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Comment by eadler | Hacker News Reader

The article does not cite or link to the study.

> The researchers found that people who ate microwave popcorn every day over the course of a year had levels of PFAS that were up to 63% higher than average.

As far as I could tell the relevant study [1] merely finds association rather than causation. This is often the best you can do in the nutrition field though. I have not yet read through the entire contents.

[1] Herbert P. Susmann, Laurel A. Schaider, Kathryn M. Rodgers, and Ruthann A. Rudel. 2019. Dietary Habits Related to Food Packaging and Population Exposure to PFASs. Environmental Health Perspectives 127, 10 (October 2019). DOI:https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP4092

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>...that were up to 63% higher than average

"Up to" can cover a lot of sins. Does that mean one person had 63% higher than normal and the median daily-popcorn eater was 10% higher?

Even double blinded randomized cross over trials only shows associations. That doesn’t mean you can’t make reasonable casual inferences after looking at the balance of evidence. Else we couldn’t even infer that smoking causes cancer, something most people have to bite the bullet on when they denounce nutrition science.

? You can show causation by having a test group and a control group.

Just get N people. Have the control group eat pot cooked popcorn and have the experimental group eat microwave.

You can’t get causation by just observing, but once you are willing to make someone do something, then it’s pretty easy to arrive at.

I tried to verify the GP quote but actually couldn’t find it in the study - but if it’s true, people who eat microwave popcorn every day for a year is an extreme population in all sorts of ways. I don’t eat anything every day for a year, much less popcorn.

The quote is in the original UCLA Health article, not the study.

"Research suggests that people who regularly consume microwave popcorn have markedly higher levels of PFAS in their bodies. A study published in 2019 analyzed a decade of data about the eating habits of 10,000 people, which was collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 2003 and 2014. Blood samples from the study participants were also collected. The researchers found that people who ate microwave popcorn every day over the course of a year had levels of PFAS that were up to 63% higher than average."

Who is going to fund a study designed to find causation of high pfas blood levels?

The corn producers, the microwave popcorn brands? If any of them ever does, be sure that the study will either find no proof of causation or not be published

The ministry of public health?

You also have to have the control group eat every other meal the same as the study.

The first thing that comes to my mind if you are eating microwave popcorn every day, what other junk foods are you eating every day?

> Just get N people. Have the control group eat pot cooked popcorn and have the experimental group eat microwave

You can only control what people eat if you lock them up in a prison or similar institution.

These days locking up thousands of people and experimenting with their diet is not cool.

The best nutritional / food studies come from prisons and similar institutions.

The Army.

A lot of studies are done on high-level, competitive NCAA / college athletes. Both cuz they're, like, already at a university, but also NCAA has mandatory physicals, and high level athletics lends itself to controlled lifestyles.

Both tend to rule out most health issues as well; in theory you can be diabetic and play NCAA Div 1 ball, but selection bias tends to weed them out, while the Army explicitly does so.

Especially since someone who eats microwave popcorn EVERY DAY is someone who clearly treats their body like a garbage can

it's cheap, even vegan probably (if not buttered), not full of sugar, etc. what's wrong with it? yes, every day seems suboptimal, but it's not trivial to have a varied balanced healthy diet, and folks need to eat every day (usually at least twice).

The reality of commercial microwave popcorn is the problem, not the "idea" of microwave popcorn, if that makes sense.

What I mean is, if you make homemade microwave popcorn with good oils and a pinch of salt it's presumably fine. But the cheap packets you buy in the store, brand-name or not, are full of crap - rancid, cheap oils, additives and preservatives of all kinds, weird artificial flavors, almost certainly a ridiculous amount of salt and sugar, and now possibly packaging that's of such poor quality it leeches PFAs. It's not the corn that's the problem.

I mean, the study states clearly that the PFAS are in the "food contact materials" in question, here, which are the microwave popcorn bags. Then they end up in the people. Kind of open and shut.

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