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> Swan also recommends reducing exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals by being a savvy consumer Most hygiene products get away with listing diethyl phthal
by DoingIsLearning 4y ago
> Swan also recommends reducing exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals by being a savvy consumer
Most hygiene products get away with listing diethyl phthalate as 'Parfum'.
What we need is not savvy consumers what we need is regulators to get serious.
- highstep 4y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethyl_phthalate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethyl_phthalate
- standardUser 4y agoI get reliably downvoted for suggesting this, but we need vastly better labelling across the board. We give companies a lot of leeway when it comes to selling things to put in and on our bodies without us, owners of said bodies, having any way of finding out what the hell is in their products, or where they came from, or how they were processed. It absolutely baffles me how everyone doesn't want considerably more information and transparency about our foods and cosmetics.
- prox 4y agoI would be massively in favour of adding a QR Code that details as much as possible (without giving away trade secrets if that is possible) where and how something is sourced and then adding how it was processed. Much like you get a track and trace with a package.
- candiddevmike 4y agoWho cares about hiding trade secrets if those trade secrets are "just a pinch of mercury" or some other nefarious chemical.
- prox 4y agoJust thinking ahead here for some possible pitfalls why companies would be against it.
- _aavaa_ 4y agoUnfortunately I just see anything that they don’t want to disclose (because it’s harmful) to become a trade secret
- standardUser 4y agoThen mandate a label that clearly states there are unknow ingredients that the manufacturer refuses to list.
- danuker 4y agoOn any ingredients list, that should be assumed when there is a vague ingredient like "Artificial Flavors". Industry plainly lists potassium sorbate, sorbic acid, and sodium nitrite, which are known carcinogens. On top of that, the packaging matters: PET is a phtalate which is an endocrine disruptor.
- mywittyname 4y agoThey are going to be against it anyway.
- ben_w 4y agoIn principal, known toxins (when at anything even close to toxic doses when used normally) should be just not allowed in consumer products in the first place. In practice, people like their alcoholic drinks and don't understand why that by itself is enough to require the Californian proposition 65 "substances at this location are known to cause cancer" sticker.
- ryandrake 4y agoThe good news is that the FDA sets "acceptable levels"[1] in food, for things like animal feces, insect infestation, mold, rodent hairs and filth, maggots, and so on, beyond which enforcement is mandatory. The bad news is they are nonzero. 1: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/health/insect-rodent-filth-in-food-wellness https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/health/insect-rodent-filth-in...
- carlmr 4y ago>The bad news is they are nonzero. Especially with mold, zero is very very difficult to attain.
- david422 4y agoThat's a pretty clever idea. I like it! There is limited package space on items, this would allow producers to document a whole lot of info and allow consumers immediate access.
- prox 4y agoThe idea actually comes from when I followed CJ Chivers (expert on weapons and war correspondent) A lot of his work is done by gathering spent munitions on the battlefield and then tracing it back to its source. The life of a weapon and munitions is usually well documented (and can go back decades!)
- madaxe_again 4y agoThis exists in Europe - it’s catchily called ECHA SCIP. You can search by EAN at https://echa.europa.eu/scip-database https://echa.europa.eu/scip-database
- jopsen 4y agoPretty cool. But fairly, limited: > Articles containing substances of very high concern (SVHCs) on the Candidate List at a concentration above 0.1% weight by weight (w/w)
- cameldrv 4y agoEWG has something that’s a lot better than nothing: https://www.ewg.org/skindeep/ https://www.ewg.org/skindeep/ They also have an app that can scan UPC codes.
- cm_silva 4y agoI knew I'd find EWG mentioned here, they're fantastic. Thank you for posting.
- Jemm 4y agoI think you forget that most people don't have basic competency with even their phones. Most have no clue how to scan a QR code.
- usefulcat 4y agoIt's still an improvement over the status quo.
- mrbombastic 4y agoPeople have the capacity to learn and scanning a QR code once you’ve seen it done once is pretty straightforward. during covid QR code menus replaced physical menus in NY for most restaurants. People complained (i don’t particularly like them either) then adapted.
- ldh0011 4y agoDifferent strokes for different folks and all that but I'm a bit of a picky eater and love being able to unambiguously mark what I don't want on my food on the ordering web apps some restaurants use now. On the other hand those places that have the QR code link to nothing but a PDF menu are just annoying.
- WithinReason 4y agoThose people wouldn't be able to interpret the data anyway. You forget that most people don't have basic competency in science, and basing decisions on that data would be extremely difficult to start with.
- biomcgary 4y agoYour proposed requirement would have a nice side benefit of making supply chains much easier to trace for other purposes (e.g., why are some shelves bare in my grocery store). I'd want a carve out for home "manufacturers" that sell less than the US median wage per year in product. They should be able to just display the QR codes cut out from the packages of their ingredients rather than creating their own QR code infrastructure.
- prox 4y agoIndeed, supply chains, or a webcam to the free range chicken eggs perhaps. Lots of options to make things a bit more transparent.
- jeremiem 4y agoClose, https://world.openfoodfacts.org/ https://world.openfoodfacts.org/ and https://world.openbeautyfacts.org/ https://world.openbeautyfacts.org/, by the same association. Crowd-sourced databases that you can query scanning the barcode using their app. The quality and availability of the information you can find varies greatly, but it's very easy to contribute. You won't find much that is not already written on the label though.
- lm28469 4y ago> I get reliably downvoted for suggesting this, but we need vastly better labelling across the board These companies shouldn't be able to use these ingredients in the first place, labels or not. It's not our job to read lists of 30+ ingredients and their wikipedia entries to know if we're at risk or not
- greenhearth 4y agoThis is of course an ideal, but in our brutal reality corporations owe no moral obligation to the society they are profiting from. They are only driven by capital and brand propagation. Sometimes a moral approach is taken as a compromise, to continue operating in peace, etc. We are left with defending ourselves as best as possible and sometimes the onslaught is too much, as indicated by multitudes of lawsuits and entire legal industries rising out of corporate negligence.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoCorporations are human constructs; they exist in whichever reality we create for them. You don't have to give in to their demands. They have to give in to ours.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lm28469 4y agoFor non religious people, the ones who don't believe in the invisible hand, regulations could take care of that, although given the current dynamic we're getting further from that by the day
- fnordpiglet 4y agoThat’s why regulation exists.
- greenhearth 4y ago
- dec0dedab0de 4y agoI 100% agree. It blew my mind that vanilla extract is not extracted from vanilla, and they're allowed to label artificial vanilla as vanilla extract because real vanilla extract tastes different, and people are already used to the other flavor matching the name. There are tons of examples and loopholes like this.
- giardini 4y agoThis. The artificial vanilla extract tastes far better than the natural. I tire of being the fool buying expensive tasteless natural organic foods and spices!
- bell-cot 4y ago"Ignorance is bliss" is safe, zero-effort, and anxiety-free - until it isn't. And when it isn't - both the "not just a river in Egypt" and "blame some handy & culturally appropriate boogeyman" strategies are popular and low-effort. And usually enjoy widespread social support.
- datavirtue 4y agoAhh....low effort sound bite boogyman legislation. Reminds me of Florida.
- CalRobert 4y agoFor what it's worth there are people working on this problem! I work for one - https://choosefinch.com/ https://choosefinch.com/ - which is a Chrome extension that scores products on amazon.com (and other retailers soon!) for, among other things, harmful compounds.
- pjc50 4y ago"This product is known to the state of California to cause cancer" : so what?
- addingadimensio 4y ago[flagged]
- standardUser 4y agoPeople should be free to draw their own conclusions, as idiotic as those conclusions may sometimes be. But obfuscation only creates more space for conspiratorial thinking. More transparency is the solution, not the problem.
- tnel77 4y agoI have a friend who gets irrationally angry about stuff like this. “People should just do their own research!” I’d like to think I’m of above average intelligence and I have no idea how I would ever go about verifying the safety of every item I buy for my family. It’s just not feasible. What if, instead, we have a group of people who enforce safety standards and we can place some trust in them to help keep us all safe?
- standardUser 4y agoWhy not both? Mandating companies maintain a comprehensive list of ingredients, processes, countries of origin, etc, that is readily available to the public does not prevent agencies from also enforcing standards.
- dang 4y ago> I get reliably downvoted for suggesting this, Your comment was heavily upvoted. Please drop these off-topic distractions from your HN comments, especially bits about upvoting and downvoting, which are such a common source of meta-noise that the site guidelines specifically exclude it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- mschuster91 4y ago> It absolutely baffles me how everyone doesn't want considerably more information and transparency about our foods and cosmetics. People do want that, which is why organic food is rising in popularity, why vegan cosmetics are a thing... the problem is politicians are bribed by big industry influence to not regulate too hard.
- eterps 4y agoPhthalates seem very hard to avoid: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/phthalates-health_b_2464248 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/phthalates-health_b_2464248
- vanderZwan 4y agoI genuinely hate this (meaning Swan's) take. The modern world is waaaay to complex to offload all responsibility to "consumers". They did it with sustainability, with sweat shops, with food, with cleaning products. It's ridiculous.
- throwawaysleep 4y agoWith sustainability and sweat shops, the trade off is making things a lot more expensive, so the offloading is more that most people don't care.
- i80and 4y agoI think a majority of people do care, but there's not really a way for them to express that in the market. You can't just buy the more expensive product and trust that it's going to be more ethically produced. It's a societal problem that can't be solved by individual consumers.
- SQueeeeeL 4y agoNon-regulatory solutions also doesn't empower the market to optimize cost in a productive way (which would cut into profits). In the current economy for the vast majority of products we have two options 1) a cheap option made in horrendous inhumane conditions and 2) a luxury good made in a process that's inherently limited in aim and scope. Globalism basically exports the suffering of the most unregulated markets to the entire planet.
- abeppu 4y ago> Ultimately, Levine and Swan say that local and global actions are needed to reduce or get rid of these chemicals in our environments. I think it's unfair to characterize Swan's take as trying to 'offload all responsibility to "consumers"'. Presumably the "get rid of these chemicals in our environments" doesn't just intend "our" to only mean some hyper-vigilant subset of the population. One can advocate for removing these from the marketplace while simultaneously having the stance that for now, in the world we actually live in, people can take some steps to limit their exposure. People are always going to ask "but what can I do _now_ to protect myself and my family?" and it's not unreasonable for an expert in the field to try to have an answer.
- highwaylights 4y agoI agree with you, but I don't know how helpful this will end up being. Endocrine disruptors are airborne and globally ubiquitous in the form of micro-plastics. All drinking water in the world is contaminated with it. [1] I'm really not meaning to be dramatic on this, but we've completely missed the boat on this one while we were arguing about climate change, and it's much too late to do anything about it now.[2] I'll not be here to see either way, and it's unlikely anyone else currently alive will unless Ray Kurzweil was right this whole time, but IMHO (I.e. take this with the pinch of salt a random Internet comment warrants) it's likely humanity as a species only has a few hundred years left at most. This isn't meant to be doom-mongering, it's just that while we worry about some dramatic cataclysmic event like a nuclear war, a pandemic or a meteor strike, the science seems to indicate it's much more likely that humanity will die off with a quiet whimper in a few generations. It's worth noting that this is not a mainstream view, and that the UN projects a level population out to 2300 [3] - I just don't see that the science backs up this claim, especially given recent understandings of fertility decline. [https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/wash-documents/microplastics-in-dw-information-sheet190822.pdf?sfvrsn=1b4d77ac_3 https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/wash-documents...] [https://www.salon.com/2022/01/16/bpa-plastics-harmful/ https://www.salon.com/2022/01/16/bpa-plastics-harmful/] [https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/files/documents/2020/Jan/un_2002_world_population_to_2300.pdf https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...]
- DoingIsLearning 4y agoI'll let the chemistry people comment on this one but phtalates are used as a 'plasticizer' they are not plastic itself as in a micro-plastic bead I am not sure how much of these plasticizers survives on the microplastic that you refer to. in our water supply or in airborne polyester fibers? Those are major sources of microplastic contamination but I am not sure they are major sources of _plasticizer_ contamination. In this case there is mounting evidence against phthalates and bisphenols as endocrine disruptors. This is the stuff getting into your blood stream through ingestion or skin absorption mostly from plastic containers, hygiene products, etc. This is one of the problems, we are missing studies that can demonstrate sources and source contribution to this problem.
- goalieca 4y agoEnvironmental may be one such reason but we should never omit obesity as a cause for any health problem. > A bidirectional relationship between testosterone and obesity underpins this association indicated by the hypogonadal-obesity cycle and evidence weight loss can lead to increased testosterone levels. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25982085/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25982085/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- whichfawkes 4y agoObesity can also be related to environmental exposures.
- bbddg 4y agoYeah trying to avoid toxic chemicals as a consumer is nearly impossible. We've been doing a home renovation and have been attempting to use zero or low VOC products and it's incredibly difficult and expensive. The effort it requires to do the research and sourcing for every product you use in your life is basically impossible for most people.
- sneak 4y agoI can't count how many times I have ordered a mineral water (to avoid chlorine in tap water to which I am sensitive) and received it in a glass contaminated with a PFAS-coated paper straw. It has nothing to do with being savvy.
- amanaplanacanal 4y agoAdditionally that water probably came from a plastic bottle. Lately I've been seeing straws made from a compostable plant based polyester. It's unclear whether they are still using problematic plasticizers in them.
- adamsmith143 4y agoIsn't this just pure BS tho? No "savvy consumer" can really avoid these chemicals. Merely by being outside in a major city or indoors in a modern home or wearing modern synthetic fiber clothing, etc, etc you are likely getting exposed. Short of literally making your own wool clothing in the middle of the woods you can't reasonably escape this stuff.
- some_random 4y agoBlaming individuals is the most successful strategy for keeping status quo while allowing activists to flourish. So go buy metal straws, recycle your plastic, eat less meat, cut up six pack holders, and be "a savvy customer"!
- throw10920 4y agoThis is a "non-constructive proof". It's trivial to say "regulators need to get serious" but it's non-trivial to actually get that to happen. With the current corrupt+uninformed regulators in place, just pushing them to "regulate more" results in a mix of regulatory capture and/or uninformed regulation made by non-technical experts. How do you propose that actually useful regulation get enacted?
- karaterobot 4y agoConsumers can voluntarily reduce their exposure to phthalates AND the industry can be regulated. Regulators aren't going to save consumers if consumers refuse to get educated or practice restraint.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jimlongton 4y ago> Regulators aren't going to save consumers if consumers refuse to get educated or practice restraint That's literally the job of regulators, see asbestos or cancer causing pesticides that have been banned or severely restricted. Do you expect all consumers to have degrees in chemistry and read papers to make risk assessments about the 10,000s of chemicals they come into contact daily?
- karaterobot 4y agoNope, not saying that. Before asbestos or cancer causing pesticides were regulated, they were perfectly fine to sell and use, but they were not in fact safe for people. In most cases, regulation lags science. In quite a few cases, things we know probably aren't safe are not regulated at all, or not sufficiently regulated. Regulation has many inputs: good science is one of them, but expediency is another, and so is corruption, and frankly so is incompetence. In any case, because the regulatory status of a substance has no relationship to whether or not it will kill you, it is safest if we have good regulation AND people do as much due diligence as they are comfortable with. Ultimately, it's your health, so you have to take responsibility for it.
- anigbrowl 4y agoI've been a very health/environmentally conscious consumer for 30 years, but I don't have time to keep up with every possible thing, nor do I want to be exhausting myself trying to urge other consumers to shift their buying choices ever so slightly. Expecting consumers to do everything is market fundamentalism and it's often a meme put around by industry to shirk responsibility. My environmental footprint is already way below average. I'm tired of sacrificing my life on the altar of market economics waiting for everyone else to catch up, while industry pours money in lobbying, PR, and advertising to maintain an increasingly dystopian status quo.
- jeffbee 4y agoWhy do people even buy "most hygiene products"? They're all bullshit, bad-smelling chemical industry effluent. A gallon of concentrated Just Plain Old Soap® retails for $40 and stands dilutions 10-to-1, is enough for all personal and household uses for an entire family for years.