Toxic "forever Chemicals" Found in 95% of Beers Tested in the U.s.
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A study found PFAS in 95% of 23 beers tested across the US, sparking concerns about water pollution and the safety of beer consumption, with commenters questioning the study's methodology and implications.
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[1] - https://www.beer-brewing.com/beer_brewing/beer_brewing_water...
[2] - https://www.ewg.org/research/getting-forever-chemicals-out-d...
I couldn’t find mention of PFAS or ‘forever chemicals’ anywhere on the first link(it may just be a little out of date concerning the last few years of development.
The second link didn’t show any mention of a beer brewing link, but was specifically addressing ‘forever chemicals’ that are meaningfully on topic.
Unfortunately they also included this caveat:
“Although some of the filters did not achieve 100 percent reduction in PFAS measured in the water samples, they did eliminate 100 percent of PFOA and PFOS, two of the most notorious forever chemicals.”
I am not. The level of filtration required to remove chemicals is simple. It's a cost, but that cost can be moved to the customers and the beer can be promoted as "The Only Safe MicroBrew In {insert_state}". Artesian waters are a massive money maker. Apply the same sales logic to the beer. If anything I would taunt all the other micro-brewers and laugh all the way to the bank.
> Conventional water treatment employed at municipal drinking water treatment plants have been shown to be nearly ineffective at removing PFAS. This can leave the burden and cost of implementing more sophisticated water treatments to brewers unless public water suppliers implement tertiary treatment to remove PFAS from finished water prior to distribution. Anion exchange and activated carbon treatments have been shown to more effectively remove longer-chain PFAS and PFSAs but were less effective in removing PFCAS and the alternative shorter-chain PFAS and PFECAs. Reverse osmosis treatment showed significant removal of PFAS of different chain lengths in drinking water, but can be prohibitive due to high operational costs and energy usage. In areas with known contamination, beers from macro- breweries were less likely to have detectable PFAS than craft beers brewed at a smaller scale, potentially due to more effective and expensive filtration of tap water at larger breweries.
On the other hand, based on the article you linked to, if something like a Berkey filter is sufficient (I have doubts about their testing, but whatever) the cost is probably not prohibitive. Assuming there's something as effective as a Berkey which can handle a more practical flow of water, but at the same cost per volume of water handled.
https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/
A link to the source of the information can be found in TFA https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c11265
Here's the study map: https://pubs.acs.org/cms/10.1021/acs.est.4c11265/asset/image...
And here's the 2024 presidential election map: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/El...
I feel it's needless to say that's not actual advice.. but well, better safe than sorry lol.
EDIT: I mean, of all the health reasons not to drink beer.. PFAS is _probably_ not the main one to worry about? I'm not a doctor, but it seems there's already enough known adverse effects that this additional piece of information is probably not a dealbreaker for those who drink?
This study is almost like an intentional parody of people who miss the forest for the trees: "lead poisoning a leading cause of death in gunshot victims!"
MDMA in my opinion produces "happy-lovey-drunk+" and it seems from friends it produces that effect even for people who are sad drunks. It does come with a crash but it's about the same as a hangover. And ice cold water tastes amazing rather than having to force it down.
Ketamine (at low doses, too much and you'll stare off into space) also produces a drunk like effect. You'll feel euphoric, blurry vision, loss of motor control. It feels tipsy-ish. The biggest pro is that there's no crash, your high just kinda ends.
That said, as long as you aren't consuming regularly in excess, even the alcohol isn't going to affect your lifespan. It just goes to illustrate the relative levels of absurdity involved here.
Leaded gas was fine for a looong time, and as an individual you can't really tell it's bad, once you zoom out and look at statistics it's not that good: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/lead-gasoline-tie...
> Dioscorides, a Greek physician who lived in the 1st century AD, wrote that lead makes the mind "give way".[121][274]
> Lead poisoning from rum was also noted in Boston.[291] Benjamin Franklin suspected lead to be a risk in 1786
> The first legislation in the UK to limit pottery workers' exposure to lead was included in the Factories Act Extension Act in 1864, with further introduced in 1899. William James Furnival (1853–1928), research ceramist of City & Guilds London Institute, appeared before Parliament in 1901 and presented a decade's evidence to convince the nation's leaders to remove lead completely from the British ceramic industry.
I don't know much about forever chemicals. Is there the same level of evidence as we had for lead?
No. We have observational data in humans (which is problematic for drawing conclusions, since PFAS contamination tends to correlate with industry and population), and animal models, mostly in non-mammalian species.
As you correctly note, lead was known to be toxic since long before leaded gasoline -- the "question" was more about the delivery mechanism (auto exhaust) than the toxicity of the element itself.
Doses make the poisons, and apparently the dose for some of these chemicals is much, much higher than tetraethyl lead.
Also, apparently the molecular diagram for TEL sorta looks like a hackenkreuz. How appropriate.
[0]https://www.wired.com/2013/01/looney-gas-and-lead-poisoning-...
https://pubs.acs.org/cms/10.1021/acs.est.4c11265/asset/image...
I am so tired. No matter how hard people try to keep this stuff out of their bodies, the lack of regulation and lack of enforcement --or even regulation and enforcement being way too late-- makes the act of simply keeping chemicals out of ourselves impossible. The chemicals are everywhere.
Vermont is in the clear.
We didn't rationally trade health for convenience, few people recognized any kind of trade-off was even occurring.
The missing sentence could be, "That's because modern detection methods are now so amazingly accurate that they can detect insignificant quantities of chemicals."
Or it could be, "Therefore, if you drink beer you will be poisoned and die a horrible death."
Or maybe it's just, "Start worrying, and we'll figure out if it means anything later."
"Stock x went up yesterday and then went down"
In the twitter world, media is like junk-food. Mostly empty calories, soundbites, and memes.
Alcohol: mouth and throat, laryngeal, esophageal, female breast, colorectal, stomach, and liver cancer.
PFAS: testicular cancer...
Nope to PFAS!
> Researchers tested 23 different beers from across the U.S. and found that 95% contained PFAS
23 beers across the 10,000+ breweries in the US? Ok, lets find out more
> By modifying a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) testing method for analyzing levels of PFAS in drinking water, Hoponick Redmon and colleagues tested 23 beers. The test subjects were produced by U.S. brewers in areas with documented water system contamination, plus popular domestic and international beers from larger companies with unknown water sources.
So, 95% of the beer they tested from a few known water-contaminated locales had PFAS, but I don't think 95% of the beer produced in the US is brewed in such places. Yeah, it makes sense that garbage water in = garbage beer out (this tracks with non-PFSA issues too)
> The researchers found a strong correlation between PFAS concentrations in municipal drinking water and levels in locally brewed beer -- a phenomenon that Hoponick Redmon and colleagues say has not yet been studied in U.S. retail beer. They found PFAS in 95% of the beers they tested.
(Being in the tap water, I'd figure it's also in locally-bottled water and soft drinks and such.)
FWIW - all the study's authors are with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTI_International They officially claimed no conflicts of interest. But if they're drinking local beers anywhere near RTI's HQ - yeah, ample reason to want things fixed.
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