Phthalates damage babies' brains and must be banned immediately, say experts | Hacker News Reader

Phthalates damage babies' brains and must be banned immediately, say experts

cnn.com

120 pointsdaegloe49 comments

it is continually revealed that modern industry is poisoning us all, over and over again, for little to no reason. in the rare instance the political will is generated to act against one thing or another, the regulation is sidestepped with analogs, and buried a hundredfold with other new profitable inventions.

unfortunately there is no reason to believe this destructive process is slowing or stopping.

we and our children are all debilitated in both subtle and drastic ways that we absolutely do not understand. the past century of industrial/biological experimentation will be looked back upon as one of the greatest and most senseless crimes ever committed.

i fear the consequences we must face.

In a lot of cases, it seems the root cause is disregard for others and greed. People wouldn’t knowingly poison babies if they didn’t stand to make money or they felt sympathy. Unfortunately it seems Hollywood for the past decade or so has glorified nihilism and Machiavellianism because they sell, which has trickled into all facets of American life to the extreme detriment of our society. That’s just my take.

It seems rather disproportionate to blame such ills on the movie industry.

Why because it’s an uncomfortable truth? It’s certainly not a novel concept

https://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/politics/documents/Ari...

https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/how-does-media-influence-social-...

https://live.worldbank.org/should-we-use-entertainment-media...

The notion that human malevolence is a recent enough development to have somehow been caused by this entity “Hollywood” is laughable on its face.

Are you under the impression that humans led some kind of Edenic existence before we started watching movies?

I’m not claiming it as an origin of malevolence but definitely an amplifier by distributing and eliciting fascination with dark triad ideas to much larger swaths of the population

It seems to me that maybe you should try switching to watching better films before you condemn an entire industry full of creative people. I happened to come across this quote from the late Roger Ebert just now:

“If it’s a great movie, it lets you understand a little bit more about what it’s like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, a different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.”

There is no monolithic “Hollywood.” Suggesting not only that there is but that it has a nefarious agenda of some kind is an all-too common element of popular conspiracy theories and, frankly, an example of lazy thinking.

It seems to me this is a straw man argument. Hollywood is merely metonymy.

I am not suggesting that you are under the impression that the film industry is only located in California. I’m sure you’re well aware that isn’t the case.

My point is that in reality all sorts of people make all sorts of films, many of which are valuable sources of inspiration and comfort for their audiences.

And yet despite this you are quite obviously engaging in a definist fallacy by suggesting that only those films and shows that bother you personally are representative and thus the entire film industry can be rightfully condemned.

Most people wouldn’t knowingly poison babies they know, or babies of people they know.

The root of cause of disregard for a group of people is anonymity, which in turn is a consequence of large and dense groups of humans. Unknown "others" just aren't real.

We feel attracted to huge and dense cities/provinces/nations, and the result becomes more and more ugly. Aren't pandemics another consequence of those?

Hollywood glorifies what sells (attracts many). Many feel, more or less consciously, surrounded by the masses, threatened by it, and react thru nihilism/Machiavellianism/...

I seemed to have trouble with sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS).

Sleeping on freshly washed sheets would irritate my skin.

I switched to a detergent without SLS and they were soft and comfortable again. I also did the same with shampoo and toothpaste, to my benefit.

Thing is, it's a cheap ingredient that has been signed-off by regulators. But manufacturers are onto the controversy and just use "alternate" names for it on the ingredients list.

Same here. I used to get terrible rashes on the back of my neck that needed increasingly stronger steroid creams to deal with. Then I found out about SLS from a BBC clip about it. It’s an incredibly drying chemical and it’s only purpose is to increase foaminess in shampoos. Because shampoo would go down the back of my neck when I rinsed it off, the SLS was causing my skin to dry and crack leading to rashes.

I’ve stopped using any cleaning products with SLS and the issue has never returned.

The part that annoys me is that SLS doesn’t really aid in cleaning. They just add it to soaps and shampoos because foam plays to the notion of cleaning. It’s a marketing thing.

How do you expect the industry to manage this? We can't even scientifically test whether the different foods we eat are harmful or good for us.

I think humanity will have to face consequences and start paying people to possibly sacrifice their health for the greater good. It's just not possible to in any other way I think.

Unfortunately, while human trials might in some perfect world be a workable idea, under capitalism we have a perpetual underclass of people who are kept at wages low enough that they would be willing to do almost anything to get a bit more money. So paying people to sacrifice their health turns into another form of abuse that poor people will endure.

This is true. There are no clean solutions.

Howabout ban the use of any packaging material that hasn't been proven safe? Allow human trials by corporate executives that wish to risk their health determining safety?

The question is exactly in it: how do you prove them safe?

OK, let's require a proof of income above the national average from the applicants. Any better now?

"It sucks to be poor; you can't even sell a piece of your health for a greater good of humankind and some good money. Only the rich folks are entitled to that."

The quotation raises an interesting point about equality. Maybe it'd be better to make there be no payment at all, then anyone who wants to participate _purely out of concern for the greater good and for no other reason_ would get an equal chance, and there wouldn't be perverse incentives then.

How many people are going to volunteer to consume potentially dangerous substances for free?

We could require that corporate executives trial the substances as part of the approval process for new materials...

Probably the most ethically sound solution. My perception of reality suggests that entire multinationals would flee any country that even murmured about such things.

I think you are right! And good riddance :)

Not exactly the same, but as a current example there have been no problems finding volunteers for the new challenge trials for covid vaccines. Some people find genuine pleasure from helping the greater good.

Amount of feeble slogan salad in HN comment section approaches Twitter poisoning levels.

Your second ever comment in this community is decrying the quality of comments in said community with an attack containing no substance?

I'm a bit unsure what to think. From the article:

> "When you have the same kind of findings repeated ... and you keep coming up with the same finding, I think you can begin to say that the data is pretty clear"

But also: > By 2019, more than 30 studies had examined prenatal exposure to different types of phthalates ... Not all of the papers had found consistent results, especially in the area of cognitive development, but the report's authors said that might be due to difference in study designs and children's ages.

While this finding certainly seems plausible, and the credentials of the project members are impeccable, I am a bit suspicious that they may simply be evaluating a large number of chemicals across a wide range of outcomes, and reporting on the noise.

Is there a theory on what the causal mechanism for these chemicals to cause these neurological conditions are?

A couple.

Some basic neuro papers have found that it's directly neurotoxic.

Others have found that it exacerbates the neurotoxicity of certain other compounds (e.g., lead).

And other studies have found that pthalate exposure increases urinary output of quinolinic acid, a neurotoxic metabolite of the tryptophan metabolic pathway to which pthalates are structurally similar.

This suggests a couple of things: (1) that pthalates are neurotoxic via the excitotoxic pathway that quinolinic acid acts through, and (2) that pthalates induce higher quinolinic acid production (we've confirmed this is true in humans).

Essentially, we've confirmed pthalates to be neurologically harmful in a number of animal studies, found a candidate pathway, and confirmed that that pathway is in fact affected in the prediction direction in humans experimentally exposed to higher doses of pthalates.

(That last bit slipped by the ethics boards because there are meds that already include pthalates, so patients were randomized to get higher- or lower- pthalate containing formulations of the med, which were otherwise equivalently dosed.)

It's a pretty reasonable conclusion at this point, if one isn't already wedded to the idea of the compound's safety.

Very interesting, thanks for the explanation!

Uhhh, there are dozens of phthalates. Each with a different chemical structure. They are not all going to follow the same metabolic pathway.

This article just calls out all phthalates. Would be better to specify which. Also some phthalates do have alternatives, but not all depending on the properties your plastizer is trying to give the plastic.

At this point it seems wiser to avoid plastics entirely for food. With so many chemical compounds, it seems very unlikely that we'll find and eliminate all the harmful ones anytime soon.

This has been suspected since (I think) 2015. They are also serious endocrine disruptors. So they're being phased out. I'm not sure why it takes 6 years (and counting) to do that...

We need a whitelist of chemicals endorsed for food, drink, and health/beauty.

Packaging ingredients need to be listed as well as food ingredients.

As an individual consumer: contact politicians. The only solution to this is regulatory.

Also, this whitelist can include exactly one (or two) recyclable plastics.

Don’t focus on the type of plastic or polymer too much. Virgin plastics themselves arent too reactive/biologically active. It’s the additives, plasticizers, and environmental/industrial chemicals they pick up that react/interfere with organisms. And those are largely unregulated and definitely opaque to any end consumer. Not all PET is equal.

Source: casual interest, and a partner who’s a biologist working on a chem PhD specifically around measuring the effect of micro/nano plastics in marine organisms.

I'd like to also see ingredient lists include the date they were last modified.

Your local politician ain't gonna do shit all. This is a national movement more than anything.

TSCA grandfathered-in thousands of chemicals without safety data. The issue is that dangerous chemicals in America are a game of Whack-a-Mole since they have to be proven unsafe in order to ban them, rather than proven safe to use, and leaving harm, pain, disfigurement, disabilities, and deaths as collateral damage in their wake.

> Phthalates damage babies' brains and must be banned immediately, say experts

The only thing to get from this is CNN is not garbage but dangerous garbage and a concerning organisation called Project TENDR is gaining a foothold.

There doesn't seem to any good research on exactly what 'Project TENDR' is yet. Possibly a mutation of the anti-vaxxer movement. They are not anti-vaxxer's but are using autism as a meme. CNN has hidden this bit.

They do seem good at astroturfing.

By their own admission these chemicals are everywhere, and yet by a lot of measures people are more healthy and living longer than before... I feel just a bit suspicious.

>and yet by a lot of measures people are more healthy and living longer than before

This argument doesn't make sense to me without something more specific. Just because such high level concepts like "health" and length of life continue to increase, that doesn't invalidate any particular malady.

There are multiple variables in play at one time. Like, ... every other thing in medical science and public health. It would probably be more helpful if someone went ahead and just looked closer at the activity of the compound of interest, and saw what impact it had in isolation.

We could call these people researchers, in honor of their tenacity in scrutinizing and re-scrutinizing their work and the work of others. And when their work impacts the health of the many, maybe we could use mass communications technology to share it.

Pie in the sky, I know.

My main objection is to the "must be banned immediately" part. That's totally alarmist and unnecessarily inflammatory.

Why should we wait?

We've been collecting increasingly reliable data on the harmful effects of pthalates on human development for at least two decades. How much data must accrue, and how harmful must it be, for an immediate ban to not be alarmist?

Tangential: US life expectancy drops a year in pandemic, most since WWII > https://apnews.com/article/us-life-expectancy-huge-decline-f...

One possibility is that people are healthy because we are increasingly paying attention to widespread low-level pollution (like phthalates, lead, asbestos, etc.)

> people are more healthy and living longer than before

If we talk about US I'm unsure about that. Specially the first part of that statement, it seems that at least one of each three Americans are obese.

The best part when _again_ some people studying _put very important thing for the public interest here_ ... is done by volunteers spending their own money.

That would be a great point if health and longevity were controlled by a single variable, and that variable happened to be phthalate intake.

But we know health and longevity are controlled by a dizzying number of factors that interact, so your suspicion, right or wrong, isn't justified by your observation. For example, far fewer people smoke today than did 30 years ago; medical treatments are more advanced than they were 30 years ago. And finally, phthalates were in widespread use 30 years ago too. Phthalates may have been harming us all along but those other improvements still result in an overall improvement in health and longevity.

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