Derek Muller confronts PFAS "forever chemicals" in his own blood | Hacker News Reader

Derek Muller confronts PFAS "forever chemicals" in his own blood

scientificamerican.com

50 pointsibobev12 comments

It is staggering how forgiving we are of a company who lied for decades about this problem (3M) and how unwilling our institutions are to protect us from harm.

Rolling back rules against forever chemical poisoning in drinking water is just madness. This is the largest poisoning in human history and Our public institutions are doing nothing to protect us.

Leaded fuel was worse, and we collectively did nothing about it for about half a century.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the behaviour of demagogues like Putin, Xi, and Trump are at least in part influenced by the damage their brains took from decades of lead exposure.

I noticed than my father has trouble controlling his anger, I do too but I’m far better at this, and my kid is totally chill.

Entire generations had their brains damaged and their personalities changed because industry wanted cheaper fuel.

Very hard to punish leadership from the 70s, this type of learning is inevitable according to science historians.

Now we know, simple to keep the tech where it is actually valuable, harder to train the public well enough to care. Verisatium had a great episode on it.

Based on his video, I have given up eating microwave popcorn and have gone back to stove-top made.

If his numbers are to be believed (and I do), the coating on the inside of a microwave popcorn bag that is used to keep the cooking oils from soaking into the paper emit PFAS chemicals. Which leach into the popcorn oils - later to be consumed by you. In the chart comparing them with other coated papers such as fast food burger wrappers, they are far and away the leading source of PFAS.

I still have questions - do the PFAS chemicals leach into the oils while sitting on the store shelf, or are they emitted when they get heated up in the microwave and exceed some temperature (like getting a Teflon pan too hot)? Not that this makes a difference in the end result, but I am curious.

Video link:

https://youtu.be/SC2eSujzrUY?t=2375

> Based on his video, I have given up eating microwave popcorn and have gone back to stove-top made.

You can also just put a few tablespoons of popcorn into an unlined plastic bag and throw that in the microwave. Way cheaper, more choice of popcorn kernels, and just as fast.

Cooking in plastic seems a bit nuts to me. Migrating plasticizers are a thing, and most are endocrine disruptors.

> The heating power seemed to increase the migration processes (up to more than 30 times)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28735545/

Er, I totally meant to say unlined paper bag. Not sure how I got that wrong. You know, sandwich bag, lunch bag, brown bag. Sorry, my bad.

Ha, no worries. That makes a lot more sense. It's still crazy to me how much microwaving in plastic is done in the world. This is a huge problem.

I can make stovetop popcorn in a similar amount of time as microwave and for a significantly cheaper price. Bonus points for being able to pick the variety such as small kernels. This is fine for me.

Time for bloodletting.

https://archive.ph/qWpZN

I think the movie's name is "Dark Waters". There's a PFAS movie that was really eye opening and felt recently reverent to the topic, the innocent bystanders, and most importantly the people in the fight or who lost their fights on the subject.

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