Interesting Links for 14-06-2015
- The Surprising Downsides of Being Clever
- (tags: iq intelligence happiness )
- The creation of Protestantism, as told through Facebook updates
- (tags: Facebook protestant catholicism history )
- Amazon commits to Terry Gilliam's 'lost' Don Quixote film
- (tags: Amazon TerryGilliam )
- Generating Magic cards using deep, recurrent neural networks
- (tags: ai magic ( Read more... )
Bisphenol A - conclusions drawn by an expert committee brought together by the US government:
"BPA at concentrations found in the human body is associated with organizational changes in the prostate, breast, testis, mammary glands, body size, brain structure and chemistry, and behavior of laboratory animals."[100] The Chapel Hill Consensus Statement stated that average BPA levels in people were above those that cause harm to many animals in laboratory experiments."
"A 2013 study found an association between urinary concentrations of BPA and body mass indexes of children and adults aged 6-19 years"
"A 2008 review of human participants has concluded that BPA mimics estrogenic activity and affects various dopaminergic processes to enhance mesolimbic dopamine activity resulting in hyperactivity, attention deficits, and a heightened sensitivity to drugs of abuse"
As well as being associated with thyroid problems, increased incidence of breast cancer, and sexual dysfunction.
Basically, BPA is well known, for decades, to cause problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#Health_effects
Which isn't so bad if your only exposure is cold things sitting in plastic boxes, because there's not much contamination from that. But if you're heating things up in water in them, then that causes a much higher level to be transferred over.
Pthalates also have fairly severe problems - with the result that they're banned in any toy a child may put in their mouth, across the EU and US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phthalate#European_Union
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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/?term=10.1289/ehp.1003220
The original post you linked cites a blog post "how plastic food containers make you fat infertile and sick" from an author who begins linking his three previous articles on why coconut milk is killing you, why drinking water from plastic bottles makes you fat and an article about how chemicals in general make you fat.
He then does (as he seems to in most of his articles) a bait and switch with BPA is bad... and these things have chemicals that are quite like BPA which is definitely bad.
Conclusion: he's a nut.
Also not helped by the original article containing such classics as "When it comes to Paleo science geekery, Chris is one of my favorite and most trusted resources" and 'it all “ends up in a big floating island in the middle of the ocean somewhere."'
Paleo science and the plastic island? I'm not sure I'm trusting the science here.
I've skimmed the pub med article and gone with apostle_of_eris's reaction. It's not making me think sous vide is a risk.
It is making me think the people writing these articles are nut-jobs or conmen (note the large number of links to "safe" products and "I’m not a paid shill for any of these products... If you end up buying any of these products from my Amazon shop, I get a small percentage commission, but that’s it.")
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But, swiftly, you seem to be indicating the BPA isn't a risk, and I could have sworn the evidence was strongly on the side of it definitely being an endochrine disruptor with likely unpleasant effects from long-term exposure to it (see contents of most of my response above), and that leeching from plastic containers into hot water was a great way to get it into people's systems.
Am I misunderstanding something here? (If that Wikipedia page has been twisted out of recognition then I'd like to know that...)
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No, I was indicating that the article starts talking about how dangerous BPA is then quickly moves to the fact that the stuff typically used doesn't have it. Then starts talking about how other chemicals are quite like BPA backs it with an article that shows that some plastics can leech chemicals that are like BPA.
I quickly read the BPA wikipedia page and came to the conclusion that I am not at all worried about BPA. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also holds the position that BPA is not a health concern. In 2011, Andrew Wadge, the chief scientist of the United Kingdom's Food Standards Agency, commented on a 2011 US study on dietary exposure of adult humans to BPA,[96] saying, "This corroborates other independent studies and adds to the evidence that BPA is rapidly absorbed, detoxified, and eliminated from humans - therefore is not a health concern."
You know what -- these people are generally very very conservative people. They know that these statements will be on record for many years.
Apparently there is some shenanigans on the wikipedia page -- for example the article claims that some children were found to have over the safe limit but the talk page suggests that in fact this was a unit confusion and the highest level found was 1/100th of the safe limit.
Also from the wikipedia talk page BPA is employed to make certain plastics and epoxy resins. BPA-based plastic is clear and tough, and is made into a variety of common consumer goods, such as water bottles, sports equipment, CDs, and DVDs Two problems with this. Firstly, BPA is not used in "certain plastics", it is basically used in ONE class of synthetic polymer, which is polycarbonate. Secondly, to list "water bottles" under "common consumer goods" is EXTREMELY misleading. Most readers will assume that "water bottles" means the bottles in which you purchase Evian water at the supermarket (or similar). In fact, polycarbonate is only used to make the 25 litre bottles of water that sit on top of office water dispensers. All drinks bottles including those in which mineral water is sold in shops are made from PET, which has no connection with BPA at all. This sort of thing only adds to the hysteria and pseudoscientific ramblings that we so commonly hear.
Which sort of confirms my fear of the bait and switch. BPA is arguably sort of dangerous to children and pregnant women in theory but not in practice. If you did somehow start using it for sous vide then it might (but maybe not) be slightly dangerous. Some sous vide plastics use similar chemicals and there is one report about that but not stating that they are dangerous.
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I'm not convinced that the evidence is in on BPA yet - but it looks like a lot of the major worries come from mouse research - and mice process it differently from humans. I'll keep an eye out.
(There's new stuff I've bumped into a few times recently like http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140805090945.htm)
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As a precaution I'm going to not boil my water cooler if I'm pregnant.
(Sorry, flippant -- actually, you're correct, I agree that the evidence is not fully in here and if something new turns up then perhaps things need to be done -- but manufacturers it appears are already moving away from those chemicals.)
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Alas my go to site for such things "deep sea news" is down for some reason
This is a reasonable summary:
http://marinedebris.noaa.gov/info/patch.html
Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch
"Despite its enormous size and density (4 particles per cubic meter), the patch is not visible from satellite photography, nor is it necessarily detectable to casual boaters or divers in the area, as it consists primarily of a small increase in suspended, often microscopic particles in the upper water column."
(Not helped by people posting pictures of polluted harbour entrances and claiming they are the garbage patch.)
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A scare article with no numbers is bunk. What fraction of a potentially damaging dose is present? How much is being ingested in the first place? What is a threshhold dose, and how confident should we be about that number? The article lacks even the most basic information necessary to begin to assess risk.
"The dose makes the poison."
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