>Heart disease deaths worldwide linked to chemical widely used in plastics
First thing I thought of is how much DEHP is used is the hospital, including for medical devices implanted in the heart. Such as pacemakers, catheters, stents and valves.
DEHP as a component is something like 30% of flexible tubing used in a hospital setting.
Phthalates leach because they aren't integrated with the base plastic by design - that's how they work. Phthalates sit in between the polymer chains (such as PET), rather than being bonded to them, which is precisely what affords that material flexibility, and also why they leach so easily.
On a similar note, we had the big push towards "BPA-free" plastic a few years ago. Manufacturers just replaced the BPA with related bisphenols like BPF which is probably just as bad as BPA and BPS which is probably worse than BPA.
This is what happens when you allow companies to dump unvetted, novel, synthetic chemicals into products and packaging. Especially when the audience for those products has substantially less information than the companies who produce them en masse.
I resent this framing as being entirely about short-sighted consumers valuing convenience. surely it has quite a bit to do with cost as well, both for the producer to increase their margins and also the end consumer. alot of it has to do with choice. the market presents very few non-plastic options in cases where plastic will do fine. so yes, convenience in the 'i hate to buy this plastic thing, but I dont have a week to find someone in estonia that still makes quality goods by hand and then wait for it to be shipped to me' sense
>I resent this framing as being entirely about short-sighted consumers valuing convenience.
Your resentment is not valid. The switch to plastics did not happen overnight. There used a lot more choices in the past. Common people increasingly chose plastics over a period of time. ( or rather were lazy) Your resentment can be rephrased as - "I cannot come to terms with the fact that common people really are that stupid".
Freedoms in various forms are generally not taken away overnight. As they say "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"
Did you read comment above because yours does not not address the response at all (and you are wrong in that context).
Again, dude above is saying clearly that the issue is man man, we did this, it's not a natural disaster, so there is no one to blame but ourselves, pretending it was an outside power that did this to you is not valid.
In normally functioning society there are built in protection mechanisms that shield general population from such harm, as much as possible of course. FDA for US for example.
You can't expect every citizen to have 20 phds and actively keep searching for all potential harm from all sides, even you, whoever you are, are not keeping up with it all, thats a fact.
It can be tackled trivially, albeit it will create some business friction - you introduce a novel chemical in your product on our market? Please here is the substantial checklist of tests that you need to pass to be allowed. Otherwise please use approved stuff or bye, be it chinese sweatshop or apple. People like trump with their elephant-in-porcelaine-shop approach could be the force of good if they focused ie on such topics with their ferocity. But they do exact opposite (cash flow uber alles, fuck non-ultra-high-net-worth plebs its their fault for being poor and dumb subhumans).
So please a bit less of that high horse and more empathy and reason, absolute capitalism with disregard of individuals is what gave us marxism and communism as response, not the path we want or need to go down in 21st century for any reason.
Eating/drinking out of plastic has been known to be bad from day one, ingesting plastic is a bad idea so eating out of and with plastic is also obviously not great, no PhD necessary for that conclusion.
Your saying people need a PhD to know to not eat plastics? Wow, you must think people are even dumber that dude above
>In normally functioning society there are built in protection mechanisms that shield general population from such harm,
Give me a single example. (You will find none.)
>It can be tackled trivially
Agreed, but it won't happen. ( I 'll leave you to figure out why it doesn't happen)
>FDA for US for example.
They are largely ineffective, if you have looked at them closely. There might be a few exceptions though.
>So please a bit less of that high horse and more empathy and reason
Great words, and quite a bit of virtue signalling. Have you observed the common person in USA? Netflix channels, tiktok, or some reality show, matter to them more than their health.
Look, I understand your sentiment but it does not gel with the reality I observe. Collectively we face the consequences of what the vast majority wants, or in this case neglects. You can either come to terms with it, or you can project your annoyance at me for stating it.
You are correct, people just get mad when they have to face the consequences their own actions.
Eating (with) plastic was known to be a bad idea by everyone from day one, we do it because we don't care until something goes wrong for us personally.
It is also what happens when you pass dumb laws with no consideration of second order effects. If you want to ban bad plastics, mandate a safe alternative.
For most of this stuff, we had something - glass. Companies lobbied against it because they had to build in recycling costs, and I assume its more expensive to ship.
Yes, but I'd reframe as preemptively get permission before use. Maybe an automatic approval with appropriate testing. Allow innovation, but add some layer of accountability.
And it doesn't help that our only practical lever for improvement was recently eliminated by SCOTUS.
Under the Chevron Doctrine, Congress could pass a law that broadly bans all chemicals like these and then the agencies could react to new studies like this and push out new rules as we learn more and as companies attempt workarounds.
But with that tool gone, there's basically no chance of this ever getting fixed. Congress will probably have to pass laws that ban each specific individual compound. Good luck with that!
What you're describing would still be 100% possible. Chevron deference specifically applied when agencies tried to expand powers in ways that were not reasonably within their mandate. For a very high profile recent example when the CDC tried to expand the expired COVID related eviction moratorium, they did so under a section of the public health services act that granted them the power to carry out measures "necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases."
Claiming that banning evictions falls under there is a rather 'creative' interpretation, but it was initially allowed due to Chevon deference where judges were obligated to defer to the interpretations of regulatory agencies.
If an agency is tasked with the 'prohibition of plastics, or related compounds, deemed reasonably likely to be harmful' then they would be fully capable of doing just that. With Chevron Deference they probably could then expand that mandate to then do something like claim regulatory authority over beaches owing to prohibited plastic waste washing ashore, but without it that would probably require a new law since that's clearly an unintended expansion of power.
> Chevron deference specifically applied when agencies tried to expand powers in ways that were not reasonably within their mandate
Not true. And I mean literally definitionally not true. Chevron deference only applies (definitionally) when the agency's interpretation is reasonable.
With Chevron deference, if a regulated entity challenged a rule, the court applied a two part test:
Part 1. Is the matter resolved unambiguously by legislation? If yes: legislation wins. If no: proceed to Part 2.
Part 2. Is the agency's interpretation of the legislation reasonable? If yes: the agency's rule wins. If no: the rule is bad.
Without Chevron deference, if a regulated entity challenges a rule, it works this way:
Part 1. Is the matter resolved unambiguously by legislation? If yes: legislation wins. If no: proceed to Part 2.
Part 2. What's the court's opinion on the matter? That's the rule for this particular instance of the problem, with effectively zero binding authority on other instances of similar problems (e.g. a case on Compound x1 will have no bearing, a priori, on a virtually identical Compound x1.1)
My use of "reasonable" might have made the matter confusing. I think "not reasonably within their mandate" and could be argued "to be reasonably within their mandate" are two very different things, but this is made much cleaner if I simply change reasonably to clearly.
Without Chevron, regulators have to stay within the bounds of the mandate clearly legally granted to them by Congress. With Chevron, they could step far beyond those bounds, so long as there was a "reasonable" argument for it.
Again the example with the CDC makes this very clear. A mandate enabling them to carry out actions "necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases" like testing, inspections, quarantines, and so forth does not clearly (or even reasonably) grant them the right to also prevent evictions. But they could create a "reasonable" argument that, though ambiguous, it should.
With Chevron this ambiguity was up to the regulator to decide themselves. Without Chevron, it's up to the judiciary to decide (if the regulator is sued). So circling back to the point here - the end of Chevron has absolutely 0 impact on the ability of a regulator under the clear mandate to 'ban unsafe plastics' from being able to 'ban unsafe plastics.'
Easiest way to explain is to correct your second paragraph:
> [With or] without Chevron, regulators have to stay within the bounds of the mandate clearly legally granted to them by Congress. With Chevron, they could step far beyond [my interpretation of] those bounds, so long as [a court found the regulator's interpretation was reasonable].
Without Chevron, even if the agency's interpretation is reasonable, the court can just come up with their own interpretation in place of it. This effectively destroys regulators' ability to make rules across broader scopes of scenarios than the ones defined explicitly in legislation (Chemical X != Chemical X.1) or across broader jurisdictions than the ones tested in court (Chemical X can rather easily be disallowed in District 2, allowed in District 5 just based on different judges' interpretations of the specific cases before them, totally divorced from the scientific basis for the ban on the chemical itself).
You seem to be drawing a distinction between whether their interpretation is reasonable versus whether a "reasonable argument could be made" that their interpretation is reasonable. The latter does not exist. The courts only test the former.
You can read how the Chevron test was applied to remove the eviction moratorium because, in fact, it's not up to the regulator to decide themselves. Their interpretation is actually reviewable by the court and will be struck down if found to be unreasonable [1]
> the end of Chevron has absolutely 0 impact on the ability of a regulator under the clear mandate to 'ban unsafe plastics' from being able to 'ban unsafe plastics.'
Lol, if this were true then not one industrial group would care if Chevron stood for eternity. But in fact they're salivating over this decision.
Regulatory agencies do not operate on mandates like 'ban hydroxywhateverazine.' Something that specific would be passed as a law. They all operate on somewhat more broad guidance which is then up to the regulator to implement. The issue that Chevron deals with is what happens when a regulator tries to grab power that is not clearly within that guidance?
Before, with Chevron Deference, the judiciary's power to do anything was extremely limited. If the agency's interpretation of their mandate was "reasonable" then the judiciary was compelled to defer to the regulator. Now, without Chevron Deference, the judiciary can actually play their role as judge once again. It's not hard to see why Chevron Deference was deemed unconstitutional. It's up to the judiciary to judge the law, not politicians and certainly not bureaucrats!
Notably the CDC's eviction moratorium was only overturned by the Supreme Court! Lower courts were obligated to defer to the CDC even in such an arguably absurd interpretation of their mandate.
And you’re apparently not even interested in understanding your own position. The decision I just linked to is from a district court. I.e. no, they actually DO NOT have the obligation that you’re supposing they do.
Care to share your theory why industry groups are so thrilled with this if it has “0 impact” on regulators’ ability to regulate?
> Regulatory agencies do not operate on mandates like 'ban hydroxywhateverazine.'
Yes, in fact they will have to operate via statutes this strict if they don’t want everything to get litigated a million times. That’s sort of the whole point.
Your “ban dangerous plastics” is a hilarious example of this. What do you mean by “ban?” In what contexts? In what concentrations? In what formulations? In what exposure levels?
Okay now what do you mean by “dangerous?” In what contexts? In what concentrations? In what formulations? In what exposure levels?
Previously, regulators could (and did) employ scientists to produce these answers and govern accordingly with published rules that applied nationwide with all such rules subject to judicial review for the “reasonableness” in their statutory basis. Now, courts have to answer these case by case, district by district, scenario by scenario. Great work!
It’s clear from your first comment that you did not know what the Chevron test was and you’re trying to retcon your argument.
To further underline how misled you are on this: SCOTUS actually didn't overturn the moratorium. They upheld it! And no decision at any level was on Constitutional grounds.
I think you should find different sources for your legal analysis.
Well, that's one thing you're right on! I was naive enough to still be reading legacy media on occasion back during COVID, and it was universally, and [in hindsight] typically disingenuously, implied that it was the Supreme Court acting to end the moratorium and not simply upholding lower courts already existing judgements and termination of such. [1] So, thanks for that!
However, that naivete ended not too long thereafter. And indeed Chevron was ended by the Supreme Court on constitutional grounds. The opinion for it is here. [2]
---
Under the Chevron doctrine, courts have sometimes been required to defer to “permissible” agency interpretations of the statutes those agencies administer—even when a reviewing court reads the statute differently
The Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, and courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous; Chevron is overruled.
Article III of the Constitution assigns to the Federal Judiciary the responsibility and power to adjudicate “Cases” and “Controversies”—concrete disputes with consequences for the parties involved. ... As Chief Justice Marshall declared in the foundational decision of Marbury v. Madison, “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”
Good lord. No. Maybe a closer reading of "legacy media" would have served you better than whatever you ended up turning to.
There were two CDC moratoriums that made it to SCOTUS. The first was upheld by SCOTUS, the second was struck down. Neither was upheld nor struck down on Constitutional grounds.
You should also read the Loper Bright decision more closely. Chevron was struck down due to conflict with the Administrative Procedures Act, not the Constitution. The do not say anywhere that Congress cannot (Constitutionally) delegate such authority to the regulatory agencies. They say that Congress did not do such in a way that reconciles its conflict with the APA.
You're rather leaving out the fact that the first was upheld for pragmatic, not legal reasons. Kavanaugh, who cast the deciding vote in favor of the CDC, stated that the CDC had clearly overstepped their bounds, but as the moratorium was set to imminently expire, and the ruling could cause imminent disorder, chose to pragmatically, rather than legally, uphold it. The CDC then shrugged and decided to try to do something similar again after it expired, and summarily lost. The legacy media framed this with quotes such as "A group of right wing extremists just decided to throw families out of their homes during a global pandemic." Yeah, real informative...
The quote I gave regarding the unconstitutionality of Chevon deference was from the Supreme Court opinion. It was both unconstitutional and contradicted previous legalese and precedent. It was a loser on every account.
Yeah, I'm not arguing the propriety of it. I'm arguing that you're not even reading the decisions. It is demonstrably untrue that district courts couldn't review agencies' interpretations of statues, as you've argued several times now.
Again: read more closely. Nowhere does Loper Bright say there was any conflict with the Constitution. Merely citing the Constitution in a decision does not mean the ruling is on Constitutional grounds. It says there was a violation of APA. That's the extent of the ruling.
You misunderstood what Chevron deference is, now you've misunderstood Loper Bright. Find new sources for your legal analysis!
Read more closely? Nowhere does Loper Bright say there was any conflict with the Constitution? A quote (amongst many) literally from the opinion, "I write separately to underscore a more fundamental problem: Chevron deference also violates our Constitution’s separation of powers..."
> A concurring opinion is an opinion that agrees with the majority opinion but does not agree with the rationale behind it. Concurring opinions are not binding [emphasis mine]
If someone files a concurring opinion that they believe it violates the Constitution, that indicates the majority opinion did not find this. That's why they filed a concurring opinion and didn't join the majority opinion, goofball. You can also read the actual majority opinion to learn, in fact, they do not argue that it's unconstitutional, but even using your shortcut it leads to the opposite of your conclusion.
By your logic, the dissenting opinions are also part of the Loper Bright decision, so therefore, Loper Bright says the opposite of what everyone thinks it says:
> Put all that together and deference to the agency is the almost obvious choice, based on an implicit congressional delegation of interpretive authority.
Wait just a second... it turns out that neither concurring nor dissenting opinions are the actual court's decision and its binding opinion, despite being published all on the same document.
Curious ain't it? Thank you for your excellent demonstration of the level of thoughtfulness and general knowledge behind Chevron opposition. I think your alternative media sources have failed you.
>Congress will probably have to pass laws that ban each specific individual compound.
This speak of stupidity/incompetence or most likely corruption, the average ignorant populace is generally to blame, their priorities are never a healthy environment ( unless it's for virtue signalling). There is no hope.
A friend of mine who works in the field says that we make some effort to not remember that glass was a thing for a reason after the epidemy of the plastic from the 60s and 70s
I wish plastic were as easily manageable as asbestos. Asbestos has always been far better contained than plastics — it's basically only ever been used “behind the scenes” in buildings. Now that we've phased out its use, you basically only need to manage asbestos when demolishing or doing extensive work on a building, when those cordoned-off spots become exposed.
Meanwhile plastics have already permeated our environment. Even if we stopped all use today, it would be practically impossible to remove every trace of them from the environment.
My father when young (60s, eastern Europe) was working as a student on road and airport runway construction, working with hot tarmac material. Used heavily-ladden asbestos clothing and gloves. Luckily no mesothelioma till now so he got lucky.
It was really in many places due to its great thermal properties. But plastic permeated everything these days, thats on another few orders of magnitudes higher level.
It seems like 200 years could be an extremely optimistic timeline without major improvements to our technologies used for removing plastic from the environment. At the moment those technologies hardly exist
Removing plastic from the environment has more to do with keeping it out in the first place. Make sure your county has proper recycling facilities and that the waste processing companies deal with plastic responsibly instead of exporting it abroad or burning it.
Is there such thing as proper plastic recycling today? My understanding is that all current generation plastic recycling is basically a scam, minor pilot projects because it is so energy inefficient that you can't possibly do it at small scale, leave alone at the scale of world-wide plastic use.
Even the Petroleum Institute has admitted that previous generations of "recycling" was a scam, but swears that this time it's real, is my understanding of the situation. In fact, I seem to recall speculation that most of the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was "recycled" plastic that had been shipped from the US and Europe to China, then dumped into rivers there and ended up in the Pacific Ocean, because plastic recycling wasn't just a scam, it was actively negative for the environment.
Just to be clear, recycling is good (paper mostly works out, aluminum for sure), but plastic recycling in particular is largely a scam designed to assuage people's guilt at how much plastic they use.
Ultimately, the way to do this is to stop using it unless absolutely necessary and use other alternatives. It's like bugs where fixing the problem before the build stage is orders of magnitude easier than trying to fix the problem once it's been released.
We can't remove it from the environment but we can bury it and we can filter it. We may be able to remove it if we can find compounds to bind with it in the soil. Everything else will be going into a landfill and our water will just be tainted forever (because it goes into the ocean and comes down in rain). So start investing in water filtration companies, in addition to the companies that will own all the water rights.
How would you possible bury it if it's distributed throughout the environment and biosphere extremely evenly from the top of Mt. Everest to the bottom of the Mariana's trench to inside your testicles and brain?
Bury everything currently on the surface of the planet and replace it with material from underground?
We can't filter water at the scale necessary. Also, when you bury it, it's going into the water cycle unless you enclose it like a landfill. That's not realistic. It also means the plastic would need to be processed at that landfill to prevent it from eventually entering the water cycle as well (once the landfill is EOL and the lining erodes).
The earth doesn't filter the byproducts out. Burying isn't a solution. It also doesn't address the behemoth scale of plastics already in the environment which will continue to release byproducts into our water.
Totally, and I hope we care to make this happen. If we cared to, I think we could solve it much faster than 200 years. My doubt is more so about our perceived incentives and will to focus on it. We've solved some insane problems, and while I know virtually nothing about this stuff, my intuition here is that solving plastics problems is likely simpler (chemically and logistically) than, say, sending rockets to space and creating nuclear reactors. I know it's more complicated than it appears on the surface (we have heaps of plastic and its byproducts in a dozen types of forms, in all different biomes, in all stages of decay, and countless byproducts under the same conditions... On a global scale), but other problems we've solved have been multifaceted too.
Maybe what we need is a strong will to solve the problem, no lobbying to prevent the funding of the necessary research or restrictions on creation of plastics, and so on. Similar to how the space race and nuclear programs more or less got all of the money, resources, and agency required to get the job done.
It seems like the reality with plastic is we've become insanely good at making it, but nowhere near as good at dealing with its externalities. We can get better at it.
many organisms are eating plastics, but that is not good for us at all in the short term.
A study ? bedford institute? from a while back reported that plastics that they were collecting from the ocean, were full of holes from bieng eaten by something, and if you think about plastic as a widly distrubuted, easily broken down substance with very high intrinsic energy content, that it's no surprise at all that things are eating it. But back to us, thats bad, because all.of those things eating plastic, are then eaten, and passed up the food chain to us, at the top.
So what we need to know, is how far advanced the process of filling the food chain with, undesirable for us substances, is, and what the future looks like if we just shrug, or how long will the system take to clear itself out.
ie: is the biosphere "saturated" or not.
If not, what is the max concentration that we can expect, and when
What if there are negative byproducts of this process though? It's a leap to conclude that we're fine. Consider that we'd be placing a lot of food for fungi into the environment, in places they shouldn't be, which would likely disrupt those environments... And also, the fungi likely can't live in every place the plastic is. Deep sea, deserts, alpine, etc.
It's extremely difficult to avoid exposure to these plastics. I started buying "pthalate free" bath products only to learn there if the bottle that holds them is plastic, then you're still getting exposed to pthalates. Most foods are exposed to these plasicizers as well, especially meats and dairy.
It's pretty crazy how bad for us meat/dairy is in a huge variety of ways yet people hand wave away most of the issues.
Antibiotics usage is still a huge issue in beef/dairy. Environmental destruction is still a huge issue in beef/dairy. Hormone exposure thru beef/dairy is still an issue. Etc. Etc.
I think in some countries people understand all these issues and some do change their behavior, but it takes much longer than you would assume (reference: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-consumpti... - note the peak consumption is in the past).
On the other hand you might downplay how bad can be for some people to totally eliminating meat/dairy. I know a couple of examples that had big issues with iron deficiency due to that. Pills didn't work for years, while restarting eating for a couple of months meat fixed all their health issues.
I do agree though that people eat way more than they need, but probably it is not only meat related (also sugar, carbs and others).
Antibiotic residue in milk is highly regulated, at least in the USA. When we treat a dairy cow with antibiotics (to cure an infection and save it's life) we don't/can't sell it's milk for several days after the end of the round of antibiotics.
How else am I supposed to get swole? I buy my meat from local butchers. Getting 200g of protein from vegetables and lentils and stuff would be impossible.
You both are correct. You need tons of protein to gain and maintain that huge muscle mass when you do bodybuilding. 200 ain't even so extreme compared to many, especially in the past.
The idea that such intake will not fuck you up later is naive. Due to all the healthy stuff that you do with and around weightlifting your health state is most probably stellar compared to same you not doing any sport, so you build a 'health margin' or whatever we can call it. But it still fucks you up, just different parts of the body.
Unless thats how you earn money and thus have to do it, I very politely suggest moving down 2 notches in intensity (if its for women they will still adore you, if compensating for some bad childhood stuff this ain't the best solution anyway). Either add more endurance if you feel not doing enough or another sport, more endurance is anyway supremely usable in all aspects of life. But as said that's just a polite suggestion for optimizing for truly long term health.
Czesc jajko dzieki za komentarz. I used bodybuilding as a catch all but what I am really doing is doing heavy strength training alongside muay thai/grappling. Either way, still need the protein. I would like to long term focus on cardio with only basic weight lifting once I hit my strength goals, so I agree with you.
That's fine, but bodybuilding is recreational with the exception of a very small number of people who are professional bodybuilders. Human beings don't _need_ to have 200g of protein per day. Assuming you're not a professional or don't have a job where large muscle mass is an absolute requirement, the excess protein intake is something you _want_ so that you can enjoy your hobby.
To be clear, you should continue to eat as much meat as you want - it's your life! There are tons of advantages to strength training and bodybuilding, and I am not trying to diminish any of that.
But what I can't agree on is that it's ethical to consume that much daily protein unless you truly need it. That level of meat consumption has very real impacts - it is literally unsustainable for a significant number of people to consume excess protein entirely from meat.
You point out that this behavior is unethical and in the same breath you say they should keep doing it. I'm having trouble reconciling these two statements, or thinking of examples of when unethical behavior should be encouraged[0]. Perhaps it should be "you *can* continue to eat as much meat as you want" instead of "you should [...]"? That way it acknowledges their agency and our inability to prevent their actions, without condoning them.
[0] so far the closest I've come is "perhaps in retaliation against an earlier injustice"
I get about 80 grams from protein powder (whey), another 20 from eggs, another 20-50 from yoghurt, and another 50-60 from a chicken breast/fish (200-300g worth). I get all my eggs and meat locally as I live in the boonies. You are being deliberately obtuse assuming I get 200 grams from only meat. This would wreck my bowels.
Cheers for the lecture though, I think I'll up it to 300 grams just from your comment alone.
>it is literally unsustainable for a significant number of people to consume excess protein entirely from meat
When the billionaires give up their profits I'll trade in my single daily unsustainable chicken breast.
For a lot of the foods on the list, the DEHP, BPA, etc., come from the packaging materials.
So, for example, Whole Foods organic grass fed beef appears to be very high in DEHP...if you get it in the plastic wrap container, but would have almost none if wrapped in wax paper (note: not the same thing as parchment paper). Similarly, a lot of restaurant to-go orders will test high for endocrine disruptors because they come in plastic containers, but would be low in these chemicals if tested at the restaurant.
I remember when this link went around that this 1% column didn't really quite make sense. 1% makes it sound like it's well within the limit, even if you ate 10 in-n-out cheeseburgers a day.
I guess the question is, at what percent of the "tolerable daily intake" of DEHP do very bad side effects (like the heart issues in this post) start to occur?
I mean yeah, the creators of PlasticList explicitly stated that they didn't change their eating habits based on their findings. Perhaps plastic contamination of food just isn't a huge issue in developed countries.
Yeah, most of the comments here are crap. The regulation for this stuff (and there are so many it's stupid) started in "the west" around 1999 and is pretty complete post 2022. Remember when polycarbonate water bottles were a thing, when they took chemicals out of kids toys and couches? That was all bad, but virgin PET, PP, silicone, and HDPE don't really leach plasticizers. That's WHY they're used. Really, this borders on a 25 year human clinical trial on South America, Africa, and SE Asia... well maybe we can measure reintroduction to the US now that corruption is a thing and regulation or rule of law is out the window. Thanks, Obama.
Yeah, they have "BPA Free" polycarbonate now, since that's what was regulated. I still wouldn't use it, there's many better cheaper alternatives, unless you're just importing it without testing? At least they're labeling it as PC?!?
Mostly, don't get your polycarbonate hot.
To be clear, if you're really worried about plastic, you can't use paper or aluminum containers either since they're coated. It's glass only, but no mason jars or screw caps since those have silicone seals. Seal it with wax/cork.
> features an amorphous silicon dioxide coating that's infused into the inner-wall of the bottle. Essentially, this forms a glass-like finish that provides a totally natural, and completely inert, solution to the problem
"glass-like" != glass
Dollars to doughnuts that coating is spray lined. Which means some sort of solvent, at a minimum. And I'm unaware of any way to fuse silica at temperatures under which plastic would survive, so it's a coating with a binder (dissolved in the solvent) which can still be damaged, scratched, leach or flake off into the water.
I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. Glass, stainless steel (316 please), or ceramics for me.
Yes, most cans are lined with plastic, but some are lined with tin, which I consider safe enough. And cans of pineapple are often lined with zinc, which I consider safe enough. Unfortunately, the only way to tell which cans have these tin and zinc linings is to buy one, open it, empty it and look at the lining.
Also, Eden Foods uses cans linings free of phthalates:
"These recent regulatory measures reflect a growing awareness of the harmful effects of DEHP. However, it is notable that many of these regulations were not in place at the time of data acquisition for the present study and their effect is not reflected in our results." (pg 11)
We are seeing results from pre-regulation era in this data.
Obama's administration passed regulations on the most well-known endocrine disrupters in 2016. They wanted to include more on the list of regulated chemicals, but the chemical industry's GOP buddies blocked that.
So basically you're blaming Obama for not managing to do something perfectly. Are you part of the "all or nothing" camp of policymaking?
The U.S. Constitution, as amended in the wake of FDR, does not permit someone to run for a 3rd term. As a constitutional scholar, Obama had no interest in creating a constitutional conflict that could tear this country apart.
It's nonsensical to blame him for something he couldn't, and wouldn't, do.
Reports like this on the dangers of DEHP is exactly why I started work on NeutraOat (https://neutraoat.com/), a modified oat fiber supplement designed to trap plasticizers in your gut before they can get into your bloodstream. The idea is to give people an easy, safe way to avoid absorbing plasticizers that you've ingested.
I just use my microwave to boil and drink a couple tablespoons of ground barley with a sweetener, beta glucan is amazing and hulled barley is awesome, cheap and higher in beta glucan than oats.
Solved every gastro issue I've ever had, humans co-evolved with barley and it's awesome. No modifications needed.
Not a bad idea for your health, but it won't trap plasticizers. We're modifying the beta glucan to have many tiny, "sticky" pores to trap the chemicals in the gut, so they go out with the rest of the beta glucan. Pure beta glucan, whether from oats or barley, won't have much effect.
Based on everything I know about the mechanism of action and the impact of dietary fiber in general on microplastic adsorption I would need to see a study with protocols and raw data published to be convinced that barley is lacking and your solution is superior but I'm open to it.
Hulled Barley is a combination of both IDF and SDF's, that study is for DF across the board. Frankly a barley drink made with unfiltered french press coffee would probably be the single best/easiest validated drink for reducing absorption of microplastics and heavy metals.
But it is an under researched area for sure.
edit because I can't reply: the above paper I linked references coffee grounds and MP.
So you eat both, have ground barley with something to make it more palatable and cook with hulled barley in meals? Seems like it's a better solution than psyllium fiber.
I grind hulled barley to a powder and then boil it with RO water in the microwave. Total cook time in my microwave for the ~2tbl I consume is 2 minutes and 10 seconds.
I put in a little stevia/monk fruit for taste.
Because the end result is basically a thickened drink with a rather neutral flavor I'll often throw in my 3rd shot of espresso for the day or just drink it as is while still hot.
A lot of cultures that are long lived tend to have barley based drinks but of course isolating barley's effect is a fools errand, it's just correlation at best.
I started playing with barley for a "cream of wheat" esq experience, which was actually way better than cream of wheat or oats but I found that the water absorption of barley is so high that for gastro purposes it's more consistent to add enough water that it remains a drink.
The upside bonus is that due to the mechanism of action you can start with very low volumes of barley and it doesn't give you gastro distress the way other types of fiber supplementation can, basically the soluble fiber slows down the movement of food through the intestines giving your gut more digestive time to create a homogenous, gelled slurry making the defection process closer to ideal texture.
I now also spend far less time on the toilet and it only takes 2 minutes and a single hot beverage every morning.
One other positive side effect is I've found that my overall hydration stays more consistent as well.
Thanks for the info! I'm always using psyllium but reading more and hearing about barley it seems like combining the two for my morning and evening drink might be the way to go.
Sounds good! I used to worry about insoluble fiber more but barley's been very effective for me so I dropped psyllium, it's method of action is improves fermentation so it definitely takes a few weeks to normalize everything. I found that with supplementing with insoluble fiber (psyllium) food was moving through my digestion too fast.
We're still prototyping and testing, but you'll probably have to eat it twice a day to get complete coverage. It needs to be in the gut at the same time as the plasticizer to have any effect.
How likely (perhaps as a percentage) do you think it is that your product will work as described? I'd be interested in taking it, assuming that's all it does is remove plasticizers and not a bunch of good things, and otherwise is mostly inert.
I've tried hard to remove phthalates from my life. The biggest change that I feel is sustainable is looking for "hard" plastics. Usually phthalates are found in flexible, soft plastics. So hard plastics typically have less of them.
My suspicion is that the use of plastics with food is also the main contributor to the fertility crisis (declining sperm counts, etc) we have. Wouldn't be surprised that this then also contributes, through sperm quality degradation, to the increase in autism.
And it isn't just my suspicion, see links below, but we haven't yet forcefully moved away from plastics around food. If RF Kennedy could do one thing, I would ask him to focus on plastics and food, rather than the more nutty stuff.
Side bonus: it may help raise the low fertility rate that Trump and Elon are so concerned about as well.
Is autism actually on the rise, or is it just more diagnosed thanks to advances in and availability of diagnoses and general awareness in the population?
A lot of people that get a fresh autism diagnosis these days recognize the same symptoms in their (grand)parents.
> The new research being shared this week found that only mild cases rose from 2000 to 2016.
> According to the analysis, 1.2 out of 1,000 children had autism with moderate or significant impairment in 2016, compared with 1.5 out of 1,000 in 2000. By contrast, mild cases rose 139% during that period — from 3.1 out of 1,000 to 7.3 out of 1,000.
I did some research on this a while back, conclusion is far from certain. There are some clear pointers to increased diagnosis (changes to the definition of autism in later DSM versions, improved awareness and access to literature), but there are also studies that indicate an increase in the number of cases. It’s impossible to be sure what’s driving this: pollutants, increased average parental age, or some other factor.
Given that autism is highly heritable, most experts are sceptical of the idea that environmental factors could drive a major increase in the numbers, although again, it could be the case that genetics predicts only predisposition towards autism, rather than the condition itself.
A lot of wiffle to say “we don’t know”, but if there is a genuine increase in the incidence of autism in the population for etiological reasons, it’s relatively small.
It could easily turn out to be a not very severe problem, like "Use rayon instead of polyester for your clothing" or "No more styrofoam, because styrene monomer offgassing in your lungs"; The issue is that without a lot of dedicated study (probably animal studies into the millions of individual-exposure-years) we wouldn't even know. These things are too ubiquitous in modern life to readily separate them from us with careful non-experimental study design.
"The duke was highly introverted and well known for his eccentricity; he did not want to meet people and never invited anyone to his home. He employed hundreds through his various construction projects, and though well paid, the employees were not allowed to speak to him or acknowledge him. The one worker who raised his hat to the duke was promptly dismissed. The tenants on his estates were aware of his wishes and knew they were required to ignore him if they passed by. His rooms had double letterboxes, one for in-coming and another for out-going mail. Only his valet was permitted to see him in person in his quarters—he would not even let the doctor in, while his tenants and workmen received all their instructions in writing."
"The underground chambers—all of which were painted pink—included a great hall 160 ft (49 m) long and 63 ft (19 m) wide, which was originally intended as a chapel, but which was instead used as a picture gallery and occasionally as a ballroom. The ballroom reportedly had a hydraulic lift that could carry 20 guests from the surface and a ceiling that was painted as a giant sunset. The duke never organised any dances in the ballroom."
We'd diagnose this guy in a heartbeat now, but then, he was "eccentric". If he'd been poor and not an aristocrat, he'd have been a "moron" or "retarded" or something along those lines.
It's deeply odd to see Kennedy saying it's a new phenomenon. His own aunt was lobotomized for "becoming increasingly irritable and difficult".
Huh? First off autism rates are provable increasing in the US. It is multi-factor for sure that includes increased awareness and more access to autism tests, but...
It is a proven fact that older fathers have a higher change of having offspring with autism [1] and it is also a fact that in the US (as like many places in the world) men are having their children later [2]. Together these two accepted scientific facts lead directly to increasing autism rates, no? Or do you disagree with this reasoning?
The link I am positing but there isn't quite as much acceptance is that sperm degradation that leads to autism, isn't only caused by age but also influenced by plastics.
> First off autism rates are provable increasing in the US.
Yes. That's what happens when you make a brand new label. (And then redefine it a few times; Asperger's used to be separate, now it's part of the spectrum. Or when we started realizing that, say, women are underdiagnosed with it and started working to address that.)
Rates of female "hysteria" are at an all-time low, for similar reasons.
> It is a proven fact that older fathers have a higher change of having offspring with autism…
Which could be just because of biological changes from their age, or environmental exposures during that time, but also could have other explanations, like autistic people having a harder time on average finding long-term partners.
Why? The rise in autism diagnoses is not the same thing as a rise in autism.
We've had plenty of autistic people all along. We just called it different things. They're the "weird uncle" or "idiot savant" or the guy who went off to live in a silent monastery of eras past. Insane asylums. Or they wandered off at age three into a snowstorm in an era where baby gates weren't a thing.
Autism is quite literally what we define it to be: there’s no physiological or neurological test we can use to diagnose it, there’s no biomarker that defines autism.
If we change how we diagnose autism, we change how we define it.
The evidence by the way seems to indicate that there is a significant increase in diagnoses, and not all of that can be attributed to changing definitions.
> If we change how we diagnose autism, we change how we define it.
But the incredibly obvious corollary to this is "you can't then turn around and compare case rates before and after that definition". You can't go back to the 1400s and reassess cases of witchcraft and demonic possession to get an accurate, modernly-accurate rate of autistic people in that era to compare against.
RFK Jr. is out there saying things like "autism epidemic" and implying the cases come out of nowhere, when many of those cases are just changing a diagnosis code on an existing condition.
Simpler version: We didn't see bacteria until 1676, and didn't give them a name until 1828… but it would be deeply wrong to claim no one got bacterial infections prior to that.
A bacterial infection is an objectively verifiable condition. You can see the bacteria under a strong enough microscope. There’s no such definitive way to diagnose autism, it’s diagnosed based on the definition we came up with to describe a cluster of symptoms.
If everyone dismissed the increase in diagnosed bacterial infections as due to the discovery of bacteria, a lot of medical research into diseases like TB would have stalled.
It is worth looking at the increase in diagnoses to understand if there is some kind of underlying mechanism (for example parental age or environmental pollutants for autism) which could explain it rather than just dismissing it as an illusion, especially if we don’t understand the underlying cause of autism.
RFKs rhetoric is clearly unhelpful and aimed at targeting autistic people, but the idea that “we have more people diagnosed with this condition than we ever had before, is there something to it beyond just relabelling?” is a valuable starting point for research.
Caution is warranted (vaccines causing autism, despite being completely debunked, is an example of how NOT to research something like this), but throwing the baby out with the bathwater helps no one.
"The term autism was first introduced by Eugen Bleuler in his description of schizophrenia in 1911. The diagnosis of schizophrenia was broader than its modern equivalent; autistic children were often diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia."
But autism is what we say it is (until we understand better and find some kind of absolute test).
A bacterial infection doesn’t care what we think it is.
Anyway it feels almost like the crux of what you’re saying now is “cases of autism have increased because we define autism differently now”. This is true, and I don’t disagree.
I objected to your suggestion that the increase in cases is largely illusory because it discards possible environmental factors, and encourages people to “stop looking”.
I don’t agree with demonisation of autistic people, but I do think trying to better understand autism and its causes is useful.
If there is an objective definition of autism, I am not aware of it.
> Yes. I've been saying that all along.
The increase in case numbers - and the inferred conclusion that something environmental has changed to cause that - is an illusion.
This has as little evidence to support it as the idea that autism increases are being caused by something environmental.
> They also found that the increase in students diagnosed with autism was offset by a nearly equal decrease in students diagnosed with other intellectual disabilities that often co-occur with autism.
> The researchers conclude that the large increase in the prevalence of autism is likely the result of shifting patterns of diagnosis that are complicated by the variability of autism and its overlap with other related disorders.
> Recent reports from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggest that there has been an increase in the prevalence of autism from 1 in 5,000 in 1975 to 1 in 150 in 2002, and to 1 in 68 in 2012. Much of this increase has been attributed to increased awareness and a broadening of the diagnostic criteria for autism. But this new research provides the first direct evidence that much of the increase may be attributable merely to a reclassification of individuals with related neurological disorders rather than to an actual increase in the rate of new cases of autism.
> The diagnostic reclassification of individuals from the category of intellectual disability to the category of autism accounts for a large proportion of the change, which varied depending on the age of the children. The researchers estimate that, for 8 year-olds, approximately 59 percent of the observed increase in autism is accounted for by reclassification, but by age 15 reclassification accounts for as much as 97 percent of the increase in autism.
If you search for declining sperm counts you'll find that the evidence is all over the place. It makes a good headline, but studies have it dropping, rising, staying stable.
There's no real evidence that people are having a harder time having babies at the same ages they did traditionally. The fertility rate is a social problem, probably (I guess it could be chemically induced behavior)
There is a lot of evidence that fertility, especially male, is dropping. This isnt societal. The actual fertility rate of sperm has been measured to be dropping.
This isn't "people aren't having kids." It's "male sperm is less fertile".
This is in addition to societal trends in developed countries to have less kids.
There are a number of studies. I wouldn't call that a lot of evidence, because they don't agree on the results. And, because the methodology changes over time, it's probably just not possible to say that there is evidence of change between pre and post-90s papers.
There need to be more studies of higher quality to actually establish what is happening. It's really not clear right now that anything is happening, and, if it is, if it's even a problem.
It is a weird caveat in that study that sort of makes it a tautology:
“We found that at least in men with no known fertility challenges, sperm counts are largely stable and haven't changed significantly in the last few years, which is reassuring news."
It is a weird exclusion. I response I would ask then if the number of males with fertility issues, and thus excluded, are increasing or also stable.
They answer that at the end: "“We didn't track men who were fertile who became infertile. I think based upon the literature so far, that might be the case due to obesity or environmental exposures, and more research is needed to definitively answer that question."
This is both disturbing and sadly unsurprising. Phthalates have been on the radar for years, but seeing a number like 365 000 deaths in one year really drives home the scale of the issue. What's frustrating is that these chemicals are everywhere: in stuff we touch daily, often without even realizing it.
> In their new analysis, the authors estimated that DEHP exposure contributed to 368,764 deaths, or more than 10% of all global mortality from heart disease in 2018 among men and women aged 55 through 64.
Given the US VP's concern about low domestic birth rates, Maybe there is a way to link this to stuff conservatives care about enough to override big business' interests. Probably not though. Sigh.
People will look back in 50 years and say "You know they used to say that packaging all food in plastic was fine? Even though the science said otherwise?"
I used to work as a bench tech at a defense contractor (microwave equipment).
Every tech had a little bottle on their bench, with a special lid, that would have a small amount of liquid always in it (you'd pump it, to bring up more liquid). These bottles are still used, today.
This was for removing solder flux. Worked great.
At the end of each row of tech benches, was a red bucket, full of the same stuff. We'd use that to wash entire boards.
If you got the liquid on your skin, it made the skin turn white, and flake off.
Smelled like acetone had a one-night-stand with gasoline.
The liquid was trichlor[0] (not the pool kind).
Our management swore that it was perfectly safe, and that we could even drink it.
The industry started with carbontet (CTC), they replaced it in the 70s with the perchlor stuff you're describing (PCE) in the 80s, then with Trichlorethylene (TCE) in the early 90s, which in turn was replaced with (TCA) Trichlorethane and now all the chlorinated stuff is gone (along with the PCB industry). There's still isopropyl and GBL butyrolactone (which is regulated as a precursor to GHB) for degreasing.
Back in the 60s carbontet was used everywhere (dry cleaning and industrial) and there are superfund sites in Happy Tx and Alabama.
Everyone has seen the walk through dry cleaning right?
https://youtu.be/WbkfkcSiYcI
We're literally 60 years since the first regulation. And your local dry cleaner was leaking chlorinated solvents into the 80s. Now the cleanup for old gas stations is mostly complete, but the new MTBE stuff is nasty!
1,1,1-trichloroethane doesn't seem particularly toxic - "probable carcinogen", some neurological and liver effects but I'd say it's probably still safer than e.g. isopropyl alcohol which definitely leads to neurological issues long-term. The reason it's banned is because of the ozone layer, not because it's unsafe to individual humans.
The problem is, there's real benefits to using plastics for all sorts of things, foodstuff packaging included. Human lives are demonstrably longer than they were in developed countries where plastics are regularly used. It'd be interesting to see if you could quantify how long the average person's life has been extended/made better because of polymers.
Could we go back to wax paper, glass bottles, metal tins, and the like? Maybe, but that comes with its own challenges, from spoilage to metals contamination to transport weight.
>Heart disease deaths worldwide linked to chemical widely used in plastics
First thing I thought of is how much DEHP is used is the hospital, including for medical devices implanted in the heart. Such as pacemakers, catheters, stents and valves.
DEHP as a component is something like 30% of flexible tubing used in a hospital setting.
Phthalates leach because they aren't integrated with the base plastic by design - that's how they work. Phthalates sit in between the polymer chains (such as PET), rather than being bonded to them, which is precisely what affords that material flexibility, and also why they leach so easily.
On a similar note, we had the big push towards "BPA-free" plastic a few years ago. Manufacturers just replaced the BPA with related bisphenols like BPF which is probably just as bad as BPA and BPS which is probably worse than BPA.
My neighbor, a retired chemist, said it is just a game of whack a mole.
This is what happens when you allow companies to dump unvetted, novel, synthetic chemicals into products and packaging. Especially when the audience for those products has substantially less information than the companies who produce them en masse.
>audience for those products has substantially less information
I assure you, they will not do anything with the information even if they had it.
Convenience trumps every other consideration including safety.
I resent this framing as being entirely about short-sighted consumers valuing convenience. surely it has quite a bit to do with cost as well, both for the producer to increase their margins and also the end consumer. alot of it has to do with choice. the market presents very few non-plastic options in cases where plastic will do fine. so yes, convenience in the 'i hate to buy this plastic thing, but I dont have a week to find someone in estonia that still makes quality goods by hand and then wait for it to be shipped to me' sense
>I resent this framing as being entirely about short-sighted consumers valuing convenience.
Your resentment is not valid. The switch to plastics did not happen overnight. There used a lot more choices in the past. Common people increasingly chose plastics over a period of time. ( or rather were lazy) Your resentment can be rephrased as - "I cannot come to terms with the fact that common people really are that stupid".
Freedoms in various forms are generally not taken away overnight. As they say "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"
Their resentment is completely valid.
Did you read comment above because yours does not not address the response at all (and you are wrong in that context).
Again, dude above is saying clearly that the issue is man man, we did this, it's not a natural disaster, so there is no one to blame but ourselves, pretending it was an outside power that did this to you is not valid.
>Did you read comment above
I sure did, thanks. Did you read convolvatron's? Because "pretending it was an outside power that did this to you" is not what they said.
In normally functioning society there are built in protection mechanisms that shield general population from such harm, as much as possible of course. FDA for US for example.
You can't expect every citizen to have 20 phds and actively keep searching for all potential harm from all sides, even you, whoever you are, are not keeping up with it all, thats a fact.
It can be tackled trivially, albeit it will create some business friction - you introduce a novel chemical in your product on our market? Please here is the substantial checklist of tests that you need to pass to be allowed. Otherwise please use approved stuff or bye, be it chinese sweatshop or apple. People like trump with their elephant-in-porcelaine-shop approach could be the force of good if they focused ie on such topics with their ferocity. But they do exact opposite (cash flow uber alles, fuck non-ultra-high-net-worth plebs its their fault for being poor and dumb subhumans).
So please a bit less of that high horse and more empathy and reason, absolute capitalism with disregard of individuals is what gave us marxism and communism as response, not the path we want or need to go down in 21st century for any reason.
Eating/drinking out of plastic has been known to be bad from day one, ingesting plastic is a bad idea so eating out of and with plastic is also obviously not great, no PhD necessary for that conclusion.
Your saying people need a PhD to know to not eat plastics? Wow, you must think people are even dumber that dude above
>In normally functioning society there are built in protection mechanisms that shield general population from such harm,
Give me a single example. (You will find none.)
>It can be tackled trivially
Agreed, but it won't happen. ( I 'll leave you to figure out why it doesn't happen)
>FDA for US for example.
They are largely ineffective, if you have looked at them closely. There might be a few exceptions though.
>So please a bit less of that high horse and more empathy and reason
Great words, and quite a bit of virtue signalling. Have you observed the common person in USA? Netflix channels, tiktok, or some reality show, matter to them more than their health.
Look, I understand your sentiment but it does not gel with the reality I observe. Collectively we face the consequences of what the vast majority wants, or in this case neglects. You can either come to terms with it, or you can project your annoyance at me for stating it.
You are correct, people just get mad when they have to face the consequences their own actions.
Eating (with) plastic was known to be a bad idea by everyone from day one, we do it because we don't care until something goes wrong for us personally.
It is also what happens when you pass dumb laws with no consideration of second order effects. If you want to ban bad plastics, mandate a safe alternative.
> If you want to ban bad plastics, mandate a safe alternative.
Not always possible, is it? I mean there must have been a time before plastics?
For most of this stuff, we had something - glass. Companies lobbied against it because they had to build in recycling costs, and I assume its more expensive to ship.
The shipping issue is entirely new. There are generations alive today that survived without fresh fruit imported from across the globe.
And pre-emptively ban new materials and outlaw attempts to innovate?
You can still synthesize new chemicals, but you have to run studies and receive informed consent from subjects before dumping it in the wider world.
Yes, but I'd reframe as preemptively get permission before use. Maybe an automatic approval with appropriate testing. Allow innovation, but add some layer of accountability.
Expect no improvement in the short-to-medium term.
I would also add long term. Often one dangerous substance is replaced with another.
And it doesn't help that our only practical lever for improvement was recently eliminated by SCOTUS.
Under the Chevron Doctrine, Congress could pass a law that broadly bans all chemicals like these and then the agencies could react to new studies like this and push out new rules as we learn more and as companies attempt workarounds.
But with that tool gone, there's basically no chance of this ever getting fixed. Congress will probably have to pass laws that ban each specific individual compound. Good luck with that!
What you're describing would still be 100% possible. Chevron deference specifically applied when agencies tried to expand powers in ways that were not reasonably within their mandate. For a very high profile recent example when the CDC tried to expand the expired COVID related eviction moratorium, they did so under a section of the public health services act that granted them the power to carry out measures "necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases."
Claiming that banning evictions falls under there is a rather 'creative' interpretation, but it was initially allowed due to Chevon deference where judges were obligated to defer to the interpretations of regulatory agencies.
If an agency is tasked with the 'prohibition of plastics, or related compounds, deemed reasonably likely to be harmful' then they would be fully capable of doing just that. With Chevron Deference they probably could then expand that mandate to then do something like claim regulatory authority over beaches owing to prohibited plastic waste washing ashore, but without it that would probably require a new law since that's clearly an unintended expansion of power.
> Chevron deference specifically applied when agencies tried to expand powers in ways that were not reasonably within their mandate
Not true. And I mean literally definitionally not true. Chevron deference only applies (definitionally) when the agency's interpretation is reasonable.
With Chevron deference, if a regulated entity challenged a rule, the court applied a two part test:
Part 1. Is the matter resolved unambiguously by legislation? If yes: legislation wins. If no: proceed to Part 2.
Part 2. Is the agency's interpretation of the legislation reasonable? If yes: the agency's rule wins. If no: the rule is bad.
Without Chevron deference, if a regulated entity challenges a rule, it works this way:
Part 1. Is the matter resolved unambiguously by legislation? If yes: legislation wins. If no: proceed to Part 2.
Part 2. What's the court's opinion on the matter? That's the rule for this particular instance of the problem, with effectively zero binding authority on other instances of similar problems (e.g. a case on Compound x1 will have no bearing, a priori, on a virtually identical Compound x1.1)
My use of "reasonable" might have made the matter confusing. I think "not reasonably within their mandate" and could be argued "to be reasonably within their mandate" are two very different things, but this is made much cleaner if I simply change reasonably to clearly.
Without Chevron, regulators have to stay within the bounds of the mandate clearly legally granted to them by Congress. With Chevron, they could step far beyond those bounds, so long as there was a "reasonable" argument for it.
Again the example with the CDC makes this very clear. A mandate enabling them to carry out actions "necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases" like testing, inspections, quarantines, and so forth does not clearly (or even reasonably) grant them the right to also prevent evictions. But they could create a "reasonable" argument that, though ambiguous, it should.
With Chevron this ambiguity was up to the regulator to decide themselves. Without Chevron, it's up to the judiciary to decide (if the regulator is sued). So circling back to the point here - the end of Chevron has absolutely 0 impact on the ability of a regulator under the clear mandate to 'ban unsafe plastics' from being able to 'ban unsafe plastics.'
Again: no.
Easiest way to explain is to correct your second paragraph:
> [With or] without Chevron, regulators have to stay within the bounds of the mandate clearly legally granted to them by Congress. With Chevron, they could step far beyond [my interpretation of] those bounds, so long as [a court found the regulator's interpretation was reasonable].
Without Chevron, even if the agency's interpretation is reasonable, the court can just come up with their own interpretation in place of it. This effectively destroys regulators' ability to make rules across broader scopes of scenarios than the ones defined explicitly in legislation (Chemical X != Chemical X.1) or across broader jurisdictions than the ones tested in court (Chemical X can rather easily be disallowed in District 2, allowed in District 5 just based on different judges' interpretations of the specific cases before them, totally divorced from the scientific basis for the ban on the chemical itself).
You seem to be drawing a distinction between whether their interpretation is reasonable versus whether a "reasonable argument could be made" that their interpretation is reasonable. The latter does not exist. The courts only test the former.
You can read how the Chevron test was applied to remove the eviction moratorium because, in fact, it's not up to the regulator to decide themselves. Their interpretation is actually reviewable by the court and will be struck down if found to be unreasonable [1]
> the end of Chevron has absolutely 0 impact on the ability of a regulator under the clear mandate to 'ban unsafe plastics' from being able to 'ban unsafe plastics.'
Lol, if this were true then not one industrial group would care if Chevron stood for eternity. But in fact they're salivating over this decision.
Care to share your theory for why that is?
[1]: https://clearinghouse.net/doc/112509/
Regulatory agencies do not operate on mandates like 'ban hydroxywhateverazine.' Something that specific would be passed as a law. They all operate on somewhat more broad guidance which is then up to the regulator to implement. The issue that Chevron deals with is what happens when a regulator tries to grab power that is not clearly within that guidance?
Before, with Chevron Deference, the judiciary's power to do anything was extremely limited. If the agency's interpretation of their mandate was "reasonable" then the judiciary was compelled to defer to the regulator. Now, without Chevron Deference, the judiciary can actually play their role as judge once again. It's not hard to see why Chevron Deference was deemed unconstitutional. It's up to the judiciary to judge the law, not politicians and certainly not bureaucrats!
Notably the CDC's eviction moratorium was only overturned by the Supreme Court! Lower courts were obligated to defer to the CDC even in such an arguably absurd interpretation of their mandate.
Again: you’re wrong.
And you’re apparently not even interested in understanding your own position. The decision I just linked to is from a district court. I.e. no, they actually DO NOT have the obligation that you’re supposing they do.
Care to share your theory why industry groups are so thrilled with this if it has “0 impact” on regulators’ ability to regulate?
> Regulatory agencies do not operate on mandates like 'ban hydroxywhateverazine.'
Yes, in fact they will have to operate via statutes this strict if they don’t want everything to get litigated a million times. That’s sort of the whole point.
Your “ban dangerous plastics” is a hilarious example of this. What do you mean by “ban?” In what contexts? In what concentrations? In what formulations? In what exposure levels?
Okay now what do you mean by “dangerous?” In what contexts? In what concentrations? In what formulations? In what exposure levels?
Previously, regulators could (and did) employ scientists to produce these answers and govern accordingly with published rules that applied nationwide with all such rules subject to judicial review for the “reasonableness” in their statutory basis. Now, courts have to answer these case by case, district by district, scenario by scenario. Great work!
It’s clear from your first comment that you did not know what the Chevron test was and you’re trying to retcon your argument.
To further underline how misled you are on this: SCOTUS actually didn't overturn the moratorium. They upheld it! And no decision at any level was on Constitutional grounds.
I think you should find different sources for your legal analysis.
Well, that's one thing you're right on! I was naive enough to still be reading legacy media on occasion back during COVID, and it was universally, and [in hindsight] typically disingenuously, implied that it was the Supreme Court acting to end the moratorium and not simply upholding lower courts already existing judgements and termination of such. [1] So, thanks for that!
However, that naivete ended not too long thereafter. And indeed Chevron was ended by the Supreme Court on constitutional grounds. The opinion for it is here. [2]
---
Under the Chevron doctrine, courts have sometimes been required to defer to “permissible” agency interpretations of the statutes those agencies administer—even when a reviewing court reads the statute differently
The Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, and courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous; Chevron is overruled.
Article III of the Constitution assigns to the Federal Judiciary the responsibility and power to adjudicate “Cases” and “Controversies”—concrete disputes with consequences for the parties involved. ... As Chief Justice Marshall declared in the foundational decision of Marbury v. Madison, “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”
---
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/aug/27/us-supreme-court...
[2] - https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf
Good lord. No. Maybe a closer reading of "legacy media" would have served you better than whatever you ended up turning to.
There were two CDC moratoriums that made it to SCOTUS. The first was upheld by SCOTUS, the second was struck down. Neither was upheld nor struck down on Constitutional grounds.
You should also read the Loper Bright decision more closely. Chevron was struck down due to conflict with the Administrative Procedures Act, not the Constitution. The do not say anywhere that Congress cannot (Constitutionally) delegate such authority to the regulatory agencies. They say that Congress did not do such in a way that reconciles its conflict with the APA.
You're rather leaving out the fact that the first was upheld for pragmatic, not legal reasons. Kavanaugh, who cast the deciding vote in favor of the CDC, stated that the CDC had clearly overstepped their bounds, but as the moratorium was set to imminently expire, and the ruling could cause imminent disorder, chose to pragmatically, rather than legally, uphold it. The CDC then shrugged and decided to try to do something similar again after it expired, and summarily lost. The legacy media framed this with quotes such as "A group of right wing extremists just decided to throw families out of their homes during a global pandemic." Yeah, real informative...
The quote I gave regarding the unconstitutionality of Chevon deference was from the Supreme Court opinion. It was both unconstitutional and contradicted previous legalese and precedent. It was a loser on every account.
Yeah, I'm not arguing the propriety of it. I'm arguing that you're not even reading the decisions. It is demonstrably untrue that district courts couldn't review agencies' interpretations of statues, as you've argued several times now.
Again: read more closely. Nowhere does Loper Bright say there was any conflict with the Constitution. Merely citing the Constitution in a decision does not mean the ruling is on Constitutional grounds. It says there was a violation of APA. That's the extent of the ruling.
You misunderstood what Chevron deference is, now you've misunderstood Loper Bright. Find new sources for your legal analysis!
Read more closely? Nowhere does Loper Bright say there was any conflict with the Constitution? A quote (amongst many) literally from the opinion, "I write separately to underscore a more fundamental problem: Chevron deference also violates our Constitution’s separation of powers..."
You are acting childish.
… “I write separately…”
As in… a concurrent, distinct opinion from the court’s decision?
This is proof of my point, not of yours lol.
That is Thomas saying: “the court DID NOT decide this ran afoul of the Constitution. I am writing separately to proclaim my own belief that it does.”
You are now misunderstanding how court opinions work.
sorcerer-mar: "read more closely. Nowhere does Loper Bright say there was any conflict with the Constitution."
Loper Bright: "Chevron deference also violates our Constitution’s separation of powers."
sorcerer-mar: "This is proof of my point."
---
NPC logic in its purest form.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/concurring_opinion
> A concurring opinion is an opinion that agrees with the majority opinion but does not agree with the rationale behind it. Concurring opinions are not binding [emphasis mine]
If someone files a concurring opinion that they believe it violates the Constitution, that indicates the majority opinion did not find this. That's why they filed a concurring opinion and didn't join the majority opinion, goofball. You can also read the actual majority opinion to learn, in fact, they do not argue that it's unconstitutional, but even using your shortcut it leads to the opposite of your conclusion.
By your logic, the dissenting opinions are also part of the Loper Bright decision, so therefore, Loper Bright says the opposite of what everyone thinks it says:
> Put all that together and deference to the agency is the almost obvious choice, based on an implicit congressional delegation of interpretive authority.
Wait just a second... it turns out that neither concurring nor dissenting opinions are the actual court's decision and its binding opinion, despite being published all on the same document.
Curious ain't it? Thank you for your excellent demonstration of the level of thoughtfulness and general knowledge behind Chevron opposition. I think your alternative media sources have failed you.
>Congress will probably have to pass laws that ban each specific individual compound.
This speak of stupidity/incompetence or most likely corruption, the average ignorant populace is generally to blame, their priorities are never a healthy environment ( unless it's for virtue signalling). There is no hope.
You’d be living in the stone age if it wasn’t for that so maybe calm down.
That isn't even close to true.
> a mole
That's a very good pun even if it wasn't intentional.
A friend of mine who works in the field says that we make some effort to not remember that glass was a thing for a reason after the epidemy of the plastic from the 60s and 70s
True! You can also see that happening in real time with the DEA and the “schedule” of banned substances.
It's frustrating how often regulation or public pressure leads to these half-measures instead of actual safer alternatives
Much like asbestos well probably spend the next 200 years sorting the consequences of plastic out
I wish plastic were as easily manageable as asbestos. Asbestos has always been far better contained than plastics — it's basically only ever been used “behind the scenes” in buildings. Now that we've phased out its use, you basically only need to manage asbestos when demolishing or doing extensive work on a building, when those cordoned-off spots become exposed.
Meanwhile plastics have already permeated our environment. Even if we stopped all use today, it would be practically impossible to remove every trace of them from the environment.
> behind the scenes
Asbestos was at times used in:
* cigarrette filters
* water filters
* hair dryers
* space heaters
* anti-scorch pads (stoves and bunsen burners)
* HVAC duct sealing
* boiler, pipe, and duct insulation (buildings, machinery, vehicles)
* brakes
My "favourite" one is bulk insulation for domestic dwellings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Fluffy
Just get a big tub of loose asbestos fibre and use a blower to fill the roof space. What could go wrong?
> blower
I’m officially horrified
* as topsoil/fill (graciously provided by Raybestos) when my hometown built sports fields in the 70/80s
floor tiles, ceiling tiles, plaster & sheetrock
There were times when you could have been surrounded by the stuff in your own home.
It was also boxed up in pure form and sold as artificial snow.
My father when young (60s, eastern Europe) was working as a student on road and airport runway construction, working with hot tarmac material. Used heavily-ladden asbestos clothing and gloves. Luckily no mesothelioma till now so he got lucky.
It was really in many places due to its great thermal properties. But plastic permeated everything these days, thats on another few orders of magnitudes higher level.
And the kicker is, we're still producing more of it every year
It seems like 200 years could be an extremely optimistic timeline without major improvements to our technologies used for removing plastic from the environment. At the moment those technologies hardly exist
Removing plastic from the environment has more to do with keeping it out in the first place. Make sure your county has proper recycling facilities and that the waste processing companies deal with plastic responsibly instead of exporting it abroad or burning it.
Is there such thing as proper plastic recycling today? My understanding is that all current generation plastic recycling is basically a scam, minor pilot projects because it is so energy inefficient that you can't possibly do it at small scale, leave alone at the scale of world-wide plastic use.
Even the Petroleum Institute has admitted that previous generations of "recycling" was a scam, but swears that this time it's real, is my understanding of the situation. In fact, I seem to recall speculation that most of the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was "recycled" plastic that had been shipped from the US and Europe to China, then dumped into rivers there and ended up in the Pacific Ocean, because plastic recycling wasn't just a scam, it was actively negative for the environment.
Just to be clear, recycling is good (paper mostly works out, aluminum for sure), but plastic recycling in particular is largely a scam designed to assuage people's guilt at how much plastic they use.
Don't waste water rinsing your recyclables. They'll eventually be floating in it.
Ultimately, the way to do this is to stop using it unless absolutely necessary and use other alternatives. It's like bugs where fixing the problem before the build stage is orders of magnitude easier than trying to fix the problem once it's been released.
We can't remove it from the environment but we can bury it and we can filter it. We may be able to remove it if we can find compounds to bind with it in the soil. Everything else will be going into a landfill and our water will just be tainted forever (because it goes into the ocean and comes down in rain). So start investing in water filtration companies, in addition to the companies that will own all the water rights.
How would you possible bury it if it's distributed throughout the environment and biosphere extremely evenly from the top of Mt. Everest to the bottom of the Mariana's trench to inside your testicles and brain?
Bury everything currently on the surface of the planet and replace it with material from underground?
We can't filter water at the scale necessary. Also, when you bury it, it's going into the water cycle unless you enclose it like a landfill. That's not realistic. It also means the plastic would need to be processed at that landfill to prevent it from eventually entering the water cycle as well (once the landfill is EOL and the lining erodes).
The earth doesn't filter the byproducts out. Burying isn't a solution. It also doesn't address the behemoth scale of plastics already in the environment which will continue to release byproducts into our water.
"Plastic free" environments will likely be cultivated and it will become yet another class divide as it will be prohibitively expensive.
Or a corporate exploit where large businesses lobby for more regulations that small businesses can't afford to comply with.
200 years ago was 1825. a lot happens in 200 years...
Totally, and I hope we care to make this happen. If we cared to, I think we could solve it much faster than 200 years. My doubt is more so about our perceived incentives and will to focus on it. We've solved some insane problems, and while I know virtually nothing about this stuff, my intuition here is that solving plastics problems is likely simpler (chemically and logistically) than, say, sending rockets to space and creating nuclear reactors. I know it's more complicated than it appears on the surface (we have heaps of plastic and its byproducts in a dozen types of forms, in all different biomes, in all stages of decay, and countless byproducts under the same conditions... On a global scale), but other problems we've solved have been multifaceted too.
Maybe what we need is a strong will to solve the problem, no lobbying to prevent the funding of the necessary research or restrictions on creation of plastics, and so on. Similar to how the space race and nuclear programs more or less got all of the money, resources, and agency required to get the job done.
It seems like the reality with plastic is we've become insanely good at making it, but nowhere near as good at dealing with its externalities. We can get better at it.
there are fungi that have evolved to eat plastic with no human intervention. we'll be fine.
There was a recentish David Cronenberg movie about humans evolving to eat plastic so we'll be fine. Can't wait to chow down on plastic.
I have a nice piece of aged nylon from the 1940s, very mature flavours, free range. Goes well with a Chianti red wine pairing.
many organisms are eating plastics, but that is not good for us at all in the short term. A study ? bedford institute? from a while back reported that plastics that they were collecting from the ocean, were full of holes from bieng eaten by something, and if you think about plastic as a widly distrubuted, easily broken down substance with very high intrinsic energy content, that it's no surprise at all that things are eating it. But back to us, thats bad, because all.of those things eating plastic, are then eaten, and passed up the food chain to us, at the top. So what we need to know, is how far advanced the process of filling the food chain with, undesirable for us substances, is, and what the future looks like if we just shrug, or how long will the system take to clear itself out. ie: is the biosphere "saturated" or not. If not, what is the max concentration that we can expect, and when
What if there are negative byproducts of this process though? It's a leap to conclude that we're fine. Consider that we'd be placing a lot of food for fungi into the environment, in places they shouldn't be, which would likely disrupt those environments... And also, the fungi likely can't live in every place the plastic is. Deep sea, deserts, alpine, etc.
It's extremely difficult to avoid exposure to these plastics. I started buying "pthalate free" bath products only to learn there if the bottle that holds them is plastic, then you're still getting exposed to pthalates. Most foods are exposed to these plasicizers as well, especially meats and dairy.
It's pretty crazy how bad for us meat/dairy is in a huge variety of ways yet people hand wave away most of the issues.
Antibiotics usage is still a huge issue in beef/dairy. Environmental destruction is still a huge issue in beef/dairy. Hormone exposure thru beef/dairy is still an issue. Etc. Etc.
I think in some countries people understand all these issues and some do change their behavior, but it takes much longer than you would assume (reference: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-consumpti... - note the peak consumption is in the past).
On the other hand you might downplay how bad can be for some people to totally eliminating meat/dairy. I know a couple of examples that had big issues with iron deficiency due to that. Pills didn't work for years, while restarting eating for a couple of months meat fixed all their health issues.
I do agree though that people eat way more than they need, but probably it is not only meat related (also sugar, carbs and others).
Antibiotic residue in milk is highly regulated, at least in the USA. When we treat a dairy cow with antibiotics (to cure an infection and save it's life) we don't/can't sell it's milk for several days after the end of the round of antibiotics.
How else am I supposed to get swole? I buy my meat from local butchers. Getting 200g of protein from vegetables and lentils and stuff would be impossible.
You probably don’t need to be getting 200g of protein a day, to start with.
I'm 6'6 and 120kg, so better safe than sorry. Are you knowledgeable about bodybuilding?
You both are correct. You need tons of protein to gain and maintain that huge muscle mass when you do bodybuilding. 200 ain't even so extreme compared to many, especially in the past.
The idea that such intake will not fuck you up later is naive. Due to all the healthy stuff that you do with and around weightlifting your health state is most probably stellar compared to same you not doing any sport, so you build a 'health margin' or whatever we can call it. But it still fucks you up, just different parts of the body.
Unless thats how you earn money and thus have to do it, I very politely suggest moving down 2 notches in intensity (if its for women they will still adore you, if compensating for some bad childhood stuff this ain't the best solution anyway). Either add more endurance if you feel not doing enough or another sport, more endurance is anyway supremely usable in all aspects of life. But as said that's just a polite suggestion for optimizing for truly long term health.
Czesc jajko dzieki za komentarz. I used bodybuilding as a catch all but what I am really doing is doing heavy strength training alongside muay thai/grappling. Either way, still need the protein. I would like to long term focus on cardio with only basic weight lifting once I hit my strength goals, so I agree with you.
"Need" and "want" are different things.
Right, the context being building muscle, therefore "need".
That's fine, but bodybuilding is recreational with the exception of a very small number of people who are professional bodybuilders. Human beings don't _need_ to have 200g of protein per day. Assuming you're not a professional or don't have a job where large muscle mass is an absolute requirement, the excess protein intake is something you _want_ so that you can enjoy your hobby.
To be clear, you should continue to eat as much meat as you want - it's your life! There are tons of advantages to strength training and bodybuilding, and I am not trying to diminish any of that.
But what I can't agree on is that it's ethical to consume that much daily protein unless you truly need it. That level of meat consumption has very real impacts - it is literally unsustainable for a significant number of people to consume excess protein entirely from meat.
You point out that this behavior is unethical and in the same breath you say they should keep doing it. I'm having trouble reconciling these two statements, or thinking of examples of when unethical behavior should be encouraged[0]. Perhaps it should be "you *can* continue to eat as much meat as you want" instead of "you should [...]"? That way it acknowledges their agency and our inability to prevent their actions, without condoning them.
[0] so far the closest I've come is "perhaps in retaliation against an earlier injustice"
I get about 80 grams from protein powder (whey), another 20 from eggs, another 20-50 from yoghurt, and another 50-60 from a chicken breast/fish (200-300g worth). I get all my eggs and meat locally as I live in the boonies. You are being deliberately obtuse assuming I get 200 grams from only meat. This would wreck my bowels.
Cheers for the lecture though, I think I'll up it to 300 grams just from your comment alone.
>it is literally unsustainable for a significant number of people to consume excess protein entirely from meat
When the billionaires give up their profits I'll trade in my single daily unsustainable chicken breast.
Link to the paper: https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2352-3964%2825...
If you want to get a sense of which foods could be high in DEHP, you can go here
https://www.plasticlist.org/
and sort by the "DEHP" column.
If I understand correctly, an RXBAR could have up to 1% of your tolerable daily intake for DEHP, and most foods are well below that.
Based on the OP, it seems like DEHP might be a bigger issue in developing countries.
For a lot of the foods on the list, the DEHP, BPA, etc., come from the packaging materials.
So, for example, Whole Foods organic grass fed beef appears to be very high in DEHP...if you get it in the plastic wrap container, but would have almost none if wrapped in wax paper (note: not the same thing as parchment paper). Similarly, a lot of restaurant to-go orders will test high for endocrine disruptors because they come in plastic containers, but would be low in these chemicals if tested at the restaurant.
I remember when this link went around that this 1% column didn't really quite make sense. 1% makes it sound like it's well within the limit, even if you ate 10 in-n-out cheeseburgers a day.
I guess the question is, at what percent of the "tolerable daily intake" of DEHP do very bad side effects (like the heart issues in this post) start to occur?
I mean yeah, the creators of PlasticList explicitly stated that they didn't change their eating habits based on their findings. Perhaps plastic contamination of food just isn't a huge issue in developed countries.
DEHP has been known to be harmful for at least 30 years
Yeah, most of the comments here are crap. The regulation for this stuff (and there are so many it's stupid) started in "the west" around 1999 and is pretty complete post 2022. Remember when polycarbonate water bottles were a thing, when they took chemicals out of kids toys and couches? That was all bad, but virgin PET, PP, silicone, and HDPE don't really leach plasticizers. That's WHY they're used. Really, this borders on a 25 year human clinical trial on South America, Africa, and SE Asia... well maybe we can measure reintroduction to the US now that corruption is a thing and regulation or rule of law is out the window. Thanks, Obama.
> Remember when polycarbonate water bottles were a thing
They're... still a thing... https://www.google.com/search?q=polycarbonate+water+bottles
Yeah, they have "BPA Free" polycarbonate now, since that's what was regulated. I still wouldn't use it, there's many better cheaper alternatives, unless you're just importing it without testing? At least they're labeling it as PC?!?
Mostly, don't get your polycarbonate hot.
To be clear, if you're really worried about plastic, you can't use paper or aluminum containers either since they're coated. It's glass only, but no mason jars or screw caps since those have silicone seals. Seal it with wax/cork.
Silicone is likely one of the safest, though.
There's been some interesting pushes to use glass linings here.
Ex Chico in the baby bottle space (glass lined plastic bottles) Purist in the adult bottle space (glass lined stainless steel).
You can also get plenty of unlined aluminum/stainless cups/bottles (amazon is full of them).
No idea how that idea is going to play out long term.
Purist has some cool plastic bottles with a glass liner: https://www.specialized.com/us/en/purist-watergate-water-bot...
They are lightweight and flexible and supposedly have minimal plastic contact with water.
> features an amorphous silicon dioxide coating that's infused into the inner-wall of the bottle. Essentially, this forms a glass-like finish that provides a totally natural, and completely inert, solution to the problem
"glass-like" != glass
Dollars to doughnuts that coating is spray lined. Which means some sort of solvent, at a minimum. And I'm unaware of any way to fuse silica at temperatures under which plastic would survive, so it's a coating with a binder (dissolved in the solvent) which can still be damaged, scratched, leach or flake off into the water.
I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. Glass, stainless steel (316 please), or ceramics for me.
Aren't steel food cans usually lined as well?
Yes, most cans are lined with plastic, but some are lined with tin, which I consider safe enough. And cans of pineapple are often lined with zinc, which I consider safe enough. Unfortunately, the only way to tell which cans have these tin and zinc linings is to buy one, open it, empty it and look at the lining.
Also, Eden Foods uses cans linings free of phthalates:
https://www.edenfoods.com/about/values.php
The PDF from NIH suggests that PP number 5 in the recycling code is the safest?
https://www.niehs.nih.gov/sites/default/files/research/suppo...
Another article says vinyl flooring including luxury vinyl may also leach off plasticizers?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4540696/
FYI:
"These recent regulatory measures reflect a growing awareness of the harmful effects of DEHP. However, it is notable that many of these regulations were not in place at the time of data acquisition for the present study and their effect is not reflected in our results." (pg 11)
We are seeing results from pre-regulation era in this data.
>virgin PET, PP, silicone, and HDPE don't really leach plasticizers.
True but most people don't know what those are, and they also don't/can't currently cover all plastic in the household / daily life.
Obama's administration passed regulations on the most well-known endocrine disrupters in 2016. They wanted to include more on the list of regulated chemicals, but the chemical industry's GOP buddies blocked that.
So basically you're blaming Obama for not managing to do something perfectly. Are you part of the "all or nothing" camp of policymaking?
They should have included "/s" at the end of that, to avoid confusion. It was a joke.
Based on his followup comment, and other comments in this thread, it doesn't appear to have been a joke.
The follow-up comment definitely was a joke, and if you didn't think so, then you really don't understand sarcasm.
No I'm blaming the decline of American Civilization on Obama, because he didn't run for a 3rd term. Easily, the best Republican candidate since Nixon.
The U.S. Constitution, as amended in the wake of FDR, does not permit someone to run for a 3rd term. As a constitutional scholar, Obama had no interest in creating a constitutional conflict that could tear this country apart.
It's nonsensical to blame him for something he couldn't, and wouldn't, do.
If Michelle Obama ran for election, I believe she would have/ will win the presidency easily.
the chemicals are phthalates, in this case di-2-ethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP)
Reports like this on the dangers of DEHP is exactly why I started work on NeutraOat (https://neutraoat.com/), a modified oat fiber supplement designed to trap plasticizers in your gut before they can get into your bloodstream. The idea is to give people an easy, safe way to avoid absorbing plasticizers that you've ingested.
Link above has a form to sign up for the mailing list. I also have a Substack post summarizing what we know about the dangers of plasticizers (https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/the-evidence-on-plasticize...) .
I just use my microwave to boil and drink a couple tablespoons of ground barley with a sweetener, beta glucan is amazing and hulled barley is awesome, cheap and higher in beta glucan than oats.
Solved every gastro issue I've ever had, humans co-evolved with barley and it's awesome. No modifications needed.
Not a bad idea for your health, but it won't trap plasticizers. We're modifying the beta glucan to have many tiny, "sticky" pores to trap the chemicals in the gut, so they go out with the rest of the beta glucan. Pure beta glucan, whether from oats or barley, won't have much effect.
Based on everything I know about the mechanism of action and the impact of dietary fiber in general on microplastic adsorption I would need to see a study with protocols and raw data published to be convinced that barley is lacking and your solution is superior but I'm open to it.
https://iadns.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fft2....
Unfortunately, unless I've misread, the evidence for barley in this case is zero. So any evidence for the modified solution wins.
Hulled Barley is a combination of both IDF and SDF's, that study is for DF across the board. Frankly a barley drink made with unfiltered french press coffee would probably be the single best/easiest validated drink for reducing absorption of microplastics and heavy metals.
But it is an under researched area for sure.
edit because I can't reply: the above paper I linked references coffee grounds and MP.
Can you expand on the coffee portion? Why would that be beneficial?
Wouldn't that trap a lot more than just the plasticizers?
So you eat both, have ground barley with something to make it more palatable and cook with hulled barley in meals? Seems like it's a better solution than psyllium fiber.
I grind hulled barley to a powder and then boil it with RO water in the microwave. Total cook time in my microwave for the ~2tbl I consume is 2 minutes and 10 seconds.
I put in a little stevia/monk fruit for taste.
Because the end result is basically a thickened drink with a rather neutral flavor I'll often throw in my 3rd shot of espresso for the day or just drink it as is while still hot.
A lot of cultures that are long lived tend to have barley based drinks but of course isolating barley's effect is a fools errand, it's just correlation at best.
I started playing with barley for a "cream of wheat" esq experience, which was actually way better than cream of wheat or oats but I found that the water absorption of barley is so high that for gastro purposes it's more consistent to add enough water that it remains a drink.
The upside bonus is that due to the mechanism of action you can start with very low volumes of barley and it doesn't give you gastro distress the way other types of fiber supplementation can, basically the soluble fiber slows down the movement of food through the intestines giving your gut more digestive time to create a homogenous, gelled slurry making the defection process closer to ideal texture.
I now also spend far less time on the toilet and it only takes 2 minutes and a single hot beverage every morning.
One other positive side effect is I've found that my overall hydration stays more consistent as well.
Thanks for the info! I'm always using psyllium but reading more and hearing about barley it seems like combining the two for my morning and evening drink might be the way to go.
Sounds good! I used to worry about insoluble fiber more but barley's been very effective for me so I dropped psyllium, it's method of action is improves fermentation so it definitely takes a few weeks to normalize everything. I found that with supplementing with insoluble fiber (psyllium) food was moving through my digestion too fast.
interesting, how often do you drink it?
We're still prototyping and testing, but you'll probably have to eat it twice a day to get complete coverage. It needs to be in the gut at the same time as the plasticizer to have any effect.
How likely (perhaps as a percentage) do you think it is that your product will work as described? I'd be interested in taking it, assuming that's all it does is remove plasticizers and not a bunch of good things, and otherwise is mostly inert.
I've tried hard to remove phthalates from my life. The biggest change that I feel is sustainable is looking for "hard" plastics. Usually phthalates are found in flexible, soft plastics. So hard plastics typically have less of them.
My suspicion is that the use of plastics with food is also the main contributor to the fertility crisis (declining sperm counts, etc) we have. Wouldn't be surprised that this then also contributes, through sperm quality degradation, to the increase in autism.
And it isn't just my suspicion, see links below, but we haven't yet forcefully moved away from plastics around food. If RF Kennedy could do one thing, I would ask him to focus on plastics and food, rather than the more nutty stuff.
Side bonus: it may help raise the low fertility rate that Trump and Elon are so concerned about as well.
https://cancer.ca/en/cancer-information/reduce-your-risk/myt...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9134445/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35134716/
Is autism actually on the rise, or is it just more diagnosed thanks to advances in and availability of diagnoses and general awareness in the population?
A lot of people that get a fresh autism diagnosis these days recognize the same symptoms in their (grand)parents.
Anyway, RFK does seem to focus on food stuffs, by banning certain food dyes (no more lurid froot loops for you (https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/04/22/nx...) but also by relaxing food safety laws (https://www.yahoo.com/news/usda-withdraws-plan-limit-salmone...).
I believe that even non-verbal and low-IQ versions of autism (ones that are unambiguous to diagnose) are also on the rise.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/new-research-cont...
> The new research being shared this week found that only mild cases rose from 2000 to 2016.
> According to the analysis, 1.2 out of 1,000 children had autism with moderate or significant impairment in 2016, compared with 1.5 out of 1,000 in 2000. By contrast, mild cases rose 139% during that period — from 3.1 out of 1,000 to 7.3 out of 1,000.
I did some research on this a while back, conclusion is far from certain. There are some clear pointers to increased diagnosis (changes to the definition of autism in later DSM versions, improved awareness and access to literature), but there are also studies that indicate an increase in the number of cases. It’s impossible to be sure what’s driving this: pollutants, increased average parental age, or some other factor.
Given that autism is highly heritable, most experts are sceptical of the idea that environmental factors could drive a major increase in the numbers, although again, it could be the case that genetics predicts only predisposition towards autism, rather than the condition itself.
A lot of wiffle to say “we don’t know”, but if there is a genuine increase in the incidence of autism in the population for etiological reasons, it’s relatively small.
> Given that autism is highly heritable, most experts are sceptical of the idea that environmental factors could drive a major increase in the numbers
But we do know that age of fathers does drive increase autism rates - thus while there is likely a genetic component, there are degradations related to age that further increase the risk: https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/risk-of-autism-spike...
High heritability doesn't exclude environmental factors. Your environment is also inherited, in a way captured by broad-sense heritability metrics.
(I don't have a big concern with what you're driving at, just with the notion of using heritability statistics dispositively this way).
It could easily turn out to be a not very severe problem, like "Use rayon instead of polyester for your clothing" or "No more styrofoam, because styrene monomer offgassing in your lungs"; The issue is that without a lot of dedicated study (probably animal studies into the millions of individual-exposure-years) we wouldn't even know. These things are too ubiquitous in modern life to readily separate them from us with careful non-experimental study design.
> the increase in autism
Is largely illusory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bentinck,_5th_Duke_of_Por...
"The duke was highly introverted and well known for his eccentricity; he did not want to meet people and never invited anyone to his home. He employed hundreds through his various construction projects, and though well paid, the employees were not allowed to speak to him or acknowledge him. The one worker who raised his hat to the duke was promptly dismissed. The tenants on his estates were aware of his wishes and knew they were required to ignore him if they passed by. His rooms had double letterboxes, one for in-coming and another for out-going mail. Only his valet was permitted to see him in person in his quarters—he would not even let the doctor in, while his tenants and workmen received all their instructions in writing."
"The underground chambers—all of which were painted pink—included a great hall 160 ft (49 m) long and 63 ft (19 m) wide, which was originally intended as a chapel, but which was instead used as a picture gallery and occasionally as a ballroom. The ballroom reportedly had a hydraulic lift that could carry 20 guests from the surface and a ceiling that was painted as a giant sunset. The duke never organised any dances in the ballroom."
We'd diagnose this guy in a heartbeat now, but then, he was "eccentric". If he'd been poor and not an aristocrat, he'd have been a "moron" or "retarded" or something along those lines.
It's deeply odd to see Kennedy saying it's a new phenomenon. His own aunt was lobotomized for "becoming increasingly irritable and difficult".
>> the increase in autism
> Is largely illusory.
Huh? First off autism rates are provable increasing in the US. It is multi-factor for sure that includes increased awareness and more access to autism tests, but...
It is a proven fact that older fathers have a higher change of having offspring with autism [1] and it is also a fact that in the US (as like many places in the world) men are having their children later [2]. Together these two accepted scientific facts lead directly to increasing autism rates, no? Or do you disagree with this reasoning?
The link I am positing but there isn't quite as much acceptance is that sperm degradation that leads to autism, isn't only caused by age but also influenced by plastics.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/autism-rates-risi...
[2] https://biox.stanford.edu/highlight/fathers-american-newborn...
> First off autism rates are provable increasing in the US.
Yes. That's what happens when you make a brand new label. (And then redefine it a few times; Asperger's used to be separate, now it's part of the spectrum. Or when we started realizing that, say, women are underdiagnosed with it and started working to address that.)
Rates of female "hysteria" are at an all-time low, for similar reasons.
> It is a proven fact that older fathers have a higher change of having offspring with autism…
Which could be just because of biological changes from their age, or environmental exposures during that time, but also could have other explanations, like autistic people having a harder time on average finding long-term partners.
All solid points, but not well-aligned with your original argument that the increase in autism is largely illusory.
Why? The rise in autism diagnoses is not the same thing as a rise in autism.
We've had plenty of autistic people all along. We just called it different things. They're the "weird uncle" or "idiot savant" or the guy who went off to live in a silent monastery of eras past. Insane asylums. Or they wandered off at age three into a snowstorm in an era where baby gates weren't a thing.
Well it sort of is, actually.
Autism is quite literally what we define it to be: there’s no physiological or neurological test we can use to diagnose it, there’s no biomarker that defines autism.
If we change how we diagnose autism, we change how we define it.
The evidence by the way seems to indicate that there is a significant increase in diagnoses, and not all of that can be attributed to changing definitions.
> If we change how we diagnose autism, we change how we define it.
But the incredibly obvious corollary to this is "you can't then turn around and compare case rates before and after that definition". You can't go back to the 1400s and reassess cases of witchcraft and demonic possession to get an accurate, modernly-accurate rate of autistic people in that era to compare against.
RFK Jr. is out there saying things like "autism epidemic" and implying the cases come out of nowhere, when many of those cases are just changing a diagnosis code on an existing condition.
Simpler version: We didn't see bacteria until 1676, and didn't give them a name until 1828… but it would be deeply wrong to claim no one got bacterial infections prior to that.
A bacterial infection is an objectively verifiable condition. You can see the bacteria under a strong enough microscope. There’s no such definitive way to diagnose autism, it’s diagnosed based on the definition we came up with to describe a cluster of symptoms.
If everyone dismissed the increase in diagnosed bacterial infections as due to the discovery of bacteria, a lot of medical research into diseases like TB would have stalled.
It is worth looking at the increase in diagnoses to understand if there is some kind of underlying mechanism (for example parental age or environmental pollutants for autism) which could explain it rather than just dismissing it as an illusion, especially if we don’t understand the underlying cause of autism.
RFKs rhetoric is clearly unhelpful and aimed at targeting autistic people, but the idea that “we have more people diagnosed with this condition than we ever had before, is there something to it beyond just relabelling?” is a valuable starting point for research.
Caution is warranted (vaccines causing autism, despite being completely debunked, is an example of how NOT to research something like this), but throwing the baby out with the bathwater helps no one.
> A bacterial infection is an objectively verifiable condition. You can see the bacteria under a strong enough microscope.
Not until 1676! (And they weren't re-observed for another hundred years after that.)
But they existed and made people sick before that date.
We may discover a diagnostic test for autism in the future. People are certainly working on it.
Similarly, autism existed long before the name autism was assigned to it. But the case count of autism was zero until the 1900s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_autism
"The term autism was first introduced by Eugen Bleuler in his description of schizophrenia in 1911. The diagnosis of schizophrenia was broader than its modern equivalent; autistic children were often diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia."
I completely agree.
But autism is what we say it is (until we understand better and find some kind of absolute test).
A bacterial infection doesn’t care what we think it is.
Anyway it feels almost like the crux of what you’re saying now is “cases of autism have increased because we define autism differently now”. This is true, and I don’t disagree.
I objected to your suggestion that the increase in cases is largely illusory because it discards possible environmental factors, and encourages people to “stop looking”.
I don’t agree with demonisation of autistic people, but I do think trying to better understand autism and its causes is useful.
> A bacterial infection doesn’t care what we think it is.
Neither does autism.
> Anyway it feels almost like the crux of what you’re saying now is “cases of autism have increased because we define autism differently now”.
Yes. I've been saying that all along.
The increase in case numbers - and the inferred conclusion that something environmental has changed to cause that - is an illusion.
See also: CVEs per Pope. https://infosec.exchange/@SecurityWriter/114397760184324654 "Autism epidemic" is like claiming Pope Francis is responsible for a huge rise in insecure code.
> Neither does autism.
If there is an objective definition of autism, I am not aware of it.
> Yes. I've been saying that all along. The increase in case numbers - and the inferred conclusion that something environmental has changed to cause that - is an illusion.
This has as little evidence to support it as the idea that autism increases are being caused by something environmental.
It's pretty clear in a chart.
https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/increasing-prevalenc...
> They also found that the increase in students diagnosed with autism was offset by a nearly equal decrease in students diagnosed with other intellectual disabilities that often co-occur with autism.
> The researchers conclude that the large increase in the prevalence of autism is likely the result of shifting patterns of diagnosis that are complicated by the variability of autism and its overlap with other related disorders.
> Recent reports from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggest that there has been an increase in the prevalence of autism from 1 in 5,000 in 1975 to 1 in 150 in 2002, and to 1 in 68 in 2012. Much of this increase has been attributed to increased awareness and a broadening of the diagnostic criteria for autism. But this new research provides the first direct evidence that much of the increase may be attributable merely to a reclassification of individuals with related neurological disorders rather than to an actual increase in the rate of new cases of autism.
> The diagnostic reclassification of individuals from the category of intellectual disability to the category of autism accounts for a large proportion of the change, which varied depending on the age of the children. The researchers estimate that, for 8 year-olds, approximately 59 percent of the observed increase in autism is accounted for by reclassification, but by age 15 reclassification accounts for as much as 97 percent of the increase in autism.
AFAIK most people can still technically have kids, they just chose not to do so.
It's easy to verify because communities living in the same countries, in the same environments, for generations, have wildly different fertility rates
If you search for declining sperm counts you'll find that the evidence is all over the place. It makes a good headline, but studies have it dropping, rising, staying stable.
There's no real evidence that people are having a harder time having babies at the same ages they did traditionally. The fertility rate is a social problem, probably (I guess it could be chemically induced behavior)
Except what you're saying isn't true.
There is a lot of evidence that fertility, especially male, is dropping. This isnt societal. The actual fertility rate of sperm has been measured to be dropping.
This isn't "people aren't having kids." It's "male sperm is less fertile".
This is in addition to societal trends in developed countries to have less kids.
There are a number of studies. I wouldn't call that a lot of evidence, because they don't agree on the results. And, because the methodology changes over time, it's probably just not possible to say that there is evidence of change between pre and post-90s papers.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41585-022-00626-w.epdf
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-sperm-counts-...
There need to be more studies of higher quality to actually establish what is happening. It's really not clear right now that anything is happening, and, if it is, if it's even a problem.
The Cleveland Clinic says sperm counts have been stable for the past 50+ years for men in the US:
https://consultqd.clevelandclinic.org/no-cause-for-panic-as-...
It is a weird caveat in that study that sort of makes it a tautology:
“We found that at least in men with no known fertility challenges, sperm counts are largely stable and haven't changed significantly in the last few years, which is reassuring news."
It is a weird exclusion. I response I would ask then if the number of males with fertility issues, and thus excluded, are increasing or also stable.
They answer that at the end: "“We didn't track men who were fertile who became infertile. I think based upon the literature so far, that might be the case due to obesity or environmental exposures, and more research is needed to definitively answer that question."
This is both disturbing and sadly unsurprising. Phthalates have been on the radar for years, but seeing a number like 365 000 deaths in one year really drives home the scale of the issue. What's frustrating is that these chemicals are everywhere: in stuff we touch daily, often without even realizing it.
> In their new analysis, the authors estimated that DEHP exposure contributed to 368,764 deaths, or more than 10% of all global mortality from heart disease in 2018 among men and women aged 55 through 64.
lol what
"linked" does not mean what most people think it means.
Given the US VP's concern about low domestic birth rates, Maybe there is a way to link this to stuff conservatives care about enough to override big business' interests. Probably not though. Sigh.
People will look back in 50 years and say "You know they used to say that packaging all food in plastic was fine? Even though the science said otherwise?"
I used to work as a bench tech at a defense contractor (microwave equipment).
Every tech had a little bottle on their bench, with a special lid, that would have a small amount of liquid always in it (you'd pump it, to bring up more liquid). These bottles are still used, today.
This was for removing solder flux. Worked great.
At the end of each row of tech benches, was a red bucket, full of the same stuff. We'd use that to wash entire boards.
If you got the liquid on your skin, it made the skin turn white, and flake off.
Smelled like acetone had a one-night-stand with gasoline.
The liquid was trichlor[0] (not the pool kind).
Our management swore that it was perfectly safe, and that we could even drink it.
This was in the early 1980s.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1,1,1-Trichloroethane
The industry started with carbontet (CTC), they replaced it in the 70s with the perchlor stuff you're describing (PCE) in the 80s, then with Trichlorethylene (TCE) in the early 90s, which in turn was replaced with (TCA) Trichlorethane and now all the chlorinated stuff is gone (along with the PCB industry). There's still isopropyl and GBL butyrolactone (which is regulated as a precursor to GHB) for degreasing.
Back in the 60s carbontet was used everywhere (dry cleaning and industrial) and there are superfund sites in Happy Tx and Alabama.
We're literally 60 years since the first regulation. And your local dry cleaner was leaking chlorinated solvents into the 80s. Now the cleanup for old gas stations is mostly complete, but the new MTBE stuff is nasty!That video is the craziest thing I have ever seen.
1,1,1-trichloroethane doesn't seem particularly toxic - "probable carcinogen", some neurological and liver effects but I'd say it's probably still safer than e.g. isopropyl alcohol which definitely leads to neurological issues long-term. The reason it's banned is because of the ozone layer, not because it's unsafe to individual humans.
I feel like it's probably the wrong chemical though, far too many similar names. Maybe you meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichloroethylene
You are probably correct. We just called it "trichlor."
I wouldn't call the smell "pleasant," or "mild," though...
This was 1983-1987. My first job.
You sure it wasn't TCE?
The problem is, there's real benefits to using plastics for all sorts of things, foodstuff packaging included. Human lives are demonstrably longer than they were in developed countries where plastics are regularly used. It'd be interesting to see if you could quantify how long the average person's life has been extended/made better because of polymers.
Could we go back to wax paper, glass bottles, metal tins, and the like? Maybe, but that comes with its own challenges, from spoilage to metals contamination to transport weight.
Like with tobacco
[dead]