Wild Boar Has Five Times More PFAS Than Humans Allowed to Eat | Hacker News Reader

Wild Boar Has Five Times More PFAS Than Humans Allowed to Eat

forbes.com

57 pointsJimmc41450 comments

Afaik, wild boars are full of parasites so I would not recommend eating them anyway. They also eat about anything, so probably that's why they're a good indicator of background pollution levels.

Still they're a popular game meat in Germany. The German Wikipedia page says the meat need to be inspected, also for radiation because of Chernobyl.

I remember having a wild boar burger which a friend of a friend hunted, as well as steak from the supermarket... both were tasty.

The story seems to be more about the ubiquity of PFAS than of the edibility of wild boar.

Indeed, from the article:

>Wild boar were selected for these PFAS studies because they — and their livers in particular — are good “bio-indicators” of “background” levels of PFAS in the environment.

I don't eat filter organs (liver and kidneys) anymore due to all the junk that's out there. I don't care if it's farm raised or wild.

maybe not "grass fed", but could they be classified "organic"?

No. Pretty much all game animals eat a ton of non-organic agricultural products, so you couldn’t label them organic.

I think this shows that "organic" isn't safer

Likewise, bees are great at picking up anything and everything, and can be a valid way to test for the presence of industrial/ag chemicals or pollution across an area.

So I don’t recommend eating bees either, and be careful of where you get your honey.

A healthy board shouldn't be wormy. The worms are an indication that the animal isn't healthy. Parasites shouldn't be harmful as long as you cook the mest properly, but yeah I can't say I'd be too interested in eating if I found a liver full of worms.

I had always heard that raising any pigs on pasture would lead to very wormy pigs as well, especially in the southern US. We raised a pair of pigs on pasture last year and when we butchered them we found absolutely no parasites or signs of previous infection. They were pastured, fed extremely high quality food, but otherwise never medicated or vaccinated. We did feed them plenty of squash seeds when squash was in season, those work great for helping with parasites load.

Purely anecdotal, but I absolutely believe that a wormy animal is a sick animal. I have to assume most people raising pigs on pasture have them on pastures that have been sprayed with pesticides and/herbicides and chemical fertilizers, and likely feed a high grain diet of GMO'd feed that was sprayed with glyphosate during harvest.

I have a friend who contracted trichinosis. They had to cut open his skull and pick out all of the worms and eggs that got into his brain. This was an adequate cautionary tale for me. I don't eat pork or other susceptible meat unless I'm very confident it was raised in such a way as to mitigate the possibility of of this horrific parasite.

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

You just have to cook it properly. It's a non-issue.

I suppose we all have our own way of judging what our acceptable and justifiable risks are. For me, setting out to cook it properly leaves more to chance that I'm personally comfortable with. Seeing the full effect of the negative consequences, (despite them being arguably remote,) was enough for me. There are too many other delicious things to eat.

USDA guidelines specify that Trichinella parasites are killed instantly at an internal temperature of 145F/62C. Well-done pork is no threat.

I don't think they're saying that properly prepared pork is a threat. I think they're saying that they don't trust themselves to do it perfectly correctly every single time.

Pork shoulder for pulled pork goes to around 195. If you accidentally took it out at 145 you’d never be able to pull (shred) it. Seems pretty foolproof.

I use a meat thermometer to make sure my meat and fish are cooked, but not overcooked

So what kind of meats do you eat? They all have their diseases.

You can have it tested. They do that for bears pretty often.

if you're foregoing proper preparation almost any food will kill you.

This seems like it's using fluorine as a proxy for PFAS?

They seem like they also directly attempted to measure actual PFAS, but then mixed the results with fluorine, I could not quite understand what they did. Maybe someone can interpert?

I don't like using organic fluorine as a proxy for PFAS, because fluorine also exists naturally in the environment - we mine it from the environment after all.

It is in section 2.3 - they directly measured PFAS in all samples with high-performance liquid chromatography-electrospray ionisation tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-ESI-MS/MS). Then they measured subsets with time-of-flight mass spectrometry (HPLC-qTOF-MS), extractable organofluorine (EOF) analysis, and dTOPA via HPLC-MS/MS.

The paper uses box plots (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40765183), on a log scale even, so it is hard to estimate the actual frequency of PFAS within the samples, but from Fig. 4 it seems like PFOS (51 ug/kg) and PFNA (68 ug/kg) were the most prevalent PFAS chemicals. For California the limit for PFOS is 0.15 µg/kg/day which for a 200lb person translates to 0.26 kg liver/kidney or about 9 oz. The FDA's serving size for liver is 3oz. So yes, it is high, and of course there are other sources of PFAS than food, but it doesn't even seem particularly problematic, unless you make a habit of eating wild boar. The EU's standard is based on within-food measurements, and is 50 ug/kg wet weight. The headline is wrong, 230 ug/kg is dry weight but wet weight is naturally lower as the denominator includes the water - it is more like 1.36x. Although I guess the sum of PFAS chemicals concentrations (median doesn't appear in study) might add up to around 3x-4x.

“We are now finding PFAS everywhere, but that it’s at levels above those allowed for human consumption in food — and wild boar meat and offal is consumed by humans — is a worry,” Dr Müller explained.

Won’t it only get worse every year? Like carbon emissions?

PFAS have a long environmental half life (decades), but despite the nickname "forever chemicals" they don't literally persist forever. People can expect to see a drastic reduction in PFAS body burden when/if environmental emissions of these chemicals are slashed. For example, the US phased out production of the PFAS perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) with a series of legal actions starting in 2004:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid#Legal_a...

As a result, blood levels of PFOA in the US population declined by 70% since the turn of the millennium:

https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects/us-population....

If other PFAS are no longer emitted to the environment, levels in the human population can be expected to decline at a similar pace.

Every day we get a little closer to an Oryx and Crake reality.

In what way? Spoilers for the third book, but my recollection is the main plot points were genetically engineering was very far advanced over even today so we genetically engineer a lot of animals for toys/food, many natural animals go extinct possibly due to these genetically engineered hybrids, one guy is able to make a sort of passive cat/ape/human hybrid he views as superior to humans to replace humans and to top it off makes a virus to kill every human on earth except him and his friends and the tame cat/ape humanoids.

Yeah it's a bit of a stretch at the moment.

But the books also just have interesting descriptions of life in her imagined dystopian post- and pre-apocalyptic society.

It does seem sometimes that things are moving in such a direction, but the details of her "speculative fiction" might not match.

For me it was Ozempic recently, that reminded me of the trilogy's pre-apocalyptic society.

Freshwater lake fish have PFAS too. Also wild game may have CWD. Larger saltwater fish have mercury. Farmed animals and fish have toxins, plastics, etc. Safest bet is small wild saltwater fish and humanely raised free-range farm animals.

I had roasted and spiced wild boar meat once, I expected it to be gamey but it was quite tender. It probably was more to do with how they had cooked it.

I always considered "gamey" to be a flavor instead of a texture, but as I think about it I appreciate expecting wild animal meat to be tougher than farmed meat. Thanks for broadening my mind!

Gamey is definitely a flavor, not a texture.

Gamey is both a flavor and texture.

Most wild game has more muscle than fat compared to domesticated animals.

Hence it's tougher and the gamey flavor is an acquired taste.

similar issue with radiation near Chernobyl. They dig deep into the ground and get into things that are normally burred.

Would be interesting to compare with e.g. Feral Pig meat in Australia

I believe wild pig and feral boar are used interchangeably, so that would probably indicate more of an environmental problem localized to Australia.

Australia is massive. If we have high levels of PFOA in feral pig meat in the N.T. and northern queensland thats a very interesting problem. The feral pig problem at large is of course an ecological disaster but since it extends into productive lands close to habitation on the coastal edge and south-east, it will include areas we know are massively contaminated. The north tip and the northern coast are much less subject to this, tick-bath and drenching tank waste aside (and that is some heinously bad stuff, but I don't think its PFOA)

Wild pig indicates formerly domestic pig that has gotten out and gone feral (which happens super quick in pigs) while boar are those swine that have either remained wild or are a generation or two removed from domesticated swine so as to be indistinguishable.

And when they interbreed that’s when the magic happens. Huge litters, massive size, cold adapted, aggressive, smart. They’re the perfect ecological disaster. Adding unacceptable levels of PFAs is icing on the cake.

"Did you know the average fish today contains more mercury than a rectal thermometer?"

"Would you eat a rectal thermometer!?"

Not on purpose

ils sont fous, ces czechs.

don't les franchies call them tchécs?

de plus, les européens semblent désormais très résistants à l’eau ...

Also found in: Floss, contact lenses, food containers (especially cupcake paper and microwave popcorn) and tampons

Guitar strings.

cellphone screens have a coating of them

nail polish and eye makeup

and of course, yoga pants in the crotch

Nonstick pans, car wax, waterproof clothes

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