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.
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.
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.
Are we doing that?
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...
> 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.
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?
And I can't imagine that polyurethane finish on hardwood floors is good either.
(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
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.
