Coffee, eggs and white rice linked to higher levels of PFAS in human body

girlfreddy@lemmy.ca to News@lemmy.world – 261 points –
Coffee, eggs and white rice linked to higher levels of PFAS in human body
theguardian.com

New research aimed at identifying foods that contain higher levels of PFAS found people who eat more white rice, coffee, eggs and seafood typically showed more of the toxic chemicals in their plasma and breast milk.

The study checked samples from 3,000 pregnant mothers, and is among the first research to suggest coffee and white rice may be contaminated at higher rates than other foods. It also identified an association between red meat consumption and levels of PFOS, one of the most common and dangerous PFAS compounds.

“The results definitely point toward the need for environmental stewardship, and keeping PFAS out of the environment and food chain,” said Megan Romano, a Dartmouth researcher and lead author. “Now we’re in a situation where they’re everywhere and are going to stick around even if we do aggressive remediation.”

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Despite all this terrible news about plastics, we still won't go after the oil companies or plastic producers in the US to help put a stop to this.

It would be inconvenient for the economy if we started prioritizing people.

I agree with you, but PFAS/"Forever Chemicals" and micro/nano plastics are different things with their own host of concerns.

They go hand in hand with a lot of plastic packaging. Either way, it'd be nice to go after companies like DuPont, Bayer, 3M, and Honeywell as well as the oil companies that provide them the raw materials anyway.

Yes, of course, I mean just stop... Eating fucking rice first!

That is much better than those long and boring legal battles anyway. Who even eats rice or eggs or drinks coffee?

California has been going after DuPont for PFAS for a couple years now.

Assuming that research is accurate, and also given that those 3 things make up a huge portion of my diet, then I'm probably mostly made of PFAS these days.

I think we all are, unfortunately.

Born too late to be made of lead or asbestos, born just in time to be made of microplastics.

Asbestos and lead are still everywhere, unfortunately.

Thousands of tons of asbestos was released when the towers came down. :/

Same, except I eat brown and red rice instead of white. I also stopped buying pre-peeled shrimp because I read it has the highest level of microplastics among seafood.

Why would when a shrimp is peeled matter? They're presumably already dead when they're peeled.

Probably during processing. If they are peeled by hand, the workers are likely wearing plastic gloves.

2 more...

"Three things people in this world consume more than almost anyone else now poison you."

Hooray.

Next up. Do you drink water? Turns out its all poison now!

Soon:

How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.

I mean, based on the amount of bottled water people drink im pretty sure that could be a concern for most people. I don't drink water bottled in plastic because I think it's wasteful and contributes to the massive amount of plastic pollution already going on, but even if we consider that the recycling process is 100% efficient, those thin, flimsy bottles are still getting heated by and exposed to sunlight. It would be naive to think they aren't leaching plastics into the water. Just buy a cheap metal bottle and refill from the tap. That's where all the major brands get their water from anyway.

Coffee, eggs, white rice

Selection bias much?

If you don't consume any of those 3 you're probably ridiculously wealthy on some freaky diet.

All this says to me is "The food of the masses is contaminated" which yeah - we already knew the rich pay a premium to get less contaminated food.

I went to Kazakhstan and people there don't eat any of those things

The traditional foodstuffs are flour and meat, with a lot of things made from milk

Call me crazy but I don't think traditional Kazakh diets were part of the study of 3000 pregnant mothers in New Hampshire.

Of course not, I'm just saying your don't need to eat those foods to survive

Suggesting we all switch to a meat-heavy diet is the worst possible suggestion for us and for the planet.

No, it's not.

And yet it's worked for many societies for millennia...hmmm

Yes, back before there were eight billion people on this planet. Farming vastly more amounts of methane-spewing animals than we do now is an insanely bad idea.

I'm wondering if factory farms were eliminated, how much the environmental damage would be reduced.

You should start using your urine to wash your clothes it worked for society for millenia...hmmm

Nobody was saying that you must eat eggs to survive - the point is to show the flaws in the hypothesis of the study when related to the sample group.

If you are sampling 3000 mothers in New Hampshire and looking for those who eat less poor people food and more rich people food you should expect to see a correlation that can be equally described by socioeconomic status as it can by diet.

Is that because of the food products themselves, or because of the non-stick coatings frequently used to package/cook/brew/prepare them?

Because of their ubiquitous usage and environmental persistence, humans are exposed to a variety of PFAS, primarily through ingestion of contaminated water and food, though PFAS have also been detected in air, indoor dust, and consumer products (Domingo and Nadal, 2017; Sunderland et al., 2019).

While certain communities can be highly exposed to PFAS due to proximity to an industrial site or occupational exposure, PFAS exposure is ubiquitous among human populations, with 98 % of the U.S. population having detectable concentrations of PFAS in their blood (Calafat et al., 2007; National Center for Environmental Health Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, 2023).

coffee

Ffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck...

I would rather die than give up the coffee

A lot of the world will die if they give up rice.

Obviously, they should start eating cake.

Are you suggesting we begin sharpening large blades?

Are you trying to help me sharpen, or get my account banned from this right-leaning new community?

😐

No no, I'm just trying to make sure your kitchen is at its best. I do have some suggestions for how to build a knife block though...

I have found the bones of the rich to be too brittle to build with. Alas, you cannot mention such things in this community. Civil unrest is strictly prohibited!

In coffee, researchers suspect that the beans, water used for brewing, or soil could be contaminated. Previous research has also found coffee filters to be treated with PFAS, and paper cups or other food packaging also commonly contain the chemicals.

I'd guess it could also be K Cups and non-dairy creamer, but who knows

At this point everything on earth is contaminated with PFAS, PFOS, PFOA etc etc.

For too long gov'ts just let the industries do what they wanted without any real oversight.

Huxley warned us that the things we love would kill us but I'd don't think he thought it would be like this particular case.

So far I haven't seen beer and cigarettes on any of these lists.

The only safe foods are beef wheat potatoes and high fructose corn syrup.

Basically my ideal breakfast…

Downvoted for innocuous comment

It really is starting to feel like Reddit around here 😊🥹

Feel like the real underdog here is seafood.

Like, we know toxins concentrate in water creatures. That's why you'll see way more warnings about fish you harvest on any DNR page than you will deer.

You've gotta be fucking kidding me. NOTHING IS SAFE ANYMORE GODDAMNIT

Nothing is safe, except the huge wealth advantage of billionaires.

PFAS-fouled sewage sludge, which is used as a cheap alternative to fertilizer

Well, considering that toilet paper is full of PFAS to help it break down super easily, yeah, I'm not surprised.

Either make TP without PFAS, which will make it jam up pipes more, or use a bidet.

Someone already mentioned this indirectly but I think this correlation is because all three items mentioned go on to be cooked in cookware coated in PTFE or mixed with spatulas and other utensils coated in PTFE.

PTFE is indispensable for high tech uses such as well almost all processes where high temperature near water boiling point is required. 100 to 200C for example. Now, because of its original use as a food process coating, PTFE is about to be banned in a stupid way.

I much rather have it banned from food use articles and allow it for use in niche technology. That would make the material more expensive and so less profitable to use in stupid uses where other materials are available.

The PFAS and plastics boundary lines in fossil records will be indeed very distinct.

I don't know how I would face the day without white rice...

Honestly I doubt it matters. They'll just keep adding more things to the list, this shit is everywhere.

I don't know what I'd do without coffee

I actually did manage to sub out coffee for tea, and can now go a day without caffeine for the first time since college. It's kind of an empowering feeling, that I would recommend.

PFAS-fouled sewage sludge, which is used as a cheap alternative to fertilizer

People still do that, with all the hormones and heavy metals? Modern human is above wolfes and sharkes in the food chain.

I just made a batch of white rice, once cooked I freeze it on baking paper. Not long ago I looked into baking paper, it's loaded with some kind of plastic non-stick chemicals.

its a good thing i don't drink coffee.

Now i can pretend i don't consume the other things listed here instead!

Your regular reminder that Teflon (PTFE) microplastics are completely harmless and are by far the most common PFAS in the environment

The literature on PTFEs illustrates that it is, at best, uncertain whether there are health harms relating to contact and ingestion. Most of the studies struggle with confounds, controls, and sample sizes because almost literally everyone has been exposed to PTFEs. Toxicity researchers would not definitively agree that it is "completely harmless".

The other commenter is right, also, that PFOA and GenX (the chemical, not the generation) are more evidently harmful and both involved in, and released from, the creation of PTFE.

Just throwing this out here in case someone is like "wait, IS Teflon fine???"

Yes, except in order to make PTFE you have to use PFAS ... so it's a double-edged sword.

Bleep Bloop. When reading this source, please be critical. This source has been rated by MFBR as being of lower credibility. Report: Source detected: theguardian.com, BSFR ratubg: bias: left-center, credibility: medium-credibility, questionable: []. Thank you for being a part of !news :D (this action was taken automatically)

The guardian is lower credibility? I guess I should get all my information from OAN or FOX, huh?

What the fuck is MFBR and why should I give a shit what it thinks? How do I know it's not biased?

I assume MFBR was supposed to be MFBC, and you can see their summary of why they assessed the Guardian that way Here

MBFC summary:

Overall, we rate The Guardian as Left-Center biased based on story selection that moderately favors the left and Mixed for factual reporting due to numerous failed fact checks over the last five years. (5/18/2016) Updated (M. Huitsing 06/30/2024)

I can exercise my critical abilities by blocking this bot! Bye!

Seems like you guys really don’t like my bot, haha. Whoops, sorry. Will for now disable it and see how to proceed.

You can also just post the 4-5 data items without claiming that this is low or high credibility or bias. Then let the people make the decision. Like this maybe:

“Based on source X, this source media bias is:

  • bias: A
  • cred: B

Methodology of X is at: “

Maybe add links to data sources and separate items that are objectively negative from those that someone may prefer? (i.e., reliability being low is always bad, left or right leaning being bad is based on individual perspectives.

Items that are objectively considered bad are removed. This message is more intended to warn the users. I agree that I should rephrase the message.

Thank you for the feedback.

I liked it. The guardian is awful. Like the huffington post. It's the other side of the coin from Fox News, etc. Lemmy just doesn't like being reminded that progressives have biased news sources too.

I don't always notice the source at first, so this was a good reminder.

It’s the other side of the coin from Fox News

It's absolutely not.

First, they don't just make shit up. Second, they're very comfortable with center-left neoliberal ideology but anything to the left of that really upsets them.

Opposite of Fox News would be The Onion because they both make up shit

Reality has a left leaning bias