Rainwater Everywhere on Earth Unsafe To Drink Due To 'Forever Chemicals,' Study Finds (euronews.com) 159
Rainwater almost everywhere on Earth has unsafe levels of "forever chemicals," according to new research. saulgood shares a report: Per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a large family of human-made chemicals that don't occur in nature. They are known as 'forever chemicals' because they don't break down in the environment. They have non-stick or stain repellent properties so can be found in household items like food packaging, electronics, cosmetics and cookware. But now researchers at the University of Stockholm have found them in rainwater in most locations on the planet -- including Antarctica. There is no safe space to escape them. Safe guideline levels for some of these forever chemicals have dropped dramatically over the last two decades due to new insights into their toxicity. "There has been an astounding decline in guideline values for PFAS in drinking water in the last 20 years," says Ian Cousins, lead author of the study and professor at the Department of Environmental Science, Stockholm University. For one well-known substance, the "cancer-causing perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA)," water guideline values have declined by 37.5 million times in the US.
If I drink rain water (Score:4, Funny)
Will that mean I will live forever thanks to these chemicals?
Re:If I drink rain water (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If I drink rain water (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently you won't stick to anything.
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You can slide into the crematorium with great speed.
It's not working! (Score:2)
Rain water drinking 3rd world countries still have the highest population.
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Send the idea to Marvel, with all the shitload of superheroes movies and TV series they've done, including the really terrible ones, they're probably out of ideas at this point.
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How about a villain who is a spoiled rich lout with ADHD, orange makeup & wild yellow hair who becomes President using demagoguery and attempts a coup.
Naaaah, nobody would believe it's realistic.
Mitigation measures? (Score:2)
I'm just wondering how well regular distillation works for separating these chemicals from my drinking water. Anyone know?
Re:Mitigation measures? (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason is that distilled water is unhealthy to drink because it is pure. As a result, minerals will flow from your body into the liquid.
At a minimum, you would need to add back in healthy levels of minerals before drinking it.
What a load of nonsense. As another poster pointed out, the quantity of minerals leaching from your body to water you drink is completely negligible. It's offset by the mineral content of a tiny quantity of food. It also seems to ignore the fact that the water (or at least the vast majority of it) that you drink ends up being absorbed by your body and becomes part of it, so any minerals that it leaches will stay inside your body. Your body eventually expels water, but, when it does so, it filters it through its own filtration system (the kidneys) which maintain homeostasis of some minerals (calcium and phosphorous, for example) in your body. In short, the whole idea that you should avoid drinking distilled water because it robs your body of minerals is complete and utter bunk and everyone should feel perfectly fine drinking distilled water.
This reminds me of the idea of "rabbit starvation". The idea is that if someone were, for some reason, forced to live purely on rabbit, they would end up starving even if they had all they can eat because the meat is so lean. The hypothetical frequently posited is trapped on an island with nothing edible and only rabbits to eat. It's nonsense in the first place because no environment that supports rabbits would have no vegetation that humans can eat. We can even live on grass if we have to (blades of grass are not super filling, but grass shoots and perhaps seeds can work pretty well, although you will spend almost all of your time foraging grass to stay alive). Aside from that though, it's built on the assumption of eating muscle exclusively. Anyone trapped on an island with limited caloric intake is going to be eating the skin and organ meats too, and probably going after bone marrow, etc. Basically, "rabbit starvation" is an idea with a tiny grain of truth behind it that's completely irrelevant in any real world scenario, just like the idea that distilled water will steal your vital minerals.
Regarding the potential contamination of distilled water from PFAs, most of them have high boiling points, so distillation should be able to remove them if it's done right. Relying on store-bought "distilled water" might be a gamble though. It might come down to the definition of "distilled". There are actually various forms of purification that are called distillation, some of which might not involve boiling the water and re-condensing it, so they may not actually be using a process that removes PFAs, but still labeling the water as "distilled". Also, the water comes in plastic that is probably treated with Bisphenol-A, which can leach into the water, sort of defeating the purpose of avoiding chemicals. Treating, filtering, and distilling the water yourself sometimes seems like it would be the best way to go.
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in your body. In short, the whole idea that you should avoid drinking distilled water because it robs your body of minerals is complete and utter bunk and everyone should feel perfectly fine drinking distilled water.
Depends on the amount. If you drink distilled water only for 3 days, you most likely die. Without eating anything etc.
No idea what your rant is a bout.
Your parent is wrong, drinking half a litre distilled water won't harm anyone, so you are right so far. However your general conclusion is as wro
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Depends on the amount. If you drink distilled water only for 3 days, you most likely die. Without eating anything etc.
You would be absolutely fine, aside from being pretty hungry (assuming that you're not diabetic or something like that). Extend that to a few weeks and you would have serious health effects, but those would come from not eating not from drinking distilled water. Because, once again, not only are the amounts of minerals you would lose to the water negligible, but you don't actually end up losing much because the water going out of your body is filtered by your kidneys, which are specifically there to keep th
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Lol, no. You'd be pretty hungry though.
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i was talking about changing your lifestyle to only drinking distilled water. Which some people *have* done as part of fasting and it *has* made them sick.
I'm sorry, but that's just impossible. I've been over all of this already, but to sum up: negligible effect compared to the minerals (what specific minerals by the way since just "minerals" is pretty vague) available in food; regular tap water is a lot closer to distilled water in terms of concentration of minerals than it is to human bodily fluids anyway, so it would have essentially the same effect as distilled water anyway; and also kidneys and homeostasis.
Cannot live on Grass, Distilled means Distilled (Score:3)
We can even live on grass if we have to (blades of grass are not super filling
No, we cannot. There are very good reasons why ruminants [wikipedia.org], mammals who can live on grass, have complex stomachs containing microbes to breakdown the plant matter and will regurgitate food to chew it a second time.
We lack this and so cannot get enough nutrients from grass to survive. While we can use the seeds of certain types of grasses, such as wheat, barley, corn etc. it took literally thousands of yea
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It's no good correcting one myth about distilled water if you are going to promulgate multiple others.
I'm not promulgating any myths.
No, we cannot. There are very good reasons why ruminants [wikipedia.org], mammals who can live on grass, have complex stomachs containing microbes to breakdown the plant matter and will regurgitate food to chew it a second time.
Sure, ruminants. Explain horses though. They are not ruminants but still eat grass. Then there's rabbits (admittedly they are coprophages). Also elephants, donkeys, zebras, grasshoppers, beavers, chipmunks, etc., etc. etc. There are, in fact, many, many creatures that can live on grass who don't require special stomachs. Ruminants may be better at extracting more nutrition from tough vegetation, but bog-standard omnivores like humans can still extract nutrition from regular gr
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You do know that navy ships go to sea for months at a time and they drink distilled water the whole time they are out. Or has that thought never occurred to you?
There is an old tradition of adding salt to the coffee because the flavor is off when it's made with distilled water. But that is just sodium chloride, not something special to replace critical minerals.
Coffee and I don't agree, but tea works just fine made with distilled water with no added salt.
Your kidneys exist to retain minerals you need and di
A problem? (Score:2)
Is this really a problem? If this stuff is so ubiquitous, where are all the deleterious effects on the population? How does this compare to things like food-born illness which is mitigated by plastics?
I'm not against trying to handle plastics better, but I'm really skeptical about how something is both ubiquitous and dangerous and somehow does not come up in the data when you look at things like excess death and life expectancy.
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Considering that rain water is distilled water, evapoured water, I wonder from where the PFAs get into it.
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Good question, most likely the dust particles that nucleate the water droplets.
Check their boiling points and see if they are less than water's. If not I don't see how they would evaporate to any significant amount.
Re:A problem? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A problem? (Score:5, Informative)
The main place we see it is in reduced fertility among males. Male sperm counts are way down from 100 years ago. This is primarily due to the psuedo-estrogens (pesticides and plastic) .
Cancer risks have increased from 3% to 50% over the last 100 years *BUT* part of that is average older age. If you died at 58, you didn't get cancer at 67. It's hard to tease out.
Also see "Childhood disability rate jumps 16 percent over past decade"
where it says
"The study also found that disabilities related to physical health conditions have decreased, while disabilities due to neurodevelopmental and mental health problems have increased greatly."
Correlation is not causation [Re:A problem?] (Score:2)
The main place we see it is in reduced fertility among males. Male sperm counts are way down from 100 years ago. This is primarily due to ...
The main determinant of sperm count is how frequently the male ejaculates. Saying "Male sperm counts are way down from 100 years ago" only says "Males are having a lot more frequent sex than 100 years ago."
(or else masturbating more often. Given that 100 years ago there was severe social pressure against masturbation, that's possible too.)
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All that social pressure against masturbation does is force people to not talk about it. Otherwise, same-old, same-old....
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I blame the Internet.
Comparison of risk (Score:2)
Is this really a problem? If this stuff is so ubiquitous, where are all the deleterious effects on the population? How does this compare to things like food-born illness which is mitigated by plastics?
I'm not against trying to handle plastics better, but I'm really skeptical about how something is both ubiquitous and dangerous and somehow does not come up in the data when you look at things like excess death and life expectancy.
Officially, what we need to know is deaths per 100,000 people due to this effect, alongside similar stats for other risks such as death by shark attack, deaths by lightning, and so on.
I note that fentanyl is now the leading cause of death among people in the US aged 18-45, with about 55,000 deaths annually and exponentially rising. I *strongly* suspect that this risk is much, much higher than the risk from forever chemicals.
This is not to downplay the risk or say that the risk is negligible, only to say tha
Re:Comparison of risk (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, that's a problem for future me. I sure don't envy that guy!
More seriously I'd say we are more than capable of doing both. We know that PFAs are a growing problem, slowing it down so we can better get a handle on it sounds a lot better than waiting until its killing 10s of thousands of people because at that point it will be too late to do anything about.
,/p
Most of our fentenyl issue is caused by our healthcare system failing us enormously due to being full of for profit entities or severely underfunded non-profits in rural areas.
My own grandmother fell and fractured her pelvis. They gave Oxycontin to deal with it. Most people understand that it is absurd to take an opioid for any long term as you will become addicted. Being 85 she complained about pain which was really just what happens when you become addicted to opioids. Your mind literally invents pain. Since she was 85 they opted to just "make her comfortable" which eventually meant she was taking fentenyl and of course was no longer able to function properly with a whole host of side effects that are well known but due to her age were simply treated with more drugs.
Eventually my mother and uncle flew out there to check on as they do at least twice a year. Looked at all the meds she was on and ask their doctor if they could create a plan to get her off all the opioids. She wasn't consciously addicted so she agreed to try it as her quality of life was declining rapidly. There were some struggles but 5 years later we all flew out to celebrate her birthday. Her quality of life is significantly improved and she only needs the occasional Advil to help her deal with some arthritis.
Then there is my cousin, he hurt his back, same story only he was much younger. Since he was younger the doctors cut him off which led to him finding alternative sources of pain meds which are of course not being regulated properly. He died of an overdose.
The healthcare industry is hurting a lot of people but only worrying about the problem in front of them either because they are too busy or because insurance makes it too difficult or won't cover treatment for addiction as you are of course addicted after two weeks to a few months while your back recovers. That type of pain is quite debilitating.
So long story short, as a society we're more than capable of working on more than one problem at a time. We've known what PFAs due to the human body for quite some time now and it would be easier to deal with now rather than later.
If the chemicals don't break down .... (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be at least one possibility that they don't break down in the human body either? I mean, if they just pass through our systems, then the fact we drank water with some small amount in it perhaps amounts to nothing?
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And here we have another specimen whose political bias filtered out the words 'cancer-causing perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA)' and 'unsafe to drink' when he read the summary.
The problem is that saying "it causes cancer" is mostly meaningless. At what ingested concentration does it cause what percent probability of cancer, and how does this compare to the amounts in rainwater?
The requirement is far less than that. 60% by chan (Score:3)
> It is not a surprise that they found thousands of things when their requirements are only 95% not-due-to-chance
The requirements are far, far less than that.
Consider these two scenarios:
A. Choose a person at random. Ask them to fill out a name tag. What are the odds they'll answer "write"?
B. A person is wearing a name tag that says "Jonathan Edward Stevens". What are the odds that that name tag randomly stuck to them and they aren't actually Jonathan?
Those are NOT the same thing! They are totally diff
Wish I could edit on Slashdot! Read this first! (Score:3)
That should say:
A. Choose a person at random. Ask them to fill out a name tag. What are the odds they'll write "Jonathan Edward Stevens"?
B. A person is wearing a name tag that says "Jonathan Edward Stevens". What are the odds that that name tag randomly stuck to them and they aren't actually Jonathan?
P value is case A, the odds of getting that result next time, by chance. That's very much NOT the same as case B, "know we got that result, what are the odds it was random chance?"
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Dang, I was seriously trying to figure out the probability and getting really confused.
On a related note. (Score:3)
I gave up on plasticized cookware years ago and went back to cast iron, stainless, and anodized. Leftovers are now in glass or porcelain. I do admit to using plastic wrap because it is just so useful - baby steps I suppose. On the clothes front everything has some poly in it unless you actively seek out 100% cotton.
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Well, more often than not these days, I use it to cover and seal in the tops of my glass containers I try to store most foods in.
I also use it to tightly wrap my raw salmon I often salt cure to make gravlax...but that is usually only overnight and then I unwrap and rinse off.
I do, however, often use gallon sized ziplock bags to stor
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I for one use it to wrap up bread products before freezing them. I can't get through most bags of anything before they mold otherwise. But if you don't wrap them tight then they get freezer burned. I then put the plastic wrapped bread into a bigger bag that I reuse. I live far enough away from the places where I shop (12 minutes to the local grocery outlet, 35 minutes to costco) that I'm not going to go shopping every time I want something, so I have to stock up. But if the food is ruined, that doesn't do m
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Plastic wrap, the great question; how does a piece of plastic wrap compare environmentally with the marginal cost of washing the extra container and cover if you don't use plastic wrap.
Over a year, how many dishwasher loads do you save using plastic wrap, and how does the extra dishwasher load compare to the plastic wrap environmentally?
Complication, some larger pieces of plastic wrap are reusable if they are still clean.
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One example: I bake an apple crisp in a 9 X 13 pan. After it cools I cover that with apiece of plastic wrap that is the width of the roll (12", yes I just ran out to measure it) by 16". If I don't cover the large pan, then I would need 11 other containers (12 servings minus the one I just ate :-)) to store the leftovers.
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Plastics get a pretty bad "wrap" but for the most part as long as they stay in the waste cycle and end up properly landfilled it's not so bad. The issue in in places where there is lacking waste infrastructure and so much ends up in the ocean, rivers, soil etc. Certainly a better use for petroleum is to make durable goods from it than just burn it to make things hot.
That said we can (and slowly are it seems) ease up on the disposable stuff and plastic packaging, it has gotten a bit out of hand how many si
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I have been having a LOT of good luck lately with carbon steel pans.
ONce I get them well seasoned, I can cook eggs in them non-stick just fine.
I will admit, I do use a good bit more oil on those than a non-stick, but they do work well.
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I gave up on plasticized cookware years ago and went back to cast iron, stainless, and anodized. Leftovers are now in glass or porcelain.
You've never been backpacking, have you?
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But you would get a more thorough exercise carrying around a cast iron skillet and glass jars
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I do admit to using plastic wrap because it is just so useful
Foil works pretty well.
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Well, not so much with acidic foods.
I've forgotten at times and used foil on things with tomato sauce, and well...after a day or so, it starts eating holes in the foil.
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I use teflon coated foil for those purposes. Then I don't have to use plastic.
Can != Should (Score:2)
Rainwater almost everywhere on Earth has unsafe levels of "forever chemicals," according to new research.
We're so smart!!
wha? (Score:2)
If everything is killing us everywhere, how come world population keeps increasing?
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How can there be significant amounts in rain? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Because the boiling point of it has literally nothing to do with anything. Them being microscopic particles does.
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Because the boiling point of it has literally nothing to do with anything. Them being microscopic particles does.
Water gets up to the clouds by evaporating at ground level, then condensing up high. Evaporation will leave any particles behind, even microscopic ones. I guess they must be blown up along with other dust particles?
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RTFM (Score:5, Informative)
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my dude, there's a key below the backslash and above the shift.
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PFOA out, GenX in. GenX is okay, because it degrades into other substances ... toxicity of those substances to be revealed in a couple decades.
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What you wrote might have looked good when you wrote it, but /. surely mangled it into an endless single paragraph-sentence.
Please do learn to use the formatting characters provided with the /. comment box so we can all more easily read what you appear to rant about.
A long single sentence looking post constrained to a single paragraph, like your post, looks like a rant in /.
Greenpeace got it almost right (Score:5, Informative)
Greenpeace should have asked for a ban on Fluorine chemistry instead of Chlorine. Organofluorine chemistry is an almost totally irredeemable clusterfuck.
In other news (Score:2)
Rain miraculously washes the dirty forever chemicals out of the air.
Re:Only Drink Beer! (Score:5, Funny)
> Stay away from water, fish fuck in it. Drink beer.
Bacteria fuck in beer.
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> Stay away from water, fish fuck in it. Drink beer.
Bacteria fuck in beer.
but that's what makes it good! fuck away, my microscopic booze buddies!
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Not only that but alcohol is bacteria poop.
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If you count yeast as bacteria, yes, that is the basic idea.
I have a batch of wine about ready to bottle, different strain of yeast, same idea.
Drink Beer, learn Science! (Score:2)
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Yeast isn't a bacteria.
It's a fungus.
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Bacteria can and do exchange DNA. Plasmids are roughly comparable to sperm, for example, but are not the only DNA transfer mechanism between bacteria.
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Drink distilled water. (Score:5, Interesting)
There is misinformation floating around on the internet that distilled water is bad for you. It's not, and the reasons why people think it is are simple and gross misinterpretation of available data. So, I would like to take this opportunity to dispel some of that misinformation.
I and others I know have been drinking distilled water for years and years and no harm has come to us .
People believe that it leeches minerals from your body. In fact, it absorbs only a trivial amount before it is right in balance with all the rest of the water in your body. You lose WAY more minerals through normal sweating and excreting.
People complain that it fails to restore such lost minerals, whereas tap water restores these minerals. It is true that distilled water will not restore lost minerals, but it is false that tapwater does restore them. The mineral content of tap water is trivial. If that is your source of minerals, you are doomed. We don't get our minerals from water, we get them from food. One bite of broccoli has more minerals in it than a gallon of tap water. The only people who need to worry about mineral depletion are marathon runners (or sick people who are losing a lot of fluids), and they can't rely on tap water either, for the same reason. The must add electrolytes to the water (tap, distilled, or otherwise) in order to avoid harmful mineral loss.
People complain that distilled water is highly acidic, since it absorbs carbon dioxide once it contacts air. In fact, it is barely acidic. Less acidic than a banana. Many orders of magnitude less acidic than soda pop. It's water! Your body is more than capable of handling it.
Babies can't handle it, of course, but they aren't supposed to drink tap water either.
All of these things are non-issues. Distilled water is the safest kind of water you can drink. And it's delicious.
Re:Drink distilled water. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Who's trolling? [wikipedia.org]
And also:
Exactly as I advocated.
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Exactly as I advocated.
Not sure of your reading comprehension or what you think you were advocating, but you and Wikipedia are painting two wildly different pictures.
Wikipedia: sensible, moderate, and lists pros and cons.
You: "Distilled water is the safest kind of water you can drink." Which is what is scientifically known as horseshit.
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An alkaline diet really is crap, believe me. You're way better off with either a Li-Ion or LiFePO4 diet.
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And the simple act of breathing is enough to quickly remove that carbon dioxide from your body and restore pH balance.
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I think what happened was a lot of people got "distilled" and "deionized" mixed up. If you drink deionized water it can do a real number on your teeth and soft tissues because it's so desperate to leech anything it can it'll tear up just about whatever it touches.
Re: Drink distilled water. (Score:2)
This is totally incorrect. Wrong. It is perfectly safe to drink deionized water, although it is pointless to do so over less expensive alternatives.
You talk about deionized water like it is hydrofluoric acid. It is not. It is water. Just plain water, literally.
You seem to think that it will dissolve your body in its search for ions, but that is incorrect. The amount of dissolved ions in drinking water is so minute, and the rate of ion exchange in your mouth is so slow, that it is perfectly safe
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Well the action of some grains is to block the absorption of some nutrients. So your fortified grains may have a negative amount of some nutrients.
Eat things that can run away. They are less adept at chemical warfare.
Horace the cheese (Score:2)
Eat things that can run away. They are less adept at chemical warfare.
Hey, okay.
Understand that blue cheese develop a character and a personality of their own in the normal run of things.
That blue cheese is just a wee bit more mature. Stop making fun of it, it doesn't like it.
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My blue cheese has become self aware in the fridge, but I don't like its priorities.
Re:Drink distilled water. (Score:5, Informative)
I use it when I want to make naturally fermented foods, like pickles, kombucha, etc...
Tap water has enough chemicals in it that kill the friendly bacteria and yeasts I want in my brews.
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Anyone who doesn't know about these people are part of those people.
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Beer is full of the urine of billions of tiny fungi
Re: Only Drink Beer! (Score:2)
Re:Fear Fear Fear (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a sad attempt to make people afraid to collect rainwater, and to exert even more control over any manufacturing. Producing something the government is not happy with? Oops looks like your PFAS output is magically too high!
No links as to if the lowering of the standards for those chemicals mentioned is reasonable or even warranted.
If this were actually as much of a problem as they are saying, there would be no wildlife left alive. Plainly there is.
Mother nature doesn't care what health conditions kill off wildlife as long as most of them make it to reproducing. Humans tend to care a bit more about having more people survive than is necessary to reproduce, and continue to survive after they have reproduced. So what wildlife will happily survive through isn't always something that makes humans happy to live through.
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You're absolutely right. "Mother nature" is totally not a thing, and her name is Gaia.
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If this were actually as much of a problem as they are saying, there would be no wildlife left alive. Plainly there is.
That seems like saying "If smoking caused cancer there would be no smokers left alive." Maybe we're still early in the timeline and the effects are forthcoming. Hopefully you're right and we have nothing to fret over, but it does seem like a reasonable thing to continue researching before we casually move on.
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Sponsored by Nestle - the company that believes clean water is not a right, and should be paid for.
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Mercury metal is... never good news, but the honest truth is that room temperature liquid mercury isn't particularly scary. If one ten thousandth of a gram of dimethylmercury touches your skin, you will go to the hospital several months later because your brain is all fucked up and then spend several more months suffering one of
Re:Food packaging, cookwear, cosmetics (Score:5, Insightful)
Per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a large family of human-made chemicals [...] found in household items like food packaging, electronics, cosmetics and cookware.
Three out of four get applied either directly to the body or food entering the body. How are trace amounts in water going to make a difference?
I see that when you read the summary your political bias filtered out the words 'unsafe to drink'. May I offer you a tall cool glass of perfluorooctanoic acid?
I see that when you read the comment you replied to, your political bias prevented you from realizing that things that are unsafe to drink are also unsafe to eat, and that people touch their faces and then touch their food pretty frequently. And of course, anything touching food tends to get into food.
As long as food packaging contains PFOA, complaining about it in rain water is worrying about getting ash in your hair while your house burns around you.
Re: Food packaging, cookwear, cosmetics (Score:2)
Whenever I start worrying about something being safe to eat or drink, I remind myself that there are microplastics in my organs, and then I ask myself again whether I should really be worried about whatever. itâ(TM)s given me an odd peace of mind about the harmful chemicals i canâ(TM)t avoid anyway.