from Hacker News

FDA denies petition against use of phthalates in food packaging

by DoubleDerper on 6/11/24, 3:34 PM with 188 comments

  • by Aurornis on 6/11/24, 4:58 PM

    I was surprised to learn that some of the highest concentrations of phthalates can be found in alcoholic beverages in glass bottles (Table 3: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7460375/ )

    This occurs due to the plastics used in producing the alcoholic beverages combined with ethanol (alcohol) acting as a solvent to liberate the phthalates

    I was equally surprised to learn that the food industry was already moving toward using fewer phthalate plasticizers already. More recent sampling efforts have actually found fewer or sometimes no phthalates at all in tubing, whereas decades ago it was ubiquitous.

  • by abeppu on 6/11/24, 5:01 PM

    A bunch of comments here are roughly "there's not great evidence that these are harmful" -- but is that the right standard? Or should there be an obligation to provide evidence that something is "safe" in order to use it in some consumer applications (like food packaging)? It's tempting to say that we should conclusively establish that something isn't harmful before we use it absolutely everywhere ... but what standard of evidence would be both achievable and ethical?

    Because generally people aren't getting acutely ill after eating food from a plastic package, we're left with the possibility that accumulative impacts over years might be harmful -- but it doesn't seem feasible to run long term studies where a treatment group is exposed to plastics for decades and a control group is not. It hardly seems achievable to do correlation studies, because you often don't know what's been in the packaging for all the food you've consumed, which may not even be in your control.

  • by austinkhale on 6/11/24, 4:28 PM

    Feels like this is going to become one of those things we look back on in retrospect and regret. We should be full steam ahead on identifying what effects microplastics & phthalates more broadly are having on our health & adjust accordingly. Early indications seem... not great.

  • by lolinder on 6/11/24, 4:44 PM

    Needs (2023) in the title. This is a nearly-one-year-old response to a petition for the FDA to reconsider its now-two-years-old denial of a previous petition.

  • by hermannj314 on 6/11/24, 4:26 PM

    This is dated from July 2023. What is making this trend today?

  • by johnmorrow on 6/11/24, 5:46 PM

    https://shaperhealth.substack.com/p/b8c75383-6899-4cab-88c6-...

    There's a ton of evidence that these substances might be bad for you. Among human study cohorts they have been shown to have a serious impact on reproductive health and infertility, metabolic and oxidative stress, cancer risk, cardiovascular health, the immune system (including children’s asthma), and neurodevelopment. Exposure risks extend from more controllable areas such as consumption of packaged food to less controllable areas such as environmental and household dust. Moreover, the impacts seems to be more pronounced in children. While most research on these effects in human subjects are more recent, people have noticed the link between plasticizers and hormones/fertility in male rats since the late 1980s. Thirty-five years of results make it less likely that human results shown are a result of p-hacking or similar statistical legerdemain. With half of the world’s plastics produced in the last 15 years - we'll probably see the research become more conclusive as the effects of those plastics are seen in further human studies

  • by CodeWriter23 on 6/11/24, 5:40 PM

    Just so you know how the FDA works, they evaluate what Industry tells them to create their “Guidance”, subject to an open comment type of process. They’re not superheroes of science working in a perpetual adversarial stance against industry. They inspect companies to ensure regulated companies comply or are in the process of complying with the official Guidance.

    Should industry players break rank and come up with science contradictory to the status quo, which challenges the Guidance. They’ll either start to notice and incorporate learnings into future Guidance revisions, or write up a Deficiency order against the company. The company can then defend itself by engaging further studies and/or litigation. AKA what the big players say is what goes.

  • by raverbashing on 6/11/24, 4:40 PM

    I'm all for evolving our knowledge of substances and their effects, but as other accounts are saying, we have more questions than answers

    And here's my problem with it: ok we figure out substance X has problems and we go and replace it with Y (which has less research on it than X). Are we sure this is a better replacement?

    We're talking about food packaging, what happens if we replace substances and end up with a lower product shelf life (which might be acceptable or not)? Or with other issues?

  • by delichon on 6/11/24, 4:27 PM

    I'm about to replace my carpet and linoleum floor with 8mm "vinyl planks" that are 80% PVC. So since I'll be scuffing the floor and breathing the emissions most of the day for up to the rest of my life, it's at least a little encouraging that the FDA doesn't find a basis to ban it in food packaging. It's not that I trust the FDA, but more that I can't really afford hardwood or tile, so it's what I want to hear.

  • by blackeyeblitzar on 6/11/24, 4:53 PM

    My personal experience is that food is overpackaged. I find a lot of produce are unnecessarily bagged in plastic containers (mushrooms, cucumbers, corn, asparagus, berries etc. in my local grocery store). I always feel weird not just about low quality plastic films touching the food, but also that I am constantly throwing out plastic that cannot be recycled.

  • by doe_eyes on 6/11/24, 4:28 PM

    I know this is going to be unpopular on HN, but I think there's this "environmentalist inertia effect" on display when it comes to stuff like that.

    A lot of the early industrial chemistry was pretty terrible for you and deserved public attention and regulatory crackdowns. Leaded gasoline and paint, organochlorine pesticides, mercury catalysts in rubbers, and so on.

    But then, the negative publicity then continued for substances that were a lot more ambiguous. For example, DDT saved millions of lives, and the backlash against it was probably overblown. Still, you know, good riddance - at least until malaria comes back in the developed world due to climate change?

    And now, we're in this place where any accusation of substances being artificial and cropping up somewhere at parts-per-billion or parts-per-trillion levels is enough to cause outrage, even if we can't demonstrate serious adverse effects on humans or most other life. Microplastics seem to be the most egregious example of this. But the panics around phthalates and BPA are another interesting case where, if you look closely enough, there just isn't a whole lot of good science to back any of it.

    I'm kinda torn about this, because I think we should be working toward reducing plastic waste, and I'd rather see phthalates replaced by safer plasticizers, such as benzoates. But the amount of alarmist headlines in this space is pretty wacky.

  • by Dig1t on 6/11/24, 8:56 PM

    Anyone who doubts that these chemicals are actually causing harm to the general population should read the book “Count Down”.

    It goes into great detail on the evidence for harm and the details of how these chemicals work.

    https://www.amazon.com/Count-Down-Threatening-Reproductive-D...

  • by loceng on 6/11/24, 5:32 PM

    I think we need to move fully to glass surfaces that any food comes in contact with; add vacuum seal to help slow decay.

    Until or unless we do mass studies, not just observational, and over a 20-30 year period - where many other known health factors will have to be kept track of accurately-thoroughly as well.

  • by Beijinger on 6/11/24, 4:31 PM

  • by deepnotderp on 6/11/24, 5:04 PM

    FDA rejects MDMA and allows phthalates- what an agency :(

  • by spandrew on 6/11/24, 4:47 PM

    I think it's pretty clear the microplastics fear-mongering doesn't have a lot of credible evidence to back it. Of course no one wants tiny plastic particles floating around the environment. But the claim here is... does it harm you? Is it toxic? How dense are the particulates per millilitre? Very little to suggest anything substantial.

    Just a reminder that the holistic and wellness industry that sells you detoxes for this stuff is worth 4.5 trillion dollars (more than big pharma, even). They are incentivized to drum up fear; plastics are killing you, aspartame is killing you. I've heard them claim even fresh fruit is killing you.

    Evidence-based decisions matter.

  • by karaterobot on 6/11/24, 4:27 PM

    "Though we obviously recognize that this is the thing that will make us look really, really bad in a few years, we're not going to do anything about it proactively."

  • by cabirum on 6/11/24, 4:34 PM

    Did the petitioners try not to eat the packaging?