Great, since the FDA won't do anything I can't for the day that whole foods to start selling non-PFA grade food.
Something's Poisoning America's Farms. Scientists Fear 'Forever' Chemicals
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Re: Something's Poisoning America's Farms. Scientists Fear 'Forever' Chemicals
#22What I'd worry about is not PFAs, but excreted drugs. Some drugs (or their byproducts) are persistent, and have been deliberately selected to have biological effects. I take metformin. This drug is mostly excreted in feces. The dry mass of feces might be 1% metformin for someone taking typical doses. The drug does break down in the environment, but only slowly.
PFAS have exceptional properties that make them difficult to degrade, especially when it has been ingested. As a result, exposure to them will lead to bioaccumulation. Wastewater is treated to remove things like metformin, and anything that eludes that can be metabolized normally.
WWTPs have not proven successful at removing metformin or its metabolite.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221334372...
Granted, this particular chemical partitions into water, not the solids, so it isn't the best example here.
Re: Something's Poisoning America's Farms. Scientists Fear 'Forever' Chemicals
#23For the record, we're already dumping hundreds of millions of kilos of poison on our food in the form of glyphosate and other pesticides, albeit not PFAS. Whereas the shock here is that we're already so full of poisons that our own sewage is untenable for use as fertilizer.
Re: Something's Poisoning America's Farms. Scientists Fear 'Forever' Chemicals
#24I remember being the "general public" unaware of PFAS. Anything "non-stick" contains it, you realise that it's everywhere in modern society. Blissful ignorance was nice while it lasted.
Significant other was studying removal methods for those chemicals and as soon as I learned enough about them, I threw all of my non-stick pans away. Learning to coat steel pans in oil to make them non-stick-ish has been a great help.
They’re also in your furniture, your takeout containers, your paper cups, paper straws, fire retardant fabrics (required for all children’s sleepwear!)
Re: Something's Poisoning America's Farms. Scientists Fear 'Forever' Chemicals
#25I remember being the "general public" unaware of PFAS. Anything "non-stick" contains it, you realise that it's everywhere in modern society. Blissful ignorance was nice while it lasted.
It was intentional ignorance. 3M and DuPont knew these chemicals were in human blood samples for decades. "How 3M Discovered, Then Concealed, the Dangers of Forever Chemicals" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/27/3m-forever-che...
Totally. Same for Monsonto and their glyphosate.
"Merchants of Poison: How Monsanto Sold the World on a Toxic Pesticide" https://foe.org/resources/merchants-of-poison/
Re: Something's Poisoning America's Farms. Scientists Fear 'Forever' Chemicals
#26So this has been going on for more than half a century now. Wisconsin started using Milorganite in 1926:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milorganite
"Since its inception, over four million metric tons of Milorganite have been sold"
Teflon was trademarked in 1945:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene
Everything alive has likely been poisoned, including children and pets. Certain diseases have been on the rise for a long time, this might be part of the explanation for why. It sounds like the solution will be to stop manufacturing PFOS and related chemicals until there is a scalable way to destroy it and then control its use and destruction, find a way to get it out of people, and probably dilute it where it is found in the environment (it is not possible to chemically process 1/5 of all the soil on agricultural lands. Is it in water tables?) Then hope what remains doesn't do too much damage. Milorganite is only sold in the US so perhaps only the US is contaminated, though I'd suspect the EU may have adopted similar practices. Possibly the US will have to outsource a lot of food production for a long time, though a lot is already outsourced.
Re: Something's Poisoning America's Farms. Scientists Fear 'Forever' Chemicals
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Significant other was studying removal methods for those chemicals and as soon as I learned enough about them, I threw all of my non-stick pans away. Learning to coat steel pans in oil to make them non-stick-ish has been a great help.
> Learning to coat steel pans in oil to make them non-stick-ish has been a great help. Doesn't this involve cooking oil into harmful polymers?
I use high-temperature oils in general so I’m not sure if those get turned into harmful polymers. Do you know of any studies on that?
Re: Something's Poisoning America's Farms. Scientists Fear 'Forever' Chemicals
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Significant other was studying removal methods for those chemicals and as soon as I learned enough about them, I threw all of my non-stick pans away. Learning to coat steel pans in oil to make them non-stick-ish has been a great help.
Eggs over-easy on steel all-clad are the bane of my existence on some mornings.
Heat up pan (higher heat) until water droplets start sliding around instead of sizzling out and then add a little bit of oil. Crack the eggs and cover for a bit. When the whites are all done, scrape the eggs off the pan and they should come off mostly clean.
Re: Something's Poisoning America's Farms. Scientists Fear 'Forever' Chemicals
#29For the record, we're already dumping hundreds of millions of kilos of poison on our food in the form of glyphosate and other pesticides, albeit not PFAS. Whereas the shock here is that we're already so full of poisons that our own sewage is untenable for use as fertilizer.
PFAS is added to many pesticides:
https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news-release/2023/06/maine...
and to some herbicides:
https://pfasproject.com/2021/03/05/pfas-in-pesticides-a-prob...
Re: Something's Poisoning America's Farms. Scientists Fear 'Forever' Chemicals
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
What chemicals are these replacements, if you can divulge that?
The manufacturers would not disclose it to us beyond it was "not-PFOA", but they did agree to disclose it to the FDA upon request. The application requires a small, inert molecule, which PFOA was, in spades. They simply made a slightly different small molecule that was almost as inert. Small is a problem because it becomes mobile. Inert is a problem because it doesn't easily break down. Now, instead of having one "fo…
Ugh. So they're replacing the "OA" bit, not the troublesome "PF" bit, and now suddenly it's all fine, dandy and legal. But still persistently toxic of course.
Also: weird (suspect?) that they didn't disclose the exact identity. I guess if you have the equipment it takes about an hour to run a gc/ms, are they just hoping to not scare people by saying upfront "it's another polyfluorinated thing"?