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It seems I shouldn’t have posted this without context

TL;DW

  • yes the video is (at least partially) about Teflon, hence the cynical title

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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)

  • 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)

  • pixxelkick@lemmy.world
    1·
    11 hours ago

    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?