'Forever Chemicals' Found In 95% of Beers Tested In the U.S. (sciencedaily.com) 67
ScienceDaily reports:
Forever chemicals known as PFAS have turned up in an unexpected place: beer. Researchers tested 23 different beers from across the U.S. and found that 95% contained PFAS, with the highest concentrations showing up in regions with known water contamination. The findings reveal how pollution in municipal water supplies can infiltrate popular products, raising concerns for both consumers and brewers...
[PFAS] have been found in surface water, groundwater and municipal water supplies across the U.S. and the world. Although breweries typically have water filtration and treatment systems, they are not designed to remove PFAS... [T]he researchers call for greater awareness among brewers, consumers and regulators to limit overall PFAS exposure. These results also highlight the possible need for water treatment upgrades at brewing facilities as PFAS regulations in drinking water change or updates to municipal water system treatment are implemented.
"I hope these findings inspire water treatment strategies and policies that help reduce the likelihood of PFAS in future pours," research lead Jennifer Hoponick Redmon said in a May announcement about their research.
[PFAS] have been found in surface water, groundwater and municipal water supplies across the U.S. and the world. Although breweries typically have water filtration and treatment systems, they are not designed to remove PFAS... [T]he researchers call for greater awareness among brewers, consumers and regulators to limit overall PFAS exposure. These results also highlight the possible need for water treatment upgrades at brewing facilities as PFAS regulations in drinking water change or updates to municipal water system treatment are implemented.
"I hope these findings inspire water treatment strategies and policies that help reduce the likelihood of PFAS in future pours," research lead Jennifer Hoponick Redmon said in a May announcement about their research.
This is why (Score:5, Funny)
Re: This is why (Score:2)
Beer isn't distilled.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
If you are worried about adverse effects of dihydrogen monoxide (it is strongly associated with drowning deaths), you could replace some of it with hydrogen hydroxide. You could even use hydric acid, although that's nicknamed "the universal solvent", so who knows what would happen if you drink beer containing it....
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No. The problem with dihydrogen monoxide is that we have polluted all natural occurances of it with PFAS molecules. It is not a joke anymore. You can literally slowly die if you drink dihydrogen monoxide or anything that contains dihydrogen monoxide, because of the PFAS contamination. How much PFAS there is depends heavily on location, so first thing everyone should do is to check their local level of contamination and after that decide whether to buy a filter or move away.
Re:Which ones? (Score:4, Informative)
Looks like almost all beers have PFAS from the water they use for brewing.
Unfortunately, we have failed to control PFAS and they are now everywhere and will need to be filtered/removed.
Re: The only way to clean this up (Score:2)
(his)
A human with xy chromosomes is commonly called male and referred to correctly with masculine pronouns in English, no matter what costume he's wearing.
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Genetic offcasts from the complex process of heterosexual reproduction, like someone born without an eye or 2 girls with a merged body below the thoracic vertebrae.
We need to care for them, help them have as normal a life as possible, but there's absolutely no reason to change broadly accepted societal mores for them.
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A human with xy chromosomes is commonly called male and referred to correctly with masculine pronouns in English, no matter what costume he's wearing
Why do you care what pronouns someone uses? And why is someone's DNA any of your business?
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I only care insofar as truth matters? Does it to you?
And I don't care what pronouns THEY use; I'm going to use the one that's descriptively factually appropriate. If it upsets them, maybe their bitch is with reality, not me.
I don't give the faintest shit what sort of role-playing someone wants to do in their life.
OTOH If a dude in a dress pretending to be a woman walks into the bathroom while my wife or daughters are in there, I'll make sure he's exiting that bathroom immediately. IDGAF about his kink.
This may actually be the case. No joke. (Score:2)
Many PFAS/Forever Chemicals have a structure and effect similar to estrogen, which makes men less manly. It also appears that there are environmental effects lowering testosterone, some researchers Link this to PFAS as well. Low sperm count has also been linked to PFAS.
So, yeah, they literally make your more trans. If you're a man that is.
Fluorine chemistry is fucked (Score:2)
Organofluorine chemistry should just be banned except for tiny amounts (ie. pharmaceuticals). Green Peace got it almost right with chlorine, just a few letters off.
Of course it won't be ... just another slow motion disaster to joint all the others.
Have you ever seen a commie drink water? (Score:2)
I can no longer sit back and allow...communist infiltraion...communist indoctrination...communist subversion...and the international communist conspiracy...to sap and impurify...all of our precious bodily fluids.
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Also not a great idea, but that's inorganic.
For me the bigger news (Score:2)
And it wasn't consistent. There's no magic brand you can buy that is free from lead and cadmium heavy metals.
It's still up for debate how bad vaping by itself is but there's no debate that you shouldn't be breathing in lead and heavy metal. And I don't mean Judas Priest.
Now would be a good time for regulation but fat chance on that. Hell the only reason I had even heard about it was an offhand
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Whiskey (Score:2)
I can hear it already (Score:1)
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Cheapest would obviously be if factories that produce PFAS would filter out their waste water, before it gets into the nature. It is very hard to find prices for industrial level PFAS filtering and there are currently several projects ongoing that try to make it cheaper, but for a household it is something like 250 dollars per year, so I think it would increase the cost of beer by 5 cents per liter or less, assuming you only need to filter the source water, not other materials that go into beer, which most
Beer? Who cares? (Score:2, Insightful)
People don't drink beer for their health; and frequent drinkers who should be concerned by heavy exposure would be the most concerned if this was soda or coffee but this is beer; these heavy users care the least (that is, not enough to quit.)
To make enough people care, you need connect these artificial hormones to more than low sperm counts; you need to link it to small penises, man boobs, and the increase in trans people and breast cancer, prostate cancer... I'm not even making those up; they really could
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To be honest, beer contains a chemical has been shown to be harmful without a doubt: ethanol. Yes, the reason many people drink beer in the first place. In addition to the obvious bad things that happen when you are drunk, it also causes cancer, birth defects, and a whole lot of other health issues, like cirrhosis. It also affects sperm counts by the way. And recent studies have shows that it is harmful at any dose, though obviously much worse at high doses.
I am not telling you to stop drinking, as long as
Re:Beer? Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
The health effects of perfluorooctanoic acid were discovered when herds of cows started getting sick and dying around a DuPont plant that released it into their effluent wanter. They're well studied now. Increased cancer risk is one of the effects, and one of those cancers is testicular.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
herds of cows started getting sick
... one of those cancers is testicular.
Cows don't have testicles.
Re: (Score:2)
No they don't.
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LOL! I bet that was an American insisting cows have testicles! Maybe the Agriculture secretary?
If they identify as a COW they can still have testicles ;-)
Re: (Score:2)
The GGP was demonstrating how using ellipses to remove half of a post could make it sound silly. I was agreeing with them by demonstrating that it also works on single words.
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People don't drink beer for their health;
That doesn't mean people who drink beer don't care about their health. PFAS are bioaccumulating substances. The effects of beer if they don't do damage do get worn off. There's absolutely reason to avoid drinking beer from known PFAS hotspots.
But with so many beers in the world, that shouldn't be too difficult. The point here is not that people need to avoid beer, it's more that fermentation doesn't break down PFAS (no shit Sherlock), and that in certain places in the world the water is considered hazardous
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I you drink enough that the PFAS in the beer is a concern to you, that means you drink so much you don't care about your health since you drink so much beer in the 1st place, which is not good for your health! That is really the point of what I was saying.
Nobody cares about old history where people can only drink sewage; also, bottled water is way cheaper if you are too poor to have safe drinking water you shouldn't be buying beer.
Not that people are rational. I knew an addict who didn't drink beer because
Re: (Score:2)
People don't drink beer for their health
Not now, certainly, but beer absolutely was used for health reasons back in antiquity.
And it worked.
The only reason the number is 95% (Score:3, Insightful)
Chemical assays nowadays can detect near-single-molecule quantities of stuff. The problem is that we don’t really understand what concentration of these molecules are bad for you (yet).
There’s radioactivity in literally every object on the planet. Lead and Arsenic contamination is detectable in every object you put in your mouth. Same goes for PFAS.
Re: (Score:3)
Oh, I'm sorry. I guess 95% of bears is a number after all.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't forget hormesis.
Re:The only reason the number is 95% (Score:5, Insightful)
So you could just as easily write an article "aresenic found in 100 of of 100 beers tested". And it would be so much fake news. So when I see an article saying they "detected" some kind of PFAS chemicals in beer, with no information about how much they detected or what kind of PFAS molecules or what amount of those chemicals are dangerous acutely or chronically...it's just as much fake news.
I actually care about PFAS pollution, that's why we need the media to do better so we can assess it seriously. When they publish slop, everyone just learns to ignore the issue.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So you could just as easily write an article "aresenic found in 100 of of 100 beers tested". And it would be so much fake news. So when I see an article saying they "detected" some kind of PFAS chemicals in beer, with no information about how much they detected or what kind of PFAS molecules or what amount of those chemicals are dangerous acutely or chronically...it's just as much fake news.
The word you need to hear is "bioaccumulation". The only material I am familiar where that word is applicable is: Lead. Even tiny amounts of lead are bad because your body can not get rid of it. Ever. If PFAS doesn't bioaccumulate, small amounts carry no worries. If it does biolaccumulate... we are in deep shit.
Re:The only reason the number is 95% (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that we don’t really understand what concentration of these molecules are bad for you (yet).
Actually we do. Many PFAS compounds have been studied and most of them have been found to be harmful at levels above a few 10s of Parts-Per-Trillion in animal testing. This is what really started this entire thing in the first place - the recognition that there is a harmful level, and the general levels in many people is above this level.
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Nevermind the fact that the industry itself knew it was a problem decades ago. And they covered it up when regulators started sniffing around by modifying the chemicals to
Odd focus on ground water (Score:2)
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Plastic pipes... (Score:1)
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PEX has no fluorine, not even chlorine.
Re: (Score:2)
Correct, but PEX pipes do contain and leach MTBE (the controversial octane enhancer that used to be used in gasoline), ETBE (its slightly larger cousin), toluene, phthalate esters, and other chemicals. Of course, sticking with copper isn't 100% safe either because copper pipe leach copper, at least until they're well-coated with a layer of minerals (assuming hard non-acidic water; if your water is soft and acidic the plumbing leaches copper continuously and you get holes in the pipes)
Pick your poison.
Really? (Score:2)
Beer brewed with municipal water that nobody drinks because it is so bad that all over the country people drink water from the now famous 'water-cooler', results in bad beer?
Who would have thought.
But there's still a bigger question (Score:2)
What percentage of "American Beer" actually contains beer?
"Forever chemical" (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why are we worried about beer, and not water? ...because I'm thirsty, not dirty.
Why unexpected ? (Score:2)
Nearly all so called "clean" water across the planet is polluted with microplastics, given that water is vital ingredient in the beer making process this is not in the slightest bit unexpected. Once again a study from the department of the fucking obvious.
Detectable vs. harmful (Score:5, Informative)
I slogged through the paper (it's surprisingly readable) to section 4.3. That's the money section, where they talk about not what they can detect but whether the measured levels exceed health recommendations. There aren't recommendations for beer so they use the levels for water, which seems pretty reasonable to me.
Of the 23 beers they tested, three exceeded the recommended level. And bear in mind, they picked beers which are brewed in areas known to have high PFASs in the local water so this was a worst-case measurement. This all seems much less scary than the headline.
The next question I would ask is how do the health consequences of the PFASs compare to the consequences of ethanol? I'm pretty sure nothing good comes from the actual alcohol and expect that's the bigger threat.
Re: (Score:3)
The next question I would ask is how do the health consequences of the PFASs compare to the consequences of ethanol?
While nothing good comes from ethanol, it is a substance that works its way out of the body. PFAS on the other hand bioaccumulates. The only known way to get it out of the body is by bleeding (literally blood doners can lower their PFAS level). Ethanol consumption is bad, but it's also something that doesn't cause lasting damage in smaller doses, unlike smoking for which there's no safe dosage.
Re: (Score:2)
You read the article?
You must be new here...
The world shat in own food & water (Score:1)
...won't be easy to undo.
Irrelevant levels (Score:2)
The level found is largely irrelevant.
You might not want it, and as policy it's great to get them out of the supply chain; but at these concentrations a lifetime of heavy drinking will increase your risk of dying by bicycle (as a pedestrian) higher than the increase risk from this source.
"Unexpected" ? (Score:2)
How is this unexpected. If PFAS have been found in surface water, ground water, and drinking water, what the heck else do people think beer is made from? Of course beer will contain PFAS, it's not like the fermentation process breaks it down.