>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.
>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.
It's time to come up with what I'd call a Plastic Chain Index. For any given edible item, a very low plastic chain index implies that it would only have plastic inadvertently absorbed from the environment, whereas a high one would be e.g. those super hot French fries rolling in plastic.
If you're optimistic, this will usher in easy measurement, widespread awareness and consumer enlightenment.
But realistically, we will spend decades over confusion as to whether a high PCI really makes for poorer health or not, where are the double-blind trials, decade long cohort studies and meta-analyses etc. until enough human sacrifices have been conducted to appease the plausible deniability of these companies.
Indeed. Until then we hapless individuals trapped in the present will have to resort to heuristics.
The best one I can think of to start with is avoid processing. The more processed a food is the more opportunities it had to potentially be contaminated. Contamination can happen with raw ingredients too, but at least that's fewer opportunities strictly speaking.
So, for example, in order from most dangerous to least:
French fries from a restaurant
French fries pre sliced in a bag but you bake them
Raw whole potatos you yourself slice up and fry in oil you purchased
Raw whole potatos of random origin, baked
Raw whole potatos of known origin, baked
It's very similar idea to eating lower on the food chain to avoid bioaccumulated toxins.
Just a heuristic but can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Happens to coincidentally also be a good way to eat healthy in general even ignoring contamination.
PS: if anyone has any other ideas for heuristics I want to know them!
You are aware that restaurants clean their food before cooking them? It's a major part of food safety.
Indeed, because restaurants generally source their food from better sources than a regular consumer can (many times, straight from the farm), restaurant food is arguably safer than "raw" food you can cook at home.
Thus, french fries from a restaurant would be at least as safe as french fries you eat at home.
Another paradox that would violate your heuristic: frozen fruits and vegetables are more nutritious, and cleaner, than "fresh" fruits and vegetables in the grocery store.
Where did you get that? Restaurants have paper-thin margins and strong incentives to use the lowest quality ingredients they can get away with.
When I was at a firm, my clients included a number of restaurants ranging from the high-end to the decidedly low-end (i.e., fast food), including a number of major restaurant chains HQ'd in the SoCal area. I can guarantee that I know more about restaurant finances than anyone on this thread other than an actual restaurant owner, because for years it was my job to know this stuff.
But anyways: the number one operational cost that kills restaurants is leasing costs, not supplies or employee wages, because those latter costs can be managed based on the amount of business, time of year, etc.
And the truth about "high quality" versus "low quality" ingredients is that at the restaurant scale, the price difference isn't that large; excepting meat, it can be as low as 10% (and in some cases, at least in SoCal it can be cheaper to buy organic produce than nonorganic). I' still close friends with a number of food purchasers and suppliers in the SoCal area, and you would be absolutely shocked at how little restaurants have to pay for their produce and fish. Consequently, their isn't much of an incentive for a restaurant to use the lowest-quality ingredients because their isn't a significant cost savings but there is a huge risk associated with using lower-quality ingredients. (However, the calculus is different for food manufacturers, who sell their products at wholesale prices and so have significantly smaller potential margins.)
Agree, gamblor clearly has only eaten at restaurants, not worked at them. Restaurants definitely love using cheap nonstick pans and other plasticware for general convenience. I've heard of chef's tricks involving plastic wrap that make me cringe.
"Restaurants" is a broad church, and has venues on both ends of the spectrum - sourcing either best possible quality or lowest possible price depending what you're buying.
As an idle heuristic, i'd tend towards French Fries in restaurants being made cheaply though.
For the frozen ones, I'm willing to hem and haw and put them on an equal level. More processed in a sense (freezing) but less in another (travel and spoilage)
Heuristics arent' meant to be perfect so finding edge cases isn't some kind of gotcha. Wikipedia has a good definition of the word if need be
If only. The amount of plastic absorbed by pretty much everything we eat could easily be the most significant part. With possible exceptions for especially badly treated products such as GP's plastic-rolled fries.
There is tons of plastic in a food factory. For example, lots of liquids flow through plastic tubing which is proven to leach phthalates. This is not going to happen with a whole potato you cook yourself using metal cookware and utensils.
How much of our ingredients come in plastics though? I'm thinking about how all of my condiments and oils come in plastic containers. Heck even my potatoes come in a plastic bag as well. It's near impossible to avoid plastic contact right now.
The more processed a food is the more opportunities it had to potentially be contaminated
Huh. You know, I've heard for a long time "avoid processed foods", but this is the first time I've seen a "why" for that. Makes sense! Thank you
I can find evidence to suggest that consuming processed foods increases microplastic exposure[1], but I don't think that's the main reason public health officials advise against eating processed foods.
It's a different level of cause and effect, but the main reason I've read is that people consume a higher amount of calories in processed food to attain the same level of satiety attained from non-processed foods. This is in large part due to added sugar and salt, as well as the removal of fibre and other nutrients during the refinement process.[2]
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...
[2] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/what-are-ultra-processed...
The reason for avoiding ultra-processed foods is that they are pretty bad for your health. This report [1] by the UN food agency is a good resource. A short paragraph from the conclusion:
the results from the studies on health outcomes show plausible, significant and graded associations between the dietary share of ultra-processed foods and the occurrence or incidence of several non-communicable diseases, including obesity and obesity-related outcomes, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, breast and all cancers, depression, gastrointestinal disorders, frailty in the elderly, and also premature mortality.
What are super hot french fries rolling in plastic? You mean like ready meals that you heat up in plastic containers?
Almost all containers have at least a thin membrane of some type of on them. The "environmentally friendly" containers might largely be cardboard, but they definitely still have that coating/membrane.
Plastic or no, these coatings almost contain some type of PFAS. Which might be the larger underlying issue here.
French fries are cooked in a deep fryer, which is made of metal. There is no PFAS in or on a deep fryer.
Do you eat fries directly from the deep fryer into your mouth?
Are you worried about microplastics on your plate? Because that is a problem you're more likely to have at home, than in a restaurant setting where they have far more powerful and effective dishwashers.
When you buy fries at a fast-food restaurant like McDonalds, the fries are served in a little container that is made of paper covered by a thin plastic layer [1]. Microscopic amounts of that plastic will get on the hot fries, and you will ingest it.
The same, of course, holds for other hot food products, like fried chicken, consumed in such containers.
Of course, the overall discussion is about microplastics in grocery store foods, but I think the above is what the thread OP meant.
[1]likely the vast majority of french fries in the world are consumed in this manner
Must be a cultural thing because like the other commenter I had no idea what was being talked about here. When I have fries/chips they come from a deep fat frier and are served on a plate.
Kinda hilarious that people would be like "omg McDonald's is bad for you?"
The containers are not a McDonald's only thing, but they are the most consumed french fries on the planet.
So it's not really a cultural thing? It's definitely a global phenomenon.
omg McDonald's is bad for you?
Now you're just being dense on purpose.
???
I'm going to be generous and give you the chance to clarify or edit your comment.
a very low plastic chain index implies that it would only have plastic inadvertently absorbed from the environment
Or just measure them and publish test results. Naming and shaming works in the consumer packaged goods market.
100% right. The challenge is it's not cheap, and someone has to pay for that and it's either government (probably should be, but we're waiting...) or the private sector, and it seems to be a hard revenue model to make work.
You first identify "most likely to be contaminated foods" whether that is a type, or sales method, or handling, etc.
Then you require that companies test and report some metric associated with the issue, just like they report calories and ingredients.
Then you require and fund the government to spot-check the reported amounts.
Eventually you could even require minimums.
You first identify "most likely to be contaminated foods" whether that is a type, or sales method, or handling, etc.
You can't fit a model without data. Consumer Reports did some random spot tests and found phtalates where we didn't expect them. That means we need more broad-based data to be able to predict what is and isn't likely to be contaminated.
That's the first step - analyze anything you can get your hands on, identify issues and theories, test them, and use that information going forward.
An easy first step would be "plastic packaged products" - test and see if there's a correlation there.
I wonder what it would take to make this cheap. It would be wonderful if you could just buy some analyzer gadget where you could just throw something in a blender, pull out a sample, put it in the machine, and 5 minutes later it would tell you the phthalate content. Then you could create a crowdsourced database, and everyone would know what not to buy. As word got out, this would also create a nice feedback loop for the food companies to clean up what they were selling.
realistically, we will spend decades over confusion as to whether a high PCI really makes for poorer health or not
Personally, I’d rather try to avoid or minimize ingesting endocrine disrupters when possible
I was recently wondering whether billionaires are already sourcing water only from pre-plastics ice like glaciers or icebergs.
Can't you just distill water? Worst case you can use electrolysis to deconstruct/reconstruct water at the molecular level.
You can get reverse osmosis filters for boats, which turn ocean water into drinkable water, for a few thousand dollars. There's some discussion over whether that's safe to drink long term, since it removes all the disolved minerals that tapwater and well water and ground water have[1], so some people then remineralise it.
Pictures of reverse osmosis filters show a lot of plastic containers with plastic tubing between them.
[1] https://waterfilterguru.com/how-to-remineralize-reverse-osmo...
this is a fine idea in theory, but in practice, the responsibility for managing such an index would (in the US) be split unpredictably between the FDA and/or USDA. the agencies have wildly varying budgets, a Byzantine web of overlap in their responsibilities, and the GOP's trying to defund them both anyway.
indeed, the Supreme Court's agreed to hear a case next year which they may use to dismantle the entire legal basis for all the US govmt's regulatory agencies. arguments in that case begin on Jan 17th
For those interested in learning more about the cases here, the precedent is referred to as "Chevron" [1] and the case seeking to overturn it this term is Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo [2]. Cafe Insider discussed the case in detail this week [3].
[1]https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/467/837/ [2]https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/loper-bright-ent... [3] https://cafe.com/insider-podcast/cafe-insider-1-2-do-agencie...
super hot French fries rolling in plastic
I’m not familiar with this. Can someone elaborate or post a link with more context?
You need a Plastic Emissions Index for measuring which products are responsible for the broad environmental pollution upstream, with textiles, tires, packing, and other contributors ranked extremely poorly / highly.
And you need a Plastic Ingestion Index for ranking foods and consumables that are more directly ingested as well.
Some accumulate in the food chain. So the big fish has all the plastic from the small fish it eats.
Note that they seem to only appear in processed food. That's kind of OK of you cook yourself apparently.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230103-how-plastic-is-g...
Plastic particles can also contaminate food crops directly. A 2020 study found microplastics and nanoplastics in fruit and vegetables sold by supermarkets and in produce sold by local sellers in Catania in Sicily, Italy. Apples were the most contaminated fruit, and carrots had the highest levels of microplastics among the sampled vegetables.
According to research by Willie Peijnenburg, professor of environmental toxicology and biodiversity at Leiden University in the Netherlands, crops absorb nanoplastic particles – minuscule fragments measuring between 1-100nm in size, or about 1,000 to 100 times smaller than a human blood cell – from surrounding water and soil through tiny cracks in their roots.
Isn't there also limited to no evidence of harms from these in humans?
Assume it's bad until proven otherwise.
You can't prove safe, you can only prove "no harms we know of yet."
You can require companies to do at least some due dilligence, though, to give a reasonable amount of comfort it is. "It's safe" is a falsifiable claim.
But that could change over time with further understanding. No point panicking today over something not known to be harmful. The effect size is clearly very small. If I wanted to better my health in an actually measurable way I'd be much better served by dropping alcohol and refined sugars than worrying about microplastics.
But that could change over time with further understanding.
That's not a good excuse not to bother at all. It's an argument for periodic reassessment of common additives.
Thought experiment: How would you go about proving that water is not bad?
Water is bad for you in doses that are trivial to acquire and consume. You've seen a pint glass before? Drink 12 of those in under 3 hours if you want to give yourself water poisoning and end up in the emergency room.
However we can also demonstrate that water is good for you in moderate doses. We have yet to demonstrate that any amount of plastic is good for you.
Put a human in a beef jerky dehydrator for a few days?
I mean, what would you even use as the control group? They're in every single human at this point.
I'll happily sign up to be mega-dosed with them for a trial, but they've tried that in mice and found pretty much no issues.
Source?
Microplastics are pretty widely understood to be endocrine disruptors.
Same here. Where are the challenge trials? Even if these effects exist, they're so small that I wouldn't lose any sleep over it
Isn't there also limited to no evidence of harms from these in humans?
nope, tons of evidence of harm
That's not true, they gave examples of raw meats (and how they were packed):
Perdue Ground Chicken Breast (foam tray with plastic wrap) 9,985
Trader Joe’s Ground Pork 80% Lean 20% Fat (plastic wrap) 5,503
Stop & Shop Ground Beef 80% Lean 20% Fat (paperboard with plastic wrap) 2,729
And dairy:
Tuscan Dairy Farms Whole Milk (plastic) 10,932
Land O’Lakes Butter Salted (paper wrap/cardboard) 581
These numbers are much lower than some of the others, but they are not only in processed food.
These numbers are much lower than some of the others, but they are not only in processed food.
Meat and dairy are heavily processed foods, and plastics are likely the least concerning thing about consuming them.
"processed" is a term that exists on a spectrum, it's rare to find any food item outside of vegetables or nuts that is truly "unprocessed." In general, meat and dairy are not considered heavily processed. Most sources consider raw meat purchasable at grocery stores unprocessed.
Yeah and even then for nuts like cashews and almonds you have to remove the outer layer and wash them to remove the more bitter (or toxic) components.
I would consider ground beef less processed than that, since it does not require a detox step (though it may be wise to cook it before consumption)
Ground beef is absolutely not "less processed" than nuts.
Processing means stuff being added and/or removed. Cows, or as they are euphamistically known as "beef", have all sorts of vitamins, growth hormones and other disgusting shit (often literally) added to their diet and bodies. It also has to be cooked, usually in oil, which generates even more Maillard reaction, and thus cancers, etc.
Almost all animal products can be considered ultra-high processed. It's on an entirely different level than whole fruits and vegetables.
Grinding meat, pasteurizing milk, churning cream are all processes that occur in a processing facility.
They're not "ultra-processed" or "ready to eat", but they're definitely processed foods.
Unless you eat anything pork. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPbF45-ZB5M
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] << Headquartered in Smithfield, Virginia, Smithfield Foods is an American food company dedicated to producing Good food. Responsibly.® >>
[1] https://fayobserver.com/story/news/2022/05/05/nc-pig-feed-pl...
[2] www smithfieldfoods com
Cows too are fed candy (with wrapper)
https://www.motherjones.com/food/2013/12/cow-feed-chicken-po...
CR only tested processed food so that's not really a conclusion you can make.
easily disproven by reading the orignal Consumer Reports post (as opposed to the Reuters article that this thread links to)
https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/the...
What is the problem with these "plastics"?
Are there places where eating plastics is considered a normal food or food additive?
Plastic pens
Plastic straws
Plastic Lilly sticks
Plastic tie-wraps
Basically anything that someone might chew on!
Although, licorice roots are okay to chew on... I guess. :-)
Although, licorice roots are okay to chew on... I guess.
Licorice can be toxic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8962506/
So can water[1]. The dose makes the poison.
As can Oxygen.
Pacifiers.
If these things break down in unknown/unpublished ways we're all fcked.
i been chewing coca cola caps since the 80s
Just like mom used to make
Check your balls for little coca cola logos.
McDonalds
Subway
It took us a couple thousand years to realize we should stop fucking around with asbestos.
Although limestone is still considered safe and is used as e.g. filler in pills. So who knows, plastic too could be as safe or as unsafe as any rock.
Although limestone is still considered safe and is used as e.g. filler in pills.
AFAIK this makes sense. Asbestos is really dangerous only in the lungs, so you need to inhale a "friable" form of it somehow. Putting it in your stomach won't do anything.
I bet if you ate asbestos continually it would probably irritate the lining of your colon and increase the likelihood of IBS or Colon Cancer. Everything can and will kill you at some level.
Death finds a way.
I bet if you ate asbestos continually it would probably irritate the lining of your colon and increase the likelihood of IBS or Colon Cancer
Well, that's never actually been proven so you can make a name for yourself by investigating this topic, if you feel so inclined.
Sounds complicated, and even if I did start chewing on brake pads (my only available source of asbestos) then my findings would be limited to n=1 which can be ignored or relegated to anecdote.
I’m more concerned with the man made fucking around that was done in the last 100 years to be honest.
I would strongly encourage you look into the research of Dr Shawna Swan. She's done several studies since the 1990's that have found and then later confirmed very alarming effects on testosterone and unborn children. And it's not just plastics causing this, it's pesticides and parabens too.
But is it the same polymers they found in the food?
Yes, they measured bisphenols and phthalates.
I actually tracked down the original which has charts of how much was found, and is what should have been linked to in this post. https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/the...
Frankly it's frightening to consider the implications.
I guess lucky for me I already do HRT and have a vasectomy.
One thing you will find about articles and comments regarding this issue is that there is always a 'we don't know' aspect if you look past the fear inducing 'it could be doing this horrible thing' stances.
I try to stay up to date with scholarly research regarding microplastic dangers to humans, and so far there is no conclusive evidence that they do anything harmful to us.
Just know that you are exposed to many hundreds of actually harmful chemicals in your daily life -- but remember that it is the dose, not the presence of a toxin that causes harm. Even water will kill you if you drink too much of it.
Until there is a smoking gun regarding these particles and human health, it would do good to focus on things you can control that are known to be harmful, rather than something you can't that is only scary sounding.
That said, it is a good opportunity to use this to advocate for far less single-use plastics in society. We should not be using nearly as much plastic for nearly as many things as we do, and it needs to be drastically reduced.
it would do good to focus on things you can control that are known to be harmful
Are you (or someone else) aware of any indices of how harmful various substances are and how pervasive they are? It'd be nice to know, for instance, how damaging one substance is versus another so that I can prioritize my concerns better.
- I imagine that the quantity that someone consumes or is exposed to plays a role. It'd be interesting to see an index of how easily the toxic threshold can generally be hit via conventional sources.
It'd be nice to know, for instance, how damaging one substance is versus another so that I can prioritize my concerns better.
A list of harmful chemicals people could be exposed to in daily life shouldn't be difficult to compile if there isn't one already, but is relatively useless because as I noted exposure itself is not the problem in almost all cases.
However taking that list and trying to compare the harm on some sort quantitative level is going to be difficult.
I wouldn't worry about it -- I was speaking more about 'stay mindful of things around you that you can control, like wearing PPE when necessary or staying away from off-gassing plastics which have a characteristic smell' rather than 'make a list of everything you are exposed to and plan your life around it'.
Phthalates and bisphenols can disrupt the production and regulation of estrogen and other hormones, potentially boosting the risk of birth defects, cancer, diabetes, infertility, neurodevelopmental disorders, obesity and other health problems.
From the article.
I’d prefer it if my food didn’t contain these substances, wouldn’t you ?
How much should we worry about the disposable cups they put coffee in? My understanding is we’re putting a hot liquid in a cup lined with plastic.
All canned drinks are lined with plastics. I think all canned things, period, at this point.
nope, phthalate-free cans have been a selling point for a while now. standard for canned beans at Sprouts or Whole Foods
Ok, I'll amend by changing to "majority". :D
I'm curious what the implication in not having a lining is. If it isn't needed, why have it on the other cans? I'm assuming it has a decreased shelf life?
Edit: I'm a little confused on the reading real quick. I am seeing that most cans are now BPA free, but it seems they are still lined with a plastic?
The metal in cans would react with certain foods or chemicals in food in often far worse ways than anything the plastic will do. There's likely no packaging material that wouldn't make any impact on its contents.
no packaging material that wouldn't make any impact on its contents.
We solved this many decades ago with a cheap, safe, abundant, recyclable material: glass.
Centralized factories and the associated transport and breakage costs ruined it.
I feel unreasonable about it, but this is exactly why I only buy glassed drinks when I can. Luckily, I should drink less anyway.
Right. This was my understanding going into this. I was surprised to hear that there were unlined cans. I'm less surprised to hear we have BPA free packaging.
"BPA free" = we changed ~one chemical to avoid the disclosure requirement != it's totally safe.
The Whole Foods cans are still plastic coated, they just market the fact that the coating is BPA free. Epoxy has historically been the predominant coating for canned food and drink products, which does contain BPA. Polyolefin dispersion coatings have been available for several years and are now widely used in jurisdictions that restrict BPA in food manufacturing; they are expected to become industry-standard within the next few years due to increasingly strict regulations.
To the best of my knowledge, all can coatings are phthalate free. I should also note that not all phthalates are created equal - terephthalates and trimellitates are of considerably less concern than ortho-phthalates.
Important to note there's a big difference in leeching between hot and cold items being put into contact with plastics.
Fair. There are also differences that come from length of exposure, though?
I don't want to start doomerism. I was just somewhat personally surprised at how many things have plastic linings. I do want companies testing, but I don't think it is good for mental health to get alarmed at all possibilities.
Most canned foods are heated as part of the canning process, aren't they? There are a handful of things that intentionally contain live cultures -- yogurts, some sauerkrauts & similar -- but otherwise I'd expect almost any canned food to have been packed hot or heated in the container during canning in order to kill food-spoiling organisms.
The only thing CR found without these chemicals was a can of seltzer.
Same goes for Keurig pods.
Hooray for Consumer Reports! They're one of the few truly independent (e.g. no paid sponsorships like you see on YouTube channels) product testing and review companies. I have a subscription to them and it's served me well, and I hope they stick around for a while.
Who else is there? Today's consumer protections for anything Internet related feels nonexistent. Who else is like Consumer Reports?
Wirecutter. They were acquired by the NY Times not too long ago. I also like America's Test Kitchen, but they only review kitchen products.
Wirecutter has gone downhill rapidly, to the extent that I wouldn't trust it anymore. Which is a shame, since it used to be my go-to for nearly everything.
Here's an article about it:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/08/wirec...
The article doesn't actually quantify them going downhill at all. Only that they've lost some luster with their fans. I honestly attribute it more to them being a victim of their own success. A Wirecutter endorsement is now so valuable that I suspect brands are deliberately gaming the system in some way to get a plaudit from them. I've bought more than a few items they've endorsed in the past few years and they've all held up very well.
I only mentioned it because you were being downvoted without anybody explaining why. If you like Wirecutter, more power to you.
GearLab uses the same model as Consumer Reports. No sponsored content, they buy all the products themselves, etc.
Looks like they do use affiliate links though, which means they have an incentive to recommend items sold on sites that will give them higher affiliate commissions.
FYI Consumer Reports also uses affiliate links now. I'm of two minds about it. OTOH it creates an incentive to recommend more items and more expensive items. OTOH I like that they capture some revenue that can go to furthering their mission.
Guess Wirecutter is in the same boat, then.
Consumer Labs, at least, which does more low-level lab testing than CR. Don't know of any others.
https://rtings.com is pretty good, they're sponsored by readers just like CR.
Project Farm on Youtube: rigorous, trustworthy, data-driven, hard to watch all the way through, but definitely worth skipping to the results.
I'm for independent analysis/investigative journalism but this seems written to generate a certain result. All foods are below the guidelines but potentially any amount is unsafe? So any detectable level is bad? It's not clear what result would have been 'good news'.
Direct link to article. https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/the...
We found [phthalates] in all but one food (Polar raspberry lime seltzer).
A very grim lol.
Let’s say we eventually get accurate measures of what is a healthy amount of plastics versus harmful amount. Let’s pretend the law is updated so that food manufacturers must limit the number of microplastics to a healthy level.
Does that capability even exist? How can food manufacturers actually control microplastics in their products? The report said even canned products have microplastic, so I think it’s more than just the final packaging.
I think the issue with canned products is still mostly about the packaging; cans generally have a plastic lining/coating that is meant to prevent their contents from reacting with the metal. Unfortunately, this is also true of metal lids on glass jars. This is even true of the lids used for home canning!
I think the capability exists (we had cans and jars before we had these chemicals), but both industry norms and likely consumer expectations must shift. E.g. suppose you had new processes which could cool food in a sterile environment before filling cans -- then could cans do with an organic wax liner?
https://ekko.world/plastic-lining-on-beverage-food-cans/2267... https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/aussie-study-finds-ph...
Don't knock it. That's a good flavor
Per the article:
> Yet some products had much lower levels than others. A serving of Pizza Hut’s Original Cheese Pan Pizza, for example, had half the phthalate levels of a similar pizza from Little Caesars. Levels varied even among products from the same brand: Chef Boyardee Big Bowl Beefaroni pasta in meat sauce had less than half the level of the company’s Beefaroni pasta in tomato and meat sauce.
This is also surprising, seeing how Chipotle will prepare the food in front of you.
> Chipotle Chicken Burrito (aluminum foil)20,579ng
Other notable:
> Juicy Juice 100% Juice Apple (cardboard box)2,260 ng
> Land O’Lakes Butter Salted (paper wrap/cardboard)581 ng
> Trader Joe’s Ground Pork 80% Lean 20% Fat (plastic wrap)5,503 ng
> Annie’s Organic Cheesy Ravioli (can)53,579 ng
FTW! BBQ all day.
> Sweet Baby Ray’s Barbecue Sauce Original (plastic)22 ng
Could be worse. Could've been Panera Bread's Charged Lemonade.
Easy way to limit your exposure: Local, organic and unprocessed whole foods. Stop eating garbage—you'll feel better and won't have to worry about stuff like this.
That's very idyllic, but the unfortunate reality is preparing whole foods takes time which many people simply don't have. Eating processed, packaged foods is a compromise they have to make to tend to family, work or other matters. Not dissimilar from putting purchases you can't afford on a credit card, and paying the price for it down the road.
there's always time
a pressure cooker cuts time considerably. a slow cooker allows you to multitask
That's more of a cultural phenomena than 'reality'. I don't meant to say it's not happening, but if one frames it as 'reality' you make it sound inevitable, whereas it's a consequence of a cultural framework and mentality.
For example, I don't personally know anyone who uses a credit card for things they can't afford, and that seems like a very US thing to do.
Notwithstanding the literature that says Phthalates are also breathed and absorbed through skin, that ship has sailed for this and the few generations ahead of us.
"That ship has sailed" is a bit of a cop out, no? Just because something already happened doesn't mean we shouldn't/can't change our ways going forward. The current levels of plastics might not be obviously harmful, but that doesn't mean we won't discover harm in the future. Or that we should just say "fuck it" and resign ourselves to eating plastics forever.
much of the time we don't even fix the problems that knowingly cause great harm, so I can understand the feeling of resignation
This is really important. Everyone squirting hand sanitizer at store checkouts and then handling BPA-paper receipts is a particularly good example.
commonly used hand sanitizers, as well as other skin care products, contain mixtures of dermal penetration enhancing chemicals that can increase by up to 100 fold the dermal absorption of lipophilic compounds such as BPA.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
I'm not a chemist. Why doesn't plastic get broken down? Will there be a future where my doctor will prescribe me an enzyme or something that will breakdown the plastics in my body so they can be filtered out, or turned into energy?
Wood's cellulose was not broken down for millennia, and then live evolved ways to eat it (like mushrooms). But before then, there were piles and piles of dead trees.
I suspect plastics will be similar. Nothing has evolved to eat them, so nothing does.
It's happening[1], albeit slowly. Plastic is such an energy-dense substance that it seems inevitable something will eat it eventually. Might not be pretty though - imagine the kind of bacterial blooms that could happen in plastic-polluted waterways.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/14/bugs-acr...
Making plastic requires a specific step of heating to very high, specific temperatures and pressures and separating components of petrochemicals or similar biomass that cannot be easily reversed by aging or biological processes. A metaphor for this might be thinking about cracking an egg and scrambling it in a frying pan, then attempting to reverse this and put the egg back together only using mechanical steps and cooling - it's impossible by any practical means.
If you have a plastic cutting board, throw it away. If you go to a restaurant that uses plastic or Delrin cutting boards, educate them, then run away. Why it's not obvious that slicing and dicing against plastic generates microplastics baffles me.
https://youtube.com/shorts/mQRPvst0BvM
dont you just poop out those microplastics anyways?
When it's foods contaminating plastic then we'll really know it's bad.
Food? Try blood[1].
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/17/dark-w...
The same outlet that ranked BMW higher than Volvo in terms of RELIABILITY.
volvo reliability is atrocious
bmw's seem to have been improving
I wonder how much of these plastics are environmental in general, for example if these plastics are in organic unpackaged fruit — it’s very likely environmental (e.g. microplastics in the water) as opposed to something in the processing for sale.
We should have some data on environmental plastics since the 1960s/70s. Would be interesting to see a graph.
To my understanding it’s very hard to avoid phthalates in food, and studies have found them in fresh produce. That said, since the source of these contaminants is often the final packaging itself, or surfaces of equipment used in processing facilities, the concentrations tend to be increased in highly processed or packaged foods.
The original source article covers some of the sources, and has data tables for the things they tested.
https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/the...
I wonder about all the take out containers. Is paper/cardboard is safe? Like the ones Chipotle uses? Or are they coated with some plastic/toxin that we are not aware of? And the bowls for soup, they seem to be coated with something.
The food industry doesn't care about long term... they are about profits now.
I firmly believe the only way to stop our culture from obsessing over the wrong things (politics, climate emergency, vaccines) is to give it something even worse to focus on - enter the War on Plastic! I genuinely hope this catches on and people start putting anti-plastic flags on their lawns.
Shocker.
Sounds like they all have them. Guess we're screwed.
It says there's ways to reduce the levels in food, but doesn't say what those methods would be.
"Annie's Organic Cheesy Ravioli contained the most phthalates in nanograms per serving,"
lol
Your fruits and vegetables might be covered with a petroleum derived "wax" by default: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_waxing
Maybe we should mandate that plastics are manufactured with an off taste, similar to the way gas has a sulfur smell added to it.
I just got rid of all of my plastic cutting boards
Crimes of the future!
There needs to be a re-examination of packaging most foods in plastic and single-use microwavable containers made from plastic.
This is the canary of plastic pollution similar to we knew about global warming in '70s. We know it's only going to get worse, but we're happy to ignore it until it gets really bad.
These plastics are going to follow tobacco and alcohol.
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.
How many cycles do we have to go through of "oh, recklessly dumping this substance into the ecosystem probably doesn't have any ill effects, and you should prove it does before being such a negative nelly"?
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.
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.
If Congress were interested in policy changes, would a tax on plastic (to cover recycling, cleanup, and future medical costs) be a way to go?
Unfortunately, sometimes there are no perfect answers and it's instead a question of balancing different pros and cons. Flame retardants are a great example - asbestos does it really well, but creates potential for long-term harm. Modern furniture and home building moved onto other fire suppressants like PBDEs[1]. These are also not great for you, however, and the question of whether it's worth it or not depends on how much those few seconds of time are worth if there's a fire in your home. The answer to that question is extremely subjective, so it's easy to disagree with any decision that the industry makes.
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...
All the science I've seen has shown a strong correlation between increased levels of phthalates and a wide range of fertility problems in human males and females.
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?
None of those substantiate an effect of similar magnitude to smoking, though. Those are all (pretty much by definition, since it's newly-published work) detections that just barely rise above the threshold needed to be confident enough to publish. Needless to say if we were living 10 years less[1] because of some unknown contaminant in our environment, we'd know.
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.
But one of the hypothesized effects, with mechanistic evidence from cell cultures and animal models, is obesity.
I don’t see how one can be confident about the presence or absence of population-level effects.
That's like step #2 from above.
Let's think about it from an evolutionary sense. Plastics aren't natural, not even close. Any yet they are *everywhere* and seeping into *everything*.
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?
Nearly 500 years ago, Paracelsus wrote "All things are poisonous and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not poisonous". He was correct then and he is still correct today, but we stubbornly refuse to accept the first law of toxicology.
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].
[0] https://www.endocrine.org/news-and-advocacy/news-room/2020/p...
That report is about plastic additives, not plastics themselves. Most of the chemicals named in the report for which there is evidence of actual harm have been banned, very heavily restricted or are in the process of being phased out in the EU.
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.
So when is enough? Will it be 2100 when an avalanche of garbage floods a city?
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.
What about the xenoestrogens angle, the hypothesis that invasive microplastics are behind the drop in fertility?
I'm more worried about the output of life that is capable of devouring plastics being toxic becoming widespread?
I'm pretty ignorant of biology, but it would be wild if plastic consuming fungi/bacteria became widespread. Imagine all the plastic bits of your car getting "moldy" if you leave it outside too long.
The FDA isn't "toothless"...
Toothless? How about clueless then? Or better, favors Big Inc profits over public health.
Call it what you want, but the FDA is too often a paper tiger.
Only someone who has never worked under the FDAs eye of Sauron could think this, strong Dunning-Kruger vibe.
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.
It's true though.
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.
Smart? What does that have to do with doing their job? Are you saying that smart people aren't lazy? Aren't corruptible? Don't suffer from group-think? Geez, the list could go on and on and on.
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.
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...
Only someone who doesn't follow the news would think this. The FDA's (unofficial) motto is:
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.
I'm sure they come hard when enforcing legislation, but the issue seems to be they are not proactive enough in investigating issues before legislation has been made.
One of the key differences here is the FDA permits food additives and adulterants to be self-affirmed as "Generally Recognized As Safe", which largely means "well, no one says it isn't, yet".
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-10-246
Right. Effectively, it's innocent until found to be guilty. In the context of public health and environmental wellbeing, that's a way-more-risk-than-is-necessary way to approach their responsibilities.
Great for profits. Nots so good for everyone and everything else.
John Oliver did a whole bit on the FDA recently. They are very stringent and professional, but massively underresourced for the amount of ground they have to cover. And they spend most of their resources on drugs and far less on food.
https://youtu.be/Za45bT41sXg?si=LiW1DD4hGJAT5OOh
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.
2% isn't nothing. It's easy to get a bigger number: have a kid (30 kg) eat two servings -- hardly unrealistic -- and you're already at 8%. And that's not the only food they'll consume that day.
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...
I appreciate that objective viewpoint and backing it up with data. If Consumer Reports presented it that way, I wouldn't have an issue with their reporting. A person can read that and have a much better understanding of the potential risk and what they want to do about it. But CR just goes for the attention-grabbing headline, a scary article with meaningless phrases like "while there is no level that scientists have confirmed as safe", no access to their raw data, and no reference to how whatever the found compares to the food safety standards (especially with the way they lumped all the phthalates together).
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.
Two points -
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.
In biotech circles, the FDA is actually renowned to be the tougher one of the two...