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 moving toward using fewer phthalate plasticizers already. More recent sampling efforts have actually found fewer or sometimes no phthalates at all in tubing, whereas decades ago it was ubiquitous.
Well, this fun fact ruined my day. Alcohol is itself an endocrine disruptor already. I just want to be able to poison myself with wine without being poisoned from the epoxies used in storage tanks or the hoses during bottling!
Anyone got a list of "clean" wineries that aren't selling contaminated product?
"How Do You Know If Buckets Are Food Grade" https://epackagesupply.com/blog/how-do-you-know-if-buckets-a... :
> Buckets made of HDPE (number 2) are generally considered the best material for food storage, especially over the long term. A vast majority of plastic buckets that are sold for food storage purposes will be made of HDPE. It’s important to note that not all HDPE buckets are food grade; to be sure, you’ll want to look for the cup and fork logo (described below) or other indication of “food safe” or “food grade” materials.
> Cup and Fork: Elsewhere on the bottom of the bucket, some food-grade buckets will have a symbol consisting of a cup and fork on them. There may also be markings like “USDA approved” or “FDA approved.”
I could see insurance companies purchasing your rewards accounts from data brokers to see what your habits are.
Our digital footprints are becoming more telling of our real lives, as more of our lives are mirrored digitally.
And in many ways that’s great - not only is booking a flight easier but my eating habits when combined with millions of others can reveal what epidemiology of yesteryear could only dream of
But I think this is where the privacy debate falls down - privacy is not real (secrecy is real, privacy is the politeness of our neighbours). What is concerning is what do others do with our information - and I think the best answer is the medical ethics answer - nothing unless it is in the individual’s best interests.
Yes there is a lot of wriggle room in those words but still
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.
I personally use stainless lunchware and cotton clothing but if we’re to run an analysis of variance on my ingestion the effect is likely nil compared to walking on office carpet or drinking from aluminum cans or brushing my teeth.
Like refinery operators and gas station workers are exposed to benzene at different levels. But what about people who buy or lease new cars every two years.
There’s too much noise vs signal for insidious risks like these not well understood factors.
IMO this is one of the more valuable comments here. Can you find any sources to cite on this?
I'd love to see more comments on the progress industries make via self-awareness rather than yet-another-villain-in-the-shadows.
Because generally people aren't getting acutely ill after eating food from a plastic package, we're left with the possibility that accumulative impacts over years might be harmful -- but it doesn't seem feasible to run long term studies where a treatment group is exposed to plastics for decades and a control group is not. It hardly seems achievable to do correlation studies, because you often don't know what's been in the packaging for all the food you've consumed, which may not even be in your control.
Can we reasonably run such a study to prove that wax paper is safe? What about plain paper? Do we just require all food producers to use no packaging at all until these controlled longitudinal studies are completed? If we allow them to use packaging, how do we define in a principled way what packaging is allowed while there are still unknowns?
One possibility would be to say that if something is currently widely used in some significant (think 5%) portion of the industry then we allow it, but that has two problems: First, it wouldn't exclude phthalates anyway, so it doesn't address the current concern. Second, it might exclude future packaging materials that we think might be safer than our current materials but which have yet to be tested.
We don't need to. We have a "Generally Recognized as Safe" standard that is well known and widely applied.
> widely used in some significant (think 5%) portion of the industry then we allow it
How about we just label things so consumers know whether or not the packaging contains phthalates? That way the market can decide if they want it in their package or not.
In the absence of concrete evidence of harm from phthalates I'm not convinced mandating yet another label would do more good than harm—it would potentially just further reduce the signal that labels provide by watering it down with yet another mandatory compliance label.
CO2 + Lignin is not edible but is biodegradable and could replace plastics. "CO2 and Lignin-Based Sustainable Polymers with Closed-Loop Chemical Recycling" https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adfm.202403035
What incentives would incentivize the market to change over to sustainable biodegradable food-safe packaging?
We could say "if it was used in the ancestral environment for similar purposes, and is not known to be harmful". Much of that stuff is bad, but our bodies have mitigations for it. (e.g. tannins leached from wooden bowls: harmful in principle, but we can metabolise them so it's fine)
Hypothetically, if phthalates exposure was responsible for 5% of cancer deaths that’s 30,000 dead Americans per year and we might not notice without a ban. It’s unlikely for this specific chemical to be that bad, but we don’t know.
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.
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.
There are legitimate scientific concerns that we are currently damaging the human gene pool.
Good regulations work well. It took a global effort to ban the CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer, and it’s completely repaired now.
Perhaps, putting it in a framing familiar to tech folk, if we have a new version of some important component of our application, "push it to 100% in prod before doing any data analysis because it hasn't been proven to be harmful to engagement" or whatever, probably wouldn't be acceptable to most of us. Maybe you do an A/B test and initially launch the new version to 5% and watch some stats, and if it does well, you scale up from there, incrementally expanding the audience and doing more data analysis. But that analysis depends on their being a population which you know hasn't received the new version.
The problem happens when a switch to selling stuff in plastic/plastic-lined packages is driven by parties who don't have the interest or the ability to release to only a slice of the population, collect the data or do this analysis (and to roll back when the data shows a negative impact).
Sure, you can't prove something doesn't exist, but you can make a reasonable determination that given exhaustive study, given correlative negative effects can be ascribed to no other known cause, and given that this is natal and pediatric health especially at stake, we should say until such time as a causative link is proven to lie elsewhere these chemicals should not be used in consumer goods out of an abundance of caution.
The redirection of that claim would be "these profits are more important than moving to protect bodily health especially for those unable to protect themselves, given what we currently know."
Honestly, no knowledge is perfect, but upon the balance we must rest our sacrosanct right to health.
I agree but the FDA might not have the legal authority to ban chemicals that are already in use that haven't been proven to be harmful. That is the case with the EPA IIRC. Although I think there actually is a lot of evidence pointing towards phthalates being harmful especially in utero.
Any person could overintellectualize this point and find exceptions. But it's just common sense.
As a proxy for "safety", look at average life expectancy. Even excluding infant mortality, life expectancy has increased by like 20-25% since the year 1900 (for people who reached age 20). We're doing something right in the modern age, and suggesting that we revert to how things were in the 1800s is not common sense, it's being a luddite (imo).
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/qtYQp1x-ZF9iXc-zVh7Kg2xJBX...
The industrial age has brought many good things and many bad things. To acknowledge the bad things is not to discredit the good things. It's quite simple.
Higher life expectancy is a good thing. Infertility, cancer, and obesity are bad things.
More of each was brought by the industrial age. I'm not saying the industrial age as a whole was bad.
Again, all of this is just overintellecualizing it.
> If the material has been in continual use since before the industrial age and we have yet to find any evidence of harm, it is far more likely to be safe than newer materials with which we have fewer centuries of experience.
Our ancestors used all kinds of things that were terrible for them and it doesn't require overintellectualizing to find exceptions, they're everywhere. But this late in the development of medicine it is fairly reasonable to suggest that if there's a long-standing tradition of using a material and we have yet to find that it causes harm, it is more likely to be safe than something new.
I also want strong regulatory bodies doing those analyses, but I also would like to see them using reasonable Bayesian priors on safety. I think assuming the Bayesian prior that: compounds that occur naturally in our environment at concentrations and particle sizes similar to what we'd be exposed to in a proposed new product are likely safe to use. The opposite just is not a good Bayesian prior, and such compounds should require greater assurance of safety before being allowed to be used in novel ways.
The above is particularly true for organic compounds.
I'd also like to see regulation of analogs like they do with drugs. Swapping out BPA for other analog chemicals with very similar shape/composition is something most people with a decent background in biochemsitry would be extremely skeptical of. Let's say they banned BPA entirely. I'd like to then see regulators step in and ban analogs by default for the same use until proven otherwise.
So much lead and mercury was used in the pre-industrial age.
> Things are not necessarily safe just because they're natural
Whatever "natural" means. It's not wrong exactly, but I think it distracts from some adjacent, non-fallacious inductive/anthropic reasoning:
> Things that have not harmed your ancestors are less likely to harm you than a novel thing which your ancestors did not come in contact with.
The former (safer) thing is more likely to end up with the label "natural" than the latter, newer thing. So "natural" ends up correlating with "safe" more often than chance would have it.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/toxic-microplastic...
More:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220216112233.h...
Microplastics are like little buckets for all sorts of toxic compounds and pharmaceuticals (that you probably don't have a prescription for like cancer treatment drugs).
in general any statement that refers to 'plastic' as a single material is wrong. the only thing the diverse materials called 'plastic' have in common is that you can mold them and that at least one of their major ingredients is a synthetic organic material, not even necessarily the majority
i think probably the concern over harm from human phthalate exposure will turn out to be baseless, but it's not implausible
The entire world would be paralyzed with fear if it were afraid to do anything that it might regret in the future.
But generally this was kind of a big deal and it mostly flew under the radar. I don’t think most people who care about endocrine disruptors knew that the FDA did this, and 2023 is not very long ago IMO.
There's a ton of evidence that these substances might be bad for you. Among human study cohorts they have been shown to have a serious impact on reproductive health and infertility, metabolic and oxidative stress, cancer risk, cardiovascular health, the immune system (including children’s asthma), and neurodevelopment. Exposure risks extend from more controllable areas such as consumption of packaged food to less controllable areas such as environmental and household dust. Moreover, the impacts seems to be more pronounced in children. While most research on these effects in human subjects are more recent, people have noticed the link between plasticizers and hormones/fertility in male rats since the late 1980s. Thirty-five years of results make it less likely that human results shown are a result of p-hacking or similar statistical legerdemain. With half of the world’s plastics produced in the last 15 years - we'll probably see the research become more conclusive as the effects of those plastics are seen in further human studies
Should industry players break rank and come up with science contradictory to the status quo, which challenges the Guidance. They’ll either start to notice and incorporate learnings into future Guidance revisions, or write up a Deficiency order against the company. The company can then defend itself by engaging further studies and/or litigation. AKA what the big players say is what goes.
And here's my problem with it: ok we figure out substance X has problems and we go and replace it with Y (which has less research on it than X). Are we sure this is a better replacement?
We're talking about food packaging, what happens if we replace substances and end up with a lower product shelf life (which might be acceptable or not)? Or with other issues?
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?
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.
Phthalates and Their Impacts on Human Health (2021)
> phthalates are more likely to enter the body through absorption via the skin and the polluted air due to fugitive emission [10]. Phthalates are semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs). DEHP and DBP are the main compounds in both indoor and outdoor air phthalates [11]. Dermal absorption also occurs from the daily use of PCPs containing phthalates via plastic package. Infants are exposed to phthalates by drinking breast milk with their mothers exposed to DEHP and DiNP, and sucking on toys containing DEHP, DBP, and BBP [10]. Phthalates are also found to cross the placenta-blood barrier, which is the major exposure route of the fetus [12].
> Studies found that low molecular phthalates, such as DEP, can acutely irritate the skin, conjunctiva, and mucous membrane of the oral and nasal cavities [20]. Phthalate exposure is associated with adverse developmental effects in terms of increased prenatal mortality, reduced growth and birth weight, skeletal, visceral, and external malformations in rodents [6]. Experiments on male rats found that the nervous system is rather sensitive to low doses of DEHP exposure during puberty [21]. The impacts of phthalates on human beings vary from gene expression to physiological changes. High molecular weight phthalates exposure is found to cause methylation status of imprinted genes, which could be directly related to androgen response, estrogen response, protein secretion, and spermatogenesis [22,23]. Human epidemiological studies have shown a significant association between phthalates exposures and adverse reproductive outcomes in both women and men, for instance, type II diabetes and insulin resistance, overweight/obesity, allergy, asthma [24].
Exposure to the plasticizer dibutyl phthalate causes oxidative stress and neurotoxicity in brain tissue (2024)
> The induction of oxidative stress in the brain subcellular fractions was proved by alterations in the activities of superoxide dismutase, catalase, glutathione reductase, and glutathione peroxidase along with the reduction in the total antioxidant capacity. Meanwhile, the levels of hydrogen peroxide and lipid peroxidation were increased. Neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine, dopamine, adrenaline, noradrenaline, and serotonin were altered in all subcellular fractions suggesting the disruption of the neurotransmitter system in the fish brain. These results indicate that DBP induces oxidative stress, which correlates with neurotoxicity in Pseudetroplus maculatus brain tissue.
Microplastics and phthalate esters release from teabags into tea drink: occurrence, human exposure, and health risks (2023)
> DEHP showed the cancer risk (CR) for children and adults. The findings of this research indicated that high MPs and PAEs levels are released from teabags into tea drinks. Considering a daily drinking of a volume of 150 and 250 mL tea by children and adults, 486 and 810 MPs may enter their bodies, respectively. Thus, tea prepared with teabag-packed herbs may pose a significant health risk for consumers.
Preconception Phthalate Exposure and Women's Reproductive Health: Pregnancy, Pregnancy Loss, and Underlying Mechanisms (2023)
> Results: An interquartile range (IQR) higher mono-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate [fecundability odds ratio(FOR)=0.88; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.78, 1.00], mono-butyl phthalate (FOR=0.82; 95% CI: 0.70, 0.96), and mono-benzyl phthalate (FOR=0.85; 95% CI: 0.74, 0.98) was associated with lower fecundability. No consistent associations were observed with pregnancy loss. Preconception phthalates were consistently associated with higher hsCRP and isoprostanes, as well as lower estradiol and higher follicle-stimulating hormone across the menstrual cycle.
> Discussion: Women's preconception exposure to phthalates was associated with lower fecundability, changes in reproductive hormones, and increased inflammation and oxidative stress. The pre- and periconception periods may represent sensitive windows for intervening to limit the reproductive toxicity of phthalate exposure.
Maternal phthalate exposure promotes allergic airway inflammation over 2 generations through epigenetic modifications (2018)
> Results: In LINA maternal urinary concentrations of mono-n-butyl phthalate, a metabolite of butyl benzyl phthalate (BBP), were associated with an increased asthma risk in the children. Using a murine transgenerational asthma model, we demonstrate a direct effect of BBP on asthma severity in the offspring with a persistently increased airway inflammation up to the F2 generation. This disease-promoting effect was mediated by BBP-induced global DNA hypermethylation in CD4+ T cells of the offspring because treatment with a DNA-demethylating agent alleviated exacerbation of allergic airway inflammation. Thirteen transcriptionally downregulated genes linked to promoter or enhancer hypermethylation were identified. Among these, the GATA-3 repressor zinc finger protein 1 (Zfpm1) emerged as a potential mediator of the enhanced susceptibility for TH2-driven allergic asthma.
> Conclusion: These data provide strong evidence that maternal BBP exposure increases the risk for allergic airway inflammation in the offspring by modulating the expression of genes involved in TH2 differentiation through epigenetic alterations.
From Oxidative Stress to Male Infertility: Review of the Associations of Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals (Bisphenols, Phthalates, and Parabens) with Human Semen Quality (2022)
> Higher levels of urinary bisphenols showed correlation with impaired semen quality and increased DNA damage. Considering phthalates and their metabolites, all studies found a positive association between urinary levels of phthalates and at least one semen parameter indicative of low semen quality; some studies also revealed sperm DNA damage. The studies on parabens less often revealed correlation of urinary parabens concentrations with a decrease in sperm count, as well as motility and DNA damage. Moreover, EDCs can elevate ROS production and lipid peroxidation, increase apoptosis, induce epigenetic modifications, and change the Y:X sperm chromosome ratio and sperm protein composition. Our review revealed detrimental effects of EDCs on semen quality and sperm DNA integrity—especially in BPA and phthalates, but also in parabens.
Can phthalates impair liver function? (2019)
> Conclusions: The ubiquitous exposure to phthalates may be related to the impairment of normal liver function
Even Andrew Huberman, who was held up as the most science-y podcaster before people caught on that he doesn't know what he's talking about on many topics (not to mention, it turns out he's kind of a bad person) made a big deal about sunscreen for a long time.
At one point he said he was "as scared of sunscreen as melanoma", which triggered a lot of his listeners to start reducing their sunscreen use and debating the merits of sunscreen. Combine this with other podcasters like Joe Rogan pushing Vitamin D as a miracle mineral and a lot of people who think they are science-driven in their health choices are eschewing sunscreen. It's a maddening turn of events.
EDIT: Aaaand of course I'm getting downvoted for calling out Huberman. This is a good time to remind everyone that he has numerous positions like this one, such as avoiding Bluetooth headphones due to "heating effects" of their wireless signal. It's impossible for Bluetooth headphones to even emit enough power to warm your skin, but it's something he believes is true. He's very charismatic and charming, but he frequently strays from the science when he senses a good story that will engage his listeners.
The scary ingredient is not your biggest health concern...
And I can't imagine that polyurethane finish on hardwood floors is good either.
Shellac or traditional varnish are probably the only things you could put on your floor that aren't produced with an industrial process. Shellac in particular is the harvested secretions of a beetle that have been cleaned and dissolved in alcohol. But it's water-soluble and so probably not appropriate for use on a wood floor. You could also use tung oil or boiled linseed oil but you'd have to sand down to #0000 steel wool to get it to shine like urethane. Tung oil is a nice coating because it doesn't turn orange like BLO, but either one you will have to keep applying every few years or the floor will stop repelling water.
Obviously we'd end up with huge Tung plantations or Shellac plantations if we tried to replace all of our floor coverings with this stuff.
(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.)
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 substances that were a lot more ambiguous. For example, DDT saved millions of lives, and the backlash against it was probably overblown. Still, you know, good riddance - at least until malaria comes back in the developed world due to climate change?
And now, we're in this place where any accusation of substances being artificial and cropping up somewhere at parts-per-billion or parts-per-trillion levels is enough to cause outrage, even if we can't demonstrate serious adverse effects on humans or most other life. Microplastics seem to be the most egregious example of this. But the panics around phthalates and BPA are another interesting case where, if you look closely enough, there just isn't a whole lot of good science to back any of it.
I'm kinda torn about this, because I think we should be working toward reducing plastic waste, and I'd rather see phthalates replaced by safer plasticizers, such as benzoates. But the amount of alarmist headlines in this space is pretty wacky.
It goes into great detail on the evidence for harm and the details of how these chemicals work.
https://www.amazon.com/Count-Down-Threatening-Reproductive-D...
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.
The study of MDMA showed benefits for PTSD: https://icer.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/PTSD_Revised-Rep...
Just a reminder that the holistic and wellness industry that sells you detoxes for this stuff is worth 4.5 trillion dollars (more than big pharma, even). They are incentivized to drum up fear; plastics are killing you, aspartame is killing you. I've heard them claim even fresh fruit is killing you.
Evidence-based decisions matter.
So maybe let's be conservative when considering compounds that live permanently in the environment, are damn near impossible to remove, and are spreading widely to every part of the ecosystem yeah?
there are in fact cases where people used something harmful for a long time before there was good evidence that it was harmful (examples include kohl, sassafras, trans fats, maybe asbestos, radium, twitter, and facebook) but leaded gasoline is not one of them
there are very many more cases where people used something for a long time before there was good evidence about whether it was harmful, and it wasn't. almost everything ever invented falls under this rubric
conservatism like yours was the default stance for thousands of years, which is why human life was impoverished and short during that time. during the 19th and 20th centuries, we took a break from it, and the result was a leap in human prosperity to previously unimaginable heights. now people want to bring it back. i'm not a fan
The ridiculousness of this claim is basically self-evident. The obvious reason for impoverished and short life spans was a low level of technological development, not conversative social attitudes. It begs the question, how exactly could modern liberal attitudes even exist in an era that lacked the technology required to have a modern liberal society?
Everyone involved knew that tetraethyllead was horrendously toxic, they just didn't particularly care.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140711220018/http://www.radfor...
It’s a fact that these chemicals behave similarly to, and bind to the same receptors as, sex hormones.
It’s a proven fact that exposure to these chemicals increases sexual dysfunction during development in animal models and in humans.
It’s also proven that these chemicals have made their way into every single food item and most cosmetic products we buy at the store.
If you just Google for papers on phthalates and endocrine disruption, there are decades of research papers supporting it.
Here’s an example of one such study in frogs and rabbits:
https://cfpub.epa.gov/ncer_abstracts/index.cfm/fuseaction/di...
Conclusions for almost all papers like this are the same.
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 they win.
If you care about future generations you should care about anything we create that's harmful and that doesn't break down naturally.
Throwing your hands up and running around like a headless chicken is probably an over reaction, but rolling your eyes and sticking your head in the ground to ignore it is also equally not good.
