The map that they produced is very easy to unintentionally misread. The map shows the predicted contamination of groundwater locations based on the models. It does not show the locations where the actual tap water source is predicted or known to be contaminated.
For example, many large cities (San Francisco, Seattle, Portland) either do not use groundwater sources from within city limits, or only use it as a secondary source. Unless you use a private well, this map is therefore not super useful for understanding whether PFAS contamination of tap water should be a concern for you. The map likewise doesn't take into account water treatment or filtering.
If you want to see the contaminants in your tapwater you can use the Environmental Working Group's tap water database here: https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/
Dr. Rohnda Patrick just did a great episode on PFAS, microplastics, and other environmental toxins in food and water. Tap water tends to have less of these PFAS/nano plastics than bottled water via degradation of the bottle. Topo Chico is especially problematic (nothing to do with the bottle).[0]
She provides sources for all her podcasts and basically just reads from scientific journals the entire time. I would separate her content from your typical "Dr." She's also not a medical doctor fyi, just a researcher.
How can laymen evaluate the merit of cited sources, particularly in matters pertaining to medicine and nutrition? All the personalities, spokespeople, advocates, activists, etc in this space all provide citations which they say back up their claims. A lot of them are lying, their claims don't appear in the cited articles, so that's easy to detect if you click through and read each one carefully, but many of the rest do cite articles saying what they claim and it's still just junk science. They do this because they know "cites sources" is a popular heuristic.
Like I can find people promoting magnetic bracelets to align my Chi and they will be citing supposedly scientific articles which supposedly back up their claims. In extreme cases like that I can feel pretty confident that it's bullshit. But the relative health benefits of eating berry A or berry B? It seems intractable. I'm left with trusting my instincts and common sense.
I'm not responsible for people's media literacy/competency. I'm also not going to take advantage of them myself, or promote people who do. Rhonda Patrick is probably one of the .01% of influences who, as far as I know, doesn't take advertisement money and is 100% merch + premium content including her online Genetic Report[0], which takes raw SNP data from companies like 23 and Me and provides you an extremely comprehensive report for all the SNPs in your report with every journal article publically available on that SNP and health outcomes associated. You can generate this report yourself if you know how with other genetics tools, but her tool is two clicks and much more value add than actual genetic companies like My23andMe's premium subscription. She routinely criticizes companies like Athlete Greens and other supplement companies, this is rare in the health-influencer sphere. Not to glaze her but I've only heard her mention brand names on the basis of their purity/lab testing and always points out when pop science studies are funded by these companies or other conflicts of interest that may distort the headline making journal articles. In fact, my journal comprehension has gotten better by listening to this podcast.
Personally find it extremely easy to detect scams. You also don't need a degree or much more than a HS degree to check sources, this was taught to most of us in high school.
You're right though, there's a billions and billions of dollars in marketing and misinformation aimed at the people who skipped that class in school (especially in the health space).
--- It was actually this report that highlighted that I might have a high likelihood for a weird genetic issue that causes you to have extremely low vitamin D. This caused me to go get testing for this as I would get bad seasonal depression in the winters. At the age of 27 my doctor told me that it was the lowest levels of Vitamin D she's ever seen including her elderly patients. This isn't something any of common mainstream genetic reports provide and they charge 10X more. You would need to generate a report manually through one of the databases to find those studies or manually look up individuals SNPs
That's great and all but as a content creator, she has an incentive to create sensational, viral content. Which also introduce bias like exaggeration of the risk. Being financial independent does not exclude this type of bias.
> Personally find it extremely easy to detect scams. You also don't need a degree or much more than a HS degree to check sources, this was taught to most of us in high school.
For every medical claim someone makes, you can find at least 3 papers published in reputable journals that claim the opposite. Knowing which papers are lacking and which aren't goes beyond what most of us were taught in high school.
> Personally find it extremely easy to detect scams. You also don't need a degree or much more than a HS degree to check sources, this was taught to most of us in high school.
If by "check a source" you mean look it up and read it, sure. But that tells you relatively little; you can verify that a claim appears in that source but actually weighing the validity of that source requires a lot more specialized expertise.
That you think a highschool course can teach all you need to reliably detect bullshit makes me think you're a lot more credulous than you seem to think.
The rest of your post is more or less about the heuristics you use in lieu of being a subject matter expert. And those heuristics are known to influencers and are routinely gamed. For instance, you're impressed that this influencer criticizes supplement companies. People peddling bullshit routinely trash talk their own or adjacent fields in order to gain trust, this is a textbook tactic. Used car salesmen trash talk used car salesmen, to make themselves seem candid and honest. Textbooks about sales and persuasion teach this tactic. Supplement peddlers trash talk homeopathy, homeopaths trash talk chiropractors, etc. Of course people who aren't peddling bullshit will trash talk bullshit too, everybody else does too so it's a very unreliable heuristic.
Thanks for the lecture on basic rhetorical strategies / fallacies. Once again, not special and concepts I learned in AP lit in 11th grade. You're acting like you understand something special, it's not. Thank you for demonstrating 11th grade media literacy,
Most water suppliers in the USA still don't test for PFAS on a regular schedule. Only the more progressive states (like ME) require testing from their suppliers.
I maintain a DB of drinking water contaminants in the US[1]. You can look up your city's system to see if they test for PFAS.
The problem is PFAS are in basically all the water on the planet and persist in the body for several years. Even if they might have a small effect that will likely be magnified due to accumulation and the long persistence. We have had very similar scenarios before (lead, asbestos,... ) and they had horrible consequences. This is the time to get ahead of this cycle.
If it's bad and we don't avoid it = potential disaster
If it's no problem and we avoid it = Some unnecessary losses
If it's no problem and we avoid it = No problem
Currently, considering past patterns, it looks like PFAS are problematic and the potential cost of failing to mitigate could be very high. So being more cautious is the rational solution, even in the face of uncertainty.
Going by the pattern of the comment, I would assume this was a typo. Maybe they intended to say:
"If it's no problem and we DON'T avoid it = No problem"
Lots of substances may not need to be tested if they occur frequently in nature as we can assume that life has already mitigated the problems that they may or not cause. If we start to widely distribute these naturally occurring substances, then we need to re-examine what effects they may have (e.g. lead occurs naturally, but putting it into the air produced a very harmful effect on human development).
If it's a new substance that doesn't already occur in meaningful quantities, then we need to be very careful before we start putting it into water supplies as that has the potential to disrupt a wide variety of life and habitats. To merely consider it not harmful due to lack of testing is really foolish.
It also means that there's no control group. I think it was in the New Yorker, an article about the chemist who was asked by 3M to investigate the health effects of PFAS after workers in their factories were getting sick. She tried to find blood samples that were PFAS-free in order to test the detection limits of her equipment, and there was PFAS in virtually every sample.
I started using reverse osmosis filtration of tap water at home. The issue is that it removes all minerals, and its pH cartridge wears thin in a mere two to three months. The missing minerals have to be compensated for via increased supplementation. Also, there is no fluoride in it anymore for your teeth, so only your toothpaste can save your teeth.
I seem to remember reading that fluoride in drinking water has no real effect on teeth, vs fluoride in toothpaste if you actually leave it in contact with your teeth for several minutes like you're supposed to.
No, you're not supposed to leave it in contact with your teeth for any period of time. If you do, you will start swallowing it. Swallowing it will cause stomach and cause other problems too.
The reason is that sodium fluoride which exists in toothpastes is associated with testicular and hormonal dysfunction in males - refer to PMID 30165274.
I have been using RO water from Prismo water in NorthBay. They have installed RO machines at various places and it costs about 2.5 bucks to fill 5 gallon jug
You can get a countertop RO unit for home use that's so easy to use. It's also utterly cheaper to use than any commercially purchased RO water. Just remember to clean the pitcher and your water bottle every week from their insides.
Also, if you buy the RO water in plastic, that's risking avoidable microplastics. I use glass and steel bottles.
I see it from both sides. On one hand, I am no longer risking poisoning my brain with excessive fluoride.
On the other hand, I now developed sensitivity in a tooth that is going to be a challenge to fix. This is despite me using fluoride toothpaste twice daily. Acidic foods can do more damage to teeth when there isn't fluoride in the drinking water. As a result, the saliva also lacks fluoride, and cannot protect the teeth so well anymore. It was my mistake for consuming an acidic food. I now have to see if expensive nano-hydroxyapatite toothpaste can fix the sensitivity.
The absence of fluoride initially causes severe dental sensitivity due to acidic foods, which is the concern here. If you have always been using fluoride toothpaste and drinking fluoride-containing tap water, you will not understand.
Toothaches are indeed also caused by headaches, oral infections, and sinus infections/allergies/irritation. Sometimes it's sinus related and sometimes it isn't. These have nothing to do with tooth sensitivity.
Most Americans are illiterate. They don't have the capacity to understand the problem or the wisdom to care. (I wonder if they every had the capacity for either.)
The map that they produced is very easy to unintentionally misread. The map shows the predicted contamination of groundwater locations based on the models. It does not show the locations where the actual tap water source is predicted or known to be contaminated.
For example, many large cities (San Francisco, Seattle, Portland) either do not use groundwater sources from within city limits, or only use it as a secondary source. Unless you use a private well, this map is therefore not super useful for understanding whether PFAS contamination of tap water should be a concern for you. The map likewise doesn't take into account water treatment or filtering.
If you want to see the contaminants in your tapwater you can use the Environmental Working Group's tap water database here: https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/
Tap water is one thing. Agricultural contamination is quite another, and also is worthy of exploration.
Specifically water for irrigation, and processed sewage/sludge for fertilizer
> processed sewage/sludge for fertilizer
This one scares me the most, including whatever drugs people flush down the toilet that they pass
It's a population density map, just as XKCD pointed out: https://xkcd.com/1138/
Dr. Rohnda Patrick just did a great episode on PFAS, microplastics, and other environmental toxins in food and water. Tap water tends to have less of these PFAS/nano plastics than bottled water via degradation of the bottle. Topo Chico is especially problematic (nothing to do with the bottle).[0]
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTzw_grLzjw&t=2s
There are so many doctors on Youtube just spouting shit that it's hard for me to separate the bullshit from the legitimate.
She provides sources for all her podcasts and basically just reads from scientific journals the entire time. I would separate her content from your typical "Dr." She's also not a medical doctor fyi, just a researcher.
How can laymen evaluate the merit of cited sources, particularly in matters pertaining to medicine and nutrition? All the personalities, spokespeople, advocates, activists, etc in this space all provide citations which they say back up their claims. A lot of them are lying, their claims don't appear in the cited articles, so that's easy to detect if you click through and read each one carefully, but many of the rest do cite articles saying what they claim and it's still just junk science. They do this because they know "cites sources" is a popular heuristic.
Like I can find people promoting magnetic bracelets to align my Chi and they will be citing supposedly scientific articles which supposedly back up their claims. In extreme cases like that I can feel pretty confident that it's bullshit. But the relative health benefits of eating berry A or berry B? It seems intractable. I'm left with trusting my instincts and common sense.
I'm not responsible for people's media literacy/competency. I'm also not going to take advantage of them myself, or promote people who do. Rhonda Patrick is probably one of the .01% of influences who, as far as I know, doesn't take advertisement money and is 100% merch + premium content including her online Genetic Report[0], which takes raw SNP data from companies like 23 and Me and provides you an extremely comprehensive report for all the SNPs in your report with every journal article publically available on that SNP and health outcomes associated. You can generate this report yourself if you know how with other genetics tools, but her tool is two clicks and much more value add than actual genetic companies like My23andMe's premium subscription. She routinely criticizes companies like Athlete Greens and other supplement companies, this is rare in the health-influencer sphere. Not to glaze her but I've only heard her mention brand names on the basis of their purity/lab testing and always points out when pop science studies are funded by these companies or other conflicts of interest that may distort the headline making journal articles. In fact, my journal comprehension has gotten better by listening to this podcast.
Personally find it extremely easy to detect scams. You also don't need a degree or much more than a HS degree to check sources, this was taught to most of us in high school.
You're right though, there's a billions and billions of dollars in marketing and misinformation aimed at the people who skipped that class in school (especially in the health space).
[0]: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/genetics
--- It was actually this report that highlighted that I might have a high likelihood for a weird genetic issue that causes you to have extremely low vitamin D. This caused me to go get testing for this as I would get bad seasonal depression in the winters. At the age of 27 my doctor told me that it was the lowest levels of Vitamin D she's ever seen including her elderly patients. This isn't something any of common mainstream genetic reports provide and they charge 10X more. You would need to generate a report manually through one of the databases to find those studies or manually look up individuals SNPs
That's great and all but as a content creator, she has an incentive to create sensational, viral content. Which also introduce bias like exaggeration of the risk. Being financial independent does not exclude this type of bias.
> Personally find it extremely easy to detect scams. You also don't need a degree or much more than a HS degree to check sources, this was taught to most of us in high school.
For every medical claim someone makes, you can find at least 3 papers published in reputable journals that claim the opposite. Knowing which papers are lacking and which aren't goes beyond what most of us were taught in high school.
> Personally find it extremely easy to detect scams. You also don't need a degree or much more than a HS degree to check sources, this was taught to most of us in high school.
If by "check a source" you mean look it up and read it, sure. But that tells you relatively little; you can verify that a claim appears in that source but actually weighing the validity of that source requires a lot more specialized expertise.
That you think a highschool course can teach all you need to reliably detect bullshit makes me think you're a lot more credulous than you seem to think.
The rest of your post is more or less about the heuristics you use in lieu of being a subject matter expert. And those heuristics are known to influencers and are routinely gamed. For instance, you're impressed that this influencer criticizes supplement companies. People peddling bullshit routinely trash talk their own or adjacent fields in order to gain trust, this is a textbook tactic. Used car salesmen trash talk used car salesmen, to make themselves seem candid and honest. Textbooks about sales and persuasion teach this tactic. Supplement peddlers trash talk homeopathy, homeopaths trash talk chiropractors, etc. Of course people who aren't peddling bullshit will trash talk bullshit too, everybody else does too so it's a very unreliable heuristic.
Thanks for the lecture on basic rhetorical strategies / fallacies. Once again, not special and concepts I learned in AP lit in 11th grade. You're acting like you understand something special, it's not. Thank you for demonstrating 11th grade media literacy,
Isn’t Topo Chico Peter Attia’s fav beverage? Would be surprised if he didn’t looked into this.
Here you go:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/10nirl9/oc...
scroll down and https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/10nirl9/oc...
Most water suppliers in the USA still don't test for PFAS on a regular schedule. Only the more progressive states (like ME) require testing from their suppliers.
I maintain a DB of drinking water contaminants in the US[1]. You can look up your city's system to see if they test for PFAS.
[1]: https://www.cleartap.com
Do you explicitly list that a PFAS test was omitted for a municipality? I looked up Austin and didn’t see it listed.
Don't want to downplay the risks, but:
Afaik, very little is still understood about the actual risks from a particular PFAS exposure level. Right?
The problem is PFAS are in basically all the water on the planet and persist in the body for several years. Even if they might have a small effect that will likely be magnified due to accumulation and the long persistence. We have had very similar scenarios before (lead, asbestos,... ) and they had horrible consequences. This is the time to get ahead of this cycle.
> We have had very similar scenarios before (lead, asbestos,... ) and they had horrible consequences. This is the time to get ahead of this cycle.
It's an assumption that this will be similar, but sure.
If it's bad and we avoid it = win
If it's bad and we don't avoid it = potential disaster
If it's no problem and we avoid it = Some unnecessary losses
If it's no problem and we avoid it = No problem
Currently, considering past patterns, it looks like PFAS are problematic and the potential cost of failing to mitigate could be very high. So being more cautious is the rational solution, even in the face of uncertainty.
> If it's no problem and we avoid it = No problem
This is incorrect. I think that you also understand why.
Going by the pattern of the comment, I would assume this was a typo. Maybe they intended to say: "If it's no problem and we DON'T avoid it = No problem"
Surely the far more dangerous assumption is to assume that an untested substance won't be harmful to life.
There are many "untested" substances.
> There are many "untested" substances.
I don't see your point.
Lots of substances may not need to be tested if they occur frequently in nature as we can assume that life has already mitigated the problems that they may or not cause. If we start to widely distribute these naturally occurring substances, then we need to re-examine what effects they may have (e.g. lead occurs naturally, but putting it into the air produced a very harmful effect on human development).
If it's a new substance that doesn't already occur in meaningful quantities, then we need to be very careful before we start putting it into water supplies as that has the potential to disrupt a wide variety of life and habitats. To merely consider it not harmful due to lack of testing is really foolish.
It also means that there's no control group. I think it was in the New Yorker, an article about the chemist who was asked by 3M to investigate the health effects of PFAS after workers in their factories were getting sick. She tried to find blood samples that were PFAS-free in order to test the detection limits of her equipment, and there was PFAS in virtually every sample.
Cert is expired so I can't even open it atm because my firewall, which I can't turn off atm, but I'm pretty sure this has all your answers[0].
https://www.hbm4eu.eu/the-substances/per-polyfluorinated-com...
I recently learned that regular blood donation and especially plasma donation appears to be an effective way to help clear the body of PFAS chemicals.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8994130/
Does blood donation then give the PFAS to the donor?
I started using reverse osmosis filtration of tap water at home. The issue is that it removes all minerals, and its pH cartridge wears thin in a mere two to three months. The missing minerals have to be compensated for via increased supplementation. Also, there is no fluoride in it anymore for your teeth, so only your toothpaste can save your teeth.
I seem to remember reading that fluoride in drinking water has no real effect on teeth, vs fluoride in toothpaste if you actually leave it in contact with your teeth for several minutes like you're supposed to.
No, you're not supposed to leave it in contact with your teeth for any period of time. If you do, you will start swallowing it. Swallowing it will cause stomach and cause other problems too.
The reason is that sodium fluoride which exists in toothpastes is associated with testicular and hormonal dysfunction in males - refer to PMID 30165274.
I have been using RO water from Prismo water in NorthBay. They have installed RO machines at various places and it costs about 2.5 bucks to fill 5 gallon jug
You can get a countertop RO unit for home use that's so easy to use. It's also utterly cheaper to use than any commercially purchased RO water. Just remember to clean the pitcher and your water bottle every week from their insides.
Also, if you buy the RO water in plastic, that's risking avoidable microplastics. I use glass and steel bottles.
Is that a 5 gallon plastic jug?
What about the membrane inside that’s possibly made of chemical treated stuff?
> "Also, there is no fluoride in it anymore"
Good. There is absolutely no reason this should be in water.
I see it from both sides. On one hand, I am no longer risking poisoning my brain with excessive fluoride.
On the other hand, I now developed sensitivity in a tooth that is going to be a challenge to fix. This is despite me using fluoride toothpaste twice daily. Acidic foods can do more damage to teeth when there isn't fluoride in the drinking water. As a result, the saliva also lacks fluoride, and cannot protect the teeth so well anymore. It was my mistake for consuming an acidic food. I now have to see if expensive nano-hydroxyapatite toothpaste can fix the sensitivity.
Tooth aches in my experience are often unrelated to the tooth but instead due to sinus pressure (an infection, allergies, etc).
The absence of fluoride initially causes severe dental sensitivity due to acidic foods, which is the concern here. If you have always been using fluoride toothpaste and drinking fluoride-containing tap water, you will not understand.
Toothaches are indeed also caused by headaches, oral infections, and sinus infections/allergies/irritation. Sometimes it's sinus related and sometimes it isn't. These have nothing to do with tooth sensitivity.
Most Americans are illiterate. They don't have the capacity to understand the problem or the wisdom to care. (I wonder if they every had the capacity for either.)
Its only about 21%, https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statisti....
That is only 1 of the many reasons why many drink only distilled water.
Though you didn't claim otherwise, I'd like to note that drinking distilled water is rather unhealthy because it deprives the body of electrolytes.
Gatorade, water sucks
RO water is also quite comparable and is more power efficient. I hope and assume you use a pH normalization cartridge, perhaps with minerals too.