a benefit in terms of procreation but detrimental to health

Maybe... but many more either kill you or they don't. Lets take your whales-getting-the-bends example. That gives us a dimension: pressure. Suppose you're whale.

- Let x be a randomly chosen pressure

- Let y be a pressure that your parents lived through

You have to spend a few minutes at x or y, which pressure do you chose? y would be a safer choice.

The same goes for potentially hazardous chemicals: the safer bet is to pick the one that comes with evidence that things like you can survive contact with it, and that'll be the one that was in your environment when you were born. Otherwise you wouldn't have been born there.

If somebody wants to sell us something that our parents never came in contact with, the evidence that it is safe should be stronger than the effect described above. I'm not a statistician, so I can't quantify that effect, but it exists, and the naturalistic fallacy distracts from it.

Sure, there is a precautionary principle. Change nothing and you won't end up worse than before.

It depends on how risky you think the baseline factors are, and how risky you think the average new factor is. It also depends on how likely catastrophic risks are.

We know people don't drop dead from most things, so risk is generally at the fringe. Long lead times and low impact.

You then have to consider how many safe products you are missing out on to avoid the bad ones.

I think the the current paradigm is pretty reasonable. Screen for major known risks and then monitor and study

I think that breaks down when you compare Neolithic or pre-industrial man to now.

Just because I can: see pre-industrial Romans and their lead acetate. Or Egyptians with their kohl eyeliner (also lead). I prefer strong regulatory bodies that methodically analyze products available to general consumers.

I think you can have both.

I also want strong regulatory bodies doing those analyses, but I also would like to see them using reasonable Bayesian priors on safety. I think assuming the Bayesian prior that: compounds that occur naturally in our environment at concentrations and particle sizes similar to what we'd be exposed to in a proposed new product are likely safe to use. The opposite just is not a good Bayesian prior, and such compounds should require greater assurance of safety before being allowed to be used in novel ways.

The above is particularly true for organic compounds.

I'd also like to see regulation of analogs like they do with drugs. Swapping out BPA for other analog chemicals with very similar shape/composition is something most people with a decent background in biochemsitry would be extremely skeptical of. Let's say they banned BPA entirely. I'd like to then see regulators step in and ban analogs by default for the same use until proven otherwise.

It doesn't require overintellectualizing, the exceptions are really obvious, like lead pipes. Generally speaking public health knowledge was extremely low in the pre-industrial era, compared to what we have now, so I don't know why we would use this as a standard. I wouldn't use pre-industrial standards for dealing with sewage or prepping for surgery, either.

Except that we've had time to observe the effects of stuff between then and now. Which is why the I don't think the parent is lobbying for a return to lead pipes.

Overintellectualizing

Don't try to pre-dodge by accusing anyone who replies and disagrees with you of overintellectualizing lol

As a proxy for "safety", look at average life expectancy. Even excluding infant mortality, life expectancy has increased by like 20-25% since the year 1900 (for people who reached age 20). We're doing something right in the modern age, and suggesting that we revert to how things were in the 1800s is not common sense, it's being a luddite (imo).

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/qtYQp1x-ZF9iXc-zVh7Kg2xJBX...

Something made in a factory is less likely to be good for you than something made by a tree and stone tools.

The industrial age has brought many good things and many bad things. To acknowledge the bad things is not to discredit the good things. It's quite simple.

Higher life expectancy is a good thing. Infertility, cancer, and obesity are bad things.

More of each was brought by the industrial age. I'm not saying the industrial age as a whole was bad.

Again, all of this is just overintellecualizing it.

Lead glazed pottery?

I think you need to flesh that standard out a bit. Maybe something more like this:

> If the material has been in continual use since before the industrial age and we have yet to find any evidence of harm, it is far more likely to be safe than newer materials with which we have fewer centuries of experience.

Our ancestors used all kinds of things that were terrible for them and it doesn't require overintellectualizing to find exceptions, they're everywhere. But this late in the development of medicine it is fairly reasonable to suggest that if there's a long-standing tradition of using a material and we have yet to find that it causes harm, it is more likely to be safe than something new.

So why was the expected age of death lower in the pre-industrial age than it is now if the materials used then are safer than modern ones?

> if the material was used pre-industrial age, it's far more likely to be "safe"

So much lead and mercury was used in the pre-industrial age.

Why do you think it is common sense? I'm genuinely curious why you think the pre-industrial environment was safe or safer.

In the US, at least, food regulations (and food packaging regulations) are relatively recent. And when they started, instead of requiring everybody prove that everything they’d been doing was safe, they came up with the idea of identifying substances or practices as Generally Recognized as Safe ( https://www.fda.gov/food/food-ingredients-packaging/generall... ), and then requiring safety analysis on new substances or practices. And things can lose their GRAS status if new evidence turns up.

>is that the right standard? Or should there be an obligation to provide evidence that something is "safe" in order to use it

I agree but the FDA might not have the legal authority to ban chemicals that are already in use that haven't been proven to be harmful. That is the case with the EPA IIRC. Although I think there actually is a lot of evidence pointing towards phthalates being harmful especially in utero.

Feels like this is going to become one of those things we look back on in retrospect and regret. We should be full steam ahead on identifying what effects microplastics & phthalates more broadly are having on our health & adjust accordingly. Early indications seem... not great.

Which indications are those? Honest question. I don't know much about this. Since plastic is one of the most biologically neutral/non-interacting materials I've never been too concerned, though I suppose in certain forms and over certain amounts it could be harmful?

Phthalates are estrogen mimics.

Well, they figured as such about bpa and here we are. They figured as such for a lot of things in the past that turned out to be not what they seemed after sufficient data were collected.

phthalates, like flax seeds and soybeans, are probably endocrine disruptors in humans. they're oils, not solid plastics; you add them to pvc to transform it from a rigid, brittle substance like those white sewer pipes into a flexible, resilient substance like shower curtains, fake leather upholstery from the 01970s, or nasogastric tubes. they evaporate from the plastic over time, so you inhale them and the plastic gets brittle. they also diffuse out of the plastic into whatever it's in contact with, especially oily things

in general any statement that refers to 'plastic' as a single material is wrong. the only thing the diverse materials called 'plastic' have in common is that you can mold them and that at least one of their major ingredients is a synthetic organic material, not even necessarily the majority

i think probably the concern over harm from human phthalate exposure will turn out to be baseless, but it's not implausible

Source on flax seeds and soybeans being endocrine disruptors?

check the sources cited in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoestrogen#Food_sources

That article also contains the phrase

> As of 2020, there is insufficient clinical evidence to determine that phytoestrogens have effects in humans.

yes, and that's also true of phthalates at normal exposure levels, which is why hospitals still use vinyl tubing; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor#Phthalates for more detail

also, though i didn't realize this, natural sources of phthalates include coconuts, poppy seeds, grapes, and kidney beans. see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8310026/ and https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Phthalic-acid#sect...

Humans have been consuming flax and soy-based products for thousands of years.

At this point, the burden of proof is on those claiming that they have hidden harmful effects that have someone escaped thousands of years of human consumption.

yes, although that burden of proof may indeed eventually be met for either phthalates in general or some specific phthalate; as with soybeans, there's strongly suggestive evidence that doesn't yet rise to the level of proof

Someone already commented about pthalates themselves but I'd also like to point out that a big problem with microplastics isn't the microplastics themselves but the fact that they absorb other chemicals which can then be released/absorbed when they get inside your body or even just on your skin:

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/toxic-microplastic...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220216112233.h...

Microplastics are like little buckets for all sorts of toxic compounds and pharmaceuticals (that you probably don't have a prescription for like cancer treatment drugs).

> Feels like this is going to become one of those things we look back on in retrospect and regret.

The entire world would be paralyzed with fear if it were afraid to do anything that it might regret in the future.

Needs (2023) in the title. This is a nearly-one-year-old response to a petition for the FDA to reconsider its now-two-years-old denial of a previous petition.

This is dated from July 2023. What is making this trend today?

Maybe this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40637089

Yeah that was my comment at the bottom of that thread.

But generally this was kind of a big deal and it mostly flew under the radar. I don’t think most people who care about endocrine disruptors knew that the FDA did this, and 2023 is not very long ago IMO.

https://shaperhealth.substack.com/p/b8c75383-6899-4cab-88c6-...

There's a ton of evidence that these substances might be bad for you. Among human study cohorts they have been shown to have a serious impact on reproductive health and infertility, metabolic and oxidative stress, cancer risk, cardiovascular health, the immune system (including children’s asthma), and neurodevelopment. Exposure risks extend from more controllable areas such as consumption of packaged food to less controllable areas such as environmental and household dust. Moreover, the impacts seems to be more pronounced in children. While most research on these effects in human subjects are more recent, people have noticed the link between plasticizers and hormones/fertility in male rats since the late 1980s. Thirty-five years of results make it less likely that human results shown are a result of p-hacking or similar statistical legerdemain. With half of the world’s plastics produced in the last 15 years - we'll probably see the research become more conclusive as the effects of those plastics are seen in further human studies

Just so you know how the FDA works, they evaluate what Industry tells them to create their “Guidance”, subject to an open comment type of process. They’re not superheroes of science working in a perpetual adversarial stance against industry. They inspect companies to ensure regulated companies comply or are in the process of complying with the official Guidance.

Should industry players break rank and come up with science contradictory to the status quo, which challenges the Guidance. They’ll either start to notice and incorporate learnings into future Guidance revisions, or write up a Deficiency order against the company. The company can then defend itself by engaging further studies and/or litigation. AKA what the big players say is what goes.

I'm all for evolving our knowledge of substances and their effects, but as other accounts are saying, we have more questions than answers

And here's my problem with it: ok we figure out substance X has problems and we go and replace it with Y (which has less research on it than X). Are we sure this is a better replacement?

We're talking about food packaging, what happens if we replace substances and end up with a lower product shelf life (which might be acceptable or not)? Or with other issues?

I'm about to replace my carpet and linoleum floor with 8mm "vinyl planks" that are 80% PVC. So since I'll be scuffing the floor and breathing the emissions most of the day for up to the rest of my life, it's at least a little encouraging that the FDA doesn't find a basis to ban it in food packaging. It's not that I trust the FDA, but more that I can't really afford hardwood or tile, so it's what I want to hear.

I wouldn't do it. The dust gets in the air, and also absorbs via the skin while walking. Not only would you be putting your own health at risk, but that of any family members and/or pets too.

Not only would you be putting your own health at risk, but that of any family members and/or pets too.

I think his point is that the FDA finds that there is no evidence to support this claim. What evidence do you have that this claim is true?

Rather, the FDA chooses to actively ignore the evidence that exists. With regarding to phthalates in general, this is just a sampling of the evidence showing harm:

Phthalates and Their Impacts on Human Health (2021)

> phthalates are more likely to enter the body through absorption via the skin and the polluted air due to fugitive emission [10]. Phthalates are semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs). DEHP and DBP are the main compounds in both indoor and outdoor air phthalates [11]. Dermal absorption also occurs from the daily use of PCPs containing phthalates via plastic package. Infants are exposed to phthalates by drinking breast milk with their mothers exposed to DEHP and DiNP, and sucking on toys containing DEHP, DBP, and BBP [10]. Phthalates are also found to cross the placenta-blood barrier, which is the major exposure route of the fetus [12].

> Studies found that low molecular phthalates, such as DEP, can acutely irritate the skin, conjunctiva, and mucous membrane of the oral and nasal cavities [20]. Phthalate exposure is associated with adverse developmental effects in terms of increased prenatal mortality, reduced growth and birth weight, skeletal, visceral, and external malformations in rodents [6]. Experiments on male rats found that the nervous system is rather sensitive to low doses of DEHP exposure during puberty [21]. The impacts of phthalates on human beings vary from gene expression to physiological changes. High molecular weight phthalates exposure is found to cause methylation status of imprinted genes, which could be directly related to androgen response, estrogen response, protein secretion, and spermatogenesis [22,23]. Human epidemiological studies have shown a significant association between phthalates exposures and adverse reproductive outcomes in both women and men, for instance, type II diabetes and insulin resistance, overweight/obesity, allergy, asthma [24].

Exposure to the plasticizer dibutyl phthalate causes oxidative stress and neurotoxicity in brain tissue (2024)

> The induction of oxidative stress in the brain subcellular fractions was proved by alterations in the activities of superoxide dismutase, catalase, glutathione reductase, and glutathione peroxidase along with the reduction in the total antioxidant capacity. Meanwhile, the levels of hydrogen peroxide and lipid peroxidation were increased. Neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine, dopamine, adrenaline, noradrenaline, and serotonin were altered in all subcellular fractions suggesting the disruption of the neurotransmitter system in the fish brain. These results indicate that DBP induces oxidative stress, which correlates with neurotoxicity in Pseudetroplus maculatus brain tissue.

Microplastics and phthalate esters release from teabags into tea drink: occurrence, human exposure, and health risks (2023)

> DEHP showed the cancer risk (CR) for children and adults. The findings of this research indicated that high MPs and PAEs levels are released from teabags into tea drinks. Considering a daily drinking of a volume of 150 and 250 mL tea by children and adults, 486 and 810 MPs may enter their bodies, respectively. Thus, tea prepared with teabag-packed herbs may pose a significant health risk for consumers.

Preconception Phthalate Exposure and Women's Reproductive Health: Pregnancy, Pregnancy Loss, and Underlying Mechanisms (2023)

> Results: An interquartile range (IQR) higher mono-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate [fecundability odds ratio(FOR)=0.88; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.78, 1.00], mono-butyl phthalate (FOR=0.82; 95% CI: 0.70, 0.96), and mono-benzyl phthalate (FOR=0.85; 95% CI: 0.74, 0.98) was associated with lower fecundability. No consistent associations were observed with pregnancy loss. Preconception phthalates were consistently associated with higher hsCRP and isoprostanes, as well as lower estradiol and higher follicle-stimulating hormone across the menstrual cycle.

> Discussion: Women's preconception exposure to phthalates was associated with lower fecundability, changes in reproductive hormones, and increased inflammation and oxidative stress. The pre- and periconception periods may represent sensitive windows for intervening to limit the reproductive toxicity of phthalate exposure.

Maternal phthalate exposure promotes allergic airway inflammation over 2 generations through epigenetic modifications (2018)

> Results: In LINA maternal urinary concentrations of mono-n-butyl phthalate, a metabolite of butyl benzyl phthalate (BBP), were associated with an increased asthma risk in the children. Using a murine transgenerational asthma model, we demonstrate a direct effect of BBP on asthma severity in the offspring with a persistently increased airway inflammation up to the F2 generation. This disease-promoting effect was mediated by BBP-induced global DNA hypermethylation in CD4+ T cells of the offspring because treatment with a DNA-demethylating agent alleviated exacerbation of allergic airway inflammation. Thirteen transcriptionally downregulated genes linked to promoter or enhancer hypermethylation were identified. Among these, the GATA-3 repressor zinc finger protein 1 (Zfpm1) emerged as a potential mediator of the enhanced susceptibility for TH2-driven allergic asthma.

> Conclusion: These data provide strong evidence that maternal BBP exposure increases the risk for allergic airway inflammation in the offspring by modulating the expression of genes involved in TH2 differentiation through epigenetic alterations.

From Oxidative Stress to Male Infertility: Review of the Associations of Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals (Bisphenols, Phthalates, and Parabens) with Human Semen Quality (2022)

> Higher levels of urinary bisphenols showed correlation with impaired semen quality and increased DNA damage. Considering phthalates and their metabolites, all studies found a positive association between urinary levels of phthalates and at least one semen parameter indicative of low semen quality; some studies also revealed sperm DNA damage. The studies on parabens less often revealed correlation of urinary parabens concentrations with a decrease in sperm count, as well as motility and DNA damage. Moreover, EDCs can elevate ROS production and lipid peroxidation, increase apoptosis, induce epigenetic modifications, and change the Y:X sperm chromosome ratio and sperm protein composition. Our review revealed detrimental effects of EDCs on semen quality and sperm DNA integrity—especially in BPA and phthalates, but also in parabens.

Can phthalates impair liver function? (2019)

> Conclusions: The ubiquitous exposure to phthalates may be related to the impairment of normal liver function

The FDA only cares about outright, immediately dangerous things. See how long they delayed with asbestos and thalidomide. Over long time frames, you are on your own

Well said. I suspect there is a lot of lobbying and legalized bribery going on. For example:

"If you pay me enough in speaker's fees, I'll approve any chemical you want!"

"If you promise me a comfy corporate job after I put in my time here, I will do anything you want!"

A couple friends and I reviewed hundreds of pubmed studies on this. We have a summary at: https://shaperhealth.substack.com/p/life-in-plastic-its-not-...

There have been a number of papers from China showing that phthalate exposure from household dust is a real concern (e.g., https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35508265/).

Phthalate exposure overall has been shown to have an adverse impact on reproductive health and infertility, metabolic and oxidative stress, cancer risk, cardiovascular health, the immune system (including children’s asthma), and neurodevelopment. Unlike dietary studies which often have mixed results, the conclusions on phthalate exposure are consistently negative.

No idea what the FDA is doing here. I understand government inertia but they seem asleep at the wheel.

The FDA is corrupt. It works for enriching the pharma industry. Working for the taxpayer is just a pretense.

Do you see the drugs they approved for AD? These drugs all cause deadly brain bleeds by removing beta amyloid which is not even the cause of AD. There is no way that these drugs fix AD. Yet, they will make the drug makers pretty rich.

The FDA seems to have an internal mandate that no fixes are to be instituted if someone is not making continuously making a load from it, at least until the first few generations of patents have expired.

Wait until you hear what chemicals your clothes are made of.

I think more people would get significant benefit from using sun block daily then obsessing over minutiae like this.

I find it ironic when overweight people with an empty, sugary iced coffee drink next to them complain about the scary-sounding ingredients in processed fast food they eat.

The scary ingredient is not your biggest health concern...

Unfortunately, questioning sunscreen use has become a popular topic among health communities that obsess over (and misinterpret) studies about chemicals.

Even Andrew Huberman, who was held up as the most science-y podcaster before people caught on that he doesn't know what he's talking about on many topics (not to mention, it turns out he's kind of a bad person) made a big deal about sunscreen for a long time.

At one point he said he was "as scared of sunscreen as melanoma", which triggered a lot of his listeners to start reducing their sunscreen use and debating the merits of sunscreen. Combine this with other podcasters like Joe Rogan pushing Vitamin D as a miracle mineral and a lot of people who think they are science-driven in their health choices are eschewing sunscreen. It's a maddening turn of events.

EDIT: Aaaand of course I'm getting downvoted for calling out Huberman. This is a good time to remind everyone that he has numerous positions like this one, such as avoiding Bluetooth headphones due to "heating effects" of their wireless signal. It's impossible for Bluetooth headphones to even emit enough power to warm your skin, but it's something he believes is true. He's very charismatic and charming, but he frequently strays from the science when he senses a good story that will engage his listeners.

Not to go off topic--cheating on his girlfriend and being a man-whore is bad behavior, yet I don't think that makes Huberman a bad person.

That's dramatically oversimplifying the situation. He didn't just "cheat on his girlfriend". He was carrying on six simultaneous relationships while misleading at least one of them into thinking they were monogamous and trying to conceive a child with her.

The big article that came out exposed how he had patterns of misleading people, telling people whatever they wanted to hear, abusing therapy speak to manipulate people, and it established a pattern of dishonesty. To reduce that all to "cheating on his girlfriend" is not accurate.

> telling people whatever they wanted to hear, abusing therapy speak to manipulate people, and it established a pattern of dishonesty.

I read that article in NY Mag prior to my comment, and then again after this comment. That wasn't my take-away. Sounded like a guy who got real famous and started to play the field, albeit badly. There was no evidence (that I recall) that Huberman acted this way in previous relationships, and no evidence that he will continue to act this way.

Not great behavior, not going to excuse it, but hardly the behavior I would say makes him a bad person. My opinion is philandering is relatively common behavior for people (men in particular) who achieve a certain level of fame and/or status.

Isn't most carpet made of synthetic fibers? i'm not sure how staying with carpet is any better.

And I can't imagine that polyurethane finish on hardwood floors is good either.

Yeah, and I bet even the expensive wool stuff that only rich people buy is treated with scotch guard and flame retardants with questionable health effects.

Bonus - scotch guard == PFAS

To my knowledge, olefin synthetic carpet is not known to contain phthalates. I would however avoid the ones that claim to be stain-resistant, as they're more likely to contain iffy coatings.

I would probably resin coat my floor instead of using urethane, but I would agree there. Even concrete floor contains silicates. I also wonder what kind of microparticles scuff off of a tile floor.

Shellac or traditional varnish are probably the only things you could put on your floor that aren't produced with an industrial process. Shellac in particular is the harvested secretions of a beetle that have been cleaned and dissolved in alcohol. But it's water-soluble and so probably not appropriate for use on a wood floor. You could also use tung oil or boiled linseed oil but you'd have to sand down to #0000 steel wool to get it to shine like urethane. Tung oil is a nice coating because it doesn't turn orange like BLO, but either one you will have to keep applying every few years or the floor will stop repelling water.

Obviously we'd end up with huge Tung plantations or Shellac plantations if we tried to replace all of our floor coverings with this stuff.

I’d worry less about silicates than anything. We evolved along sandy coastlines not polyurethane or pvc.

crystalline silica is an iarc group 1 carcinogen, the highest-concern category, and occupational illnesses due to crystalline silica exposure have been well known for thousands of years

When I built my home I used concrete floors that I then kept waxed. It seemed like the best solution I could find. But then we had to cover the floors with wool rugs because the acoustics were painful.

wool is pretty great; the worst you can say about it is that it's a mild allergen and kind of expensive

just to disambiguate, though, the risk of silica exposure from walking around on a concrete floor, or even sweeping it, is not worth worrying about. i wouldn't clean it with a leaf blower though

I assume you don’t cut tile with a tile saw very often without a respirator so its a non issue.

polyurethane is a resin

tung oil is pretty toxic. boiled linseed oil has heavy metal salts in it to make it polymerize, though typically nowadays these are cobalt, iron, and manganese rather than lead; calcium and zinc are basically nontoxic alternatives

shellac is not water-soluble; it's alcohol-soluble and thermoplastic

the plantation sizes necessary to coat everyone's floor with tung oil or shellac are fairly modest

"Boiled" linseed oil is not actually boiled, to save costs they just add metal salts to catalyze the polymerization. You can get linseed oil without the heavy metals, that is actually boiled: https://www.triedandtruewoodfinish.com/products/danish-oil/

danish oil has heavy metal salts in it, specifically salts of cobalt and zirconium: https://www.coo-var.co.uk/files/ww/safety/308-Q271%20-%20DAN...

ionic cobalt and ionic zirconium are both of fairly moderate toxicity; they aren't in the same ballpark as things like lead and mercury, but they also aren't as relatively harmless as calcium or zinc

i think that normal 'boiled' linseed oil does have stand oil in it, as well as the siccatives we're talking about here and other additives like antiskinning agents

The one by Tried&True appears to be pure linseed oil: https://s3.gomedia.ws/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2016/03/FB...

Carpets often repel water… using PFAS.

Just wait until you hear about tire dust!

You can have VOC testing done to determine if yours are off-gassing. That's the real test, not the FDA. Generally speaking Luxury Vinyl Planks are the way to go if you don't want to risk off-gassing.

A simple TVOC & HCHO meter at home should imho be a low-cost first step, indicating a need for improved ventilation, or for eliminating questionable sources of the gassing. The alcohol hand sanitizer sets off the TVOC reading though.

I’m not convinced that the TVOC sensor included on consumer air quality monitors does much beyond give people anxiety. Maybe it’s useful if it prompts people to open their windows more often, but mine is so impacted by daily activity and subject to calibration drift to the point I wish it wasn’t part of my sensor unit. Opening a single bottle of beer will spike the levels for hours. It’s a super effective fart detector. I’ve had one for four years but I don’t know how I’d use it to determine whether some new product was harming the air in my home, the readings are just too noisy.

With regard to a new product, I would try seeing the reading first thing in the morning before any human activity.

Why would LVP be any different?

They aren't made of PVC so they don't contain phthalates

This is what i found when looking it up....

Luxury Vinyl Plank (LVP) flooring is made up of multiple layers of materials, including polyvinyl chloride (PVC), wood composites, and limestone stabilizers:

Backing: A layer of foam, cork, or PVC

Core: A WPC (wood polymer core) or SPC (stone polymer core) core

Vinyl layer: A layer of PVC

Glass fiber: A layer of glass fiber

Print layer: A layer that displays the product's colors and design

Wear layer: A protective layer made of polyurethane that resists scratches and stains

Urethane coating: A protective coating

Hm, I wonder how that composition varies, but at least off-hand the quantity probably matters. It's the off-gassing and the top coat that get you with flooring.

From my understanding the "luxury" part is from the design and texture, but the composition is more or less the same

I know it's the lesser of two evils but I'd rather have quality vinyl off-gassing PVC than carpet emitting PFAS and trapping dirt.

If it’s any consolation, even old wood floors will typically shed plastic particles when worn as they get refinished/sealed with polyurethane. Some really old school folks will use boiled linseed oil, which isn’t a man made plastic - but does polymerize into a type of plastic when it dries.

Don't do it. PVC should not be inside your house in large quantities.

My personal experience is that food is overpackaged. I find a lot of produce are unnecessarily bagged in plastic containers (mushrooms, cucumbers, corn, asparagus, berries etc. in my local grocery store). I always feel weird not just about low quality plastic films touching the food, but also that I am constantly throwing out plastic that cannot be recycled.

I wonder if it's to control the spread of mold/fungus. If I have a bunch of berries in a bin, and one of them has mold, I could lose a big chunk of the bin. But if they're in little plastic containers, I only lose that one container.

(Yeah, I know, the mold may have spread before they were put in the containers. It still limits the spread, even if it doesn't totally eliminate it.)

I don’t think so because all the berry containers have holes in them. But the other produce don’t have holes and either have a harder but flexible plastic top, or plastic film, or just shrink wrap around the package.

I know this is going to be unpopular on HN, but I think there's this "environmentalist inertia effect" on display when it comes to stuff like that.

A lot of the early industrial chemistry was pretty terrible for you and deserved public attention and regulatory crackdowns. Leaded gasoline and paint, organochlorine pesticides, mercury catalysts in rubbers, and so on.

But then, the negative publicity then continued for substances that were a lot more ambiguous. For example, DDT saved millions of lives, and the backlash against it was probably overblown. Still, you know, good riddance - at least until malaria comes back in the developed world due to climate change?

And now, we're in this place where any accusation of substances being artificial and cropping up somewhere at parts-per-billion or parts-per-trillion levels is enough to cause outrage, even if we can't demonstrate serious adverse effects on humans or most other life. Microplastics seem to be the most egregious example of this. But the panics around phthalates and BPA are another interesting case where, if you look closely enough, there just isn't a whole lot of good science to back any of it.

I'm kinda torn about this, because I think we should be working toward reducing plastic waste, and I'd rather see phthalates replaced by safer plasticizers, such as benzoates. But the amount of alarmist headlines in this space is pretty wacky.

Isn't this progress? It sounds like as we advance we can afford to have more and more high standards for things we couldn't afford to before

prohibiting more and more things is, in my book, the diametrical opposite of progress; progress is when you can do more and more things, not less and less

Only if your definition of progress is maximal technological advancement at all costs. Prohibiting dangerous chemicals or processes is progress in terms of human living conditions.

historically speaking, it has occasionally been progress by my definition (you can't do much at all if you're crippled by minamata disease, although the chemicals and processes that caused minamata disease weren't prohibited, just done more carefully) but much more often it has been pure superstition (like the european union borax ban), racist paranoia (like the us ban on marijuana), or regulatory capture aimed at preventing market competition and boosting the profits of the currently dominant lobbyists

Anyone who doubts that these chemicals are actually causing harm to the general population should read the book “Count Down”.

It goes into great detail on the evidence for harm and the details of how these chemicals work.

https://www.amazon.com/Count-Down-Threatening-Reproductive-D...

I think we need to move fully to glass surfaces that any food comes in contact with; add vacuum seal to help slow decay.

Until or unless we do mass studies, not just observational, and over a 20-30 year period - where many other known health factors will have to be kept track of accurately-thoroughly as well.

Ugo Bardi: Are Plastics killing us?

https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/are-plastics-killing-us

FDA rejects MDMA and allows phthalates- what an agency :(

At what point do we just come and say that the FDA is corrupt.

The study of MDMA showed benefits for PTSD: https://icer.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/PTSD_Revised-Rep...

I think it's pretty clear the microplastics fear-mongering doesn't have a lot of credible evidence to back it. Of course no one wants tiny plastic particles floating around the environment. But the claim here is... does it harm you? Is it toxic? How dense are the particulates per millilitre? Very little to suggest anything substantial.

Just a reminder that the holistic and wellness industry that sells you detoxes for this stuff is worth 4.5 trillion dollars (more than big pharma, even). They are incentivized to drum up fear; plastics are killing you, aspartame is killing you. I've heard them claim even fresh fruit is killing you.

Evidence-based decisions matter.

Also most microplastics in the environment are from rubber tires grinding away on road surfaces so the food packaging stuff is a little forest for the trees imo.

I don't lick the road, though. In terms of it's ability to get into my body, food packaging has a much better pathway than tires.

food packaging doesn't produce microplastics, and you inhale tire dust

Doesn't it? Got any evidence for that claim?

no, it doesn't. no, i don't have any evidence it doesn't. if you go looking for evidence that it does, though, you won't find any evidence for that, either

Of course it does - plastics used in packaging scratch easily. That's enough to produce microplastics.

Additionally polypropylene degrades under sunlight, becoming brittle. The process takes several months.

oh, sure, they can produce microplastics after you take the food out. but you aren't going to get plastic dust in your lettuce

the most common plastics used in packaging are pet, polypropylene, and polyethylene, which have exceptional elongation at break. when you scratch them, you don't produce microplastics; you produce a burr on the surface

You're gonna get it in your yoghurt and food packed in tupperware though, as metal utensils can and will scrape some of the plastic off.

Anyway, they're already present in tap water, so your lettuce is also already infused with microplastics.

that's a good point about the tap water, and you're probably right about polystyrene yogurt cups and tupperware, though i still think you won't find any evidence of it unless you do the experiment yourself

Evidence-based decisions matter, but so does extreme caution when considering the scale and widespread impact. There was no evidence against leaded gasoline… right up until there was, and by then everyone had been breathing exponentially-increasing amounts of lead.

So maybe let's be conservative when considering compounds that live permanently in the environment, are damn near impossible to remove, and are spreading widely to every part of the ecosystem yeah?

there was excellent evidence against leaded gasoline even before it was commercialized. lead had been known to be toxic for two thousand years, many of the workers in the pilot tetraethyl lead plant died, and midgley (the inventor) gradually became paralyzed, probably as a result of his exposure. people used leaded gasoline to kill insects, and accidental human deaths from ingestion were fairly common

there are in fact cases where people used something harmful for a long time before there was good evidence that it was harmful (examples include kohl, sassafras, trans fats, maybe asbestos, radium, twitter, and facebook) but leaded gasoline is not one of them

there are very many more cases where people used something for a long time before there was good evidence about whether it was harmful, and it wasn't. almost everything ever invented falls under this rubric

conservatism like yours was the default stance for thousands of years, which is why human life was impoverished and short during that time. during the 19th and 20th centuries, we took a break from it, and the result was a leap in human prosperity to previously unimaginable heights. now people want to bring it back. i'm not a fan

>conservatism like yours was the default stance for thousands of years, which is why human life was impoverished and short during that time.

The ridiculousness of this claim is basically self-evident. The obvious reason for impoverished and short life spans was a low level of technological development, not conversative social attitudes. It begs the question, how exactly could modern liberal attitudes even exist in an era that lacked the technology required to have a modern liberal society?

that's like saying 'the obvious reason she died was that my hammer hit her in the head, not that i swung my hammer at her head'

i'm not sure what you mean by 'modern liberal attitudes' but in any case i think it's irrelevant

By "modern liberal attitudes", I mean exactly that. Liberal beliefs held by the general public that came about in the modern era (post enlightenment), which is simply a more rigorous description for what you seem to be referring to when you say that the world took a break from conservatism "during the 19th and 20th centuries". All that to say, it's extremely relevant to the discussion.

If, as you claim, conservatism was the main reason for low life expectancy, then at any point in time people could have just stopped being conversative (I don't even really know what you mean by this, but according to you it happened in the 19th century), and their standard of living would have gone up as a result. I'll say it again, this is ridiculous on its face. The industrial revolution, which lead to today's human prosperity was driven almost entirely by SPECIFIC environmental, economic, and cultural conditions. It was not driven by some shift in public attitude about being generally more accepting of change.

i wasn't talking about conservatism in general. i was talking specifically about stouset's form of conservatism: 'extreme caution when considering the scale and widespread impact ... let's be conservative when considering compounds that live permanently in the environment, are damn near impossible to remove, and are spreading widely to every part of the ecosystem'

such extreme caution is entirely compatible with liberal post-enlightenment beliefs, but not with technological progress, which was indeed largely driven by shifts in public attitudes about technical innovations, including but not limited to novel materials. when newton was inventing modern physics he had to keep his chemistry experiments secret because chemistry was illegal, and the catholic church specifically prosecuted people (via the inquisition) for practicing chemistry: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30134775/

this problem continues to the present day, where it continues to retard technical progress in many places; and, of course, hatred and even legal prosecution of chemists in particular has returned in places like the usa. but the problem is much broader than this; for example, william kamkwamba relates in his autobiography how his neighbors believed the windmill he had built in malawi was causing a drought through witchcraft, after having ridiculed him as a lunatic for years when he was hanging out in the junkyard to salvage the parts to build it

>There was no evidence against leaded gasoline

Everyone involved knew that tetraethyllead was horrendously toxic, they just didn't particularly care.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140711220018/http://www.radfor...

What’s the metric for harm?

It’s a fact that these chemicals behave similarly to, and bind to the same receptors as, sex hormones.

It’s a proven fact that exposure to these chemicals increases sexual dysfunction during development in animal models and in humans.

It’s also proven that these chemicals have made their way into every single food item and most cosmetic products we buy at the store.

If you just Google for papers on phthalates and endocrine disruption, there are decades of research papers supporting it.

Here’s an example of one such study in frogs and rabbits:

https://cfpub.epa.gov/ncer_abstracts/index.cfm/fuseaction/di...

Conclusions for almost all papers like this are the same.

"Though we obviously recognize that this is the thing that will make us look really, really bad in a few years, we're not going to do anything about it proactively."

For many years now, the FDA has been actively working against the public interest. They won't do anything until a court forces them to act. It's not just about being proactive; the data is already out there to show harm.

Did the petitioners try not to eat the packaging?

When the packaging rubs off against the food, particulates from the packaging mix into the food.

I do think this is heavily overblown to get more research grants financed.

I think the onus on proving safety should be on the people selling products, not on some third party to prove that those products are dangerous.

Otherwise, we get vendors poisoning us for decades, and then whoopsie-daisies pleading ignorance. And even when they get held accountable (almost never), the value that remains in the vendor is insufficient to compensate for the damage inflicted on us.

Heads I lose, tails they win.

But how can anyone prove safety here? On anything? I’m unaware of any substance which isn’t dangerous or harmful in some context. Even sand!

What is the actual bar?

Generally safety is evaluated based on intended use.

The intended use of leaded gasoline is burning it and putting lead in the air.

The intended use of asbestos is as an inert fire-retardant layer. It's safe in that context. Where it's not safe is in all the work that goes into building, or tearing down that layer.

The intended use of BPA was putting it into 'microwave safe' plastic containers, where it leeched into food.

Bleach is safe to handle (carefully), but not safe to drink.

I’m not sure your examples make much sense?

It also requires a risk/reward assessment, as everything has tradeoffs. Without some sort of assessment of concrete risks, making tradeoffs is also a wild guess.

Using asbestos in oven mitts? Probably not worth it, safety wise. Plenty of good and safe alternatives, and nobody is going to die if it’s 25% more or less effective.

Using it in firefighter turnouts? Maybe, depending on shedding characteristics and effectiveness of alternatives.

Using it in encapsulated hard paneling for specialized industrial furnaces? Quite safe.

But only if you have some sort of stats on cancer rates vs exposure rates. But that takes a lot of time and exposure (for almost anything except FOOF anyway), and requires actually using it.

Or a lot of guessing and inconclusive/misleading lab tests anyway.

And if you can’t use something until you can prove it’s safe, the whole situation is a Catch 22.

especially sand; crystalline silica is a known carcinogen (iarc group 1, the most severe classification)

(when inhaled)

Generally only when in a very fine powdered crystalline form, though, and only when exposed persistently at a moderate level.

High short term exposure apparently isn’t a cancer risk (but is a ‘you’ll be miserable and have a hard time breathing’ risk), and low grade exposure below a threshold is also apparently fine.

And just sand itself (except for certain specific rare types) is also apparently fine.

Weird eh?

well, it depends on what you do with the sand; things like sandblasting or desert sandstorms liberate plenty of the very fine powdered crystalline form that is the concern

your points about high short-term exposure and long-term low-grade exposure are well taken, and may also apply to phthalates, since humans evolved in an environment with many sources of phthalates, such as coconuts, poppy seeds, grapes, and kidney beans. see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8310026/ and https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Phthalic-acid#sect...

Plastics and related materials leeching into food and water is one of the theories for continent-wide decrease of testosterone in male mammals in North America

If it widely impacts other mammals other than humans, then it probably isn't primarily attributable to eating from packaged foods. It is probably from a shared resource like our air or water.

Oh shit a few hundred molecules worth! We are surely doomed.

Why trivialize this stuff? Wondering where this impulse comes from

My guess, youth. Guesses after that get less generous

Because if just touching fruit is going to hurt us, surely handling it is far worse? Why aren't we seeing obvious health problems from the plant workers etc? If it was that toxic, we'd know.

Not every package and contents within are the same. The plastic containers for prepackaged produce are much lower on my concern list than say Coke and Red Bull type drinks. If you've ever seen what those can do to concrete, you'd really question what it's doing to the plastic linings in the bottles/cans. Someone also mentioned alcohol reacting with the plastics. All of those gas stations where they have pallets of soft drinks just sitting outside in direct sunlight also gives me pause on how lackadaisical we've become. The '91 Gulf War gave us lots of insights into storing Diet Coke in the sun in a desert can cause "unexpected" reactions to the liquid.

Throwing your hands up and running around like a headless chicken is probably an over reaction, but rolling your eyes and sticking your head in the ground to ignore it is also equally not good.

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

If you care about future generations you should care about anything we create that's harmful and that doesn't break down naturally.

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