>Consumer Reports said none of the phthalate levels it found exceeded limits set by U.S. and European regulators.
I'm totally fine with this. Maybe the FDA is toothless, I don't know, but EFSA do not kid around.
I'm totally fine with this. Maybe the FDA is toothless, I don't know, but EFSA do not kid around.
Broiling, frying and baking makes food more toxic. There's absolutely no getting away from that fact. As soon as you apply high heat to a food, you're performing a poorly-controlled chemical synthesis that produces all sorts of toxic stuff - acrylamide, acrolein, heterocyclic amines, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, you name it. The risk isn't particularly high, but it's real.
Most people have perfectly reasonably decided that they are willing to take that very modest risk in preference to exclusively eating raw foods. Some people aren't willing to take that risk and it is their right to do so, but anyone proposing a ban on the sale of cooked food on public health grounds would be rightly dismissed as a lunatic.
The plastics that we use (within and without the food industry) aren't significantly toxic and they're incredibly useful. Without plastics, the food available to you would be more expensive and much less varied. A lot of work has gone into minimising the harms and maximising the benefits of plastics and other synthetic chemicals and that work continues.
The villainisation of plastic is based on prejudice, not science. Some people have decided to hate or fear plastics and are trying to concoct an argument that they are devastatingly dangerous, but that effort has yielded little other than rumour and guilt-by-implication.
Yes, we produce a lot of plastic, because it's very useful. Yes, some of that plastic does get into the environment and can in some cases bioaccumulate. Yes, some species of animals have been meaningfully harmed by plastics, primarily because they are unable to distinguish macroplastics from food and actively seek out and eat pieces of plastic that they then cannot digest. No, there is no evidence that the levels of microplastics or free plasticisers in the environment are significantly harmful to human health or ecosystem health, nor any plausible mechanism by which that could be true or become true in the foreseeable future.
Plastics are not the next CO2 or the next tetraethyllead. They are far too well-studied to hold any significant surprises. Many, many researchers have spent their careers actively trying to prove that plastics are terrible (by fair means or foul), all to no avail.
This statement is absurd. The vast majority of research is (1) funded by industry, (2) focused on how plastic can be used in industry, and (3) not focused on biological aspects.
The actual research on endocrine effects of plastics show it has a clear negative effect [0].
> EDCs are chemicals that disturb the body’s hormone systems and can cause cancer, diabetes, reproductive disorders, and neurological impairments of developing fetuses and children. The report describes a wealth of evidence supporting direct cause-and-effect links between the toxic chemical additives in plastics and specific health impacts to the endocrine system.
[0] https://www.endocrine.org/news-and-advocacy/news-room/2020/p...
To reiterate my original comment, I trust the judgement of the EU regulators. I don't know enough about US regulators to comment. I don't know if that report is just scaremongering about known issues that have already been addressed, or if it's still relevant because the EPA and the FDA are asleep at the switch. It certainly doesn't scare me, because the concerns it raises are ancient history from where I'm sitting. If the US government allows companies to sell you products that contain harmful levels of known toxins, then I don't see how anyone could reasonably conclude that the real problem is that some of those known toxins happen to be added to plastics.
Maybe that's not so bad? The modern consumer has access to a wide variety of hyper-processed food that is nutritionally bad anyway, the microplastics are just the toxic sprinkles on top.
> No, there is no evidence that the levels of microplastics or free plasticisers in the environment are significantly harmful to human health or ecosystem health, nor any plausible mechanism by which that could be true or become true in the foreseeable future.
What about the xenoestrogens angle, the hypothesis that invasive microplastics are behind the drop in fertility?
So when is enough? Will it be 2100 when an avalanche of garbage floods a city?
The First half argued plastics are useful yet they might be somewhat poisonous.
The second half then suddenly insisted we cannot believe plastics are poisonous.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
First, don't worry about it...
Then, some is ok...
Wait! Less than some is ok...
Wait again!! Next to nothing is ok...
Fuck!!! Avoid this shit at all costs.
No. Demographics can show you with extremely small error bars the aggregate health effects of smoking and (heavy) drinking. If there was an effect of that magnitude from other variables, we'd know for sure. Microplastics and pthalates and other related contaminants are real, and deserve study. But let's not get ahead of ourselves with the doomerism.
We surely don't know the whole story, but we know pretty well that the effect is less than smoking/obesity/etc. because it would be there in the data if so.
Just once, I'd like to sacrifice consumerism at the altar of my and my family's internal organs, versus the other way around. We're a few decades late to finally be putting full product lifecycle accountability in the laps of manufacturers everywhere.
Because to be blunt, and even to adopt your inflammatory frame, "recklessly dumping substances into the ecosystem" has been Generally Accepted As Safe for literally thousands of years. For everything particular you want to shout about, there are thousands or tens of thousands of human impacts that went just fine. We have 8 billion of us out there, demanding zero impact just isn't going to happen.
So... do you freak out about watering your garden with a well? Ever use fertilizer or lime? Eat food at a restaurant with a grill? Buy a cut of meat wrapped in wax paper? Use anything made of smelted metal? Use a refrigerator? I mean, just think about the crazy alien cultures going on in that sourdough starter in that fridge! Everything impacts the environment. Everything leaks.
You square this by measuring impacts and doing the science, not by shouting on the internet. I'm sure that's not as satifying, and tends frustratingly not to have the villains you clearly want to see. But it's the only way that actually works.
For hundreds of thousands, substances that have negative effects (eg human corpses) were disposed of far from populations, precisely because humans learned that consequences quickly. Humans have been cognizant of causation, when they could detect it, for longer than thousands of years. Yes the black plague took awhile to figure out. As we saw with cigarettes, society is always trending to keeping the status quo. Often, to society's own detriment over the short term, along the span of human existence.
> We have 8 billion of us out there, demanding zero impact just isn't going to happen.
That's not relevant.
Which is exactly my point. Things like corpse burial and fecal sewage management and plague isolation and smoking regulation were all done because the evidence of their effect was clear and measured! They did the science.
All the freakouts in this subthread might be true, but right now they are sitting just above the noise floor. All I'm saying is that we should recognize that and not apply moral reasoning that ignores the distinction.
It is almost certainly not true that the pthalate linings on your bean can or whatever is as bad as the black plague (we started with smoking, but sure, let's go where you took us). And arguing as if it were is hurting the discourse and making a solution less likely. To wit: please be serious about this stuff.
Remove all PBDEs: "Why are you putting my family in jeopardy?"
Use PBDEs: "Why are you putting my family in jeopardy?"
Finally, as with many other issues, the unseen element is cost. It's possible to use materials that don't require PBDEs to keep them from igniting rapidly, but will people be willing to pay that premium for their homes and their furniture? The rising popularity of "dollar stores"[2] and TEMU suggests that they won't. And making things more expensive through regulation has the side effect of empowering political forces that would gladly obliterate any kind of regulatory protection for consumers - making things worse, not better.
[1] https://www.ecohome.net/guides/2223/flame-retardants-in-furn...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/more-wealthy-people-shopping...
The terrifying thing is that phthalates in mothers not only cause developmental issues in the reproductive systems of their offspring, but the offspring then carry the same risks to _their_ offspring, even if they have reduced phthalate exposure post-birth, meaning you need 2 "clean" generations to clear out the contamination properly.
I think a lot more studies are starting to look at this and I predict we're going to see a rapid increase in regulation of plastics once the generational impact becomes clearer.
Is that actually confirmed or were the studies just not long enough to determine whether the effects persist for more generations?
How can you be so confident that a) the effects would be so clear, and b) we'd know for sure the cause of those effects was microplastics?
We have an increase in early onset cancer, since the 1990s, more than can be explained by just earlier detection: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-022-00672-8
and "There is a mysterious epidemic of kidney disease called chronic kidney disease of unknown etiology (CKDu) that is occurring in many parts of the world. Unrelated to known risk factors such as diabetes and hypertension, CKDu mostly affects the young and middle-aged" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8437007/
and "Driven principally by aging [...] For most of human history, Parkinson has been a rare disorder. However, demography and the by-products of industrialization have now created a Parkinson pandemic" - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30584159/
And the obvious ones like heart disease - if you can claim a group of diseases are caused by "old age" and another group by "obesity and bad diet" - would we know if microplastics were a cause, an exacerbator, a trigger?
As always, xkcd makes the point best: https://xkcd.com/882/
The world isn't falling apart. You're just digging around to find enough "maybes" to P-hack your way into believing it.
[1] About the right order of magnitude for smoking all by itself.
I don’t see how one can be confident about the presence or absence of population-level effects.
There's nothing doom-tastic about being smart and practical. Furthermore, due to the ubiquitous nature of these chemicals we'll never be able to be certain of their ill effects. There will be no way to rule out other things so their assumed innocence will persist. Why so much risk?
1. That's the current tolerable levels of xenoestrogen chemicals per agencies. However it's not clear whether there's a safe level of plastic ever established by these agencies.
2. These "Safe levels" are adjusted all the time. There no reason to presume that in the future the current safe levels won't be reduced.
I tried to look up the regulations, but whatever the value of EU regulations may be, readability and simplicity are not their strong points. Picking on DEHP because it's one CR mentions, I found these secondhand references:
* https://www.foodpackagingforum.org/news/16th-amendment-to-eu... * https://www.foodpackagingforum.org/news/efsa-updated-risk-as...
The first says that the "specific migration limit" for DEHP had been lowered to 0.6 mg/kg. I assume that's the amount that ends up in the product. The second refers to Tolerable Daily Intake based on body weight, of 50 µg/kg.
So we're talking about, in one measure, the limit being 600000 nanograms in a kilogram of food. The serving size of Annie's Original Organic Cheesy Ravioli is 242g. So the allowable amount of DEHP in that serving would be 2,479,338 nanograms. They found 53,579, or around 2% of the acceptable amount.
Looking at it from TDI, Wikipedia gives a low bound on the average adult body weight of 60 kg. That's 3,000,000 nanograms, which brings it down to 1.8%.
Consumer Reports has not been a reputable publication for many years, and they continue to trade on their name as many Americans at least have it in their head that CR is some kind of unbiased arbiter of quantitative information about what's good or not. What they actually do is clickbait to sell subscriptions. This became clear to me when I realized that any time they write about a product category I have a lot of experience with, their recommendations make no sense. Thinking that they actually provide useful information but only about the things I don't have the ability to fact-check them on is a form of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.
German government research estimates that around 1% of the population consumes more than the TDI (according to another federal government press release from 2013[1]). According to that source, kids' exposition to DEHP is half from food, and half from other sources like toys and the overall environment, and the typical exposition is between 15-44 ug/kg (i.e. below the TDI).
[1] https://www.bfr.bund.de/de/presseinformation/2013/13/weichma...
To give them a modicum more credit: I missed the link to this PDF the first time, which at least discloses the testing methodology and has a page listing the applicable safety standards. https://article.images.consumerreports.org/image/upload/v170...
There's something I find very interesting in there: they added phthalates and phthalate replacements together and reported it as phthalates. Phthalate replacements are also known as "non-phthalate plasticizers", which as the name implies, are not phthalates, and are used in products that want to be "BPA and phthalate free". To what extent are those reported numbers actually coming from DEHA in pthalate-free polyethylene wrappers? To me, this crosses the line from simple clickbait to dishonesty.
I don't have a horse in this race apart from being the kind of person who just wants to know what is actually true. Industry will absolutely lie and poison us to make a buck, but at the same time, everything is chemicals, and many "natural" substances are incredibly toxic. Ultimately it is farcical to think that any of us are in a position to do or even properly evaluate research and we rely on experts and reputation to try to make sense of these technical fields. CR publishing it doesn't make it untrue, but unfortunately I think it's a mistake to rely on them either. At best it's a pointer that there may be something interesting and worth seeing if anyone else has done a better job.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-10-246
> Because GRAS notification is voluntary and companies are not required to identify nanomaterials in their GRAS substances, FDA has no way of knowing the full extent to which engineered nanomaterials have entered the U.S. food supply as part of GRAS substances. In contrast to FDA's approach, all food ingredients that incorporate engineered nanomaterials must be submitted to regulators in Canada and the European Union before they can be marketed.
Great for profits. Nots so good for everyone and everything else.
Call it what you want, but the FDA is too often a paper tiger.
I don't have to work at the FDA to see that it's compromised. Somebody already figured it out.
https://www.science.org/content/article/fda-s-revolving-door...
Remember, personal attacks are not allowed here.
One doesn't have to work for the FDA to realize that the prioritize profit over health in a lot of cases. Case in point is sunscreen. How many years did the FDA allow sunscreens that didn't protect against UV-A exposure, knowing that UV-A was the primary cause for sun damage related skin cancer.
Even when they did decide to require protection against UV-A, the enforcement was delayed for several years, explicitly to not cause financial harm to sunscreen makers. I remember back in college, enforcement was delayed over a year to permit sellers to move through existing stock of sunscreen.
This is far from the only example. FDA very much prioritizes protecting companies bottom lines.
The FDA almost certainly has at least a dozen folks much smarter than the user calling them 'clueless'.
And all regulated organizations, in total, certainly have many hundreds much smarter responding to the FDA.
It's very likely that at least a few thousand actual bonafide geniuses interact substantially, in some way, in any given year.
If smart was all that is necessary, we wouldn't need the likes of the FDA. If smart was all that is necessary, the world wouldn't be the clusterfuck that it is.
History is clear...relying on smart is a stupid idea. Ignoring history? Even worse.
Innocent until found guilty.
They know. We know it. Big Inc knows it. That's a foolish - at best - way to approach public health and ecological health. Tho', of course, it's great for profits.