- cross-posted to:
- videos@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- videos@lemmy.world
It seems I shouldn’t have posted this without context
TL;DW
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yes the video is (at least partially) about Teflon, hence the cynical title
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no, Teflon (or generally big Fluoropolymers) are not the problem. Ingesting them does nothing to you, because as long, chemically inert polymers they just pass through you from one end to the other
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The problem are perfluoroalkyl acids: C8 (PFOA) and later substitutes such as C6/GenX, PFOS, PFHA, PFHxS which are chemicals used to start the Teflon polymerization. They are short-chained carbon-fluorine molecules that coincidentally mimic the structure of fatty acids, thus can accumulate in our bodies without a way for our bodies to break them down.
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These chemicals leach into the environment from factories and accumulate in everything, to the point that the whole water cycle has been contaminated (yes that shit comes down everywhere with the rain)
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There is conclusive proof that PFOA exposure is linked to a number of organ damage and cancers, particularly testicular cancer and kidney cancer, with likely links to lung and pancreatic cancer not reflected in the study due to survivor bias (they died before the study was concluded)
I haven’t actually yet seen any conclusive proof that PFAS are poisonous to ingest, however
Sure, it’s present everywhere, and I wouldn’t be shocked if we found out it’s bad for us.
But it has to actually be a poison to call it poison.
Pollutant? For sure. Poison? No proof of that yet. Just very annoying but the very principle that makes it hard to scrub out of water (very non reactive and tiny) is also what makes it seem to, so far, show no negative side effects on stuff.
It’s there but kinda just, doing nothing as far as we can see… so far
We need more funding into studies on it.
PFAS are endocrine disruptors. It’s incorrect to say that they do nothing to us. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7926449/
That happens when you bury your head in the sand and refuse to learn anything.
… No? I consider myself pretty well read.
If you have any conclusive peer reviewed papers that prove PFAS are poisonous if ingested at such microscopic scales, please by all means… link them
I have been keeping an eye on the progression of study on PFAS for nearly 6 years now since they started finding it all over the world. Im not gonna claim it isnt poisonous, but I certainly am gonna say despite all the studying, no actual issues have been found with them yet that have been repeatable in peer reviewed studies.
Everything seems to still be quite a bit inconclusive so far. Albeit I also chalk a lot of that up to a pretty heavy amount of muzzling on actually researching the impact of PFAS. If you have anything that proves otherwise though, by all means share it with the rest of the class.
Now, if you wanna talk about inhaling vapors from burnt PFAS, now we are talking about potential poisons that can really fuck you up.
But the quantity of PFAS in things like drinking water seems to be so incredibly low and some studies have shown that boiling water actually helps remove many different types of microplastics, including PFAS, due to interesting effects of sodium deposits in the water forming that bind to them sorta Katamari Damacy style.
But other than that, no, I havent seen anything else, just a loooot of “inconclusive, needs further study” stuff published time and time again.
It took me 5 minutes to find this.
www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/15/4/573
You clearly didn’t read it, it’s just a giant metastudy gathering up tonnes of research but it’s basically just a shotgun paper covering all the “maybes” that have been highlighted
It cites dozens and dozens of papers, most of which highlight “maybe possibly potentially PFAS levels corrolate with (insert health effect here)”
However it also glosses over tonnes of other studies that havent found links to be statistically significant.
I want you to read this XKCD comic and try and understand how it relates to the discussion
https://xkcd.com/882/
You sound like the people that will argue that climate change is made up by China or some silly bullshit like that. Rejecting all data with claims that it’s fake.
People like you aren’t worth the time.
No.
There’s a huge difference between rejecting data and just pointing out that nearly every single study is too small and underfunded and nearly every one of them is preliminary.
There’s a reason all these papers are careful to say stuff like “more research is needed”
The goal of science is to try and prove the negative
You never actually can sufficiently prove your goal, but you can disprove other possibilities to narrow alternative reasons down until you get as close as possible to your outcome being the only remaining reason left.
This has not been achieved with PFAS studies yet simply due to a lack of time and quantity. Most of these studies are either too small, or too specific to do anything more than conclude “well, this definitely is interesting and should be investigated more”
Because proving it actually for sure does something is incredibly challenging, because there’s thousands of other variables at play, and many of the studied symptoms don’t display massive magnitudes in change.
Not enough to be very certain that they aren’t being caused by some other factor that pairs up with PFAS exposure.
For example, PFAS exposure also will correlate with other possible exposures to pollutants simultaneously for the same reason you got exposed to PFAS.
Air pollution levels also correlate, once again, same reason.
It’s devilishly challenging when the people with above average PFAS exposure also are getting exposed to other pollutants to then narrow down to just PFAS being the cause. It could be the wrong chemical causing issues… or ot could be 100% the cause.
It’s not like Asbestos where we could find villages with clean drinking water and air quality with zero other concerns that had huge issues due to being downwind of a mine.
If they managed to find a large group of people downstream of a plant that only dumped PFAS in the water and not other pollutants too, you’d be in business.
But that isn’t a thing, they dump all manner of shit in there with the PFAS, so can you see how that fucks up the numbers?
“To poison” just means to make people ill by ingesting it. PFOAs are quite well studied and are known carcinogens, and definitely toxic according to multiple studies, this is trivial to find on Wikipedia, etc so… I dunno - seems like a contrarian take?
PFOA studies linking exposure to a number of health conditions, including thyroid disorders, chronic kidney disease, liver disease, testicular cancer, infertility and low birth weight. The list goes on, those are just some.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid#Toxicology
Its important to understand that “cannot be dismissed” is not the same as “we think it does do this”
It’s a double negative, its “we dont not think it causes it”, but waaaaay more study is needed.
Serum Concentrations of Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances and Risk of Renal Cell CarcinomaActually is a new one for me, I havent seen this one, and it does look much more compelling than the other smaller studies, this one is more concerning than the others.Fourth link is a lot of nothing, why did you bother linking it? It just discusses other studies but doesnt add anything new of substance.
Fifth link is pretty sketchy, theres many other variables that also associate, and they didnt even find a link between specifically PFOS anyways
Its important to note that every single one of these studies is empirical post exposure which means many other associated variables can also contribute.
People with low PFAS vs high PFAS exposure almost undoubtedly are also exposed to many other things… like pollution in general
It’s borderline impossible to actually separate out PFAS levels from these other entangled variables, people who are heavily exposed to 1 type of pollution will also be exposed to many others, and theres a heavy association between living situation and PFAS exposure.
That is why its so damn hard to get any conclusive proof on this, the only way to truly figure it out would be to purposefully administer PFAS to people intentionally in a controlled environment, to try and separate out variables.
The relationships that do show up are all very tenuous, and could easily be also explained by the dozens of other variables, so thats why you keep seeing the wording of “may contribute” or “requires further study” or “associated with”
Your comment cherry picks the weakest language of the Wikipedia article and studies and ignores the rest. You’ll struggle to find any reputable study anywhere that says “our study proves that X does Y” like you’re asking, because thats not how studies language is conveyed and would be incorrect language to use in a medical study. When 20 studies all say “we have shown a strong correlation between cigarette consumption and cancer of the throat, mouth, and lungs” then you will hear scientists say “the link between cancer and cigarettes is known, and well studied” and news articles will say “cigarettes cause cancer”.
Your suggestion that the only way we’d know for sure is human trials of intentional PFOA exposure is… I’m gonna be generous and say… naieve. Scientists are perfectly fine with using lab, mouse, and emprical cross-sectional studies - that’s all valid scientific evidence. They don’t actually need to take the final Dr Mengele step of subjecting people directly to suspected toxins before they can draw highly accurate conclusions, especially for something like PFOA that has large sections of the population with high dosages that they can compare against those with low dosages already.
Not true. Just one example, we have many population groups that live in areas where groundwater is used for drinking that also live near a firefighting training base/station that has released huge amounts of PFOAs into the aquifers. These populations are otherwise quite normally distributed for age/weight/health/occupation and exposure to other chemicals and perfect for study of PFOAs and have been shown in studies to have much higher levels in their blood serum.
It’s fine though - if you wanna sprikle PFOA on your cereal or something until 100 more studies are done, I can’t stop you. But just know that your tendency to cherry pick data and your unconventional assessment methods of studies is giving you a very poorly informed choice.
There is (according to the video) concrete evidence for both acute toxicity as well as causal carcinogenic effects when it comes to PFOA.
The distinction here is between long-chained Fluoropolymers like Teflon, which are completely benign as far as evidence suggests; and fluoroalkyl acids (like PFOA), that are short-chained, can enter the bloodstream, and mimic the structure of fatty acids thus being able to bond to stuff in our body.
No, there’s a very minor causational link that has been classified as “needs further study”
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/chemicals/teflon-and-perfluorooctanoic-acid-pfoa.html#%3A~%3Atext=Studies+in+humans%2Cneeded+to+clarify+these+findings.
Its extremely far away from “concrete evidence”, that’s what Im talking about when saying this video was hypebole.
Many places are classifying it as potentially hazardous to be safe, because:
Even watching a video is too hard for you, poor baby
No, I watched it, and the end result is a lot of hyperbole.