How One Company Secretly Poisoned The Planet

In 1929 in Chicago,

people kept mysteriously dying inside their homes.

It took 15 deaths for the authorities

to realize that these people were getting killed by their fridges.

Because fridges back then were no longer just boxes of ice.

Instead, they relied on a chemical

looping through the back to stay cold.

And the best chemical for this job was methyl chloride,

a toxic and virtually odorless gas.

So, if it somehow leaked from the fridge,

it could kill you without warning.

Other fridges used flammable gases instead,

so a leak combined with a spark from the stove

and your house could suddenly go up in

So, one company tried to solve this problem.

But in the process,

they accidentally created a seemingly magical substance.

Soon, it made its way into a huge

range of products, which were so popular

they ended up in nearly every home in America.

But what people didn't know

was that these products came at a price.

The chemicals used to make them were being released

into the environment, slowly

poisoning everyone on the planet, including me.

You have high levels of a chemical you never heard of. It shocks me.

Like, where could this have come from?

Almost every living creature,

from polar bears to birds

to fish, massive worldwide contamination

by completely man-made chemicals

that are fingerprints back to just a couple of companies.

This is a video about one of the biggest chemical cover-ups in history.

For legal reasons, I want to note that this investigation

is based on publicly available documents,

recordings, and third-party opinions.

All sources are linked in the description.

The story all began

with an attempt to save lives.

In 1936, a chemical company called DuPont

set out to find a safer

alternative to the gases used in fridges,

one that was neither toxic nor flammable.

Their lead scientist on the project was a 27-year-old

chemist named Roy J. Plunkett.

He was experimenting with a gas called tetrafluoroethylene or TFE.

It's a pair of double-bonded

carbons, each bonded to two fluorine atoms.

One morning, as Plunkett was setting up a test, his assistant

picked out a cylinder full of TFE

and twisted the But, nothing came out.

Plunkett thought the gas must have leaked,

but the cylinder still weighed about as much as a full one.

So, he grabbed a saw

and cut the cylinder

in Inside, he was shocked to see

it was full of a white, slippery powder.

So, what happened to the gas?

Well, what the chemist reasoned was that under the high pressure of the cylinder,

one of the double bonds between the carbons in TFE must have broken.

And now, those two carbon atoms each had a bonding site free.

So, one of them probably grabbed onto a carbon from a different TFE molecule,

breaking its double bond,

and then that molecule

did the same, and the process

repeated again and again

until all of the TFE

was trapped in these long chains.

The gas had polymerized

into forming this slippery powder.

Plunkett just wanted to get rid of it because it ruined his experiment.

But, before throwing it out, he decided to do some tests on it.

So, he tried pouring water on it, but the water just beated off.

So, he tried acid. Again, nothing happened.

Then, he tried the strongest

base he had, but that wouldn't melt it, either.

Plunkett went through all of the solvents

in the lab, but the powder remained intact.

It wouldn't melt, corrode,

or react with anything.

It was seemingly indestructible.

The reason it was so indestructible

was because of this bond, the carbon-fluorine bond.

See, out of all of the elements,

fluorine is the greediest,

the most electron-hungry atom.

Its outer shell is a single electron away from being complete,

which would make it perfectly stable.

So, fluorine really, really wants that electron.

And because it's so small compared to most other elements, the protons

in its nucleus can get close to the electrons of other atoms.

And because of their positive charge, they pull on them really hard.

So, near a carbon atom, fluorine grabs onto one of the carbon's electrons

to complete its outer shell.

And this keeps the two atoms bonded together.

But the fluorine isn't done there.

It keeps tugging on the carbon's electrons,

pulling them closer to itself,

which makes fluorine slightly negatively charged

and the carbon slightly positive.

So, now there's an electrostatic

attraction that makes this bond even stronger.

Now, in reality, electrons behave more like fuzzy clouds than the orbiting points in

this animation, but the principle still holds.

In terms of energy,

this is actually the strongest

single bond a carbon can form.

So, if other atoms or molecules

get close, they're essentially ignored.

And Plunkett's magic powder was completely

covered in carbon-fluorine bonds,

so it hardly reacted with anything.

Okay, so he's got this incredibly inert stuff.

Was he really trying to get rid of it?

He actually didn't know what to do with it, cuz like, what do you

do with a material that doesn't, you know, react with anything?

But luckily, his employer, DuPont,

they were actually working with the US Army on the Manhattan Project.

So, they were refining

uranium and plutonium, cuz of course there's a World War II reference in every Tasting History video.

You just You just have to have it.

To get the fuel for nuclear bombs,

enriched uranium, you first have to turn the uranium into a gas, uranium hexafluoride.

It was a nasty chemical that corroded everything.

So, all the gaskets,

seals, and miles of pipe in the plant at Oak Ridge

had to constantly be replaced, slowing down production.

But then DuPont was like,

"Listen, we have this seemingly indestructible chemical, right?

It doesn't react with stuff,

it doesn't corrode, so maybe we can try and use it against uranium hexafluoride."

So, they get a bunch of this powder, they cram it together under high

pressure to create these cakes,

Now you had a solid of this material that you could machine

into gaskets and cylinders that you could push into these pipes.

They put these two blindings

into the pipe, and boom, it works like magic, like like a charm.

The uranium hexafluoride was no match

for this magic material.

As Gordon Fee, the manager of the nuclear weapons plant, put it,

"There was never a substitute

considered, as far as I know."

The material worked so well that the army wanted to use it for everything.

The same gaskets and seals were installed into fuel tanks

and airplane engines to protect them from oil and water.

And weapons manufacturing plants no longer had issues with the corrosive nitric acid

needed to make explosives.

DuPont saw the potential, too, so they trademarked

the material in 1944.

They didn't trademark it under the name

cuz admittedly, that name kind of sucks.

So, they took TE from tetra,

FL from fluoro, and then they had a bunch of these other

miracle materials, rayon, nylon,

so they took ON from the end of those, and boom, Teflon. Nice. Okay.

It's a good name.

Under the army's order, DuPont

ramped up Teflon production at their test plant in Arlington, New Jersey,

giving their whole supply to the government.

But DuPont struggled to produce enough Teflon

to meet the military's demand.

As their Arlington scientists put it,

"The major advantages of

solvent resistance and high thermal stability,

offer obstacles from the standpoint

of ease in fabrication.

You could only really mold Teflon into solids, so gaskets,

seals, pipes, but you couldn't put it into water to make a spray because

it doesn't dissolve in water.

They actually didn't know anything that dissolves Teflon.

But there was an even bigger problem at that point.

To polymerize TFE into Teflon,

you can add a reactive

atom or molecule that will hijack

the first carbon double bond

and start the reaction.

This is called the initiator,

and the bond formed between it

and the first TFE molecule

releases a small amount of energy.

Then a bit of energy is also released when the next TFE molecule joins

the chain, and the next, and the next.

And if the process

isn't controlled, the reaction

gets very hot very quickly.

And if it gets above 200°

TFE rapidly decomposes into carbon and tetrafluoromethane,

which releases even more energy all at once.

This caused a massive

explosion at the Arlington plant in 1944, killing two workers.

You need a way to

dissipate the heat, take the heat away from the reaction

without it staying in there

and therefore expanding and creating that explosive force.

Yeah, and one of the ways to do that

was to have the reaction happening in water because water can absorb a huge

amount of energy before it ever heats up.

But if you inject TFE into a water cylinder,

the gas doesn't dissolve.

Even at high pressure, most of the TFE just stays on top.

So if you add an initiator,

the polymerization is triggered in one place,

and so it can still cause an explosion.

What you need is some way to disperse

the TFE throughout the water first,

and to do that, DuPont needed help.

In 1951, they purchased

a special acid from 3M,

the company behind Scotch tape.

This acid, called PFOA,

looked almost exactly like Teflon.

It had a chain of eight carbon atoms covered in fluorines,

but at the other end, there was a double-bonded

oxygen and an OH group.

That's what makes it an acid.

And since there were eight carbons in the chain,

DuPont also referred to the acid as C8.

The tail end of C8, like Teflon, was hydrophobic,

but the acid head group loved water. It was hydrophilic.

So, when you add C8 into water, the molecules

rearrange themselves so that the heads

touch the water, but the Teflon-like tails don't.

They create little bubbles

all throughout the water,

which are virtually dry on the inside.

If you now inject TFE and stir the whole mixture up,

well, the hydrophobic gas

ends up in the middle

of these C8 And those bubbles are dispersed

everywhere, evenly throughout the water.

You know what this reminds me of?

Is Yeah, so it's the great combiner

that allows like oil and water to mix.

And now if you sprinkle in initiator molecules, the initiator molecules also go into these bubbles.

They start the polymerization reaction.

So, from TFE to Teflon.

But now, since it's happening spread

all throughout these bubbles,

the heat is evenly dissipated throughout the water,

and no one explodes.

And since Teflon is now suspended

in a solution, you can spray it onto surfaces like a coating.

This thing doesn't stick to anything.

How do you stick it to the gaskets?

You know, how do you actually use it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's a good question.

So, the trick was actually the surface had to be really rough.

So, what you do is you sandblast

it to create grooves and imperfections

at this like nanoscopic level.

Now, if you spray the coating on, what happens is,

if you heat it up, the water evaporates.

The C8, it also evaporates,

but Teflon, instead of it evaporating,

it just softens up.

So, although there's no chemical interaction

here, now it's mechanically

stuck to the surface.

That's how they got it to

With the war over, the army lifted the secrecy bans on the Teflon patents,

and DuPont was allowed to sell it commercially.

And suddenly, people all over the world were coating everyday items in Teflon,

trying to create a world-changing product.

One day in 1954,

a French engineer, Marc Gregoire,

tried putting Teflon on his fishing gear to prevent tangles.

But then his wife saw him doing that, and her reaction was that

this is absolute nonsense.

No one is ever going to use this.

You should do something that someone's actually going to use.

So, how about you put it on a pan?

Make a pan And once these pans hit the market,

it was a cooking revolution. Teflon. Teflon. Teflon.

And DuPont knew exactly

how to market it.

Even oatmeal won't stick to Teflon. Hey, neat. Let me try.

And it wasn't just nonstick pans.

Teflon C8 and chemicals like it were used in

Slippery contains the magic of DuPont Teflon.

Suddenly, we had Teflon

stain-resistant carpets and stain protection sprays like 3M's Scotchgard.

Jackets lined with Teflon

were waterproof and breathable.

Gore-Tex is the brand name.

Teflon was so inert that medical implants made out of it wouldn't be rejected by the body.

It was used to coat the Statue of Liberty's

steel framework to save it from corrosion.

And even bullets were coated with Teflon to minimize the damage they did coming

out of the gun

The term Teflon was so ubiquitous

that when the Italian mobster John Gotti was being prosecuted

in the late 1980s,

none of the charges against him would stick.

So, he was dubbed Teflon Don.

By the late 1990s,

the Teflon business generated

roughly a billion dollars in yearly sales for DuPont.

Teflon has a great future,

and its uses will be many.

The chemicals were everywhere.

Even where they shouldn't be.

There's something going on wrong with this water.

They won't tell us what it is.

The man behind the camera is Earl Tennant, a farmer in West Virginia.

And I said, "What do you expect a man's cows to drink on their

on his own property?"

He suspected that something in this creek was poisoning his cows.

This is of these animals that I've lost

on this Do you see the discoloration

in the hair here on her neck?

And they keep trying to tell me there's nothing wrong with these things.

I can call the West West Virginia state veterinarian.

The only thing he asked me is, I had Do you have a good attorney?

Earl was desperate, so he hired a

Uh he came to our offices

um armed with boxes of VHS videotapes.

We started watching these videotapes

and you know, there was a serious problem here.

There's something wrong with this cow.

Her hooves are running through to the

The animals were wasting

away and they were skin and bones

and they had tumors

and black teeth and you could see on the videotape

white foam coming out

of the pipe on this landfill

next door with these animals

standing in the white foam.

The hair on their hooves was being eaten off

by whatever was in the water.

This is a lower pipe.

Do you see what's coming out of it?

There was a discharge

pipe and it had the marking of E.I.

du Pont de Nemours

& And the landfill

that pipe was draining from belonged to DuPont's

massive factory complex outside of Parkersburg,

West Virginia, just 6 miles away.

That factory was Washington

Works, the first commercial Teflon plant.

It provided jobs for almost 2,000

people in the town.

And DuPont's presence was felt

I have been a resident of Parkersburg for 48 years.

I do not work for the DuPont company,

but I have seen how their people have done much for the cultural growth of this community.

There are facilities for

tennis, camping, swimming, softball,

and more than 20 areas equipped for cookouts and family picnics.

DuPont took care of the

So, when the town folk got word that Earl Tennant hired a lawyer to

investigate they shunned him and his

As his sister-in-law put it, "We'd walk into a restaurant

and everybody in the restaurant

would get up and leave."

But, Earl wasn't scared off and neither was Rob.

I thought this was going to be pretty straightforward.

See, the US Environmental

Protection Agency, the EPA,

dictates exactly which chemicals are safe to be disposed

of in a landfill

and in what amounts.

We would get those records and permits and it would tell us

which chemical was causing this problem.

But, none of those records

were really anything that was really causing a problem.

You know, nothing that would explain that white foam.

Whatever it was in Earl's water

wasn't on the permits.

Now, already in the 1950s,

people knew that Teflon, specifically

PTFE, was pretty safe.

It's a long and extremely inert molecule.

So, if you ingest it, your body just flashes it out.

However, if you heat Teflon to 350°

C, it starts releasing fumes

that make people sick.

This often happened to workers in Teflon plants.

Stray PTFE powder would fall onto their cigarettes

as they were working

and then later they would accidentally

smoke one of these cigarettes.

Luckily, the symptoms were mild.

Fatigue, tightness of chest,

headaches, and they would usually pass within 48 hours.

It was called polymer fume fever.

And even though it rarely happens today,

it's why you should never overheat

your Teflon pan to these temperatures,

especially if you have pet birds at home, because the fumes are much more toxic to them.

But, Teflon couldn't have poisoned Earl's cows.

There were no fumes

or high temperatures, so there must have been something

else in the water.

Rob filed a legal request for all of the Washington Works operational

records, and DuPont sent them over.

More than 60,000 documents.

A lot of folks would try to say, "Okay, you you want a lot

of documents, we'll give you a lot of documents."

and hope that there'd be no way somebody could actually wade through

all of these files and all of these materials.

But, I am the kind of person that I do dig in and I

do want to go through those documents,

so I actually did read all of that.

And in those files,

a certain chemical kept popping up everywhere.

I never saw the kinds of things

I was seeing now in these documents

from In 1961, the same year Teflon pans hit the US market,

DuPont's in-house scientists tested C8 on rats.

Ingesting as little as 1.5

mg of C8 per kilogram of body weight

caused the rats' livers to grow abnormally.

And a dose of 570

mg per kilogram was lethal.

For reference, sodium cyanide,

one of the most dangerous poisons,

is lethal to rats in doses of 5 to 15 mg per kilogram.

But, even though C8 was less fatal,

it was concerning for two other reasons.

First, like Teflon, its tail is made of carbon-fluorine

bonds, which makes it incredibly stable.

So, C8 wouldn't break down in the environment for decades.

And second, C8 looks like the fatty acids

that humans and animals need for normal functioning,

just with fluorines instead of hydrogens.

So, the concern was that C8 could get into the bloodstream,

hitch a ride on the proteins that transport

fatty acids around, and get almost anywhere in the

And because of the carbon-fluorine

bonds, humans and animals have no way to break down C8,

so it could slowly

build up, mimicking those fatty acids and potentially disrupting

the systems they regulate, like the liver. Toxic, persistent, bioaccumulative.

So, the concern was

it's like a ticking time bomb.

It's got more opportunity to cause harm.

As a safety measure, that same rat study suggested that

all these materials should be handled with extreme care.

And that contact with skin should be strictly avoided.

In 1962, DuPont redid the study and confirmed

that high doses of C8 kill rats

through injury to the stomach,

intestine, brain, lungs, and pancreas.

Then in 1965, they found those same toxic effects in dogs.

The evidence was mounting.

They were even studying monkeys.

Some of the monkeys were dropping dead.

These chemicals were causing

toxic effects in multiple

organ systems in multiple

All these studies weren't being shared

with the scientific community.

And likely no one outside of DuPont

would have noticed something was wrong

if it was not for

tooth decay, the most widespread of all diseases.

In the 1950s, tooth decay was a nationwide

problem, so the US started adding inorganic

fluorides like sodium fluoride to the public water supply.

This helped fight cavities.

16 years after fluoridation,

all children will have

65% less tooth decay.

In 1975, researchers wanted to know if that inorganic

fluoride was getting into people's blood,

so they sampled blood from around the US,

and the results were as expected.

More fluoride in the tap water meant more fluoride in the blood.

But they found another type of fluorine in the blood, too,

which was organic fluorine,

carbon-fluorine bonds, and it didn't follow the same trend.

Well, these researchers were wondering, "Where is this coming from?"

Because this is not a naturally occurring substance.

And they did research, and they found

that 3M was making

these organic fluorides, the things like PFOA.

All right, so they approached

3M in 1975, asking them,

"Hey, we found this stuff in the general US population's blood.

You know, could it be yours?"

And 3M pled ignorance.

But just 3 months later,

3M compared the spectrum of organic fluorine from the study to their own chemicals,

and it was a match.

Their chemicals were getting into the blood of people all across the United States,

but they didn't tell the researchers.

3M and DuPont were worried,

so they checked their own workers' blood.

They found that they, too, were contaminated

with C8 at levels a thousand

times higher than those in the study.

And when DuPont checked their medical records,

many of these workers were showing signs of liver disease.

Meanwhile, DuPont was dumping almost 10 tons of C8 into the Ohio River each

year, and they were piling up thousands

more tons as C8 sludge

that would leach from the landfill

next to Earl's farm.

All while showing commercials

like And the water that eventually

flows to the river is collected at five points and analyzed

to make sure we don't pollute the Ohio.

And by the early '80s, the first cancer study is done in rats,

and it confirms PFOA

causes, not just might be linked with, but causes testicular tumors. All right?

That sends alarm bells off within

the company because the concern

is of course we're putting this in the air, we're putting in the water, it's in Teflon.

DuPont collected samples around Washington Works and C8 wasn't just in the river,

it was in the public water

So, in 1984 DuPont

officials met to assess whether C8 should be swapped

for a safer chemical.

But their conclusion was that currently

none of the options developed are from a fine powder business standpoint economically attractive.

So, C8 stuck around

and DuPont just came up with a safe dose for drinking water.

DuPont scientists are the first people on the planet

to say what would be a safe level for humans.

They calculated something like 0.6

parts per billion, which they rounded up to

The importance of that is at that time that was about the lowest

level you could detect in water.

Essentially, if we can detect

it, it's too high.

So, to put that into perspective,

here is one 2 and 1/2

thousand liter tank of water

if filled to the brim.

Now, imagine you take one drop of PFOA,

0.05 milliliters, and you place it not in one of these tanks or two

or three, 20 of these tanks.

That's one part per billion

and that's the number DuPont thought would be unsafe for humans to

And after determining its own safety metric,

DuPont tested the landfill wastewater

leaching into Earls Creek.

It came back at 1,600 parts per billion.

They didn't tell anybody.

So, at that point

I thought I'd figured out what had finally happened to the cows.

Rob compiled all the evidence into a 900-page

letter and sent it to the EPA,

the Department of Justice,

and even the US Attorney General.

And just a few months later,

DuPont settled with Earl Tennant and his family for an undisclosed sum.

Although they didn't admit to any wrongdoing.

But the stuff wasn't just in the water the cows were drinking.

This was in the surrounding

communities public wells, right? People around Mr.

Tennant, the tens of thousands

of people in that community had likely been drinking

this for decades and didn't know.

So Rob sued DuPont again.

Now on behalf of the 70,000

people around Parkersburg who were unwittingly exposed to C8.

And it wasn't just Parkersburg

or West In the year 2000,

researchers analyzed blood samples from thousands

of Americans all across the country.

And 100% of those samples

came back positive for C8

at an average of five parts per

But if virtually everyone in the US is contaminated,

how harmful could C8 really be?

This is exactly what Rob had to find out to have a fighting chance against DuPont.

So in 2005, he spearheaded

a medical study of everyone around Washington Works.

Scientists need to know if the chemical C8

causes any health problems.

By completing a health questionnaire

and having your blood tested, you can help.

Analyzing the blood samples and medical records took seven long years.

And many in Parkersburg

passed away before a verdict was even reached, including

Earl and his wife Sandra.

But finally, in 2013,

an independent science panel had the results.

They confirmed a probable link between C8

and six human diseases,

including thyroid disease, testicular

cancer, and kidney And these findings were based solely

on the nearby community

with an average C8 blood level of 28 parts per billion.

So for example, an average American male has around a one in 43 chance

of developing kidney cancer.

It's around one in 73 for females.

But a A with more than 30 parts per billion of C8 in their

blood serum might have about double the odds.

So, roughly 1 in 22 for males

and 1 in 37 for females.

But, the data in many of these studies

only included survivors, not people who might have already died from C8 exposure.

So, the verdict was that

the findings must be interpreted

with The true risk of C8

might be even Luckily, once these studies were published in 2013,

DuPont was pressured by the regulators

to phase out C8.

And by 2017, they had to pay out over $600

million to victims of C8 exposure.

Which is a pretty small price to pay for a company that made almost

$80 billion in sales just that year.

And all throughout, DuPont

denied any But, that wasn't the end of it for Parkersburg

or anyone else, because DuPont

separated its entire Teflon business

into a spin-off company,

Chemours, that agreed to use a different

So, what was it?

They simply took C8

and knocked two carbons

off and started making C6.

They called it GenX.

Because it was shorter and had an oxygen atom interrupting the carbon chain,

it was expected to be more degradable.

So, Chemours claimed a dose as high as 70 parts per billion of GenX

in drinking water would still be safe.

That chemical gets shipped to the same plant in West Virginia.

So, now GenX goes into the air.

GenX goes into the Ohio River.

GenX is found in public water supplies.

So, GenX is allowed to come out into the world,

be used in Teflon,

then the cancer study is done, which shows

GenX causes the exact

same three tumors in rats that PFOA did.

Liver, testicular, and pancreatic.

And the fact that its chain is shorter also makes GenX more mobile.

So, it could contaminate larger areas.

The truth is, we just don't know enough about it.

And that's exactly the problem.

It took us decades

to get to the point of finally addressing C8.

They simply tweak it a bit,

change the chemical name.

All of the science

and all of the concern, that's on C8.

This is C6 or C9 or C4.

You don't have enough evidence

that these other ones are bad. This is whack-a-mole.

We we get to the point where addressing

one and the new one pops up and we're told we have to start over.

And it isn't just C8 or GenX.

They belong to a family of over 14,000

different man-made chemicals, all covered in carbon-fluorine bonds.

And companies can make them however they want.

C7s, C9s, branched polymers, acids.

The generic term for all of these substances

is PFAS, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

And like Teflon, they have almost magical

They repel liquids, so PFAS

are used to make clothing waterproof.

They're also grease-resistant, so we coat things like fast-food

wrappers and microwave popcorn bags in PFAS to prevent stains.

Waterproof lipstick and mascara,

hygiene products, and even contact lenses have PFAS in them.

Even the screen you're watching this on likely has a PFAS anti-smudge coating.

The trouble is that the same carbon-fluorine

bonds that make PFAS so stable

and useful in consumer products

also make them incredibly

persistent in the environment.

Which is why you might also know PFAS

under a different name, forever chemicals.

They have been found

everywhere, from bustling cities to untouched areas of wilderness.

Every continent, including Antarctica,

has PFAS all over it.

Almost every living creature,

from polar bears to

to birds to fish, I mean this stuff is being found everywhere.

So, massive worldwide contamination.

But, by completely man-made

chemicals that are fingerprints

back to just a couple of

Even though companies knew how dangerous these chemicals were 50 years ago,

they decided not to inform the public and the regulators.

So, we're only finding out about this global contamination now.

And there've been many cases

where important public health information

doesn't get widely disseminated for years.

And whenever that happens,

media coverage can be inconsistent,

which is why I've partnered up with Ground News as the sponsor of this video.

Their platform reveals how stories like these are covered across the media landscape.

For example, a recent study suggested that 23

million Americans were exposed to forever chemicals through wastewater.

But you probably haven't seen the story since fewer than 40 outlets even published it.

And take a look at how different

some of these headlines are.

With Ground News, you can also see that government-funded

sources had limited reporting

of this story, and only 9%

of the publications were right-leaning.

So, Ground News flagged this as a potential blind spot.

It's highlighted on their blind spot feed, where you can see stories that are

disproportionately covered by one side

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And now, back to PFAS.

Now, Now want to find out how much

of these chemicals is actually in my blood.

So I have a little test here.

I hate the idea of uh

drawing my own blood.

That was pretty easy actually.

I was really worried that there was not going to be enough blood coming out.

But now there's plenty.

So the question is

how much of these dangerous chemicals

are in my blood?

Has anyone ever come back with blood that has zero PFOA whatsoever?

I've been doing blood testing on PFOA since 2007

and I've never seen a non-detect. No way.

So I hear that 98%

of the population has PFOA in their blood, but I'm I'm looking for that

2% that doesn't because I've yet to see them. That's incredible.

I mean very very bad incredible, but wow.

But if everyone on Earth has trace amounts of these chemicals in their blood,

how much harm could they really be doing?

I want to make a distinction

because it turns out not all PFOA are equally dangerous.

You can kind of split them up into two groups.

First up you have long repeating chains of carbon-fluorine

bonds that are tens or hundreds

of thousands of atoms long.

So stuff like These are so big and inert that even if you do

ingest them, your body is just going to flush them out.

They can't be absorbed into your bloodstream,

so you're pretty safe.

They're called fluoropolymers because the long repeating chains of carbon and fluorine bonds.

But the catch is to make these fluoropolymers,

stuff like Teflon, you need to use processing aids, things like PFOA

or GenX, and those are the nasty ones.

These molecules are five to 10 carbons long, which makes them small enough to

actually enter the They have functional groups at the ends that are usually acids.

The most common ones are perfluoroalkyl

acids, which means that they can bind to the proteins in your blood and

be transported anywhere in in body.

So they slowly accumulate

and build up over

Now, there are more than just two groups of PFAS and even different definitions

of what PFAS even are,

but most of what we know really relates to just a handful

of chemicals from this group here, to these perfluoroalkyl acids.

Perhaps the most comprehensive

document on PFAS toxicity

was published in 2022

by the National Academies

of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

And it looked at only seven perfluoroalkyl acids.

These are sister chemicals to PFOA,

and some of them, like PFOS

and PFHxS, were used heavily in the production of stain and water-resistant

products, like 3M's Scotchgard,

before they too got phased out due to toxicity concerns.

The report surmised that if the sum of these seven acids in your blood

is below two parts per billion,

there shouldn't be any harm.

If your level is between two and 20 parts per billion,

there's a potential for harmful health effects.

Although the exact mechanism

by which PFAS cause harm isn't fully understood,

exposure has most consistently

been associated with high cholesterol,

a decreased immune system response to vaccines

and infections, kidney cancer,

and decreased growth in infants.

But PFAS have also been linked to dozens of other conditions.

And above 20 parts per billion, the risk is even greater.

So, where do I fall on this graph? Right.

So, I I have a result here.

You're not going to tell me what yours were before I see mine? All right.

Uh you're positive for PFOA. Okay.

The level for PFOA

for a a US

person went down from five parts per billion around the 2000s

to around 1.46, what you have.

So, you're super average for a a US person. Great. Okay.

The The news is though, no GenX

for for you or for me. Which is great.

All right, let's go.

But the the the real surprise I guess is PFOS,

the the sister chemical.

And it was used in a similar way, so stain resistant carpets, treated clothing.

And your result is at 8.93

parts per billion, whereas the US average is 4.3. Yeah. That's crazy.

Yeah, it is crazy cuz it was discontinued

pretty much in 2002.

This is not the results I expected.

I honestly expected very boring results of like, yeah, you're around the middle of

the pack or a little bit on the low side.

And then for PFHxS,

basically PFOS but six instead of eight carbons,

your levels here are almost seven parts per

But the US average is one part per billion.

You're higher than 95% of Americans.

It just is like it shocks me cuz like I was fully walking into

this meeting expecting to be, you know, roughly average.

Yeah, to me it's scary.

You live, you know, you live a normal life thinking that you're taking care

of everything and then you have high levels of a chemical you never heard of.

The combined sum of all the PFAS detected in my blood was 17.92

parts per billion, more than double the US median.

I'm just below the level where the National

Academies recommend additional screenings

for PFAS related I had no idea I would come back with such elevated levels.

I'd love to get the levels sort of down a bit to a level

where I feel like it's more in line with the general population. Yeah.

But like where could this have come from?

There are three main ways we get exposed to forever chemicals,

and the one you'll hear the most about in the media is likely PFAS containing products.

Shampoo, dental floss, paints, varnishes. Potentially dangerous chemicals. Dangerous chemicals. Toxic chemicals.

People are throwing out their nonstick

My wife threw out all our nonstick pans over a year ago, and since

then we've been using stainless steel.

She is very good at making it not stick.

Me, not so much.

But, are pans really the problem?

The actual coating on the pan is Teflon,

which again is just a long inert chain of carbon-fluorine bonds.

So, even if you ingest it, it doesn't react with your body.

If you have a pan like that at home, you probably don't need to throw it out.

The same goes for most other PFAS-containing products.

Waterproof clothing, stain-resistant furniture,

and sweat-proof watch bands

might all release some level of PFAS,

but the risk of direct exposure through skin is likely low.

So, the bigger problem is how easily PFAS

from these products can end up in the environment.

And many of the factories

that make these products

don't have a good track record of keeping the chemicals contained.

People don't understand that the stories

that you see, for example,

what was happening in the community

in West Virginia, this is the same

chemical and the same things

that we're seeing play out now in

Australia, and in Japan,

in Italy, in Germany, in the UK.

I mean, there are a lot of folks that are still

not grasping the fact that

these are the same

Our second main source of exposure is food.

A lot of it comes packaged

in PFAS-treated materials like takeout boxes,

microwave popcorn bags, and burger wrappers.

If it's on a burger wrapper,

is it a tiny amount?

Is it ridiculously tiny amount?

We actually did tests at the lab

with stuff that usually contains PFAS.

So, microwave popcorn, fast-food wrappers,

paper cups that are waterproof.

So, I have tap water here from a house in London.

Could we boil some water because usually you interact with these products

when they're hot, and then see if any of the PFAS leaches off,

and you potentially eat them or drink them?

This is citizen science, right?

So, it's like there might be some error, but with a solid control,

and then with the same tap water going to all of them,

we can at least get something. Yeah.

Yeah, and even if we get nothing, we'll know that people are probably safe using these products.

Right, we stirred around.

Yeah, really get that

PFAST in that water, right?

And get that Well, it's supposed to be safe for human consumption.

Yeah, it's just a wild thing.

We sloshed it around there, hot water, boiling water for around 30 seconds,

and then we tested the water to see if any of the PFAST that

are used to coat these items

would actually make it into the water.

So, here's what I got.

And these are parts per trillion now.

So, for PFOA, good news,

basically no detection anywhere,

except for the microwave popcorn.

I will say these are very low levels, but uh

hold your horses cuz microwave popcorn gets it gets worse.

The thing about microwave popcorn,

it's sitting in there wrapped

up with the popcorn

for months or years before you ever stick it in your microwave.

That gives those chemicals plenty of time

to like leach into the oils,

and it's going to go all over the popcorn, and you're going to eat it.

This could explain some of our own results.

The level for PFPEA,

which is a shorter variation

of PFOA, came back at 10 parts per trillion

after the popcorn bag test.

And you can see similar results in some of the other PFAST species.

But then microwave popcorn actually drops for PFOS.

Why could that be?

I don't We don't actually know.

I was going to say maybe the PFAST

like went on that wrapper and found its friends

and just hung out there. Yeah, could be.

I know we've only done

like one test here, no repeat measurements, so we can't

conclude much from this,

but there's something to be said for when you're using these

they're going to leach into your water, leach into your food.

And research tends to agree.

A 2019 study found that eating fast food and microwave popcorn, especially,

can increase your PFAST

load, while eating home-cooked meals doesn't.

But even something as simple as reheating

your food on a plate instead of in the original packaging

could prevent PFAS from migrating

to your Now, you might expect that these part per trillion levels we detected

in the London tap water are nothing

compared to the parts per billion

you'd find in human blood.

But the surprising thing is that to have two parts per billion of PFOA

in your blood, you don't need to drink water with two parts per billion

of PFOA in Because PFAS

accumulate in your body over time.

So, even water with as little as four parts per trillion

of PFOA combined with other exposure

can be enough to maintain

your blood levels this high.

And this is why, in addition to food,

water is your biggest source of exposure.

This is especially true if you live near a PFAS factory

where the local water is often heavily contaminated.

But the same goes for areas near military bases or airports.

See, adding chemicals like PFOA

or PFOS to water

lowers its surface tension,

so the water gets more slippery.

And these chemicals also tend to foam up,

so they make for an excellent ingredient in firefighting foams.

They spread quicker and the foam blocks access to oxygen extremely well.

And since both military bases and airports

frequently do fire drills with these foams,

they end up seeping into the surrounding soil and ground water.

But it doesn't stop there.

Currently, we have reached

planetary saturation levels for PFAS,

which means that when you look up at that cloud

and it rains, it rains unsafe levels of at least four PFAS

It turns out that our entire

water cycle is contaminated with PFAS.

So, even when it rains on the Tibetan Plateau,

that rain contains PFAS.

To check the water levels in your area,

you can use these maps that show PFAS contamination

across the US, Europe, and

What about Los Angeles? Encino.

That's where I spent

like seven of the last 10 years. Crescenta Valley.

Those are all high. Yeah.

Santa Clarita some PFHxS level is crazy.

So maybe you're getting your water from Santa Clarita. Wow.

There's a calculator it could give you what an estimate in your blood serum is.

What we can try to do now is put that up in the calculator

see if you get something close to what you have if you want. Sure.

PFHxS so typical value for an adult

is one part per billion

and then the Santa Clarita water is around 37 parts per trillion.

If you look after like 10 years

So after roughly 10 years of exposure you would have 6.85

parts per billion in your blood.

And then I can tell you that you are at 684.

That would explain things.

Now I can't say for sure where my drinking water was coming from

but if I was consistently

drinking water contaminated at similar levels

then that would explain my results.

But if you're worried about your own water

you should contact your provider directly for the most relevant information.

It's concerning just how unregulated

drinking water has been.

It was actually only a year ago in April 2024

that the US EPA finally set legal limits for PFAS in drinking water.

The safe level for PFOA

went down from DuPont's

initial one part per billion

to four parts per trillion.

So we're no longer talking about one drop of PFOA in 20 of these

tanks we're talking about one drop in 5,000.

That's five Olympic sized swimming pools.

And if there's even a drop of PFOA in there

the EPA is concerned.

The same four parts per trillion limit was also set for PFOS the sister chemical.

And GenX went down from the 70,000

parts per trillion initially proposed by Chemours to just 10.

The same goes for PFHxS.

For reference, the EPA's limit for lead in water is 10,000 parts per trillion.

And for cyanide, 200,000.

It gives you a pretty clear indication

of how concerned the scientific community is.

And just when we got EPA limits,

we got a new administration

in the US, which might be reversing

some of the PFAS bans.

So, you can't always depend on the regulators,

and you seemingly can't depend on the companies that make this stuff

to dispose of it safely.

So, what can you do?

If your water is contaminated,

you might want to consider getting a PFAS certified filter.

Reverse osmosis, granulated active carbon, and ion exchange filters are all capable

of removing PFAS out of drinking

But, the responsibility to filter drinking water shouldn't come down to the individual.

PFAS should be captured

at the source during manufacturing,

before they ever reach the environment.

And some companies, like Pure Affinity,

are developing custom filters to make that happen.

Uh so, very lab-looking lab. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

So, could you walk me through like what all these pipes do and what

do you have in here?

So, this water is representative

of where you've had a big fire fighting foam incident.

So, you want to filter this water.

But, basically, the concept is take it from the top through the vessel.

As it passes through this material,

it basically sticks on

to some of the PFAS chemicals in water, and then you run into another part of treatment. Right.

And a third one.

To me, it seems like if PFAS are so like bioaccumulative

and actually persistent and stable,

they don't really react with things.

So, how do you force them to react with with stuff in here?

Basically, taking advantage of this long organic

tail, as well as the polar head.

And so, you can have some electrostatic

interactions with the polar head, and then you can have some hydrophilic

and hydrophobic interactions with the tail.

And by combining these three binding mechanisms,

you increase massively your likelihood

of binding PFAS, even if it's still difficult. Right.

Do the levels drop 100%

already here, or do you see a gradual decrease in PFAS as That's the cool question.

So, in the beginning, it drops 100% after this one. Oh.

So, problem solved, or Problem solved for the time being.

What we see right now is it will last about 40,000

volumes of this vessel.

So, a 10-liter vessel

would basically provide all of the PFAS treatment for a household. In a year? For a year.

You want this to be in factories

first, so it never gets into the water. Yeah.

We're talking to the

fluorochemicals manufacturers, and they're really trying to,

yeah, move forward, rather than just wait for

Everyone's true risk from PFAS will be different.

It depends on dozens of factors,

like your water contamination,

your lifestyle, what you eat.

But, how much should you really worry about it?

Like, if I'm at 17 or 18 parts per billion, is that the equivalent

of drinking a beer a night, or

going out in the Australian sun without sunscreen?

So, what I like to do is create this hierarchy of risk.

And, in terms of

hierarchy of risk reduction,

number one on that

is stopping smoking, exercising,

consuming a healthy whole food diet,

and making sure you're getting 7 to 9 hours of sleep.

Then, you have medium levels of intervention,

seeing your primary care doctor,

controlling your cholesterol numbers.

And then, on the lower tier that you have,

PFAS probably falls into that lower tier.

Being preventative about PFAS exposure

is currently our only option,

because there are no approved

medical treatments However, if you compare PFAS contamination

between the sexes, male levels are consistently

higher, at least up until around the age of 50,

when menopause usually starts.

This is partly because menstruation,

birth, and lactation are all ways PFAS

can escape the body.

PFAS can pass through the placenta

and into the fetus during pregnancy.

And then the baby can also get exposed through breast milk.

It's something that pregnant

people should be extremely careful about.

You know, young children are incredibly susceptible.

They're drinking more water, they're growing,

they're near surfaces like treated carpets.

Now, not everyone has to change their lifestyle because of PFAS,

but if you're in a high-risk group because of pregnancy

or because you live or work

in a PFAS-contaminated area,

you might want to consider it.

Firefighters have especially high PFAS levels because their gear and foams are laced with them.

Remarkably, a 2022 study found that when firefighters

donated blood or plasma

frequently enough, they reduced their PFAS levels by up to 30% within a year.

And it's kind of ironic

that, you know, our our health system is coming back to

What do you think about the idea of donating

blood as a way to reduce PFAS in the body?

I've never heard of that as a strategy.

That's kind of interesting.

Well, I definitely recommend people donate blood more frequently,

not because of PFAS exposure, but because of the fact we desperately need blood.

What's important to note is that, especially in this current administration,

we need to be very careful about shifting budgets away from research agencies.

Because without that research,

the guidance that I'm giving is going to be significantly more flawed.

The reason I'm able to talk about what we know and what we don't

know comes from that research.

So, if we're going to be cutting the budgets to these major agencies

and letting scientists go,

we're only going to get worse and worse information.

We are still a good few years away from proper medical treatment and better

PFAS regulations because this is extremely tricky.

There are places where we should ban PFAS completely,

like hygiene products, cosmetics, and food packaging.

And some countries are already doing that.

But we also can't ban PFAS altogether,

at least not yet, because we still rely on these chemicals for things like

medical implants, and it's currently impossible

to make semiconductors for our electronics without them.

All the tubing for the vaccine manufacturing is PFAS-based.

They take us to space as well, our space suits.

But even in these niche applications,

we have to be responsible

around how we use it.

People are coming together from a lot of different disciplines

to create destruction mechanisms,

to create novel capture

materials, and to create novel replacements.

I am excited and

inspired by all of the great work that's going on around me.

So I think if people want to learn more, I would advise them to

learn about the risks, but then also learn about the new technology

that's that's being developed

that will hopefully put us in the right direction.

So to me, you know, one of the most important things we can do

is have discussions like what we're doing right here.

If the story is in the information's

out there, people can make informed

choices about whether they want to continue

purchasing things that have these materials in them.

And what we're seeing is

consumers, as they do become aware,

are saying, "No, we don't want these chemicals."

And companies are voluntarily

coming forward and taking these chemicals

out of products because the consumers

are now demanding it.

We've been here before with leaded gasoline, freon, and asbestos.

And each time, we did the research

and made the right decision to phase these chemicals out.

With PFAS, we're just starting to understand the problem,

but I'm hopeful we'll make the same decision again.

If you want to inform yourself more about PFAS, we've attached

all the sources we've used to make this video

down in the description.

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