In this and subsequent blogs I will lay out some of the major classes of chemical compounds in involved in manufacture and production, distribution, utilization, disposal and recycling of plastics. It is by no means inclusive, just the primary players that we have data points on. More than 350,000 chemical compounds have been made in the past 70 years. Only about 20% were ever tested in any fashion. There are about 80,000 registered chemicals in the US of whom less than a dozen have been regulated.(source Linda Birnbaum,podcast with Nate Hagens Jan 21, 2025, The Great simplification.
Some of these chemicals used in plastics will be familiar to you and others probably not. The most widely used are bisphenols, and phthalates and PFAS. . Bisphenols and Phthalates are plasticizers which are added to plastics to increase flexibility, durability, transparency and longevity. They are similar in their effects on biologic systems. They are especially toxic to mollusks, invertebrates. and fish when they show up in bodies of water because they leach out so readily. They are similar in uses and effects so in a sense talking about them separately can be misleading. Lets start with BPA, Bisphenol A being the poster child.You will likely know it from the baby bottle and sippy cup controversy within the past 15 years. It has long been known as an EDC(endocrine disrupting chemical) and despite hundreds of studies over decades the FDA responding to the Chemical companies lobbying allowed it to be used in Baby bottles, water bottles and food packaging. But retailers in 2011 and many states did voluntarily remove it from shelves in 2011 responding to consumer pressure and not FDA regulation.. The FDA did nothing for years but finally did ban it from baby food/formula containers in 2013. At this point I feel the need to add a big culprit to my list: The FDA! It reads: FOOD and DRUGS which is ridiculous on the surface. . It is like having the FAA combined with EPA under one roof. The FDA IMO has failed dismally at regulation of both food and drugs. At the very least it should be broken into two agencies. Another important fact is the the FDA has concerned itself with ACUTE and not chronic toxicity of both food and drugs. This has been pointed out by many scientists. This applies to both acute and chronic disease and the FDA has ignored chronic disease caused by certain “ foods”. An example is that the FDA has stated there is no risk to high sugar consumption acutely when it has long been known to be one of the dominant causes of the Metabolic syndrome when consumed heavily chronically. I have addressed this in a previous blog and will do so in the future. It is also well known that chemicals and additives banned in Europe and Asia are not banned in the US by the FDA. Sorry about that rant. Let us return to our EDC’s………….
BPA was discovered by Alexandr Dianin in 1891. An interesting factoid about phthalates and Bisphenolwas was their discovery in the 1930’s that they had estrogenic effects like Bisphenol, when the search was on worldwide for a synthetic estrogen. We knew 90 years ago of their potential for endrocrine effects! But these two classes lost out to diethylstilbesterol(DES) being developed about the same time. More on that later. BPA really entered industrial production in the 1950’s with the development of epoxy adhesives and polycarbonate. BPA was mixed with phosgene(YES! one of poison gasses of the first World war!) and it made a hard plastic: polycarbonate. Polycarbonate was a durable plastic so hard that it was bulletproof. It was easily formed into cheap food and liquid containers when it was licensed in 1963 without any published safety information(!). Bisphenol found its way into other plastics such as polyacrylate,polyethylamide,polyester, polyester-styrene, polysulphone. Also polyethylene(as in water bottles), polyethylene terphthalate(a pthalate) and pvc as a hardening agent, antioxidant and stabilizer. It is still with us and is ubiquitous. It is found in free form on some thermal printing papers, cosmetics, medical equipment, sports equipment, many toys, clothing, food and drink containers and other goods.
Bisphenol production(2022) was said to be 10 billion kg/yr. It cannot be usefully and economically recycled (like almost all plastics!!!), and ends up in landfills leaching out into groundwater, dust, dirt and air. The USGS has seen concentrations as high as 6 mg/ltr and Japan has estimated that 84% of all EDC estrogenic activity in their country is due to just to Bisphenol. BPA can be measured in 93% of all US citizens and it is a cumulative poison. The good news is that its half life is only in days to hours unlike another class of chemicals we will visit, the “forever chemicals”, PFAS. You would think that Food and drink companies would have removed it decades ago but you would be wrong. Most of the International soft drink companies like Coca-Cola, Monster energy drinks and General mills still use it because Bisphenol products are part of the business and profit model of BIG Processed Food and Big Fast food companies. They continue to use it for food safety considerations and long shelf life which to an extent is true, But it poses other more hidden and delayed food safety risks which they are happy to ignore. These companies and the production companies like Dow, Dupont and their Trade group the American Chemical Council use the well thumbed playbook of the tobacco companies of denial, obfuscation and delay.. I would not accuse them of criminality or evil because it is useful and fair to look at both sides of an issue. If the FDA says they can use these poisons then they are off the hook when they do. There is a huge database of medical conditions related to just this chemical and its relatives and I will only hit upon some of the more proven established conditions but the potential list is very large. I will also explain the exact biophysiological mechanisms altered and how and why they work to do their nefarious effects. I realize I may lose a few of you. Sorry!
There has been a steady rise in population “excess deaths”beginning to rise above baseline in the past several decades and there is no doubt in my mind that this is largely due to chemical environmental and dietary substances. It is almost guaranteed to be multicausal with a HUGE amount of factors, most of which will be difficult to tease out individually. It will be difficult to remove chemicals like Bisphenol by legislative action but we as individuals can do a lot to reduce their impact on our lives. If we don’t use it, they wont(may not?) make it. I will humbly offer my suggestions in a future blog.
Let us look at the mechanism of EDC’s of which BPA is a big player. BPA looks to the human body like an estrogen or an androgen hormone. It mimics their action on both short and long term metabolism. BY binding to various receptors it can block the action of hormones even at very low concentrations. For example we know the BPA is an antagonist of the thyroid hormone precursor. It interferes with thyroid synthesis, secretion and signaling.
We also hear almost daily about the drop in sperm cell levels and production worldwide, worse in certain regions. BPA decreases sperm cell motility, and spermatogenesis. That hits both the quantity and quality of sperm. But wait! There’s more. Men exposed to daily elevated levels of BPA show reduced sexual desire and libido, reduced erectile function and orgasms. These effects have been found not only in humans but in mice,cattle, chickens and even fish!!! The signal paper was a meta study of over 7500 abstracts and papers in 2017 byLevine, Swan, at al., in “Human Reproductive update”.
They said that sperm concentration in the developed world from 1973 to 2011 had fallen from 99 units to just 47, a compound rate of almost 2%/yr. This has continued since then and even has accelerated in some regions. It is believed that the etiology is chemical toxicity which almost certainly starts early in fetal development and comprises epigenetic factors.(I will address the fascinating phenomenon of epigenetics in a future blog). This was not good news to the chemical companies and they of course are fighting back. The American Chemical council used the old legal argument:”Correlation is not causation.” This despite a large raft of studies showing exactly that using in vivo and in vitro studies of humans and mammals.
As a sidebar I would like to insert the work of Jeremy Grantham, who authored a paper https://www.gmo.com/americas/research-library/chemical-toxicity-and-the-baby-bust_viewpoints/which created quite a stir about this sperm depletion issue.
Jeremy Grantham is a British investor and philanthropist who considers this phenomenon of sperm and birth decline and deferred childbirth the” greatest threat to the human race”. He focused on this in an excellent paper in 2020 in the publication GMO.com. entitled “Chemical Toxicity and the Baby Bust.” He posts graphs from the WHO and the US National center for Health Statistics also showing large jumps in auto immune diseases such as Type 1 DM, MS, Asthma, Celiac disease and autism. I commend readers to read his excellent paper. Jeremy was influenced by a well known book”Empty Planet: The shock of global Population Decline” published in 2019. I am not persuaded that this is due solely to chemical toxicity . There are other drivers of acute and chronic disease. The list is not short.
Let me end this blog. There are more chemical culprits every bit as terrifying as Bisphenol and phthalates. Let us look at the "Forever Chemicals", the PFAS.
PFAS stands for per- or polufluoralkyl substances. I should mention that over 350.000 chemicals have been synthesized or released in the last 70 years and only a small minority have ever been tested. Among the 80,000 ”regulated “chemicals, only a small amount have been tested for bio toxicity. There are many many more classes of chemicals which I will not characterize for toxicity. I have chosen just these few classes because they have received a lot of media attention recently. Now to PFAS: PFAS substances are characterized by a Carbon-Fluorine bond of great bond strength. It is its bond strength which is the chief problem because strong bonds mean that is difficult for nature, the environment or our metabolism to break down the chemical. Fluorine is a member of the halogen Group 17 on the Periodic Table of elements, non metallic elements of great reactivity and unfortunately toxicity. The main ones are fluorine, chlorine, bromine and iodine and none exist in nature in their free form because they are so reactive. In fact Fluorine is the most reactive element of all. It should be no surprise why it poses potential biotoxicity. Enough chemistry! As an aside I bring this up to inform the reader to be aware of any chemicals with “fluor” in its name. PFAS chemicals which number 9512(!!!) come in short and long chain variants with the long chain versions thought to pose the greater risk. PFAS are used in a vast array of products that require dirt, grease and water repellency but also in medical products, cookware, low friction uses(Teflon), fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, and growth chemicals, cosmetics, building materials, clothing and most cleaning products. This is just a partial list.
What are the known and certain health dangers of the PFAS? Let me paste a summary from a paper from a National Library of Medicine paper here:
• Reproductive and developmental outcomes: PFOS and PFOA exposure leads to a decrease in serum levels of sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG) in men and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) in women. It also negatively affects spermatogenesis and sperm quality, and possibly influences the menstrual cycle. PFAS in the placenta and breast milk may adversely influence fetal or breastfed infants’ development.
• Immune responses: Exposure to PFAS in infancy and childhood triggers immunosuppression as evidenced by the increased incidence of lower respiratory tract infections and atopic dermatitis. Researchers correlated a modest down-regulation of the C-reactive protein response with PFOA blood levels.
• Thyroid function: Researchers found a negative correlation between PFAS exposure and serum total thyroxine levels, which indicates PFAS exposure results in thyroid dysfunction and disease. These chemicals can alter human thyroid hormones and potentially contribute to thyroid autoimmunity.
• Lipid and insulin dysregulation: PFAS exposure leads to an increase in serum cholesterol levels in adults and children. Even a low PFAS dose can increase blood cholesterol levels.
• Liver disease and cancer: The liver is the primary organ for long-chain PFAS storage, which could subsequently trigger hepatocyte fat infiltration, apoptosis, hepatocellular adenomas, and carcinomas. Scientists observed that PFAS exposure increases alanine aminotransferase levels in the liver which could result in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).
• These are just the known health issues that we know today.
• There almost certainly will be others to come.
How do these PFAS get into our bodies? They enter primarily by food and water and contact with our skin or lungs or if you are a fetus through your mother's placenta PFAS is in especially high concentration in products like firefighting foams but pose no direct risk unless you happen to be a fireman or live near an airport or military base where the PFAS/Foam has soaked into the ground and contaminated the aquifer. You get PFAS in food if you eat processed foods, fast foods which come wrapped in pfas coated wraps and containers or things like pizza boxes and microwave popcorn bags. PFAS is in a myriad of cosmetics and skin care products.They make the skin soft and supple and glossy for example. PFAS is also in shampoos and conditioners, nail polish, toothpaste, sunscreens, dental floss and micropowders. This class of uses may be especially malignant to people who use a lot of such items.
PFAS gets into food in several ways. It can be from runoff into fields and water where crops are grown or animals grazed or from landfills where PFAS has been buried and has leached out. There are 20 million contaminated acres in Michigan and Maine which used industrial sewage sludge as fertilizer which was provided “free” by the local municipaliries. The PFAS got into the crops and into the animals bodies and milk and eggs. Non organic foods acquire PFAS from growth regulators and certain fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Ultra processed food and many fast foods are a sure route of ingress coating the wraps and containers of the fast food. What is a person to do? I will address some ideas to mitigate and even eliminate chemical contamination in our lives in a later summary but after reading this it should be obvious that the route to health involves divorcing yourself from our industrial civilization systematically removing known dangerous products and practices and assuming most industrial products are toxic unless proven otherwise . It is a big list but not really that difficult a task. It can be as simple as avoiding miracle fabrics and wear only cotton,wool or silk clothing. Eliminating virtually all fast food consumption and prepare real food at home. If food comes with an ingredients list, consider putting it back on the shelf.! Consume Foods that Michael Pollan has said your grandmother would have brought to the table. Growing your own organic food or buying from farm stands and preparing it yourself and limiting “eating out” at restaurants where you have little to no control how food is prepared. These are just a few general ideas of mine which I will address in detail later.
I need to inform the reader that waiting until research is done elucidating current and future chemical poisons before taking action is a fool’s errand. There is simply no way to know now or ever all the negative sources impacting ourselves and our environment. A large difficulty is simply devising methodologies to do the research. The researcher will be constrained by funding and in the case of evaluating biotoxicity he(she) will be limited in most cases by use of established cell cultures and cell lines, certain lab animals and timescales, dose/response curves and half lives of chemicals which may or may not translate over into human physiology. The toxicities will almost certain be different for different sexes of different ages in different regions with differing individual susceptibilities, coexistent diseases and metabolism. Good studies may take a long time to perform and in the end not even be conclusive. The researcher, may not be immune from improper pressures from for example. Big Ag or Big Food or Big Pharma who may be quick to deny, delay or attack conclusions. These giant multinational corporations have owned the turf for many decades and have made a lot of money in the process and will be loath change or stop a lucrative business model. MY advice is YOYO(“You’re on your own”) and Save yourself!
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