EPA Moves to Roll Back Drinking Water Standards
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
Awesome. I am sure the people in charge are smart and this is the best path forward for all of us. After all, that is the promise of free and fair elections.
The whole MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement is an absolutely brilliant masterstroke by corporate interests. Get people up in arms about pseudoscientific bogeymen like artificial dies. Then claim as a major win how you've gotten big food companies to pinky promise that they'll stop using these dyes in Fruit Loops and sodas in a few years - because of course we'll all be super healthy once we're downing naturally dyed Fruit Loops and soda. Meanwhile, gut environmental regulations that actually do have a measurable positive impact on health, make healthcare even more unaffordable, and kick lots of people off Medicaid so rich people can get a tax break. But hey, at least you'll be the beacon of health since you can now gobble your fries cooked in lard instead of those naughty seed oils.
The focus and prioritization is definitely out of line though, and it's particularly absurd in the face of the rolling back of pollution protections and removing access to healthcare.
Basically, it's focusing on a minor problem rather than the major ones. (But the minor problem is a legitimate one, and we should be solving all of them).
Knurick's has a great blog post on the issue, https://drjessicaknurick.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-synt....
That said, definitely in agreement about the major point that it's a distraction, and Knurick says many times she's not advocating for food dyes, rather that the bigger issue is the overwhelming prevalence of ultra-processed (i.e. high calorie but devoid of other nutrients and fiber) foods in the US first.
Last I checked the Federal government does not manage private wells. There are exempt under the Clean Water Act.
Chlorine needs to stay in city water to disinfect all the distribution pipes throughout a city. But at point of use, you should not be drinking/bathing in chlorine or chlorine disinfection byproducts.
And of those that don't it's mostly because their water is supplied by a well in an area where the groundwater has minerals that affect smell/taste and it's cheaper to buy bottled than to filter them.
Well, them and Canadian Indigenous reserves lol. But those have been described as 3rd world anyways.
Tap water was not drinkable there, and it sucked to have to rely on water jugs or water filters of unknown quality.
We are not there in the US but the enshittification is accelerating.