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Toxic "forever chemicals" found in 95% of beers tested in the U.S.
- JoeAltmaier 1y agoBeers were only tested in areas with bad water quality.
- Bender 1y agoBrewers are supposed to have really good filtration FWIW. [1] If particles are showing up in beer then something has gone horribly wrong as in, someone is being incredibly cheap. [2] [1] - https://www.beer-brewing.com/beer_brewing/beer_brewing_water/water_treatment.htm https://www.beer-brewing.com/beer_brewing/beer_brewing_water... [2] - https://www.ewg.org/research/getting-forever-chemicals-out-drinking-water-ewgs-guide-pfas-water-filters https://www.ewg.org/research/getting-forever-chemicals-out-d...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- justin66 1y agoWhich of the filtration methods on that list do you believe should be capable of filtering PFAS, the "forever chemicals" in question?
- Bender 1y agoI linked them.
- dnemmers 1y agoI read through both of the links posted. I couldn’t find mention of PFAS or ‘forever chemicals’ anywhere on the first link(it may just be a little out of date concerning the last few years of development.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.”
- robthebrew 1y agoin a microbrewery? You are kidding.
- Bender 1y agoin a microbrewery? You are kidding. 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.
- ch4s3 1y agoSome places with weird water profiles will set up RO systems and add minerals to build a water profile on top of that, but it's far from the norm. People decide based on how their municipal water supply works with the kind of beers they want to make. I've seen a few brewhouses in the process of being built and talked to some commercial brewers about water, and depending on the location some places just use municipal water. New York water has a great profile for beer.
- timr 1y agoYou don't need reverse osmosis to filter out PFAS -- activated carbon will do it.
- d4v3 1y agoActivated carbon will remove the larger chain PFAs, but is not as effective as removing the smaller ones. From the paper: > 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.
- cluckindan 1y agoPFAS may be ending up in the product from the processing equipment, not necessarily only from the water source.
- ChoGGi 1y ago"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."
- catlikesshrimp 1y ago"Average ∑PFAS concentrations of Criteria 3 and 4 beers (popular national and international beers) were similar to the average ∑PFAS concentrations of many Criteria 1 and 2 beer" A link to the source of the information can be found in TFA https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c11265 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c11265
- notherhack 1y agoAnd by "95%" they mean 22 out of 23 beers tested.
- onemoresoop 1y agoAnd these areas are exactly the most densely populated: https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/ https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/
- drob518 1y agoWay to ruin my Friday. Sigh. Now, I can’t even drink to forget society’s ills.
- biglyburrito 1y agoYou still can, just don't drink beer made in US plague states. Here's the study map: https://pubs.acs.org/cms/10.1021/acs.est.4c11265/asset/images/large/es4c11265_0006.jpeg 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/ElectoralCollege2024.svg/500px-ElectoralCollege2024.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/El...
- Insanity 1y agoOr.. drink enough of it until you forget that you were worried in the first place. 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?
- daveidol 1y agoNow do the crime map!
- timr 1y agoIf you're going to worry about beer, worry about the alcohol, which is unquestionably toxic and carcinogenic. 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!"
- Spivak 1y agoAlso liver damage has got to be one of the worst lived experiences that exists. And alcohol seems to slowly accumulate that damage over time. After seeing the end state with my grandparents and experiencing the end state with a viral infection I decided that alcohol just isn't worth it. It's not that good of an experience compared to alternatives to justify that awfulness.
- xnx 1y agoIf everyone is consuming these chemicals, maybe they're not so bad.
- lm28469 1y agoIt's not a problem until it's a problem and then it's too late to do anything, the default stance should be to worry, not to let it pass. 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-tied-millions-excess-mental-health-disorders-study-rcna182881 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/lead-gasoline-tie...
- tokai 1y agoLeaded gas was never fine. GM avoided using the word lead about their tetraethyllead product because everyone knew lead was problematic. Lies and lobbying assured that they knowingly could go ahead and poison the whole world.
- bitshiftfaced 1y agoWikipedia has a history of how lead was known to cause problems, dating back to antiquity. Some excerpts: > 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?
- timr 1y ago> 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.
- hiatus 1y agoThe study https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c11265 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c11265
- 1970-01-01 1y agoHere's the map. Drink responsibly! https://pubs.acs.org/cms/10.1021/acs.est.4c11265/asset/images/large/es4c11265_0006.jpeg https://pubs.acs.org/cms/10.1021/acs.est.4c11265/asset/image...
- justin66 1y agoThis looks a lot like one of those heat maps that correlates almost exactly to population.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoAre we looking at the same map? The PFAS contamination truly does not follow population.
- thw_9a83c 1y agoIt's good to be on the west side, I guess. Seriously, what's the source of the PFAS/PFOS contamination? Chemical plants?
- gjsman-1000 1y agoIn Minnesota, it’s almost certainly 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing).
- ryathal 1y agoPFAS was used in a lot of different things, the sources of major contamination are military bases and manufacturing plants, but it was used in a wide array of consumer products so there is some level of contamination almost everywhere.
- robthebrew 1y agobeer brewers cannot be held responsible for municipal water issues.
- ch4s3 1y agoI agree, but if I were setting up a brewery in Coastal North Carolina, I'd invest in an RO system, the water is known to be all kinds of bad in the area. I have some relatives in the area and their town had to install a municipal RO system because they were facing law suits, however not everywhere in the region has done so.
- OutOfHere 1y agoUsing a well-maintained pH-remineralized RO system isn't exactly rocket science. In this day and age, it is a basic expectation.
- mandeepj 1y ago[flagged]
- whatamidoingyo 1y agoOr something like "Drinking One Beer a Day Can Extend Your Life by 30 Years"
- onemoresoop 1y agoA new study will come out with PFAS showing in every product. Check out the contamination areas: https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/ https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/
- bell-cot 1y agoIf you are seriously worried about PFAS in your beer, go to the ACS Journal article - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c11265 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c11265 - which is pretty readable. That will give you some good ideas of which breweries might best be avoided for now. > 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 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.
- everdrive 1y agoThis is troubling, but what it people had been forced to actually scrub their pans, or occasionally get wet in the rain? Those outcomes would truly be unbearable, and we can't let the march of progress by stymied by a few minor problems.
- serf 1y agogo ahead and pretend the decision is that obvious and easy to make, but the reality was that the market offered a product that performed better (non-stick pans), and people flocked to it because of a shared negative experience in the kitchen. We didn't rationally trade health for convenience, few people recognized any kind of trade-off was even occurring.
- everdrive 1y agoWe're killing ourselves just so we can slightly more comfortable. It's the dumbest thing in the world. People are pouring gallons of neurotoxins on their lawns so they aren't faced with observing multiple kinds of grass, or god forbid, weeds. The market may be filling people's desires, but people's desires are terrible and should often be ignored. People have a desire to be bored less often, and now we're cursed with smart phones and social media. Call me a luddite if you want, but make sure not to drink your water or your local beer.
- EGreg 1y agoWhat about the other 5%? Have they really found a way to get rid of PFAS???
- jhallenworld 1y agoIs it more or less dangerous than the alcohol? Alcohol: mouth and throat, laryngeal, esophageal, female breast, colorectal, stomach, and liver cancer. PFAS: testicular cancer... Nope to PFAS!
- myvoiceismypass 1y agoThe title was scary until I saw: > 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)
- 7402 1y agoIt's annoying that the title and summary alone tell me nothing, without additional information about 1) how sensitive are these tests, and 2) what concentration is medically significant. 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."
- bwfan123 1y agoReminds me of the completely vacuous headlines in financial media. "Stock x went up yesterday and then went down" In the twitter world, media is like junk-food. Mostly empty calories, soundbites, and memes.
- righthand 1y agoI think people will miss the true headline. That we have let private corporations destroy our water supply with chemicals. This obviously isn’t exclusive to beer either.
- OutOfHere 1y agoWell said. Much of the drinking water in the US is thoroughly contaminated with PFAS, and the contamination of beer is just a symptom of it.
- onewheeltom 1y agoThe beers are anomonized so I don’t know which beers to avoid. Guess I’ll avoid them all.
- t0bia_s 1y agoIt was safer to drink beer back then in mediaeval times because of was not possible to test source of drinking water and chance to have contaminated beer was minimal. Funny how times changed.