😳What are forever chemicals? Why are they in some food packaging materials? “Forever chemicals” are also known as PFAS, which is a family of many different individual compounds that are mostly used to make products waterproof and greaseproof (useful qualities for food packaging materials!) For many decades, they were thought to be inert and to have no impact on health, but a growing body of epidemiological evidence had started to suggest that higher exposure to some types of PFAS over longer periods of time are associated with increased risk for a wide range of diseases. This is tricky, because among all of the different compounds that are considered PFAS, there are actually really big differences in their size, how long they stay in the body, and how they interact with body systems. This means that studying one particular PFAS compound doesn't necessarily translate to another PFAS compound. Still, on the whole, there is enough evidence suggesting that we should probably be consuming less of them, and so the FDA has now worked with food packaging material manufacturers to eliminate PFAS from food-contact materials. One thing that I want to make clear is that PFAS health risks are still being studied, but seem to be the result of higher exposures over longer periods of time. You shouldn’t really be too concerned with whether the place you got lunch from today has PFAS or not. That being said, at a population scale, the evidence is looking like taking PFAS out of food materials is a good idea for the long term. We all have a limited number of things that we can worry about, and there are other factors that will much more strongly influence your health that are worth spending more time worrying about than PFAS, like making sure to eat nutritious foods, trying to fit in some regular physical activity each day, and improving the quality and quantity of your sleep! #science #health #pfas #foreverchemicals #todayilearned #til #longervideos #drnoc what is pfas? What are pfas? How to reduce forever chemicals