Journal that published faulty black plastic study removed from science index
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
However, in my own assessment, my maximum daily exposure to ingested flame retardants should be zero, rather than some off the cuff figure that was certainly done with appeasing industry in mind.
So yes, I still ditched my plastic cookware in favor of stainless steel and silicone, and am still happy that the erroneous study got my attention.
1) Make thing that operates on hot surfaces/ near fire
2) Materials thing is made of known for being flammable
3) Add extra chemicals to help stop thing from catching on fire
Seems pretty logical to me.
They shouldn’t be present in products designed to come in contact with food, when many good alternatives are available (inherently heat-resistant thermoplastics, silicone, stainless steel, etc)
There is no good evidence of this for the chemical in question.
But nobody ever thought anyone would actually be crazy enough to put BFRs in kitchen utensils, where perfectly good, and cheap, alternatives exist!
[1] https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-t...
> In 2004, ATSDR wrote "Nothing definite is known about the health effects of PBDEs in people. Practically all of the available information is from studies of laboratory animals. Animal studies indicate that commercial decaBDE mixtures are generally much less toxic than the products containing lower brominated PBDEs. DecaBDE is expected to have relatively little effect on the health of humans."
But I'm sure you're right. After all, history tells us that if someone is widely accepted to be a witch, they must be a witch.
My understanding was that you were arguing that any hint of disagreeing with current scientific understanding was equivalent to believing in witchcraft, given the similar lack of evidence — an eminently defensible position, no question.
However: the witch hunters at Salem also had plenty of evidence to support their claims — albeit evidence we can now see with modern eyes as hopelessly wrong and heavily weighted by the powers that be in order to advance their own interests (land grabs, mostly).
Unfortunately the average citizen at the time had no way of interrogating the veracity and efficacy of either the claims of witchcraft, nor the very tests by which said witchcraft could supposedly be revealed.
Which leads to my intended point, which is that I sure hope this doesn’t turn out to be another leaded paint situation (we knew lead was poison but didn’t account for dust particles and childhood curiosity), or a climate change situation (the companies themselves knew it was harmful and flooded the field with misleading studies), or an arsenic situation (basically Victorian leaded paint), or a tobacco situation (4 out of 5 doctors recommend X), etc.
Essentially: misaligned incentives can be equally, if not more, powerful than the scientific method itself when it comes to shaping public policy.
But I do I apologize for glibly mirroring your own phrasing when making my own point, I can see how that would be frustrating, especially without the added historical context with which you may be unfamiliar.
I have pointed out that these specific chemicals look to be less toxic than the class in general, so just pointing to evidence about the class in general is not sufficient.
4) Profit
Then it’s entirely not shocking.
That is why white plastic utensils are not being called out: although white utensils are common, white electronics cases are rare, so the white utensils do not have high levels of retardants.
What does this even mean? You refuse to eat anything that could possibly put out of a fire, or if included within anything else, could slow down the progress of fire when that thing burns?
I don't understand taking pride in irrationality. If you have some evidence (or even some reasonable suspicion) that the specific chemical could be harmful in the amount that you consume it, avoid it. It's weird for me to brag that I'd avoid something despite any evidence, because somebody mentioned it once and I refuse to let it go. What if what you replace it with causes cancer, but has no effect on fires?
If there was a thread on the respiratory hazards of airborne micron-sized particles, I guarantee that someone in the comments section would say "I can't believe these unscientific yokels are afraid of clouds."
If someone has a plan to inhale no micron-sized particles, their plan will not work.
I just think that going for "zero" is usually a flawed plan. Things are tradeoffs and decisions should recognize that. Everything is toxic in different ways. Some options are clearly better than others, but the analysis needs more effort than looking at a single number.
And sometimes the exposure already is effectively zero, making any action at all a waste of time.
I don't know if this case is safe or not, but acting based on a single variable is a bad idea, especially without keeping reasonable expectations at the forefront.
If you can't afford wooden sauce spoons, a material which the human body evolved in close contact with, naturally disinfects itself for years or decades after the tree is felled, and is extremely affordable to the point that you can find endless amounts of it for free on craigslist, then you sure as heck can't afford the cancer treatments you're risking with the synthetic stuff.
The exposure is effectively zero...when? Wasn't your whole original argument the exact opposite? That exposure is never precisely zero? Dividing the numbers in the study by ten does not make any of them zero.
Acting on limited data is often much more advantageous than not acting on available data.
What I'm saying is, you should make sure you're actually moving a meaningful amount.
And you can't assume wooden is better when it's still coming from a big factory.
> The exposure is effectively zero...when?
It depends on what chemical you're looking for and where you're looking. It's a pretty generic statement, it's not just about utensils.
> Wasn't your whole original argument the exact opposite? That exposure is never precisely zero? Dividing the numbers in the study by ten does not make any of them zero.
There is a point where the effect is zero, but you're never going to reach actual zero.
Your goal should be the former, not the latter.
And sometimes you don't need to do anything to reach the former. In that situation, replacing products just hurts you by wasting time and money (and less time and money will increase stress which is bad for your health).
So no, my argument has not changed.
> Acting on limited data is often much more advantageous than not acting on available data.
Sure, I agree. But have a realistic idea of the impacts and risks before acting.
Brominated flame retardants. Polybrominated diphenyl ethers were called out in the study.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybrominated_diphenyl_ethers
Is 99% okay, or 80%, or 10%?
Especially when the intake could easily be avoided by not using recycled electronic‘s enclosures.
How much risk are you willing to take for a company‘s profit?
At a broader level, though, I am certainly not happy this erroneous study got my (and many other people's) attention, because it's conclusions were complete bullshit. I don't understand these kinds of unscientific apologetics - it's the exact same kind of thinking that leads people down the road of "Sure, that study of vaccine implications in autism may have been completely fraudulent, but I'm still glad it got my attention because it informed me of all the random chemicals in vaccines!"
I personally did not ditch my plastic cookware, and I'm glad I didn't, because so far there is zero actual evidence that one needs to.
We can live in a world of nuance where we refute the specific claims of this study while still making choices to proactively avoid potential harm from plastic products. Many other valid studies are finding microplastic in our bodies and environment at levels we didn't remotely suspect before.
Where was the problem with 80% then, it’s still below the limit.
It adds up with all other sources of harmful materials.
Less is better
Rather they were just a few outliers that completely threw the average off?
The problem isn’t the flame retardant but the source and for black kitchen utensils they sometimes used old plastic from TVs and such
But rather to ensure the experimental methodology was sound, it cites the appropriate previous work, that it is significant enough, etc.
I actually think that calculation verification and statistical significance verification is a great idea, but shouldn't be done by "peers", but rather someone who specializes only in that. More of a type of auditor.
The article made waves because it didn't surprise anyone, because in fact a ton of household staples are full of toxins (spices are full of lead, etc).
So the reason it made waves is because it confirmed everyone's previous biases. Which is why people defend it even when that "confirmation" was based on an error of simple arithmetic.
Reminds me of a bunch of studies that were taken out by Excel errors, like that economics failure about national debt going higher than GDP being some sort of trigger for societal failure. The people who boosted that study were the people who were saying the same thing, with no study, for no other reason than that the numbers are of a similar magnitude. After it was shown that the study showed no such thing, its supporters insisted that it was still true because of course it was true.
https://stanfordreview.org/clarifying-the-implications-of-th...
Your comment is the first time I've ever heard anything about lead in spices, and I read a lot of news. In my experience, very few things are actually "common knowledge", it just seems that way when everyone in our particular social circles knows something.
Personally, I would expect a lot of products to be near a lot of limits for various toxins. Especially around food, my expectation is for limits to be safe with a nice-sized buffer, sometimes too big of a buffer. The point of having limits is that products inside them are fine.
Most papers are full of errors nobody ever catches (or cares to catch).
Science is about making reality the arbiter of truth. What is true is what you can demonstrate in an experiment pretty much anywhere. Science is self-correcting not because other scientists take a look at your work before it gets published, but because a theory that is not backed up by reality will be harder to build on, make worse predictions, and generally not be useful for actual work. It doesn't matter how much "hype" built up around LK-99 for example, because you could not build anything out of it, because it didn't work as claimed, and no amount of belief can overcome that.
Science is self correcting because the universe is not convinced by rhetoric, and will only ever follow it's own rules.
Tellingly, scientists who have been around for a while do not consider a published paper as especially meaningful. They do not consider peer review as vouching for a paper's correctness. They have seen hundreds of papers pass peer review and make it into Science and Nature and turn out to be bunk. No scientific process will be perfect, so some amount of papers should be expected to be wrong, no matter how genuinely careful and perfect the scientists who wrote it were.
It's really sad how over-indexed the lay-public has gotten on peer review. It's just not how science works. It can still be somewhat useful for more popular journals who have to pick and choose what to publish anyway, but it's only useful if the peer reviewers are themselves domain experts in a rigorous and formalized scientific discipline.
How about this off-by-100x multiplication error I discovered in a published paper[1]?
AFAIK, that paper hasn't been retracted. I was meaning to contact the author and publisher, but never got around to it. A mitigating factor is that the error is made in regard to a side topic of the paper, not the main topic of the paper.
See https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/black-plastic
"Lead author Megan Liu, science and policy manager at Toxic-Free Future, described the mistake as a “typo” and said her co-authors have submitted a correction to the journal. The error remains in the online version but Liu said she anticipates it will be updated soon.
“However, it is important to note that this does not impact our results,” Liu told National Post. “The levels of flame retardants that we found in black plastic household items are still of high concern, and our recommendations remain the same.”"
The correction/corrigendum note is here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004565352...
Huge math error corrected in black plastic study; authors say it doesn't matter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42437201 - Dec 2024 (112 comments)
A simple math error sparked a panic about black plastic kitchen utensils - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42400008 - Dec 2024 (176 comments)
Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41996156 - Oct 2024 (845 comments)
I'm sure the authors weight the impact on their reputation versus the benefits of catching more headlines for the public good.
I think it all worked as intended.
Regarding stainless steel, that's during production of the item, not during cooking. You'd have to be welding, or using heat hot enough to cut through the steel, to release it in your own kitchen.
Regarding glass, you can check for chips and the condition of your glass far better than you can for microplastics. One is also likely to leech (plastics) over the course of its life, while one is not (glass).
Salt, acid, alkaline solutions could potentially lower the temperature at which hexavalent Chromium appears.
"Could potentially" means I was brainstorming possibilites, I didn't look for a study, I'm not too worried about it. I'd be more worried about Nickel than Chromium, but it's obviously false that you "need" welding levels of heat to produce oxidized forms of Chromium.
Heat does leach plastisizers and other chemicals into food.
Microplastics do move from cookware into food.
I have a set of pots/pans and accompanying utensils, all stainless, that I've used for decades, and plan to use for the rest of my life.
This also constitutes a reduction in constantly produced plastic waste.
Try not to use ANY plastic...