FDA rejects petition to set PFAS limits in food

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/08/us-food-and-drug-administration-rejects-petition-to-set-pfas-limits-in-food

by randycupertino • 14 days ago

218 130 14 days ago

theguardian.com

BLKNSLVR• 14 days ago

No Tylenol for y'all, but I'll shout the whole bar another round of PFAS!

They have been linked to cancer, birth defects, decreased immunity, high cholesterol, kidney disease and a range of other serious health problems. They are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they can persist for thousands of years in the environment, and are designed to be indestructible.

But _not_ autism! Autism is the great evil we have chosen as our individual health enemy. I don't see autism listed, you may pass.

logancbrown2• 14 days ago

I think you mean PFOS and not PFAS, the relationship of cancers and health risks is linked to PFOS, but not PFAS in general at this time. PFOS in consumer-facing products were also majority phased out back in 2015.

OutOfHere8• 14 days ago

That's 100% disinformation. PFAS accumulates in the body and causes harm. If anything, its approval as pesticides for food crops is highly concerning.

cmdrmac• 14 days ago

Not surprising at all. What are "action levels" supposed to do? It's basically a helpful suggestion to take action, but you don't have to. FDA obviously doesn't care about the well-being of anyone.

OutOfHere8• 14 days ago

The decision has got to be 100% political. The level and damage could be 1000x and they still won't act if it makes them money in the form of corporate campaign donations.

seethishat3• 14 days ago

Doing whole blood donations seems to significantly reduce PFAS in the blood. Here's one paper:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

Edit: This also helps others who are in accidents, car wrecks, have Cancer, etc. Yes, we pass on the PFAS to others, but the immediate need for blood is more urgent than the potential long term impacts of PFAS.

hombre_fatal4• 14 days ago

My girlfriend accidentally told the donation center she went to Mexico, and they banned her from donating for four years.

Apparently you'd only go to Mexico to eat brain tacos and share needles with cows. Surely there's a better way to filter out risky blood.

notrealyme1232• 14 days ago

I was banned roughly the same time for being in the US. I guess its mostly so they don't need to check for unexpected things.

seethishat3• 14 days ago

Yes... travel, tattoos, drug use and sexual behavior can and should disqualify a person from donating blood.

josefritzishere• 14 days ago

Sounds like a wild party.

Georgelemental• 14 days ago

eat brain tacos

What's wrong with that? Animal brains are a common dish in many countries, including France, Asia, and parts of the United States

bitshiftfaced2• 14 days ago

"Accidentally"? Implying she should've lied about it even though they probably have some reason (evaluating risk presumably) for asking?

rayiner5• 14 days ago

Surely there's a better way to filter out risky blood

It's simple Bayesian probability. Blood tests have a relatively high error rate. Hep-B tests have a 6-12% false negative rate early in the disease, and Hep-C is 3-6% even later in the course of the disease. That's considered a "very low" false-negative rate for a blood test.

In Bayesian terms, blood tests don’t “screen” for a disease. They reduce the odds ratio of contaminated blood by a factor of 10 or so. But the ultimate odds still depends heavily on the prior odds—the prevalence of the disease in the donor population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_probability. Even with testing, you can reduce the risk of contaminated blood by drawing blood from a pool of donors that has lower prevalence rate of diseases.

comrade1234• 14 days ago

There are other ways she can donate her blood.

maxweylandt• 14 days ago

Do blook banks have a way of filtering out PFAS? Or are we giving each other forever chemicals through blood donations?

Rohansi• 14 days ago

A life saving blood transfusion or avoid forever chemicals likely already in my body, hmmm what to choose...

buckle80173• 14 days ago

Not without filtering other things we need.

BenjiWiebe• 13 days ago

I think people getting blood usually have lost a bunch of their own first. And blood isn't usually given just for fun, it's to save their lives, i.e. PFAS isn't a huge concern at that point.

SoftTalker2• 14 days ago

Bloodletting making a comeback? And having actual benefits this time?

lesuorac• 14 days ago

There's kinda a significant difference between bloodletting and blood donation.

For starters, you're not supposed to donate blood when you're sick.

The other being the quantity. A donation is 1-2 pints. Wikipedia lists bloodletting as easily 3 pints [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting#Use_in_the_1600s_...

jenkinstrigger• 14 days ago

me to the plague doctors: we are SO back

mrhottakes• 14 days ago

It never went away; now they call it "therapeutic phlebotomy"

Forgeties793• 14 days ago

Medical leeches are actually a real thing.

bigmadshoe• 14 days ago

Aren’t we just donating the PFAS to potentially sicker patients?

OGWhales• 14 days ago

I'd assume donated blood matches the average level that people already have in them, so not sure it really matters. But if you donated regularly enough, you could be donating blood that has lower than average levels!

evilduck• 14 days ago

PFAS doesn't immediately harm you like missing a few pints of blood does.

And it's not like you're concentrating higher levels of PFAS into the recipient, they likely have the same average blood concentration levels as the donor does since we're all equally exposed to the same sources.

blitzar• 14 days ago

Reason #136 for why tech-bros need a blood boy to infuse from daily.

wolttam• 14 days ago

we pass the PFAS to others

Is there no way to filter them out of withdrawn blood?

tristor6• 14 days ago

That's correct.

JCharante• 14 days ago

I used to donate blood regularly but now that I'm in Japan they require me to be decently fluent in Japanese to "understand" the risks, despite having done it a bunch of times in other countries (and other medical procedures not requiring Japanese knowledge).

bdavisx• 14 days ago

I wonder what it would cost in the US to have a pint of blood taken - I can't donate. Guess I could do it myself...

seethishat3• 14 days ago

I'm not sure there are any regulations around opting to do that in the US. Do you have a phlebotomist friend? If so, they might do it for you, but it can be risky and they might not want to take the risk, get sued, etc.

It is an interesting question. Are there companies that draw and discard?

HumblyTossed• 14 days ago

What happened to MAHA?

OutOfHere8• 14 days ago

It got deprioritized in favor of campaign donations, cryptocurrency investments, and general money inflow from PFAS industry lobbyists!

Forgeties793• 14 days ago

I mean what did we expect? This admin’s entire MO has been dismantle or de-fang what little regulatory framework we have left.

Did they really think RFK Jr. was ushering in a healthier, “more natural” America?

deepsquirrelnet• 14 days ago

Turns out it's easier to make conspiracies than effective policy. Who knew?

Forgeties793• 14 days ago

The moment MTG was elected and I realized that the “true believers” were getting into Congress I knew it was going to get rough.

mindslight• 14 days ago

Yes. But of course "healthier" is describing the health of brain worms. On the bright side, this probably indicates that the reactionaries' pushes to lower the intelligence of the population are reaching a point of diminishing returns, as they've now had to turn to parasites to continue the trend.

WarmWash2• 14 days ago

From the article:

The agency said it plans to set less non-binding “action levels” that do not require contaminated food to be removed from shelves. “Tolerance levels”, or limits, make it illegal to sell food contaminated beyond a set threshold.

From the FDA

Action levels and tolerances represent limits at or above which FDA will take legal action to remove products from the market.

Typical junk tier rage bait journalism you can expect from the guardian.

estearum• 14 days ago

You can read the FDA letter itself: https://www.regulations.gov/document/FDA-2023-P-4826-0015

Your comment does not give a correct impression of FDA's position here.

Action levels are correctly described by the article and not by whatever FDA quote you provided, which seems to imply the FDA is required to take action to remove products. Surpassing action levels do not require FDA to remove products from the market.

fcarraldo2• 14 days ago

This is correct. So much misinformation being spouted here on the spurious grounds that The Guardian is an inaccurate news source.

WarmWash2• 14 days ago

Here is the FDA document I got the quote from

https://www.regulations.gov/document/FDA-2020-D-1956-0001

notrealyme1232• 14 days ago

I can not find it in the FDA list. Is there a newer source?

groundzeros20153• 14 days ago

The article fails to mention risk and the amounts that create those. In typical journalist fashion it just emphasizes the word “chemical” and other scary framings.

cluckindan• 14 days ago

True. The risk is heavily downplayed, since the health effects manifest in decades and can be blamed on lifestyle factors, while the amounts causing health issues are in the order of parts per trillion.

OutOfHere8• 14 days ago

Well it is scary and harmful. Since it accumulates in the body, the safe level is zero. Do you work for the chemical industry?

groundzeros20153• 14 days ago

the safe level is zero.

This is not true of any substance.

Well it is scary and harmful

Well that narrative certainly came through. The facts supporting it did not.

Do you work for the chemical industry?

No. Do you? Does this invalidate that the article did not use the opportunity to inform me?

ck2• 14 days ago

if a request doesn't come with a minimum $2 Million check attached or crypto transfer, nothing will get done this decade

it's going to be a health and science dark ages for US

feverzsj• 14 days ago

EPA already set a Maximum Contaminant Level of 4.0 ppt. That's why they moved most PFAS production to China.

fcarraldo2• 14 days ago

In drinking water, yes. And the EPA coordinated a "voluntary" phase-out of PFAS in packaging, but it is not enforced.

Is there a limit in food, which is what this petition was about?

toomuchtodo4• 14 days ago

Another issue is that sewage sludge and "biosolids", unknowingly containing PFAS, is/was being used as farm fertilizer, causing some farms to have to be written off for food production. I would expect many more farms in the future to be found with PFAS soil levels exceeding what is safe to produce food with. The only way to find out is to test.

Maine listened to farmers and confronted the PFAS crisis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47509448 - February 2026 (0 comments)

Maine Is a Warning for America's PFAS Future - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40007582 - April 2024 (0 comments)

Toxic Chemical Contaminant PFAS Found on Maine Farms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20142212 - June 2019 (1 comment)

The practice of spreading sludge as a soil amendment has been a common practice in Maine and across the nation for decades. Land application of sludge material occurred long before there was knowledge that it may contain PFAS or the health implications of PFAS.

EPA Fact Sheet: Draft Sewage Sludge Risk Assessment for PFOA and PFOS: Information for Farmers - https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2025-01/fact-shee... - January 2025

EPA Basic Information about Biosolids: https://19january2021snapshot.epa.gov/biosolids/basic-inform...

SoftTalker2• 14 days ago

I can't believe that we are still using sewage sludge as fertilizer. People dump anything down the drain. I remember this being an issue 30-40 years ago with PCBs.

appplication• 14 days ago

I have no issue repurposing biological waste as fertilizer, that’s fine. But sewage is not just biological waste. It’s got all sorts of other shit in it that’s not suitable for reentry into the food chain. This isn’t a practice that should be allowed anywhere. It’s not like they can’t grow crops without it, they’re just gaming costs.

rayiner5• 14 days ago

The EPA first issued health advisories around PFASs in 2009. Why didn’t these folks file this petition sometime during the 12 years since then where it likely would’ve gotten a more favorable reception?

abracadaniel• 14 days ago

I feel like most people hadn’t heard about them until a couple of years ago.

bix6• 14 days ago

The timeline is wild. It took Patagonia like a decade to actually make PFAS free stuff.

swed4202• 14 days ago

Why didn’t these folks file this petition sometime during the 12 years since then where it likely would’ve gotten a more favorable reception?

Because then The Uniparty would look bad.

Instead, we can prop up the illusion of democracy and point fingers at "the other side" of good cop / bad cop while elites poison everybody more. We wouldn't want people living too far beyond their working years, after all.

mhurron• 14 days ago

Ya, everything is a conspiracy. It couldn't be that the FDA has been working on PFAS related issues for 6 years now and this petition was more to speed things along in a way that would force progress.

But no, everything is a big conspiracy.

1970-01-01• 14 days ago

Because the majority of Americans are too stupid and too lazy; they won't bother until the threat is literally killing them.

jasonlotito• 14 days ago

2009 is a generation ago. Asking why a new generation why they might not have petitioned 17 years ago seems like asking where a 21 year old was on 9/11.

As for a better reception, the assumption was RFK Jr. would take it more seriously.

logancbrown2• 14 days ago

Because the EPA called it the "2010/2015 PFOA Stewardship Program" not the "2010/2015 PFAS Stewardship Program" PFAS != PFOA

thisisit• 14 days ago

whataboutism is a tiresome argument.

Lets agree that these folks are wrong and ideally they should have petitioned 12 years ago. The question to ask is - for an admin which loudly claims to make America healthy again and talk about making everything chemical free etc - why can't they pass this? Is it because they can't score brownie points with base or they are overtly corrupt and do the same thing they accuse others of doing? Or that they know their supporters will not look at the validity of the claim and instead discredit people by asking whataboutism and party line questions?

rayiner5• 14 days ago

In any economy, there is a slider you can move to make tradeoffs between environmental protection and ease of doing business. The parties openly campaign on moving the slider in one direction or the other. Regulating PFAS would have a major economic impact, because they're in everything. So it's not a surprise that the folks who favor moving the slider more to the ease-of-business side would be opposed to stringent regulation of them.

What I'm asking--as someone who thinks we should have draconian regulations around endocrine disruptors, costs be damned--is why there's not more energy around regulating PFAS from the side that generally favors protecting the environment even if that increases costs of doing business. The MAHA people seem to be the most energized about the issue, but they're in the wrong party to do anything about it. How did PFAS fall into this weird donut hole?

John23832• 14 days ago

Because we learned more, gathered more public concern, and then acted?

If there’s not a eureka moment of knowledge, should we do nothing?

jmyeet• 14 days ago

Whenever I see something like this, I'm always curious how the libertarians rationalize their world view. Because this is what they want: no regulations where companies can do whatever they want. And they will.

We're witnessing the looting of America. Every level of government seems increasingly dedicated to transferring wealth from the taxpayer to the wealthy. But even that's not sufficient. Apparently the wealthy also need to poison the land and people too for an uptick in profits. Why should they care? Capital is mobile. They'll simply leave whenever society collapses.

parineum• 14 days ago

As a not libertarian, it's pretty simple. Look at Patagonia[1] for how the free market addresses this issue. If people care, markets will cater to them.

[1]https://www.patagonia.com/our-footprint/pfas.html

bijection• 14 days ago

Short of frequent blood donation, is there any reasonably adoptable life change a person can make to meaningfully reduce expected PFAS intake, or is it best to try not to think about it?

tristor6• 14 days ago

Yes, there are a few things you can do. In rough priority / proven benefit order:

1. Eliminate as many items as possible from your diet that make use of PFAS based components, such as plastic linings. This means don't buy groceries packaged in lined packaging, this means don't cook with Teflon pans, and it means don't drink water from plastic bottles or bottles lines with plastic.

2. Get a whole-home water filtration system that is certified (NSF 53 or similar standard) to reduce/remove PFAS and if possible, on top of this do under-sink RO for drinking/cooking which is certified (NSF 58 or similar) to remove PFAS and use glass or stainless steel reusable water bottles to take water outside your home.

3. Exercise regularly so that you sweat and drink lots of appropriately filtered water, donate blood and/or plasma regularly.

4. Eliminate clothing or other items in your wardrobe that are coated with DWR or similar coatings. Don't make use of any PFAS-derived treatments/plastics in your clothing. This is especially important during the process of washing your clothes, as this generates microplastics which are PFAS contaminated and you can ingest them via breathing.

Everything else is basically guesswork, these are the only things known to have any benefit. We mostly ingest PFAS due to contamination in the food and water supply. This contamination is unavoidable, but we can greatly reduce exposure by making smarter choices about packaging materials and cooking methods, and a big one is simply not drinking anything that you can't confirm has been properly filtered and packaged.

I'm a bit extreme, I even brew and bottle my own beer and other beverages like soda and water kefir/kombucha to avoid exposure to externally packaged products that may be contaminated with PFAS.

OutOfHere8• 14 days ago

You missed a few:

1. Don't eat out where they might have used PFAS coated nonstick cookware such as Teflon. It is not sufficient to avoid it at home.

2. Don't use conventional dental floss as it's made of PFAS. Find ones that aren't.

3. Intake substantial supplemental fiber daily, e.g. psyllium, as it binds to bile which binds and excretes a subset of PFAS.

4. Strongly prefer certified Organic foods as these don't use PFAS pesticides and PFAS containing sewage sludge, both of which are allowed in conventional foods.

Note that RO water requires monitor pH adjustment, plus adding sodium bicarbonate on top for meeting bicarbonate/buffer requirement, and a substantial increase to one's supplemental calcium and magnesium intake if not already high. RO water is not appropriate for non-technical persons. Countertop RO works pretty well, and it doesn't necessarily have to be under-the-sink. For everyone else, a gravity filter is better than nothing.

Everything else is basically guesswork

What's up with the haughty arrogance? It is both unjustified and wrong.

andrekandre• 14 days ago

i've heard some water filters can take out pfass, and a lot of it comes from food containers (i guess takeout items etc) and non-stick cookware, water-proof clothes [0] so probably good idea to avoid those...

[0] https://www.greenmatters.com/living/list-of-products-with-pf...

mech998877• 14 days ago

I wonder how much teflon wears off the die into the spaghetti on pasta extrusion machines.

OutOfHere8• 14 days ago

I don't know why people eat pasta, considering bulgur wheat is pretty good, is easy to cook, also cooks in the microwave, and is much less processed. I like bulgur wheat a fair bit.

rasz• 14 days ago

Would dousing someones food with PFAS be in any way illegal if FDA deems PFAS safe ?

fuckinpuppers• 12 days ago

MAHA … am I right? What a joke!

FDA rejects petition to set PFAS limits in food

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