The study was off by a factor of 10, and the levels of flame retardants found was actually under the FDA guidelines for maximum daily exposure.
However, in my own assessment, my maximum daily exposure to ingested flame retardants should be zero, rather than some off the cuff figure that was certainly done with appeasing industry in mind.
So yes, I still ditched my plastic cookware in favor of stainless steel and silicone, and am still happy that the erroneous study got my attention.
Because many of these flame retardants are not only environmentally toxic, but seriously incompatible with human life.
They shouldn’t be present in products designed to come in contact with food, when many good alternatives are available (inherently heat-resistant thermoplastics, silicone, stainless steel, etc)
Brominated Flame Retardants?! It's pretty widely accepted that these are highly toxic. The question regulators have been looking at [1] is how dangerous they are when used in domestic furniture, curtains, etc, where children might be exposed and it might be present in household dust. At least when used in these products, the presence of BFRs hopefully does more good than harm, by preventing fires.
But nobody ever thought anyone would actually be crazy enough to put BFRs in kitchen utensils, where perfectly good, and cheap, alternatives exist!
> In 2004, ATSDR wrote "Nothing definite is known about the health effects of PBDEs in people. Practically all of the available information is from studies of laboratory animals. Animal studies indicate that commercial decaBDE mixtures are generally much less toxic than the products containing lower brominated PBDEs. DecaBDE is expected to have relatively little effect on the health of humans."
But I'm sure you're right. After all, history tells us that if someone is widely accepted to be a witch, they must be a witch.
Right, so even way back in 2004 they (PBDEs) were known to be toxic in animals. But you won't accept that they're toxic to humans too until it's proven? How would you propose to obtain such proof? Human trials? Will you volunteer?
You made the original claim without evidence. It's up to you to provide that evidence. You're engaging in a classic crank move there. I'm just applying Hitchen's Razor: "what is asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence."
I have pointed out that these specific chemicals look to be less toxic than the class in general, so just pointing to evidence about the class in general is not sufficient.
For my part, I’m certain your counter-argument is the more accurate take. After all, history tells us that such studies are never quietly funded by the industries most likely to profit off of positive results, without regard to human cost.
You are saying that if my argument cannot be conclusively shown to be 100% correct, it must be assumed to be incorrect. Way to stack the deck in your favor, champ.
I am sorry you took that as my meaning! I certainly didn’t intend to claim you needed to prove your case 100% or be excoriated, and I understand you taking affront, given that interpretation!
My understanding was that you were arguing that any hint of disagreeing with current scientific understanding was equivalent to believing in witchcraft, given the similar lack of evidence — an eminently defensible position, no question.
However: the witch hunters at Salem also had plenty of evidence to support their claims — albeit evidence we can now see with modern eyes as hopelessly wrong and heavily weighted by the powers that be in order to advance their own interests (land grabs, mostly).
Unfortunately the average citizen at the time had no way of interrogating the veracity and efficacy of either the claims of witchcraft, nor the very tests by which said witchcraft could supposedly be revealed.
Which leads to my intended point, which is that I sure hope this doesn’t turn out to be another leaded paint situation (we knew lead was poison but didn’t account for dust particles and childhood curiosity), or a climate change situation (the companies themselves knew it was harmful and flooded the field with misleading studies), or an arsenic situation (basically Victorian leaded paint), or a tobacco situation (4 out of 5 doctors recommend X), etc.
Essentially: misaligned incentives can be equally, if not more, powerful than the scientific method itself when it comes to shaping public policy.
But I do I apologize for glibly mirroring your own phrasing when making my own point, I can see how that would be frustrating, especially without the added historical context with which you may be unfamiliar.
Wood is also known for being flammable, but wooden cooking tools are very common. I think anyone who cooks a lot has an intuitive understanding that just touching something hot is not enough to make anything in a kitchen catch on fire, and that home kitchen fires are relatively rare even with a gas stove involved. So it is surprising to learn that there are flame retardants in these tools because they clearly aren't necessary.
The flame retardants were added to the plastic cases of electronics, which at the end of their lives got recycled into kitchen utensils.
That is why white plastic utensils are not being called out: although white utensils are common, white electronics cases are rare, so the white utensils do not have high levels of retardants.
I understand, I'm just explaining why the average person wouldn't expect to find flame retardants in kitchen tools. It is not a logical assumption like the other comment claimed.
The problem were not the flame retardants per se but the black plastic added from other recycled electronic devices to get the black color flame retardants.
At an individual level, sure - there is tons of conflicting information out there so you just need to use your best judgement to decide what to do for you.
At a broader level, though, I am certainly not happy this erroneous study got my (and many other people's) attention, because it's conclusions were complete bullshit. I don't understand these kinds of unscientific apologetics - it's the exact same kind of thinking that leads people down the road of "Sure, that study of vaccine implications in autism may have been completely fraudulent, but I'm still glad it got my attention because it informed me of all the random chemicals in vaccines!"
I personally did not ditch my plastic cookware, and I'm glad I didn't, because so far there is zero actual evidence that one needs to.
On the flipside, blindly accepting industry safety standards is how we ended up with lead paint and asbestos everywhere. Insufficient evidence of harm is not the same as proof of no harm.
We can live in a world of nuance where we refute the specific claims of this study while still making choices to proactively avoid potential harm from plastic products. Many other valid studies are finding microplastic in our bodies and environment at levels we didn't remotely suspect before.
Is this really clear from the study? Which utensils are made from black ABS and actually end up touching food? The lid of a blender maybe?
It can't be anything that gets hot.
> my maximum daily exposure to ingested flame retardants should be zero
What does this even mean? You refuse to eat anything that could possibly put out of a fire, or if included within anything else, could slow down the progress of fire when that thing burns?
I don't understand taking pride in irrationality. If you have some evidence (or even some reasonable suspicion) that the specific chemical could be harmful in the amount that you consume it, avoid it. It's weird for me to brag that I'd avoid something despite any evidence, because somebody mentioned it once and I refuse to let it go. What if what you replace it with causes cancer, but has no effect on fires?
It's not irrational to avoid exposure to unknown or poorly studied chemicals. Avoiding something for which one has no evidence in either direction is a good risk avoidance strategy. In general, when it comes to my body, I prefer a whitelist vs a blacklist approach.
It is rational (you have a cogent reason for doing do) but the reasoning is specious, because you are singling out one specific thing to avoid. If you listed all such substances fitting the criteria "unknown or poorly studied" then you would have to live in a bubble to avoid them all.
> What does this even mean? You refuse to eat anything that could possibly put out of a fire, or if included within anything else, could slow down the progress of fire when that thing burns?
Brominated flame retardants. Polybrominated diphenyl ethers were called out in the study.
They obviously meant halogenated, dangerous flame retardants, which are approved for use in consumer electronics but not utensils, not water...
If there was a thread on the respiratory hazards of airborne micron-sized particles, I guarantee that someone in the comments section would say "I can't believe these unscientific yokels are afraid of clouds."
Well if that's the plan, distinguishing actual zero from negligible, step one is figuring out whether the leeching from the existing products is negligible or not. No assuming that non-zero presence means much.
So, taking some simple measures to reduce the amount of scientifically proven harmful synthetic chemicals a person puts in their mouth...is unscientific because you want to quibble about the statistical precision of the wording of a conversational comment. The American FDA says "it's not enough to worry about, trust us" while Americans now ingest up to a shopping bag worth of plastic each month, companies like Dow and DuPont spend literal millions per year lobbying, and the multi-trillion-dollar healthcare industry controls a double-digit percentage of the American economy and labor force. This must be the kind of thinking which results from excessive consumption of flame retardants and Brawndo.
I just think that going for "zero" is usually a flawed plan. Things are tradeoffs and decisions should recognize that. Everything is toxic in different ways. Some options are clearly better than others, but the analysis needs more effort than looking at a single number.
Actually I think going for zero would be an admirable goal here, if pursued in a healthy balance stopping short of obsessive phobia-driven mania. But that aside, nobody is denying that there are other sources of various harmful substances besides kitchen utensils. In no way, shape, or form does that invalidate the perfectly logical sentiment of "I wish I could have zero synthetic plastics and flame retardants entering my body so I at least stopped putting plastic utensils in my mouth and food." You do not need more studies, measurements, thresholds, comparison of relative contribution of various sources, or a feasibility analysis of sealing yourself in a giant glass terrarium to justify every word of that basic sentiment including "zero."
Stopping a single source is not going to stop you from ingesting synthetic plastics and flame retardants. And you need to replace the utensils with something else, the cost of which might be worse in not only money but possibly health too, if you make a snap decision based on a single factor instead of the entire picture.
And sometimes the exposure already is effectively zero, making any action at all a waste of time.
I don't know if this case is safe or not, but acting based on a single variable is a bad idea, especially without keeping reasonable expectations at the forefront.
I already addressed your first sentence in my previous comment. Nobody suggested that replacing your utensils would reduce your intake to zero. That does not invalidate wishing for zero and doing what you can to move in that direction.
If you can't afford wooden sauce spoons, a material which the human body evolved in close contact with, naturally disinfects itself for years or decades after the tree is felled, and is extremely affordable to the point that you can find endless amounts of it for free on craigslist, then you sure as heck can't afford the cancer treatments you're risking with the synthetic stuff.
The exposure is effectively zero...when? Wasn't your whole original argument the exact opposite? That exposure is never precisely zero? Dividing the numbers in the study by ten does not make any of them zero.
Acting on limited data is often much more advantageous than not acting on available data.
> Nobody suggested that replacing your utensils would reduce your intake to zero. That does not invalidate wishing for zero and doing what you can to move in that direction.
What I'm saying is, you should make sure you're actually moving a meaningful amount.
And you can't assume wooden is better when it's still coming from a big factory.
> The exposure is effectively zero...when?
It depends on what chemical you're looking for and where you're looking. It's a pretty generic statement, it's not just about utensils.
> Wasn't your whole original argument the exact opposite? That exposure is never precisely zero? Dividing the numbers in the study by ten does not make any of them zero.
There is a point where the effect is zero, but you're never going to reach actual zero.
Your goal should be the former, not the latter.
And sometimes you don't need to do anything to reach the former. In that situation, replacing products just hurts you by wasting time and money (and less time and money will increase stress which is bad for your health).
So no, my argument has not changed.
> Acting on limited data is often much more advantageous than not acting on available data.
Sure, I agree. But have a realistic idea of the impacts and risks before acting.
When this study was first published, Adam Ragusea did a video on it[1]. 12 minutes in, he points out that he thinks there is a basic arithmetic error in the paper. This was well before anything was on the news, and he was the only one talking about that before everything blew up. I'm surprised more people didn't catch it.
Good. Not catching a simple multiplication error is a terrible indictment of their peer review process. On the other hand, peer review is doomed and getting more doomed by the day, and I expect more and more journals will fail if the quality criteria get fairly applied.
I never thought of peer review as being meant to verify calculations.
But rather to ensure the experimental methodology was sound, it cites the appropriate previous work, that it is significant enough, etc.
I actually think that calculation verification and statistical significance verification is a great idea, but shouldn't be done by "peers", but rather someone who specializes only in that. More of a type of auditor.
I don't think peer reviewers need to be redoing every calculation, but you might expect them to be familiar enough with the field that "toxins in kitchen utensils are close to the EPA limit" would be surprising enough that they'd question it and double check it.
How many researchers do you think are working on cookware toxins? "Peer" is used broadly here.
The article made waves because it didn't surprise anyone, because in fact a ton of household staples are full of toxins (spices are full of lead, etc).
I don't agree that it didn't surprise anyone. Flame retardants are surprising, black plastic being worse than others is surprising, common household tools nearly at the legal toxin limit is surprising. Even the general idea of plastic being potentially bad for you is still new information for a lot of people.
Your comment is the first time I've ever heard anything about lead in spices, and I read a lot of news. In my experience, very few things are actually "common knowledge", it just seems that way when everyone in our particular social circles knows something.
> common household tools nearly at the legal toxin limit is surprising
Personally, I would expect a lot of products to be near a lot of limits for various toxins. Especially around food, my expectation is for limits to be safe with a nice-sized buffer, sometimes too big of a buffer. The point of having limits is that products inside them are fine.
> The article made waves because it didn't surprise anyone
So the reason it made waves is because it confirmed everyone's previous biases. Which is why people defend it even when that "confirmation" was based on an error of simple arithmetic.
Reminds me of a bunch of studies that were taken out by Excel errors, like that economics failure about national debt going higher than GDP being some sort of trigger for societal failure. The people who boosted that study were the people who were saying the same thing, with no study, for no other reason than that the numbers are of a similar magnitude. After it was shown that the study showed no such thing, its supporters insisted that it was still true because of course it was true.
Yes, as an academic scientist when I occasionally need to actually reproduce something from published literature to use in my own research- I almost always find at least half a dozen errors, even in a well respected journal. The only way to really find such errors is to painstakingly reproduce the work, and that is not part of the publication process- it would double the time and cost.
As an academic scientist that does peer review- I would never consider redoing math unless the conclusion seemed suspicious. Peer reviewers don’t have a lot of time and need to assume good faith and careful basic competency from the authors. We spend realistically about an hour to review a study that might have taken a whole team of authors half a decade. Mostly we are looking to confirm that the work is presented clearly, and that the evidence is sufficient to support the conclusions. Peer review is little more than proofreading from an unbiased 3rd party.
Peer review is not an important part of the scientific method actually. It's not even necessary. There was no peer review for most of what we now take for granted in science. The Journal Nature did not make peer review standard until 1973.
Science is about making reality the arbiter of truth. What is true is what you can demonstrate in an experiment pretty much anywhere. Science is self-correcting not because other scientists take a look at your work before it gets published, but because a theory that is not backed up by reality will be harder to build on, make worse predictions, and generally not be useful for actual work. It doesn't matter how much "hype" built up around LK-99 for example, because you could not build anything out of it, because it didn't work as claimed, and no amount of belief can overcome that.
Science is self correcting because the universe is not convinced by rhetoric, and will only ever follow it's own rules.
Tellingly, scientists who have been around for a while do not consider a published paper as especially meaningful. They do not consider peer review as vouching for a paper's correctness. They have seen hundreds of papers pass peer review and make it into Science and Nature and turn out to be bunk. No scientific process will be perfect, so some amount of papers should be expected to be wrong, no matter how genuinely careful and perfect the scientists who wrote it were.
It's really sad how over-indexed the lay-public has gotten on peer review. It's just not how science works. It can still be somewhat useful for more popular journals who have to pick and choose what to publish anyway, but it's only useful if the peer reviewers are themselves domain experts in a rigorous and formalized scientific discipline.
I reviewed articles and never verified their calculations because it is not part of what a reviewer should do. A reviewer should never try and replicate the experiment or crunch numbers. It should look at the methodology, background, significance, possible enhancements etc.
In the case of these journals, "peer" simply means "someone who shares the same agenda", and they won't care about the science or even the numerical results as long as the conclusion agrees with their ideology. The extremist envrionmentalists have been pushing their idiotic agenda for far too long, and it's good to see the sane people are now pushing back.
An off-by-10x multiplication error in a published paper?
How about this off-by-100x multiplication error I discovered in a published paper[1]?
AFAIK, that paper hasn't been retracted. I was meaning to contact the author and publisher, but never got around to it. A mitigating factor is that the error is made in regard to a side topic of the paper, not the main topic of the paper.
"Lead author Megan Liu, science and policy manager at Toxic-Free Future, described the mistake as a “typo” and said her co-authors have submitted a correction to the journal. The error remains in the online version but Liu said she anticipates it will be updated soon.
“However, it is important to note that this does not impact our results,” Liu told National Post. “The levels of flame retardants that we found in black plastic household items are still of high concern, and our recommendations remain the same.”"
It is. Stainless steel or glass (chemically inert) are far superior. Even 10x less flame retardants and other chemicals are still way too much. Not to mention the FDA exposure levels being too high.
Yes, but you're leaving out some important context, context which still renders them safer than black plastic.
Regarding stainless steel, that's during production of the item, not during cooking. You'd have to be welding, or using heat hot enough to cut through the steel, to release it in your own kitchen.
Regarding glass, you can check for chips and the condition of your glass far better than you can for microplastics. One is also likely to leech (plastics) over the course of its life, while one is not (glass).
On the basis of chemistry? that hexavalent chromium is formed via oxidation, and I was throwing out basic ways that are used to increase oxidation rates and decrease energy thresholds needed to attack the chromium oxide layers and oxidize the element.
"Could potentially" means I was brainstorming possibilites, I didn't look for a study, I'm not too worried about it. I'd be more worried about Nickel than Chromium, but
it's obviously false that you "need" welding levels of heat to produce oxidized forms of Chromium.
The paper was right and for the right reasons. They just decided to lie to catch more headlines (nobody would have cared about it being high but under the FDA limit). It was just more effective to say "oopsie our bad but it changes nothing to our recommendations".
I'm sure the authors weight the impact on their reputation versus the benefits of catching more headlines for the public good.
As someone who cooks only occasionally, my black plastic utensils wear like shit and are impossible to get odors out of. I much prefer the stainless steel ones, or even wood. Wood honestly wears better than plastic, except it doesn't melt.
Just be careful that the stainless is compatible with your pots and pans. Enameled cookware, for example, doesn't mix well with metal utensils, because they chip the surface
The study has other problems as well.
The typical customer electronics cases where you would find the flame retardants would be mostly from ABS.
Kitchen utensils used in a pan can not be from ABS or they would melt. So they are made from silicone or nylon.
There is a table in the paper, but its vague at best.
However, in my own assessment, my maximum daily exposure to ingested flame retardants should be zero, rather than some off the cuff figure that was certainly done with appeasing industry in mind.
So yes, I still ditched my plastic cookware in favor of stainless steel and silicone, and am still happy that the erroneous study got my attention.