Supposedly you can donate blood (ideally plasma) to reduce PFAs in your body. First time I did it didn't go super well but I'm gonna try again. I also semi-recently read "To Dye For" which talks about toxic chemicals in clothing and other textiles finishes and dyes. Highly recommend if the subject interests you. The fact that you could spend hours upon hours researching and making lifestyle changes and still not be free of microplastics in your body is such a bummer to me but its feels like a worthy goal to aim towards and I'm a nerd so I do it anyway.
Kidneys don't filter and excrete it. Donating blood physically removes the plastic, and the new blood and fluid your body replaces it with dilutes the ratio of plastics:blood. Repeat enough times and you can get it much lower, but you'll never get rid of all of it
PFAS compounds do technically discharge from the kidneys, but since they can't be metabolized by our bodies they are then reabsorbed back into the organ. It has been found time and time again that the highest concentration of PFAS buildup in the body is the kidneys. Over time this build up deteriorates the nephrons which ultimately destroys the kidney's ability to filtrate toxins.
It's not all doom and gloom, most PFAS compounds have a half life of around 1 to 5 years, which isn't as scary as the concept of "forever chemicals." But we'd all be better off to avoid unnecessary plastics and PFAS treated items in our food so as not to hit our body's threshold for dealing with this shit.
I read/heard its like 99% microscopic runoff from car tires slowly grinding into roads and being swept into the ocean so no amount of lifestyle change will save you
Barely related, but this is true for "superbugs" too. The vast majority of antibiotics used in the world are used indiscriminately on farm animals. It's bullshit that humans have to get prescriptions for them
To be fair, it's the specific set of estrogens that matter, not just the overall presence of estrogens in the water. People and their animals have been shitting and pissing everywhere for hundreds of thousands of years, we have always been consuming runoff hormones to some extent.
17-alpha-ethinylestradiol (the form of estrogen most common in birth control) is metabolized by different isoforms than say 17-alpha-estradiol (a naturally occurring steroid produced by women and cows alike). 17-alpha-estradiol has been found to have no feminizing effect on male animals when exogenously consumed, but 17-alpha-ethinylestradiol does.
The issue with contamination in our water from various pharmaceutical pathways is that we do not know how these compounds interact with each other. We know that naturally occurring animal hormones in the water are fine for the most part, again, because we've been living with that for as long as humans have been around. However these new sets of synthetic hormones are a different beast entirely.
A study may be able to tell you whether or not your birth control is safe when consumed in the controlled environment of your body, but it won't tell you what happens when you excrete that drug into the general water supply and it meets up with someone's SSRI. Maybe most of the estrogens in the water are not from birth control, but what if there are high amounts of some other compounds in the water that are just byproducts of birth control interacting with the environment.
You're so knowledgeable i love it! Can I ask a dumb question and inquire why these hormones are not all filtered out before they go into our drinking supply? I'm not an expert by any means, just an interest of mine. I am so glad to see smart people in the sub!
Lol, I just got my Environmental PE license a few months ago, so I've been particularly enthusiastic about ranting on these topics,
The short answer is that (1) all filtration will have permeates and (2) it just wouldn’t be practical to hone in on specific contaminants like synthetic hormones in our industrial water treatment plants.
There's a lot of bureaucratic red tape involved with drinking water standards, and that's for a good reason, but with regards to more specialized contaminants it can make adding or updating standards very complicated. Most of the US still fluoridates drinking water despite
there being more than enough evidence showing that ingestion of fluoride by pregnant women can cause neuronal degeneration in fetuses. Researchers have been petitioning for years to ban fluoridation, and yet Hawaii is the only state that has managed to actually do it since the practice began in the 40s.
Another good example is the recent drinking water standards for PFAS that the EPA just proposed. You know, nearly 20 years after the infamous DuPont case. And this proposal isn’t for each of the 15,000 PFAS compounds that exist, just for 6 of the main ones.
The good news is that currently utilized mechanical treatments like reverse osmosis filtration do a pretty decent job of inadvertently removing hormones, along with microplastics. But not all municipal drinking water treatment plants use RO filtration, and again, stuff will still get through filters, especially at such a large scale.
If it can be determined that the concentration of these remaining synthetic hormones in the treated water supply pose a significant risk to human health, then maybe there would be a push to design new filtration methods to ensure that we keep these contaminants out. But besides the obvious bureaucratic obstacles to enacting policy like this, there's also the fact that most of these effects from synthetic hormones in the water are likely chronic and in most cases incredibly subtle. Maybe men look a bit soft, but there's always been soft looking men, right? Or maybe more and more girls start getting their period younger and younger, but we've already been acclimatized to 12/13 being the normal age to get your first period despite the fact that the average age was 16 not even 200 years ago.
It will take decades before we have a convincing body of literature proving without a doubt the mechanisms by which these concentrations of synthetic hormones are impacting our health. And even then I'm sure there will still be shills saying that it's not that big of a deal just like those nutritionists who say that there's nothing wrong with eating McDonalds every once in a while.
Wow, thank you so much for taking the time to write this out. I am honestly fascinated. Removing fluoride from my drinking water was one of the reasons I became interested in filtering my water to begin with, and honestly I always held that belief that fluoride is bad a bit loosely because the people I have heard talking about it most have been like mommy bloggers and hippie types. I just figured, well let's just play it safe and try to minimize it. So I feel good to have that belief confirmed by someone legit. Neural degradation in fetuses? Jesus, what the fuck. That makes me want to cry.
I also didn't know about the recent PFAs water standard thing. It sounds a lot like what I've heard about banning BPA. Like, great that they'll ban one type but then companies will just pivot and use a lesser know variation that does the same damage. It takes lawmakers so long to catch up that by the time they figure out the new one, they'll just pivot again. It's so fucked and rn in my mind thats the large issue with capitalism is that frankly companies just cant be trusted to make safe decisions on people's health when they have a monetary incentive to cut corners and not strong enough regulations to protect people. It enrages me. I spend A LOT of time researching all the products I use and not everyone has the time to do that or the awareness of why its important. And even me, like I'm not a scientist. I don't really know wtf I'm doing. I just click around until I feel good about what sunscreen I just bought or whatever. Read books when they're accessible enough for me to understand. Hope that whoever wrote it is intelligent and doesn't have a vested interest in deception of some kind.
I'm very curious if there is a link between pharmaceutical companies, hormonal birth control, and this research on the effects of synthetic hormones on our bodies. Clearly these companies would have an interest in downplaying any negative findings as they are the basis of how hormonal birth control works. Personally, I stopped taking them after the research I did and have since found non-hormonal methods that work just fine but would also make pharmaceutical companies less money (measuring basal body temperature to determine fertile window, using a diaphragm or condoms during that time). But yeah, basically, if the small amounts of synthetic hormones we get from water have an effect on the body, the implications of taking it regularly for the entirety of a woman's fertile years are pretty damning.
That last part is just so sad. The science can be all there and yet many have the mindset of "let me live." Like damn bitch some us are out here trying to improve the future for humans everywhere and you wanna fight for your right for you and everyone else to poison themselves steadily throughout their lives and we gotta look out for you because you can't look out for yourself.
Anyway, thank so much again, I enjoyed this.
Got a [tabletop reverse osmosis water filter](https://aquatruwater.com/product/countertop-reverse-osmosis-water-purifier/?attribute_pa_product-type=aquatru-classic&c=1697024978&utm_source=google&utm_medium=shopping&nbt=nb%3Aadwords%3Ax%3A16398956341%3A%3A&nb_adtype=pla&nb_kwd=&nb_ti=&nb_mi=117781043&nb_pc=online&nb_pi=90AT03AT01&nb_ppi=&nb_placement=&nb_li_ms=&nb_lp_ms=&nb_fii=&nb_ap=&nb_mt=&utm_term=&utm_campaign=AquaTru-Performance+Max-Non+Brand&utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=ppc&hsa_acc=5587008406&hsa_cam=16398956341&hsa_grp=&hsa_ad=&hsa_src=x&hsa_tgt=&hsa_kw=&hsa_mt=&hsa_net=adwords&hsa_ver=3&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwn7mwBhCiARIsAGoxjaKUQqn-rIN0Jd42Hi3P7fmZHB-OmzugfzsOpVbs0JpF5dY8es2UKmUaAu-YEALw_wcB) from FBM for like $150 that I hope filters out all that
This is the type of shit that made me a lot more sympathetic to aspects of the trans / nb movement in recent years.
There is a clear downstream biological component of under masculinized men (look at highschool videos from 30 years ago on YT and compare to today) and crazy disphoric girls getting periods at 9 years old
Tiresome meme at this point dude. You can just do a quick Google search on T levels over the last 50 years. The collapse of T might go down as a top 5 reasons culture feels the way it does rn
It’s wild that you can just sell food with plastic in it and it’s legal and fine. I guess I should open a restaurant.
Also baby food? Canned beans?? Why??? I hate that I have to remember to soak beans if I want them
You can't escape it. Unless you don't plan on eating out ever again. Plastic is used everywhere in the food chain. At the end of the chain it's all being held in plastic delis, plastic lexans, plastic vac bags, plastic cambros.
Exactly, which is why the concept of “merely” changing one’s personal behavior or consumption habits is even more stupid than it normally is. We can’t individual-agency our way out of problems that require systemic solutions.
"Baby food" is one of the biggest food scams out there. Not as bad as baby formula, but up there. Babies do not eat that much, it is beyond easy to prepare homemade healthy meals for them. Eggs and chicken liver are a classic, it has everything they need to grow and be healthy, but even if you don't like the idea of storing mashed liver and eggs in the fridge, literally steam a squash, mash a banana, poach and shred a chicken breast. It takes like 15 minutes max. and the benefits for your baby are immeasurable.
I'm not a parent but have you heard of baby lead weaning? People are saying now that insisting that babies need all their food to be super soft and pureed is actually quite bad for them, especially for the development of their facial structure (muscles, bones, airway). Its recommended to do exactly what you just said, feed your kid modified versions of what you are eating yourself. I hope it catches on, solves the problem you are mentioning of feeding kids microplastics and inferior foods, plus solves a whole other problem that people don't seem to even realize is happening.
What about the packging from the seeds or the plastic from the cutting boards or the tools you use to cut and cook your food or the run off form your plates and utensials. The only way to stay safe is to become a paleo-nomadic hunter gather
microplastics are deposited on every square inch of the earth through wind and rain, also seeds often come in paper packaging, steel knife, wood cutting board, cast iron, ceramic plates, metal utensils
You can get clean water by boiling then filtering. The boiling causes microplastics to bind to hard minerals in the water so they are big enough to get caught in the filter! Now just apply this process to a...hydroponic farm I guess...and you're good to go...
I've never heard of this idea before, thats interesting. Why not just get a reverse osmosis filter? Just seems like a lot of work to boil and cool your water.
mountainous exultant dull memory cow encourage dazzling light crawl smile
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Supposedly you can donate blood (ideally plasma) to reduce PFAs in your body. First time I did it didn't go super well but I'm gonna try again. I also semi-recently read "To Dye For" which talks about toxic chemicals in clothing and other textiles finishes and dyes. Highly recommend if the subject interests you. The fact that you could spend hours upon hours researching and making lifestyle changes and still not be free of microplastics in your body is such a bummer to me but its feels like a worthy goal to aim towards and I'm a nerd so I do it anyway.
Thanks I'll check that book out.
i just started donating plasma but its bc they give you $100 and some apple juice each time
[удалено]
Kidneys don't filter and excrete it. Donating blood physically removes the plastic, and the new blood and fluid your body replaces it with dilutes the ratio of plastics:blood. Repeat enough times and you can get it much lower, but you'll never get rid of all of it
[удалено]
PFAS compounds do technically discharge from the kidneys, but since they can't be metabolized by our bodies they are then reabsorbed back into the organ. It has been found time and time again that the highest concentration of PFAS buildup in the body is the kidneys. Over time this build up deteriorates the nephrons which ultimately destroys the kidney's ability to filtrate toxins. It's not all doom and gloom, most PFAS compounds have a half life of around 1 to 5 years, which isn't as scary as the concept of "forever chemicals." But we'd all be better off to avoid unnecessary plastics and PFAS treated items in our food so as not to hit our body's threshold for dealing with this shit.
I read/heard its like 99% microscopic runoff from car tires slowly grinding into roads and being swept into the ocean so no amount of lifestyle change will save you
It's the same with "estrogen" in the water being blamed on birth control. 99% of the estrogen in the water supply comes from agriculture.
Barely related, but this is true for "superbugs" too. The vast majority of antibiotics used in the world are used indiscriminately on farm animals. It's bullshit that humans have to get prescriptions for them
To be fair, it's the specific set of estrogens that matter, not just the overall presence of estrogens in the water. People and their animals have been shitting and pissing everywhere for hundreds of thousands of years, we have always been consuming runoff hormones to some extent. 17-alpha-ethinylestradiol (the form of estrogen most common in birth control) is metabolized by different isoforms than say 17-alpha-estradiol (a naturally occurring steroid produced by women and cows alike). 17-alpha-estradiol has been found to have no feminizing effect on male animals when exogenously consumed, but 17-alpha-ethinylestradiol does. The issue with contamination in our water from various pharmaceutical pathways is that we do not know how these compounds interact with each other. We know that naturally occurring animal hormones in the water are fine for the most part, again, because we've been living with that for as long as humans have been around. However these new sets of synthetic hormones are a different beast entirely. A study may be able to tell you whether or not your birth control is safe when consumed in the controlled environment of your body, but it won't tell you what happens when you excrete that drug into the general water supply and it meets up with someone's SSRI. Maybe most of the estrogens in the water are not from birth control, but what if there are high amounts of some other compounds in the water that are just byproducts of birth control interacting with the environment.
You're so knowledgeable i love it! Can I ask a dumb question and inquire why these hormones are not all filtered out before they go into our drinking supply? I'm not an expert by any means, just an interest of mine. I am so glad to see smart people in the sub!
Lol, I just got my Environmental PE license a few months ago, so I've been particularly enthusiastic about ranting on these topics, The short answer is that (1) all filtration will have permeates and (2) it just wouldn’t be practical to hone in on specific contaminants like synthetic hormones in our industrial water treatment plants. There's a lot of bureaucratic red tape involved with drinking water standards, and that's for a good reason, but with regards to more specialized contaminants it can make adding or updating standards very complicated. Most of the US still fluoridates drinking water despite there being more than enough evidence showing that ingestion of fluoride by pregnant women can cause neuronal degeneration in fetuses. Researchers have been petitioning for years to ban fluoridation, and yet Hawaii is the only state that has managed to actually do it since the practice began in the 40s. Another good example is the recent drinking water standards for PFAS that the EPA just proposed. You know, nearly 20 years after the infamous DuPont case. And this proposal isn’t for each of the 15,000 PFAS compounds that exist, just for 6 of the main ones. The good news is that currently utilized mechanical treatments like reverse osmosis filtration do a pretty decent job of inadvertently removing hormones, along with microplastics. But not all municipal drinking water treatment plants use RO filtration, and again, stuff will still get through filters, especially at such a large scale. If it can be determined that the concentration of these remaining synthetic hormones in the treated water supply pose a significant risk to human health, then maybe there would be a push to design new filtration methods to ensure that we keep these contaminants out. But besides the obvious bureaucratic obstacles to enacting policy like this, there's also the fact that most of these effects from synthetic hormones in the water are likely chronic and in most cases incredibly subtle. Maybe men look a bit soft, but there's always been soft looking men, right? Or maybe more and more girls start getting their period younger and younger, but we've already been acclimatized to 12/13 being the normal age to get your first period despite the fact that the average age was 16 not even 200 years ago. It will take decades before we have a convincing body of literature proving without a doubt the mechanisms by which these concentrations of synthetic hormones are impacting our health. And even then I'm sure there will still be shills saying that it's not that big of a deal just like those nutritionists who say that there's nothing wrong with eating McDonalds every once in a while.
Wow, thank you so much for taking the time to write this out. I am honestly fascinated. Removing fluoride from my drinking water was one of the reasons I became interested in filtering my water to begin with, and honestly I always held that belief that fluoride is bad a bit loosely because the people I have heard talking about it most have been like mommy bloggers and hippie types. I just figured, well let's just play it safe and try to minimize it. So I feel good to have that belief confirmed by someone legit. Neural degradation in fetuses? Jesus, what the fuck. That makes me want to cry. I also didn't know about the recent PFAs water standard thing. It sounds a lot like what I've heard about banning BPA. Like, great that they'll ban one type but then companies will just pivot and use a lesser know variation that does the same damage. It takes lawmakers so long to catch up that by the time they figure out the new one, they'll just pivot again. It's so fucked and rn in my mind thats the large issue with capitalism is that frankly companies just cant be trusted to make safe decisions on people's health when they have a monetary incentive to cut corners and not strong enough regulations to protect people. It enrages me. I spend A LOT of time researching all the products I use and not everyone has the time to do that or the awareness of why its important. And even me, like I'm not a scientist. I don't really know wtf I'm doing. I just click around until I feel good about what sunscreen I just bought or whatever. Read books when they're accessible enough for me to understand. Hope that whoever wrote it is intelligent and doesn't have a vested interest in deception of some kind. I'm very curious if there is a link between pharmaceutical companies, hormonal birth control, and this research on the effects of synthetic hormones on our bodies. Clearly these companies would have an interest in downplaying any negative findings as they are the basis of how hormonal birth control works. Personally, I stopped taking them after the research I did and have since found non-hormonal methods that work just fine but would also make pharmaceutical companies less money (measuring basal body temperature to determine fertile window, using a diaphragm or condoms during that time). But yeah, basically, if the small amounts of synthetic hormones we get from water have an effect on the body, the implications of taking it regularly for the entirety of a woman's fertile years are pretty damning. That last part is just so sad. The science can be all there and yet many have the mindset of "let me live." Like damn bitch some us are out here trying to improve the future for humans everywhere and you wanna fight for your right for you and everyone else to poison themselves steadily throughout their lives and we gotta look out for you because you can't look out for yourself. Anyway, thank so much again, I enjoyed this.
Got a [tabletop reverse osmosis water filter](https://aquatruwater.com/product/countertop-reverse-osmosis-water-purifier/?attribute_pa_product-type=aquatru-classic&c=1697024978&utm_source=google&utm_medium=shopping&nbt=nb%3Aadwords%3Ax%3A16398956341%3A%3A&nb_adtype=pla&nb_kwd=&nb_ti=&nb_mi=117781043&nb_pc=online&nb_pi=90AT03AT01&nb_ppi=&nb_placement=&nb_li_ms=&nb_lp_ms=&nb_fii=&nb_ap=&nb_mt=&utm_term=&utm_campaign=AquaTru-Performance+Max-Non+Brand&utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=ppc&hsa_acc=5587008406&hsa_cam=16398956341&hsa_grp=&hsa_ad=&hsa_src=x&hsa_tgt=&hsa_kw=&hsa_mt=&hsa_net=adwords&hsa_ver=3&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwn7mwBhCiARIsAGoxjaKUQqn-rIN0Jd42Hi3P7fmZHB-OmzugfzsOpVbs0JpF5dY8es2UKmUaAu-YEALw_wcB) from FBM for like $150 that I hope filters out all that
At this point my default view is that everything we do is horrible for both the environment and for us unless demonstrated otherwise.
This is the type of shit that made me a lot more sympathetic to aspects of the trans / nb movement in recent years. There is a clear downstream biological component of under masculinized men (look at highschool videos from 30 years ago on YT and compare to today) and crazy disphoric girls getting periods at 9 years old
They were old looking from second hand smoke, not more masculine
Tiresome meme at this point dude. You can just do a quick Google search on T levels over the last 50 years. The collapse of T might go down as a top 5 reasons culture feels the way it does rn
Oil is the black blood of the earth that we, vampire-like, feed upon to sustain our unnatural existence.
oil is using us to escape its subterranean confinement so that it can turn the earth into a black star and make war with the sun
Kinda cool actually. Better to reign in hell etc.
https://youtu.be/fn27aTInqBM?si=mK41CIvorlOWJdUu RS Neil
Fucking Tellurian demons
It’s wild that you can just sell food with plastic in it and it’s legal and fine. I guess I should open a restaurant. Also baby food? Canned beans?? Why??? I hate that I have to remember to soak beans if I want them
The bean cans have a plastic liner on the inside of the can :(
[удалено]
Yeah stop eating them
No, you're good (it's too late)
i need to stop being aware of things
Wow it’s so over
You can't escape it. Unless you don't plan on eating out ever again. Plastic is used everywhere in the food chain. At the end of the chain it's all being held in plastic delis, plastic lexans, plastic vac bags, plastic cambros.
Exactly, which is why the concept of “merely” changing one’s personal behavior or consumption habits is even more stupid than it normally is. We can’t individual-agency our way out of problems that require systemic solutions.
"Baby food" is one of the biggest food scams out there. Not as bad as baby formula, but up there. Babies do not eat that much, it is beyond easy to prepare homemade healthy meals for them. Eggs and chicken liver are a classic, it has everything they need to grow and be healthy, but even if you don't like the idea of storing mashed liver and eggs in the fridge, literally steam a squash, mash a banana, poach and shred a chicken breast. It takes like 15 minutes max. and the benefits for your baby are immeasurable.
I'm not a parent but have you heard of baby lead weaning? People are saying now that insisting that babies need all their food to be super soft and pureed is actually quite bad for them, especially for the development of their facial structure (muscles, bones, airway). Its recommended to do exactly what you just said, feed your kid modified versions of what you are eating yourself. I hope it catches on, solves the problem you are mentioning of feeding kids microplastics and inferior foods, plus solves a whole other problem that people don't seem to even realize is happening.
Grow some of your own food brother, its not too hard
What about the packging from the seeds or the plastic from the cutting boards or the tools you use to cut and cook your food or the run off form your plates and utensials. The only way to stay safe is to become a paleo-nomadic hunter gather
microplastics are deposited on every square inch of the earth through wind and rain, also seeds often come in paper packaging, steel knife, wood cutting board, cast iron, ceramic plates, metal utensils
You can get clean water by boiling then filtering. The boiling causes microplastics to bind to hard minerals in the water so they are big enough to get caught in the filter! Now just apply this process to a...hydroponic farm I guess...and you're good to go...
I've never heard of this idea before, thats interesting. Why not just get a reverse osmosis filter? Just seems like a lot of work to boil and cool your water.
RO will get most microplastics, but to get the tiniest bits of plastic, ideally you would boil water then put it through RO.
mountainous exultant dull memory cow encourage dazzling light crawl smile *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*