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FDA denies petition against use of phthalates in food packaging

fda.gov

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Re: FDA denies petition against use of phthalates in food packaging

#81

Post by nrenegar »

kogus wrote: post #12
OutOfHere wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't do it. The dust gets in the air, and also absorbs via the skin while walking. Not only would you be putting your own health at risk, but that of any family members and/or pets too.

Not only would you be putting your own health at risk, but that of any family members and/or pets too. I think his point is that the FDA finds that there is no evidence to support this claim. What evidence do you have that this claim is true?

A couple friends and I reviewed hundreds of pubmed studies on this. We have a summary at: https://shaperhealth.substack.com/p/life-in-plastic-its-not-...

There have been a number of papers from China showing that phthalate exposure from household dust is a real concern (e.g., https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35508265/).

Phthalate exposure overall has been shown to have an adverse impact on reproductive health and infertility, metabolic and oxidative stress, cancer risk, cardiovascular health, the immune system (including children’s asthma), and neurodevelopment. Unlike dietary studies which often have mixed results, the conclusions on phthalate exposure are consistently negative.

No idea what the FDA is doing here. I understand government inertia but they seem asleep at the wheel.

Re: FDA denies petition against use of phthalates in food packaging

#82

Post by kragen »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #77
tedajax wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also most microplastics in the environment are from rubber tires grinding away on road surfaces so the food packaging stuff is a little forest for the trees imo.

I don't lick the road, though. In terms of it's ability to get into my body, food packaging has a much better pathway than tires.

food packaging doesn't produce microplastics, and you inhale tire dust

Re: FDA denies petition against use of phthalates in food packaging

#83

Post by drjasonharrison »

ActionHank wrote: post #74
Aurornis wrote: post #47

I was surprised to learn that some of the highest concentrations of phthalates can be found in alcoholic beverages in glass bottles (Table 3: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7460375/ ) This occurs due to the plastics used in producing the alcoholic beverages combined with ethanol (alcohol) acting as a solvent to liberate the phthalates I was equally surprised to learn that the food industry was already m…

Insurance companies already track whether you smoke, drink, or do recreational drugs. I wonder how long until they start to ask questions that indicate your risk based on chemical \ microplastic consumption.

Perhaps the blood tests will/already do include this analysis. Asking people about their behaviours/habits/diets is usually a very poor data source. Not only do people have poor memories, but they are motivated to recall only positive behaviours, etc.

Many studies on health interventions (diet, exercise, sleep) have had to handle these problems and usually have to resort to much more controlled studies to demonstrate the effect beyond the "very large numbers, very long time" post-hoc analyses.

Re: FDA denies petition against use of phthalates in food packaging

#84

Post by kragen »

lazide wrote: post #44
vkou wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the onus on proving safety should be on the people selling products, not on some third party to prove that those products are dangerous. Otherwise, we get vendors poisoning us for decades, and then whoopsie-daisies pleading ignorance. And even when they get held accountable (almost never), the value that remains in the vendor is insufficient to compensate for the damage inflicted on us. Heads I lose, tails th…

But how can anyone prove safety here? On anything? I’m unaware of any substance which isn’t dangerous or harmful in some context. Even sand! What is the actual bar?

especially sand; crystalline silica is a known carcinogen (iarc group 1, the most severe classification)

(when inhaled)

Re: FDA denies petition against use of phthalates in food packaging

#85

Post by abeppu »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #64
abeppu wrote: post #49

A bunch of comments here are roughly "there's not great evidence that these are harmful" -- but is that the right standard? Or should there be an obligation to provide evidence that something is "safe" in order to use it in some consumer applications (like food packaging)? It's tempting to say that we should conclusively establish that something isn't harmful before we use it absolutely everywhere ... but what standa…

1. It's a lot harder to prove something is 100% assured safe then the other way around 2. Every substance/material/etc that is investigated and banned incurs overhead on taxpayers and industry directly. What you're asking for would be extremely prohibitive to getting anything done at all.

To be clear, I'm not asking for anything. I'm raising a question, because I'm genuinely conflicted. It seems intractable to test everything for long enough to know that it's safe. On the other hand, the 20th century had some good examples of cases where we understood that something harmful only very long after it was in the environment (e.g. leaded gasoline).

Also to be clear, at no point did I say 100% about anything. Please do not attempt to put words in my mouth, or to fight a straw man. We can all acknowledge that empirical studies don't give 100% certainty about anything.

But it does also seem fundamentally problematic for us to make substances or materials ubiquitous in our environments faster than we can study them. We then also arrive at a methodological problem, where, for example we cannot meaningfully study whether long-term low-level exposure to PFAS are causing impacts on fertility in part because there is not a population that hasn't already had that exposure.

Re: FDA denies petition against use of phthalates in food packaging

#86

Post by r2_pilot »

cynicalpeace wrote: post #71
abeppu wrote: post #49

A bunch of comments here are roughly "there's not great evidence that these are harmful" -- but is that the right standard? Or should there be an obligation to provide evidence that something is "safe" in order to use it in some consumer applications (like food packaging)? It's tempting to say that we should conclusively establish that something isn't harmful before we use it absolutely everywhere ... but what standa…

For me, the standard is: if the material was used pre-industrial age, it's far more likely to be "safe". Any person could overintellectualize this point and find exceptions. But it's just common sense.

Just because I can: see pre-industrial Romans and their lead acetate. Or Egyptians with their kohl eyeliner (also lead). I prefer strong regulatory bodies that methodically analyze products available to general consumers.

Re: FDA denies petition against use of phthalates in food packaging

#87

Post by AnimalMuppet »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #34

My personal experience is that food is overpackaged. I find a lot of produce are unnecessarily bagged in plastic containers (mushrooms, cucumbers, corn, asparagus, berries etc. in my local grocery store). I always feel weird not just about low quality plastic films touching the food, but also that I am constantly throwing out plastic that cannot be recycled.

I wonder if it's to control the spread of mold/fungus. If I have a bunch of berries in a bin, and one of them has mold, I could lose a big chunk of the bin. But if they're in little plastic containers, I only lose that one container.

(Yeah, I know, the mold may have spread before they were put in the containers. It still limits the spread, even if it doesn't totally eliminate it.)

Re: FDA denies petition against use of phthalates in food packaging

#88

Post by allturtles »

cynicalpeace wrote: post #71
abeppu wrote: post #49

A bunch of comments here are roughly "there's not great evidence that these are harmful" -- but is that the right standard? Or should there be an obligation to provide evidence that something is "safe" in order to use it in some consumer applications (like food packaging)? It's tempting to say that we should conclusively establish that something isn't harmful before we use it absolutely everywhere ... but what standa…

For me, the standard is: if the material was used pre-industrial age, it's far more likely to be "safe". Any person could overintellectualize this point and find exceptions. But it's just common sense.

It doesn't require overintellectualizing, the exceptions are really obvious, like lead pipes. Generally speaking public health knowledge was extremely low in the pre-industrial era, compared to what we have now, so I don't know why we would use this as a standard. I wouldn't use pre-industrial standards for dealing with sewage or prepping for surgery, either.

Re: FDA denies petition against use of phthalates in food packaging

#89

Post by kragen »

snapcaster wrote: post #59
doe_eyes wrote: post #5

I know this is going to be unpopular on HN, but I think there's this "environmentalist inertia effect" on display when it comes to stuff like that. A lot of the early industrial chemistry was pretty terrible for you and deserved public attention and regulatory crackdowns. Leaded gasoline and paint, organochlorine pesticides, mercury catalysts in rubbers, and so on. But then, the negative publicity then continued for…

Isn't this progress? It sounds like as we advance we can afford to have more and more high standards for things we couldn't afford to before

prohibiting more and more things is, in my book, the diametrical opposite of progress; progress is when you can do more and more things, not less and less

Re: FDA denies petition against use of phthalates in food packaging

#90

Post by loceng »

I think we need to move fully to glass surfaces that any food comes in contact with; add vacuum seal to help slow decay.

Until or unless we do mass studies, not just observational, and over a 20-30 year period - where many other known health factors will have to be kept track of accurately-thoroughly as well.

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