This is a simplification. Type 2 diabetes is heavily polygenic, but the genetic connection could be... you are genetically predisposed to like sweet food! In which case, the diet intervention would work, most people just aren't willing to do it.
Many genetic predispositions are behavioral, it's not all pure metabolic effects.
Jesus HN, it's a sweet drink. Y'all act like nobody eats cookies, candy, ice cream. Happy Birthday here's your kale salad.
The "ate like shit your whole life and are now overcorrecting in your 40s because you got consequences for the first time" energy is big in this thread.
my fam loves boba w zero sugar added... all the places we go to here in san diego let you adjust (e.g. omomo [0]). basically a fresh milky fruit or avocado smoothie with chewy tapioca pearls. it's a fun treat that seemed a lot healthier than an ice cream or something. these findings make me sad :-|
How much people happen to eat in one sitting is nice bonus info, but it doesn't make sense to complain that the data has been normalized into density figures.
Either way, a little 16oz carton of Ben and Jerry's that people smash in one sitting is 1200 calories. So it's still more sugar- and calorie-dense than boba tea.
I don't really see the point in bickering over calorie-dense junk foods though. Both of them are displacing healthier foods in your diet that you could've eaten instead. Neither should account for more than a small fraction of your calorie intake.
I like the texture of the tapioca balls and like milk tea. I’d only get the milk tea plus tapioca (and choose the lowest sweetness possible, “no sugar” if offered)
I mean I get not liking it. I like it. I’d have it maybe once every three months as a little treat
It seems noteworthy, but not commented that I can see (in the article), that the different samples of "Boba Guys Black Tea Pearls" have 20x variation in measured amount.
So what's up with that? (I have uninformed ideas...)
Further down, they explain the measurement errors involved:
"
If you buy the same product twice, how much will chemical levels vary?
When we bought two samples of the same product, plastic chemical levels differed on average by 59%, calculated as Relative Percent Difference (RPD).
To test whether completely identical samples would show different levels of chemicals, we sent about 10% of our products in triplicate. This means we sent three copies of the product from the same batch – with matching lot number and expiration date – bought at the same store on the same day. We found that the triplicate samples differed less – on average by 33%.
Our lab’s quality control methodology lists 20% RPD as an acceptable margin of measurement error for duplicate samples, meaning if you tested the exact same sample twice, you could see up to a 20% difference purely due to measurement noise. Taking that into account, the RPD for two samples of the same product (not necessarily from the same lot) ranges from 39-59%. For samples with the same lot number and expiration date, the RPD narrows to 13-33%.
Within-product variability appears high, possibly because we are dealing with very small chemical concentrations measured in nanograms."
Yep, I saw that section. To my interpretation, these average percents are so much smaller than the variation seen, that it's basically /not/ addressing the outlier variations.
Perhaps plots would be better/less alarming than easy-to-cherry-pick tables, but I'm not expert on conveying this sort of data either...
In Taiwan, there was a huge scandal decade ago about this exact same issue — people discovered vendors were using plasticiser to make the boba jelly like.
Im sure most of the boba shops in the US import ingredients from Taiwan, so its not surprising here
The sugar content of boba tea is much more relevant than trace levels of BPA. You will have disastrous health effects from sugar, versus potential effects from BPA.
> At least one of the 18 chemicals was found in every baby food, prenatal supplement, human breast milk, yogurt, and ice cream product that we tested, to name only a few categories.
Ideally the "% Limit" column would:
1. Be right-aligned
2. Have consistent formatting (i.e. same number of digits after the dot)
3. A little bar underneath each number showing relative scale (i.e. top entry is full width, last entry is 216.7 / 32571.4 = 0.00665307601, though maybe on a log scale for confusion? ;)
I don't see much that I recognize as "food" in the report, and in the database I see that actual foods — eggs, bananas, suchlike — are no-detect across the board. Conclusion: eat food, instead of whatever these things are.
There's only one tomato item and it's ND across the board? Agree on the other stuff, you shouldn't eat animal products because of the bioaccumulation issues.
I punched in all the stuff I ate this week and almost none of it is in their test. It's very skewed to weird processed stuff, there's only a few items from real produce markets.
Looking forward to more testing like this. I've been trying to consciously avoid anything combining "hot" with "plastic" though there's only so much you can do.
Fish are aggregators of this stuff so that's not surprising. Spam and other processed meats and prepared foods also not too surprising (though what's with the Annie's organic mac and cheese being so full of it? Maybe it's the sauce?)... I think the tap water was the scariest one to me. Sure, you expect some but ... wildly unsafe levels?!
Initial data says they're at least bad for sea life. Doubtful it's good to have such durable micro materials bouncing around our lungs and digestive tracts. Stopping pollution is also much easier than cleaning up after the fact.
> Doubtful it's good to have such durable micro materials bouncing around our lungs and digestive tracts.
Having odd things in your lungs is bad. Having things bouncing around in your digestive tract means nothing. The whole point of the digestive tract is that you put untrusted materials into it.
Uh, smoke particles and mineral dusts are generally non digestible - and we’ve been eating smoked/cooked meats and slightly dirty things for at least as long as recorded history?
There's growing evidence, especially in the past few years with better studies, that suggests HPV is a significant driver, if not the most significant driver, of the increase in colorectal cancer among younger adults. I suspect it's been a disfavored explanation because of certain implications--implications which should be irrelevant and not even necessarily true, but I digress. The HPV vaccine should in theory be protective[1] so in the next decade or so it might become more clear even in the absence of additional direct investigation. Likewise, we should expect the incidence of oropharyngeal cancers to decrease, which probably not coincidentally has also risen among younger--20-50yo--adults. Notably, the HPV link is more clearly established.
[1] HPV16 and HPV18 being the variants most often identified in HPV-associated colorectal cancers[2], and which are targeted by HPV vaccines as they're the variants primarily responsible for cervical and anal cancers.
Also, is there an aggregate plastic danger metric? It would be great to develop an aggregate metric that combines the different types of plastics and multiplies them by their known potential dangers to the human body. I realize the multiples will change over time as more research comes in, but right now, there's no way to quantify BPA vs DEHP dangers.
The PlasticList site explores safety levels, including a discussion of aggregate levels across products and chemicals. It’s an interesting but frustrating read.
Are you looking at the results in the table on the main page? That is tap water treated with some purifying tablet, not straight tap water. There is plain tap water in the full database but it doesn't seem to have levels of anything in excess of established limits.
My mistake, I didn't see that part. I thought the tablet treatment was just something they did to prepare it for testing. Maybe the tablets kill the microfauna via microplastic overdose.
Manufacturers are putting more and more plastic into things to cut costs it seems.
My favorite pour over coffee maker almost entirely had water in contact with metal and glass during brewing. Glass reservoir, glass decanter, metal grounds basket - only rubber tubes going from reservoir to heating element.
When it died (your average coffee maker only lasts 5 years) all of their newer more expensive models had mostly plastic everything except for the decanter.
Great read and amazing initiative.
Relevance of findings seems to 90% depend on whether you believe the EFSA BPA intake thresholds over the FDA.
Love how transparent they’re about it instead of doing what most do.
The world needs more of this.
Am I interpreting this correctly that Brita actually works as a limiter for plasticizers in tap water? Specially since tap water plasticizer content can vary by a lot?
If you are interested in water filters that filter out microplastics, look in to filters that have NSF ratings for it. Afaik only the berkefeld filters (NOT berkey) do. Also a lot of water filter companies are sketchy, and market their filters with terms like made from NSF rated components but do not have the actual full filter assemblies tested (red red red flag).
One thing I'd like to see tested: I have a theory that reusable plastic containers leach out most of their chemicals early in their life, so the amount imparted to any food diminishes with each use. Under this theory, I save and reuse old plastic containers for a long time, and avoid new ones (especially single use). Could this be true, or misguided?
I don't have any sources handy but I believe conventional wisdom is that plastic decomposition accelerates with age due to the cumulative effect of UV exposure.
I'd expect almost the opposite. Plastics left in the sun tend to turn brittle, I'd expect that to be a big contributor to microplastics generally in the environment as those plastics break down.
But I agree, would be interesting to know.
I've been switching my stuff over to glass when possible. But, unfortunately unless I become a full-time farmer there's no escaping the fact that my food comes wrapped in plastic that's wrapped in plastic and further wrapped in more plastic. Single use plastics for food should be heavily restricted.
Not exactly food containers, but apparently, textiles release most of their microplastics after the first few washes [1]. So, the longer you wear a tshirt, the safer it becomes.
At the same time, some containers like Huskee cups literally start breaking down after a few years [1], so it’s not just microplastics, but you can see bigger chunks of plastic ending up in your food.
"They certainly did not advise putting deli containers in the microwave or dishwasher. Warner puts it simply: “The more you reuse them, the more they would be likely to leach chemicals because of the repeated washing and exposure to acidic things and soap, and scouring them in cycles. "
Why not both? My guess would be, they release one type of horrible thing early on, then graduate to some other horrible thing through short term degradation.
We switched out plastic containers for glass and silicone for the most part some time back. Personally I was just routinely disappointed with the quality of the tupperware-type things, so why not spent a few bucks more once and get something that lasts? It still will have a plastic top or parts but you can at least heat it up in the glass part.
I wish similar testing were available in Australia, I'd pay for a subscription to have access to high-quality independent testing of the common foods that are available in the shops.
I wonder if enough people care for this to be a viable business model.
I just want a ballpark on the orders of magnitude between alternatives so I can make simple swaps.
The most popular three brands of each food category (canned black beans, soy milk, hummus, etc.) would be a nice start.
On the other hand, it also seems like the wrong fixation for most people. Most people should probably be making swaps away from things like junk food and saturated fat before they invest energy in minmaxing the nanograms of pfas in their butter. It would suck if it introduced more chaos and confusion into health/food discourse.
I put in a quote request with the lab OP used, the economics might work out but we'd run into the problem of people sharing the insights/outliers on social media?
The salmon in the first table shows BPA levels at 500-1000% the safe level, with salmon near the top of the range of all tested products, but in the separate "Results" page, if I search for "salmon", the same products show up but the BPA levels are only around the 20th percentile of tested samples.
It's such a sad realization when you notice that most of the cost decreases for common products have happened through plasticizing everything.
It's basically impossible to find cheap natural products for cleaning consumables, for example, and it's really hard to find trustworthy global brands.
Plastic is entering absolutely every aspect of our lives and I really fear it's a "lead in gasoline" and "asbestos" moment for our generation :-( and it's going to be much harder to undo that either of those.
My wife is a doctor dealing with (part of) the endocrine system and for years she has had us avoiding heating anything up in a plastic container and avoiding food/liquids+plastic where we can. She believes that these endocrine disruptors are very likely much worse for us than we currently realize, and that the research is eventually going to show that.
From my understanding she feels that the mechanisms for these endocrine disrupters are there, that they act similarly to BPA, which is better understood, and that over time as research is done we will find more ways that they interact. The research is hard to do and takes a very long time, and quite a lot of it is not definitive because it is difficult with so many confounding factors, but there is a lot of it and more over time.
My wife is a researcher that has looked in to human breast milk, and blood metabolites. She has colleagues who have looked in to similar things. They all avoid plastics as much as possible.
I think when people act like this they get a little irrational even if they have credentials and education. For example, the concern is limiting plastic intake. the solution is to limit it at home apparently, because this is within our realm of control. It's a fallacy though.
However, if this was approached scientifically, we might ask ourselves to identify where these plastics are most likely to come from when we get in contact from them. Are these few levers in our control really having any effect compared to the levers we have no control over that probably also contribute significant plastic in our lives? That is the first question to be asked before any action IMO. It is humbling I am sure to know of a problem but also subconsciously at least know there isn't anything you can do about it. Like most other pollution I guess; you have to breathe that air at the end of the day. And your only salve is the scientific community gathering evidence of these effects so that regulation might be written to target them specifically. Individually, we are powerless.
Being lazy here, but would love to know more about how testing for all of these plastics chemicals that are omnipresent is done in a way that ensures the measurement process or tools themselves do not contribute trace chemicals (e.g. lab tech wears latex gloves while handling the sample, whoops, etc).
They go into significant detail about their sample handling as well as documenting potential sources of contamination here: https://www.plasticlist.org/methodology
211 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 54.3 ms ] threadAlso T2 is on the rise in young people. Have their genetics changed dramatically in the past few decades? Or has food?
https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/data-research/research/young-pe...
[1] https://www.thediabetescouncil.com/link-epigenetics-type-2-d...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10258626/
We like to think that our (positive) behavior comes from our own self-made character traits rather behavior that is genetically determined.
Many genetic predispositions are behavioral, it's not all pure metabolic effects.
The "ate like shit your whole life and are now overcorrecting in your 40s because you got consequences for the first time" energy is big in this thread.
[0]: https://www.omomoteashoppe.com
It’s okay if something isn’t for you!
That is, like, the definition of nutritional benefit.
Boba has ~14g per 100g, depending on the type.
Coca Cola has ~11g sugar per 100g.
In other words, ice cream has 1.8x more sugar content than boba and 2.3x more sugar content of Coca Cola.
If you’re concerned about the tapioca, that’s literally just starch. You know what else contains starch? Potatoes and rice.
Nothing at Boba Guys weighs 100g. That's the difference! 100g really is a typical cup of gelato or ice cream.
Most Boba Tea cups I’ve seen are far bigger than the typical ice cream.
You can’t use per-100gm doses this way. You have to look at sugar in the product as ordered.
People don’t order and eat their food in neat 100gm increments.
Either way, a little 16oz carton of Ben and Jerry's that people smash in one sitting is 1200 calories. So it's still more sugar- and calorie-dense than boba tea.
I don't really see the point in bickering over calorie-dense junk foods though. Both of them are displacing healthier foods in your diet that you could've eaten instead. Neither should account for more than a small fraction of your calorie intake.
What did you expect me to do, bash out a 5x10 multi-company matrix so you can compare perfectly across servings?
The state of nutrition science is so bad that I wouldn't believe most any study, though.
I mean I get not liking it. I like it. I’d have it maybe once every three months as a little treat
So what's up with that? (I have uninformed ideas...)
" If you buy the same product twice, how much will chemical levels vary?
When we bought two samples of the same product, plastic chemical levels differed on average by 59%, calculated as Relative Percent Difference (RPD).
To test whether completely identical samples would show different levels of chemicals, we sent about 10% of our products in triplicate. This means we sent three copies of the product from the same batch – with matching lot number and expiration date – bought at the same store on the same day. We found that the triplicate samples differed less – on average by 33%.
Our lab’s quality control methodology lists 20% RPD as an acceptable margin of measurement error for duplicate samples, meaning if you tested the exact same sample twice, you could see up to a 20% difference purely due to measurement noise. Taking that into account, the RPD for two samples of the same product (not necessarily from the same lot) ranges from 39-59%. For samples with the same lot number and expiration date, the RPD narrows to 13-33%.
Within-product variability appears high, possibly because we are dealing with very small chemical concentrations measured in nanograms."
Perhaps plots would be better/less alarming than easy-to-cherry-pick tables, but I'm not expert on conveying this sort of data either...
Im sure most of the boba shops in the US import ingredients from Taiwan, so its not surprising here
(I feel like I'm still seeing plastic straws for boba everywhere in San Jose; but I'm far from a frequent consumer)
Wow
Ideally the "% Limit" column would: 1. Be right-aligned 2. Have consistent formatting (i.e. same number of digits after the dot) 3. A little bar underneath each number showing relative scale (i.e. top entry is full width, last entry is 216.7 / 32571.4 = 0.00665307601, though maybe on a log scale for confusion? ;)
Salmon, Chicken breast, Beef (ribeye), Rice, Pasta, Tomatoes, Cow Milk, and a Stanford University Dining Meal (Beans, Chicken, Rice, Cauliflower)
I punched in all the stuff I ate this week and almost none of it is in their test. It's very skewed to weird processed stuff, there's only a few items from real produce markets.
Fish are aggregators of this stuff so that's not surprising. Spam and other processed meats and prepared foods also not too surprising (though what's with the Annie's organic mac and cheese being so full of it? Maybe it's the sauce?)... I think the tap water was the scariest one to me. Sure, you expect some but ... wildly unsafe levels?!
Edit: I see they appear to be using the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) intake limits for most of their tests.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10151227/
Having odd things in your lungs is bad. Having things bouncing around in your digestive tract means nothing. The whole point of the digestive tract is that you put untrusted materials into it.
But not new. At all.
And the last decades we’ve had a new unknown cause of colon cancer increase in young adults.
My money is on plastics, but will be hard to prove.
[1] HPV16 and HPV18 being the variants most often identified in HPV-associated colorectal cancers[2], and which are targeted by HPV vaccines as they're the variants primarily responsible for cervical and anal cancers.
[2] See, e.g., https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1479314/ and https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9610003/
Perhaps inappropriate to ask, but are you thinking the implication is anal sex, or the ‘eating ass’ cultural element, or something else?
This would make the main giant aggregate list: https://www.plasticlist.org a lot more useful.
My favorite pour over coffee maker almost entirely had water in contact with metal and glass during brewing. Glass reservoir, glass decanter, metal grounds basket - only rubber tubes going from reservoir to heating element.
When it died (your average coffee maker only lasts 5 years) all of their newer more expensive models had mostly plastic everything except for the decanter.
I doubt the BPA in fish originates from the fish themselves. It's more likely from the can linings used to package the fish.
How can I test for effects from endocrine-disrupting chemicals on my children? Are there blood tests that check for this?
But I agree, would be interesting to know.
I've been switching my stuff over to glass when possible. But, unfortunately unless I become a full-time farmer there's no escaping the fact that my food comes wrapped in plastic that's wrapped in plastic and further wrapped in more plastic. Single use plastics for food should be heavily restricted.
[1]: https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/microplastics-from-te...
[1]: https://uk.help.huskee.co/en-US/what-does-end-of-life-cups-r...
"They certainly did not advise putting deli containers in the microwave or dishwasher. Warner puts it simply: “The more you reuse them, the more they would be likely to leach chemicals because of the repeated washing and exposure to acidic things and soap, and scouring them in cycles. "
https://www.epicurious.com/expert-advice/is-it-safe-to-reuse....
tl;dr -> if you care about your health with regards to plastic ingestion, just use glass or metal.
We switched out plastic containers for glass and silicone for the most part some time back. Personally I was just routinely disappointed with the quality of the tupperware-type things, so why not spent a few bucks more once and get something that lasts? It still will have a plastic top or parts but you can at least heat it up in the glass part.
I wonder if enough people care for this to be a viable business model.
I just want a ballpark on the orders of magnitude between alternatives so I can make simple swaps.
The most popular three brands of each food category (canned black beans, soy milk, hummus, etc.) would be a nice start.
On the other hand, it also seems like the wrong fixation for most people. Most people should probably be making swaps away from things like junk food and saturated fat before they invest energy in minmaxing the nanograms of pfas in their butter. It would suck if it introduced more chaos and confusion into health/food discourse.
I put in a quote request with the lab OP used, the economics might work out but we'd run into the problem of people sharing the insights/outliers on social media?
Also side note, this test seems exorbitantly expensive in India. $1100 for 1 kit! https://www.amazon.in/Phthalates-Test-Bus-Days-Schneider/dp/...
The salmon in the first table shows BPA levels at 500-1000% the safe level, with salmon near the top of the range of all tested products, but in the separate "Results" page, if I search for "salmon", the same products show up but the BPA levels are only around the 20th percentile of tested samples.
It's basically impossible to find cheap natural products for cleaning consumables, for example, and it's really hard to find trustworthy global brands.
Plastic is entering absolutely every aspect of our lives and I really fear it's a "lead in gasoline" and "asbestos" moment for our generation :-( and it's going to be much harder to undo that either of those.
https://www.plasticlist.org/diy
(I also avoid these things but only because I feel paranoid about it.)
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c01942
However, if this was approached scientifically, we might ask ourselves to identify where these plastics are most likely to come from when we get in contact from them. Are these few levers in our control really having any effect compared to the levers we have no control over that probably also contribute significant plastic in our lives? That is the first question to be asked before any action IMO. It is humbling I am sure to know of a problem but also subconsciously at least know there isn't anything you can do about it. Like most other pollution I guess; you have to breathe that air at the end of the day. And your only salve is the scientific community gathering evidence of these effects so that regulation might be written to target them specifically. Individually, we are powerless.