Consumer Reports finds 'widespread' presence of plastics in food

Only someone who has never worked under the FDAs eye of Sauron could think this, strong Dunning-Kruger vibe.

The highest amount in their list was 54 micrograms per serving. Most of them were under 5 µg. They seem to have just bundled everything together instead of listing specific amounts of specific chemicals, and chose to put the numbers in "nanograms per serving" to make them look as big as possible.

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.

Put a human in a beef jerky dehydrator for a few days?

> These plastics are going to follow tobacco and alcohol.

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.

That video of pigs being fed plastic it is in a facility in North Carolina, USA, run by Smithfield Foods, a Chinese-owned entity, the largest pork producer in the United States.

I have searched for to know what happened with that facility, but the only article that I've been able to find, and that it is showed as first result in the search engine, is from fayobserver[1], labeled as USA Today Network, saying a "do not worry".

Legal or not, it's an outrage. Did the FDA allowed this in the end?

From their web[2] >

[1] https://fayobserver.com/story/news/2022/05/05/nc-pig-feed-pl...

[2] www smithfieldfoods com