This headline isn't exactly accurate and the article is misleading. PFOA was used in the process of affixing Teflon to surfaces but is not present in the pan itself. PFOA has built up in the environment as a result of the manufacturing processes that use it.
It would be more accurate to say "3M knew that manufacturing non-stick pans, and a number of other products, was poisoning all of us in the '70s".
You didn't have to have a Teflon pan to be exposed and having a Teflon pan didn't increase your exposure significantly. Microwave popcorn bags and other food wrappers were hundreds of times worse.
Teflon pans remain safe to use. All these other non-stick products are potential problems but it's impractical to try to identify which ones have PFOA or PFOS... so it's a good thing it's being phased out.
PFOA/S are bad, but ALL organofluorines are bad. That is pretty much a settled fact even though industry press will only point to peer-reviewed studies on specific molecules like PFOA/S.
Including chipping Teflon, and that winter boot waterproofing spray you have in your closet...
edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted. The body does not have a way of breaking down the carbon-fluorine bond, therefore these chemicals tend to bioaccumulate.
Why the focus on bioaccumulation over harmfulness? Is it that bioaccumulation means that there is no safe exposure level to a substance that might have even minimal harmfulness?
Now I'm really going to reveal my ignorance...
I also don't understand how a substance with such a strong bond that we can't break it down, can interact with anything in the body. Is it something like a catalyst?
Bioaccumulation can cause harm in a number of different ways.
One of the biggest risks is cancer. For example, lung cancer is often caused (in part) by accumulation of soot in your lungs, or asbestos particles, that your body cannot remove. And yes, they say there is no safe exposure level to smoking or asbestos.
Other effects include mental illness, diseases of the liver or kidneys, often seen with heavy metals.
When foreign objects get in protected nooks and crannies of your body, like vital organs, and stay there for the rest of your life, bad things happen.
But just because our bodies bioaccumulate things doesn't mean they cause cancer. You didn't really address any of GP's questions. Do PFOA (and similar) molecules affect cancer rates, and if so - how significantly? Also if PFOA and friends are so unreactive with the body - can't be removed, then what is the mechanism by which they cause problems?
>But just because our bodies bioaccumulate things doesn't mean they cause cancer
And just because we can't pinpoint a mechanism of action doesn't mean it doesn't cause cancer :) There have been a number of MoA's proposed for PFOA specifically. Here are a couple:
Not everything has been studied. And may things are difficult to study. The "little black dots" or fake dirt on fancy astroturf fields are made from recycled road tires, which are a cocktail of all kinds of bad chemicals. And when they get lodged in goalkeepers' skin over time, they enter the body and cause some pretty rare and bad blood cancers. Do I have a study I can point to that says how? No. But do you want your daughter diving on one of those turf fields? https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/27/health/artificial-turf-cancer...
> The "little black dots" or fake dirt on fancy astroturf fields are made from recycled road tires, which are a cocktail of all kinds of bad chemicals. And when they get lodged in goalkeepers' skin over time, they enter the body and cause some pretty rare and bad blood cancers.
If this is true it should soon show up in people who work with tires or live near highways as well?
In addition to that story there is another story I cannot find at the moment, that referenced a vegetable farm in Mexico which was linked to some bad human effects. Turns out it was right next to the highway and the pollution from diesel trucks was making it into the food. They moved the farm farther from the roadside and the problem stopped.
That's the real question. From a 2010 paper (admittedly dated):
Data on the human health effects of PFOA are sparse. There is relatively consistent evidence of modest positive associations with cholesterol and uric acid, although the magnitude of the cholesterol effect is inconsistent across different exposure levels. There is some but much less consistent evidence of a modest positive correlation with liver enzymes. Most findings come from cross-sectional studies, limiting conclusions. Two occupational cohort studies do not provide consistent evidence for chronic disease; both are limited by sample size and reliance on mortality data. Reproductive data have increased recently but are inconsistent, and any observed adverse effects are modest.
> I also don't understand how a substance with such a strong bond that we can't break it down, can interact with anything in the body. Is it something like a catalyst?
No, just an agonist or antagonist for some hormone, neurotransmitter, etc. Just search Google Books for "fluorinated agonist" or "fluorinated antagonist". That is, it's about 3D shape, to fit some receptor protein, and not about chemical reactivity.
Teflon is mostly inert and does not have much of an effect on the body. There is no reason to believe it is bad for you. It also does not generally bio-accumulate.
PFOA however has a head group that is not inert (the acid part).
More generally though the reason we don't like bio-accumulation is because it can have effects that are hard to detect and could take 20 years to show up (think asbestos). With something that is only in you body for a week, whatever it does to you would be detectable in that time.
Do you have any recommendations on where we could read more about the hidden history of PFOAs and teflon? These days all the nonstick pans say PFOA-free, but if they were never present in the actual pan, is it just a marketing gimmick? Like putting gluten-free on old foods that never contained gluten, or bpa-free on things that historically didn't use bpa?
It is a marketing gimmick, but your description of the marketing gimmick is wrong. They say PFOA-free because they use PFOS or another analogue in their manufacturing. They are no more safe.
Just like with BPA free plastics that often have even higher levels of BPS, BPF, etc. or related compounds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuMGc0EswTc
(exploration of literature and the plastic industry's move away from BPA -- as always with Nutrition Facts, Dr. Gregor is totally calm and uses no scare tactics)
Thank you for that addition. I was stuck on the gluten-free thing and you are right about the BPA-free thing - another area where manufacturers just switched to a different, bad chemical.
What they mean when saying PFOA-free is that it wasn't used in the manufacturing of the product. For instance if you look at pans sold at Ikea they will explicitly say in the materials section: "No PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid) has been used to make non-stick coating on this product."
Looks like microwave popcorn bags still contained high levels of PFOA as of 2006, though I wasn't able to find a more recent reliable source. "Consumption of just 10 bags of microwave popcorn a year could contribute about 20%
of the average blood PFOA levels, say the scientists interviewed anonymously for this article." PDF: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es062599u
You can easily cook popcorn on a stove top. Pour some popcorn and oil in a pot, once is starts sizzling shake a bit, once it starts poping shake a lot. Take it off when the pops slow to about once a second and pour into a bowl. Add salt as desired.
Heat the oil sufficiently before adding kernels. Drop a few kernels into the oil as a gauge. When two of them have popped then you can pour in the rest and give it a vigorous shake.
And for the sake of completeness, be sure the pot has a lid!
So much better. It also lets you imitate movie theater flavors if that’s your thing, with refined coconut oil and some Flavocol. As a bonus you can find the kind of popping corn you prefer. For me, I love the smaller “hullless” varieties, they’re sweet and you don’t get stuff in your teeth.
It is Magic, and a single container will last for so many rounds of popcorn you wouldn’t believe it. I found as a trick you add the falvacol to the popcorn and oil before popping, not after for the best results. Bonus? House smells like good, fresh theater corn!
Oh, and if you like buttered corn, add a teaspoon or two of clarified butter to the mix. Like kettle corn? Add some sugar to taste before popping. Like it cheesy? Buy some freeze dried cheddar and add it immediately after popping. If you’re feeling fancy, try some freshly grated parmasean. Cinnamon sugar also works well, as does powdered peanut butter, a bit of cocoa, and some confectioners sugar.
add a teaspoon or two of clarified butter to the mix
I make mine in a special bowl in the microwave (because I'm lazy) using ghee, so yeah...
add a teaspoon or two of clarified butter to the mix
To save some calories I add a bit of splenda afterwards (heat seems to destroy splenda, so it's got to be after the fact). Not as good, but better than nothing.
"Microwave Susceptor". Its a super thin layer of aluminum or graphite that absorbs microwaves and gets really hot. Its in the bottom layer of the bag and the reason for "this side up".
Wow, I assumed similarly - that there's something in the bag that helps the air inside heat up. I guess maybe moisture in the corns is enough. I learned something new and useful today, thanks!
Guess how early (70s) microwave cookbooks told you how to make popcorn, before Orville Redinbacher got involved. Yet my wife, same age I am and read the same cookbooks, buys pre-packaged unflavored microwave popcorn from the store. </shrug>
I've used hot-air popcorn poppers for decades. They draw a lot of power (they're pretty similar to hair-dyers, electrically speaking), but they work well.
In January 2016, the FDA finally banned the Teflon-like, grease-resistant chemical that's been linked to various cancers, infertility, thyroid issues, and birth defects from being used in food packaging: perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). That was great news since a study by the FDA found that up to 20 percent of PFOA levels in our bodies can come from consuming a mere 10 bags of popcorn a year. Unfortunately, the FDA has already approved nearly 100 PFOA-like compounds for use in food packaging—a majority of which have little to no information regarding long-term health consequences, according to the Environmental Working Group. So, although all of the bags listed below are PFOA-free, there is little evidence to support (or deny) that PFOA substitutes are safe to be in contact with your food. Ah, the joys of food manufacturing.
Agreed. The idea that I would want chemicals on anything I buy by default is nuts. Maybe it's safe, maybe a study will come out in 50 years showing it's not, maybe you let your pan get too hot and the teflon breaks down into your food[1]. And in exchange for... non-stick? Worst trade-off ever.
As somebody that enjoys cooking and also eating (eggs, for example), this sounds like an impossible task that accomplishes very little health-wise as you will still be consuming the problem on bad pans. May I suggest the less painful “don’t use metal on your nonstick and throw anything with scrapes / gashes in the trash”?
Eggs are easily cooked on, e.g., cast iron. I do it all the time - been cooking for decades without teflon.
I've used mostly cast iron and wood since I started cooking, with some steel pans for acidic things and special cases. As a bonus, you never have to throw it away - if you somehow get it rusty enough that steel wool won't do the job (say, leave it in a moldy basement for a few years), just take it to your local auto body shop for sandblasting and re-season.
I cook eggs in nice, thick stainless steel/Aluminum pans and cast iron, and never have issues with it sticking. Ditto for things like grilled cheese. The secret is letting them heat up before using them; not getting them too hot, and using a little oil or butter.
I hate non-stick pans. I can't baby them (I'm not responsible enough) and things just stick endlessly for me. It's just a bad experience. Invest in some nice, non-non-stick pans and you won't have stickage.
It's not impossible to cook eggs in a steel pan without sticking. (That's my preferred method) You have to heat your pan before adding oil. And you have to be careful with the surface, avoid scratching it and also making sure to remove any bits to do get stuck.
I agree that avoiding non-stick is probably minimally beneficial, but knowing that normal pans can be cooked on without things sticking, I avoid them.
This thread has really diverted into a pile of anecdotes. :)
Fair, and I also use cast iron for high temp cooking. I meant more avoiding it at restaurants as well as at home. Nonstick seems to be the go-to for omelettes and other dishes (giant skillets excepted of course)
Ceramic non-stick performs better than bare stainless steel. Vitrified finish on iron is less non-stick but still a lot easier to use than maintaining a properly seasoned iron pan. Cooking in these kinds of pans still requires a little butter or oil, but they perform well for people who want to minimize the use of fat.
Some folks below are replying to the contrary, however, in my 10 years of working in NYC restaurants, from your local bar/pub to fine dinning and BRGuest, I have never seen a non stick pan in the kitchen.
Chefs take their frustration out on pans and slam, toss, and scrape them to oblivion.
Edit: adding an anecdote about cooking eggs:
In one restaurant I worked, it was part of the interview process to ask a chef to make an omelette. If the eggs got stuck to the pan or the omelette was destroyed, they didn’t get hired.
When I asked our Sous Chef why this was so difficult he explained that it’s a basic skill that every chef should have and understand the chemical reaction of proteins in a high heat pan with oil.
It’s pretty easy to heat up a nonstick-pan to temperatures where it releases toxic fumes. Just put it on an induction stove without anything in it. A very typical thing to do.
“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”
Moving the actual pieces of paper around is more expensive than moving bits around. This should be obvious. Sometimes you're paying an armored truck to move cash or somebody to count it. Other times you're accepting that tonight's deposit was stolen from you on the way to the bank.
I'm all for physical currency and we should vote and campaign to keep that part of our financial system but this isn't a conspiracy. Cashless will out-compete cash almost every time. The only exceptions are local businesses trying to avoid taxes.
I had the same experience so I just bought their iOS port of Graphing Calculator. It's cheap at $10, it's excellent, but mostly I wanted to say thank you for doing such a ridiculous amount of unpaid work, at personal legal risk, for the sake of math students.
Not even a little bit but that's a fascinating device.
The hearing aid you linked uses light to activate a transducer that's been placed against the tympanic membrane (eardrum). It could have used a wire, radio waves, whatever.
This technique is a combination of a viral infection that transfers light-sensitivity genes into the inner ear and a surgical implant that produces light in the inner ear modulated in response to sound.
One is an externally worn device and the other is a combination of surgery and viral gene-editing. They're "akin" in that they both use light as part of the system. Well, I guess they also both use devices made from baryonic matter.
The only reason this even looks like a problem is that humans don't follow the law.
In most jurisdictions if there's an emergency vehicle running flashers and/or siren behind you on the same side of the road you're supposed to slow, pull over, stop, then proceed only when the vehicle passes you.
If the emergency vehicle parks behind you then you have effectively been pulled over.
Pulling over safely is practically the first thing a self-driving car team works on. It is very easy to detect flashers and sirens. So... no problem.
Well, except that self-driving vehicles may accidentally be pulled over by firetrucks.
So if the autonomous vehicle hears the sirens, does it start to pull over, or wait until it can also detect flashers? What about a loud stereo playing a siren sound or a car with flashers installed on it? I'm just wondering, because although I know this sounds like a pretty simple problem, I don't think that it is.
When you hear a siren you're to become alert for the possibility of flashers behind you. You are not supposed to just start pulling over because it may not be on the same road as you and pulling over may block traffic. Imagine if every car in a crowded downtown pulled over every time the drivers could hear a siren. Instant gridlock.
So a siren played loudly on the radio will not cause a rule-following car to pull over, regardless of who or what is driving it. I presume you're talking about siren sounds in music, but...
Installing flashers that produce the same pattern as official police flashers and/or playing a continual siren is impersonating an officer. That's a serious crime.
Fake flashers will probably cause self-driving cars to pull over but they'll also cause humans to pull over. Not a self-driving car problem.
In the future police flashers can have a cryptographic element emdedded in the flash pattern that a self-driving car or a human-driven car with sensors can authenticate but that's an enhancement over the current situation.
It's one of the best-defined situations in traffic because it's precisely the fallback behavior. Detect emergency vehicle behind you, pull over as far as is safe, wait. If a self-driving car can't do that then it's hardly self-driving at all.
The real trouble, which you haven't brought up, is when the traffic is already at a standstill and an emergency vehicle approaches. The soft and gradual scooch-scooch movements that we have to do to clear enough space for the emergency vehicle are a much tougher case.
You can pull over a self-driving car. You just may have difficulty getting past it to an emergency.
To some extent for Big Tobacco this might be like BP hedging on solar power. Nicotine is still best extracted from the tobacco plant. I doubt they'll fight vaping forever.
What I see is people foolishly fighting the last war. Today's adults have been trained since early life on the evils of smoking and nicotine addiction and vice. We have this narrative of Big Tobacco pushing a product they claimed was safe and which was not. There are all these programmed mental circuits saying "if you don't like smoking, you should be suspicious of vaping."
And so at the beginning of vaping there was a lot of FUD about popcorn lung. Now there's FUD about kids getting hooked on Juul. Everybody's looking for the catch because last time there was a catch.
A future in which 20% of the population is forever hooked on vaping nicotine and no cigarettes are sold is a utopia compared to what we have now. Instead of embracing that future we have the anti-tobacco activists spreading alarm about vaping and all the old smoking laws being expanded to cover an activity that doesn't justify the ostracism.
I've never smoked or vaped and the laws have no effect on me. For a brief period I saw smokers switching when they could vape indoors. That advantage is disappearing.
We're missing a chance to kill cigarettes in the developed world. We should embrace the viral appeal of the vape fad before they become just another nicotine delivery device. We could save millions of lives.
I agree very strongly. Vaping is a bit of an unknown, but it's difficult to overstate how terrible tobacco is.
Like you, I've never smoked or vaped, but I see vaping as an excellent chance to actually kill off tobacco. If we later learn some flavouring agent is harmful, well, we have an entire regulatory apparatus that let's us solve these things.
> We could save millions of lives.
Yep. Or we could virtue signal about how important self restraint and puritan morals are. Might kill a bunch of people, but man, think how great that smug feeling will feel!
You're hitting the nail on its flattest head here. The metaphors are deliberately broken. The ways in which they break are meant to show aspects of the system.
Theorems have characteristics that aren't obvious to non-mathematicians. Hofstatder's goal was to convey some of these characteristics. A metaphor that says "if a theorem were a record and a mathematical system were a record player, here is what would happen to the record player when it played a self-referential theorem record" is an excellent way to show how theorems are different than anything we normally deal with.
A more modern book would have been able to rely on the metaphor of a program "crashing" which would have been sad and inept. There are a thousand ways a program can crash and very few of them reflect any aspects of Gödelian incompleteness. They're just poorly made, like a record with a big hole in the track that breaks the record needle.
There are essays in Hofstadter's collection "Metamagical Themas" that expand significantly on his idea of what metaphors and analogies actually are and what he thinks they're capable of doing. Reading those makes it very clear why he'd use broken metaphors in GEBEGB.
I think GEBEGB is most useful in exposing people who don't yet have any formal training in mathematical theory to some deeper concepts and inspiring them to find the subtle edges of these systems. I read it at about 12 and it changed my life by exposing subtle fripperies of thought. If I'd read it at 20, as the author of this article did, I too would probably have experienced these little amusements as lack of rigor. Instead I experienced them as mysteries, and now as an adult I experience them as very dry jokes and thought prompts.
Also adding to this. A main point of the book is also that there is no logical system that can be complete, so someone trying to get the real big picture needs to be able to live outside logic comfortably as well.
A little bit like Zen thinking. You cannot make a clapping sound with one hand. But you have to accept that the question can exist in a space with zero answers.
It's hard to understand why Snopes has this marked as a myth. The specific anecdote structure with the wife showing up is clearly a meme but that doesn't make it a mythical type of event.
We're much better at dealing with this situation in developed countries now. It's still a serious hazard. Around the turn of the 20th century it was very difficult to handle.
This seems to involve patients being 'crushed' for an extended period of time. Like more than 15 minutes, where tissue dies and basically creates a poison, that enters the blood stream when the patients get released.
That doesn't seem to describe a situation like the ggp was talking about.
Note that I'm addressing the Snopes conclusion more than the comments of the HN poster, except insofar as he/she used Snopes as a source.
The key elements of the Snopes article are these:
-Victim was crushed by machinery.
-Victim is still alive.
-Victim is not in much pain.
-If the machinery is removed the victim will probably die quickly.
-There's time to have them communicate with loved ones, a priest, whoever.
There are literally videos of this situation on liveleak. It happens with trains, with elevators, with forklifts and freight, and most commonly with car accidents.
The reason you don't remove the person at first is that they'll bleed out. The crushing material is an effective tourniquet so the person just sits there, alive and moving.
By the time that emergency responders get there to address the blood loss crush syndrome is a definite possibility. The person is generally going to faint the moment the equipment is removed because of the sudden loss of blood pressure. If they don't die of blood loss then they may have kidney failure and die on the way to treatment.
Everything about this is shockingly common except bringing the victim's family down to say goodbye or bringing in a priest.
To suggest that this has not happened in any of the hundreds or thousands of crushing cases since the industrial revolution occurred is ludicrous. It used to be that companies provided housing for workers near the factory/trainyard/loading dock. It would often have been the case that the victim's family could get there before an emergency responder.
The sense in which this is a "legend" is that people claim it happened to a friend-of-a-friend or whatever, and it's true that's an urban legend channel, but the actual events are documented except for the dramatic last kiss. I wouldn't even be sure that isn't documented. I just haven't seen it.
It would be more accurate to say "3M knew that manufacturing non-stick pans, and a number of other products, was poisoning all of us in the '70s".
You didn't have to have a Teflon pan to be exposed and having a Teflon pan didn't increase your exposure significantly. Microwave popcorn bags and other food wrappers were hundreds of times worse.
Teflon pans remain safe to use. All these other non-stick products are potential problems but it's impractical to try to identify which ones have PFOA or PFOS... so it's a good thing it's being phased out.