Last year the EPA massively tightened its recommendation for PFAS in drinking water from 70ppt to 0.004ppt for PFOA and 0.02 ppt for PFOS[1]. I don't think anyone is enforcing anywhere near that level yet... CA is the strictest in the US at 5.1ppt.
The scariest part of this to me is that even if you do manage to get it out of your water at home through filters or reverse osmosis it's probably in all your food at high concentrations. At least as of 2019 in Canada and the EU PFAS levels in retail meat are at 500-700ppt and the US is entirely unknown [2].
It's also pretty tough to even figure out what filter setup to use at home since the NSF filter standards are still for the outdated 70ppt metric. Duke did a decent study on actual filters a few years back[3].
It's interesting to me that people worrying about PFAS at 0.004 ppt levels consider Reverse Osmosis filters made from PTFE membranes a way to remove them. What are the PFAS levels in the membrane? Who tested it?
Charcoal filters are only removing 3/4 while RO is removing 19/20, but if you're at 70ppt, you're not getting to 0.7ppt even with both of those together.
If you believe the people testing, why not believe the same for tested teflon pans?
I still suspect RO is pretty good since otherwise semi fabs would be contaminated, but I think the PTFE boats were probably also pretty good. It's the thousands of gallons of PFAS by-product pumped into the ground or sold off as flame retardant that I'd worry about.
RO doesn't seem like a good idea - completely removes a lot of the needed minerals from water that your body needs. WHO issues a warning about drinking from these kinds of systems exclusively.
As I remember the studies, minerals in water is on the order of 5-10% extra calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium. Negligible on the rest. A nice little bump, but nothing a decent diet won’t attain. Although half of westerners are deficient in magnesium, so that one is a good supplement to take regardless.
When the trade off is arsenic, lead, pfas, bromate, hexavalent chromium, haloacetic acids, nitrates, uranium, trihalomethane, and who knows what other carcinogens…
You can purchase elemental mineral drops and add that back in to RO water. Given the importance of water and minerals, I find it to be worth it but that's definitely an individual choice, as well as a privileged one (meaning I can afford RO water and minerals to add).
I've been drinking RO water almost exclusively since conception and I'm fine. I eat a SAD(standard American diet) and I get enough minerals from my food.
> Seven out of eight US kale samples recently tested for toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” contained high levels of the compounds.
> The testing looked at conventional and organic kale bought at grocery stores across the country, and comes after Food and Drug Administration analyses conducted between 2019 and 2021 found no PFAS contamination.
> The findings “stunned” researchers who expected to find low levels of the chemicals, said Robert Verkerk, founder of the Alliance for Natural Health non-profit, which produced the paper.
>“It’s pretty scary and there’s no easy solution,” he said, adding that the findings highlight the need for the FDA to implement a more robust PFAS testing program for the nation’s food supply.
The EU is, typically, doing a far better job of researching this than the FDA. The latter of which seems almost entirely driven by corporate interests at this point. There's a paper from the EU here [1] which is far too verbose, but offers some interesting data:
- For PFOS and PFOA, ‘Fish and other seafood’ was the most important contributor to the mean exposure, followed by ‘Eggs and egg products’, ‘Meat and meat products’, and ‘Fruit and fruit products’. For PFOA, ‘Vegetables and vegetable products’ and ‘Drinking water’ were also important contributors. For several of the other PFASs, ‘Fish and other seafood’, ‘Fruit and fruit products, ‘Vegetables and vegetable products’, ‘Drinking water’, as well as ‘Starchy roots and tubers’ were the most important food groups.
- Diet is the major source of PFAS exposure for most of the population, but other routes such as dust ingestion and indoor air inhalation may also contribute substantially
- PFASs are transferred from soil to plants. In general, transfer rates are higher for the short chain PFASs and decrease from roots to leaves to fruits.
- In food producing animals, PFASs transfer from feed to animal derived food like milk, eggs and meat, with clear differences between species and the type of PFAS. This is also relevant for soil ingestion by foraging farm animals
---
I think the conclusion is that everything is potentially exposed, so the individual source is more important than the type of medium. Another somewhat interesting article [2] showed how a sampled chocolate cake ended up with extremely high levels. It (probably) wasn't even from the cake itself, but from a chemical used to greaseproof paper at some point in its production. So my take from that would be, as always, to consume foods which have gone through minimal processing before getting to you.
Do you know if the contamination of fruits/vegetables is due to the contact with earth (i.e. superficial and could theoretically be rinsed off or something) or is it actually "ingested" by the plant?
Most forever pollutants have greater concentrations as you go up the food chain. The grass has 1ppm, the cow eats 100x it's body weight over its lifetime, and cannot eliminate the pollutant so it gets up to 100ppm. Add in a few more levels and it can really ratchet up the dosage.
Is more complicated than that. If those chemicals are lipophilic substances (attracted by fat) then cows should accumulate more. But if they are hydrophilic substances, attracted by water, we need to remember that lettuce is 96% water. One Kg of meat is rich energy food and not equivalent to Kg of lettuce. We would need to eat much more Kg of lettuce for the same.
As we are talking about chocolate pie I assume that they are lipohilic. But vegetables aren't an homogeneous group and some seeds and fruits have a lot of oil. We could find that meat is safer than some of them and expect a much higher variability inside the group than with meat.
I assume this, but I don't know every chemical in this group. What is strange is that Kale does not seem like a very oily plant (in my opinion, could be wrong). This species store sugars as chill protection.
The main question to ask here is if this chemicals are causing chronic inflammation and in that case if is related with the obesity epidemic. We know that people living in the upper course of the rivers and allegedly drink better quality water are less obese on average.
A possible null hypothese to start could be: A body accumulating toxic substances in the fat cells, could react making more fat cells as a defense (to dilute the poison by cell)?.
Are somebody checking if the areas with more chemicals in the water show a higher average of Body Mass Index?
I wonder if it’s worth it to filter the water you drink. If that’s at the bottom of the chain then would the amount you get from food (especially meat) vastly dwarf the amount you directly drink?
I'm no expert on this and my interest has purely been from doing a home filter setup in an NYC apartment and trying to figure out what the best practices are, but my understanding is plants can also be impacted through uptake but there isn't too much evidence it's resulting in higher levels outside of known PFAS hotspots.
The FDA suggests that the primary issue at least in the US right now is seafood[1].
Seems at least kale [0] is affected, with the suspected pathway being more common for organic (organic fertilizer). This bothers me, as we do like our kale in the house. Still better than meat I suppose.
I grew up in an agricultural area and the water was completely untreated. It was literally a canal from the river that was then sprayed onto fields. It wasn't uncommon to have to clean out small fish from the irrigation pump's filter. Sometimes you'd lose water pressure completely and have to drive down to the irrigation ditch and clean a racoon carcass or something out of the intake grate.
Sample size is 716. Time period was 5 years. The sampling process was carried out by property owners as volunteers and involved several steps. Several detections were at or below limits for current testing methods.
And the study, much more rationally than the headline, concludes:
"Modeled results indicate that on average at least one PFAS is
detected in about 45% of US drinking-water samples. Results also
indicate that 1) detection probabilities vary spatially (8% in rural areas
up to > 70% in urban areas/areas with a known history of PFAS
contamination), 2) drinking-water exposures may be more common in
the Great Plains, Great Lakes, Eastern Seaboard, and Central/Southern
California regions, and 3) temporal variations in concentrations/detections may be limited"
I think the key here is that we can't trust regulators, though I would certainly welcome their contributions...
Perhaps what needs to happen is engineers developing a cheap rapid test where it becomes possible for consumers to become aware enough of the invisible problem that it becomes possible to advocate for a solution.
At the moment, we are left fighting ghosts, some of which may not be real. How are we to hold cities responsible for their water when it's possible they are part of the good 50% as far as we know?
What if the bottled water we buy to avoid pfas has higher concentrations than the tap? We are powerless to even hold manufacturers responsible.
Going from this to "we can't trust regulators" is quite a jump. The EPA and other regulators are quickly tightening regulations, but how do we currently filter PFAS up the food chain?
If anything, distrust should be placed in the chemical companies as "the chemical industry knew about the dangers of PFAS and failed to let the public, regulators, and even their own employees know the risks." [0].
Tap water is safer and held to a higher standard than bottled water. The EPA requires tap water to be tested multiple times a day and the information is publicly available. Is bottled water held to a similarly high standard?
Would you trust someone that didn't tell you you were drinking poison from 40+ years? Because that is exactly what happened.
1970's - The EPA knew since 1970s[1], and possibly even earlier, of the evils of the stuff that was getting dumped into the open.
1983 - The EPA learned of the Oakdale Dump (supefund site) and they still took no action [2] on the chemicals itself.
2001 - It was left to hero Billot, to literally put a target on its back by whistleblowing on the whole industry after the EPA, local county regulators, had all failed to blow this issue open.
2016 - First year of advisory from EPA [3]
That's approximately 46 years for EPA to release regulatory advise on this carcinogen.
1981 - "Two years after DuPont learned of a famous monkey study in 1979, 3M shared the results of another study (with Dupont) it had done, this one on pregnant rats, whose unborn pups were more likely to have eye defects after they were exposed to C8. The EPA was also informed of the results." [4]
Well, here in south west Virginia, it was a company dumping waste into the Roanoke River.
>Since 2014, ProChem has been servicing “vessels” — which are the same configuration as home water softeners and serve essentially the same purpose — that are part of the manufacturing process at a Chemours plant near Parkersburg, West Virginia. After ProChem removed calcium and magnesium compounds from the units, they were returned to Chemours.
>Samples of ProChem’s wastewater that were discharged into a sewer system that leads to a Montgomery County water treatment plant showed levels of 1.3 million parts per trillion.
>“If ProChem had been made aware of the presence of GenX on those vessels, it would not have accepted the order,” the company said in a statement released Friday. “As soon as this knowledge was obtained, the service of these vessels ceased.”
They can be expensive but it's worth it to have clean drinking water. Be sure to get one with a built in pump to maintain the right pressure on the membrane. I like the iSpring brand.
The scariest part of this to me is that even if you do manage to get it out of your water at home through filters or reverse osmosis it's probably in all your food at high concentrations. At least as of 2019 in Canada and the EU PFAS levels in retail meat are at 500-700ppt and the US is entirely unknown [2].
It's also pretty tough to even figure out what filter setup to use at home since the NSF filter standards are still for the outdated 70ppt metric. Duke did a decent study on actual filters a few years back[3].
[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/stricter-federal-...
[2] https://www.nal.usda.gov/research-tools/food-safety-research...
[3] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/acs.estlett.0c00004/s...