I get reliably downvoted for suggesting this, but we need vastly better labelling across the board. We give companies a lot of leeway when it comes to selling things to put in and on our bodies without us, owners of said bodies, having any way of finding out what the hell is in their products, or where they came from, or how they were processed. It absolutely baffles me how everyone doesn't want considerably more information and transparency about our foods and cosmetics.

I would be massively in favour of adding a QR Code that details as much as possible (without giving away trade secrets if that is possible) where and how something is sourced and then adding how it was processed. Much like you get a track and trace with a package.

That's a pretty clever idea. I like it! There is limited package space on items, this would allow producers to document a whole lot of info and allow consumers immediate access.

The idea actually comes from when I followed CJ Chivers (expert on weapons and war correspondent) A lot of his work is done by gathering spent munitions on the battlefield and then tracing it back to its source. The life of a weapon and munitions is usually well documented (and can go back decades!)

Who cares about hiding trade secrets if those trade secrets are "just a pinch of mercury" or some other nefarious chemical.

Just thinking ahead here for some possible pitfalls why companies would be against it.

Unfortunately I just see anything that they don’t want to disclose (because it’s harmful) to become a trade secret

Then mandate a label that clearly states there are unknow ingredients that the manufacturer refuses to list.

On any ingredients list, that should be assumed when there is a vague ingredient like "Artificial Flavors".

Industry plainly lists potassium sorbate, sorbic acid, and sodium nitrite, which are known carcinogens.

On top of that, the packaging matters: PET is a phtalate which is an endocrine disruptor.

They are going to be against it anyway.

In principal, known toxins (when at anything even close to toxic doses when used normally) should be just not allowed in consumer products in the first place.

In practice, people like their alcoholic drinks and don't understand why that by itself is enough to require the Californian proposition 65 "substances at this location are known to cause cancer" sticker.

The good news is that the FDA sets "acceptable levels"[1] in food, for things like animal feces, insect infestation, mold, rodent hairs and filth, maggots, and so on, beyond which enforcement is mandatory. The bad news is they are nonzero.

1: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/health/insect-rodent-filth-in...

>The bad news is they are nonzero.

Especially with mold, zero is very very difficult to attain.

This exists in Europe - it’s catchily called ECHA SCIP. You can search by EAN at https://echa.europa.eu/scip-database

Pretty cool.

But fairly, limited:

> Articles containing substances of very high concern (SVHCs) on the Candidate List at a concentration above 0.1% weight by weight (w/w)

EWG has something that’s a lot better than nothing: https://www.ewg.org/skindeep/

They also have an app that can scan UPC codes.

I knew I'd find EWG mentioned here, they're fantastic. Thank you for posting.

I think you forget that most people don't have basic competency with even their phones. Most have no clue how to scan a QR code.

People have the capacity to learn and scanning a QR code once you’ve seen it done once is pretty straightforward. during covid QR code menus replaced physical menus in NY for most restaurants. People complained (i don’t particularly like them either) then adapted.

Different strokes for different folks and all that but I'm a bit of a picky eater and love being able to unambiguously mark what I don't want on my food on the ordering web apps some restaurants use now. On the other hand those places that have the QR code link to nothing but a PDF menu are just annoying.

Those people wouldn't be able to interpret the data anyway. You forget that most people don't have basic competency in science, and basing decisions on that data would be extremely difficult to start with.

It's still an improvement over the status quo.

Your proposed requirement would have a nice side benefit of making supply chains much easier to trace for other purposes (e.g., why are some shelves bare in my grocery store).

I'd want a carve out for home "manufacturers" that sell less than the US median wage per year in product. They should be able to just display the QR codes cut out from the packages of their ingredients rather than creating their own QR code infrastructure.

Indeed, supply chains, or a webcam to the free range chicken eggs perhaps. Lots of options to make things a bit more transparent.

Close, https://world.openfoodfacts.org/ and https://world.openbeautyfacts.org/, by the same association. Crowd-sourced databases that you can query scanning the barcode using their app.

The quality and availability of the information you can find varies greatly, but it's very easy to contribute. You won't find much that is not already written on the label though.

> I get reliably downvoted for suggesting this, but we need vastly better labelling across the board

These companies shouldn't be able to use these ingredients in the first place, labels or not. It's not our job to read lists of 30+ ingredients and their wikipedia entries to know if we're at risk or not

This is of course an ideal, but in our brutal reality corporations owe no moral obligation to the society they are profiting from. They are only driven by capital and brand propagation. Sometimes a moral approach is taken as a compromise, to continue operating in peace, etc. We are left with defending ourselves as best as possible and sometimes the onslaught is too much, as indicated by multitudes of lawsuits and entire legal industries rising out of corporate negligence.

Corporations are human constructs; they exist in whichever reality we create for them. You don't have to give in to their demands. They have to give in to ours.

Well long ago we demanded limited liability.

For non religious people, the ones who don't believe in the invisible hand, regulations could take care of that, although given the current dynamic we're getting further from that by the day

That’s why regulation exists.

Who will regulate the regulators then?

I 100% agree. It blew my mind that vanilla extract is not extracted from vanilla, and they're allowed to label artificial vanilla as vanilla extract because real vanilla extract tastes different, and people are already used to the other flavor matching the name. There are tons of examples and loopholes like this.

This. The artificial vanilla extract tastes far better than the natural.

I tire of being the fool buying expensive tasteless natural organic foods and spices!

"Ignorance is bliss" is safe, zero-effort, and anxiety-free - until it isn't.

And when it isn't - both the "not just a river in Egypt" and "blame some handy & culturally appropriate boogeyman" strategies are popular and low-effort. And usually enjoy widespread social support.

Ahh....low effort sound bite boogyman legislation. Reminds me of Florida.

For what it's worth there are people working on this problem! I work for one - https://choosefinch.com/ - which is a Chrome extension that scores products on amazon.com (and other retailers soon!) for, among other things, harmful compounds.

"This product is known to the state of California to cause cancer" : so what?

saying that perfume is an endocrine disruptor and is contributing to the global drop in fertility is a right wing conspiracy theory .. careful bud

People should be free to draw their own conclusions, as idiotic as those conclusions may sometimes be. But obfuscation only creates more space for conspiratorial thinking. More transparency is the solution, not the problem.

I have a friend who gets irrationally angry about stuff like this. “People should just do their own research!” I’d like to think I’m of above average intelligence and I have no idea how I would ever go about verifying the safety of every item I buy for my family. It’s just not feasible. What if, instead, we have a group of people who enforce safety standards and we can place some trust in them to help keep us all safe?

Why not both? Mandating companies maintain a comprehensive list of ingredients, processes, countries of origin, etc, that is readily available to the public does not prevent agencies from also enforcing standards.

> I get reliably downvoted for suggesting this,

Your comment was heavily upvoted.

Please drop these off-topic distractions from your HN comments, especially bits about upvoting and downvoting, which are such a common source of meta-noise that the site guidelines specifically exclude it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

> It absolutely baffles me how everyone doesn't want considerably more information and transparency about our foods and cosmetics.

People do want that, which is why organic food is rising in popularity, why vegan cosmetics are a thing... the problem is politicians are bribed by big industry influence to not regulate too hard.

I genuinely hate this (meaning Swan's) take. The modern world is waaaay to complex to offload all responsibility to "consumers".

They did it with sustainability, with sweat shops, with food, with cleaning products. It's ridiculous.

> Ultimately, Levine and Swan say that local and global actions are needed to reduce or get rid of these chemicals in our environments.

I think it's unfair to characterize Swan's take as trying to 'offload all responsibility to "consumers"'. Presumably the "get rid of these chemicals in our environments" doesn't just intend "our" to only mean some hyper-vigilant subset of the population. One can advocate for removing these from the marketplace while simultaneously having the stance that for now, in the world we actually live in, people can take some steps to limit their exposure. People are always going to ask "but what can I do _now_ to protect myself and my family?" and it's not unreasonable for an expert in the field to try to have an answer.

Fair, I should have said "Swan's statement in the quote" - the intention was mainly to avoid being misinterpreted as disagreeing with DoingIsLearning anyway, not to dunk on my namesake.

With sustainability and sweat shops, the trade off is making things a lot more expensive, so the offloading is more that most people don't care.

I think a majority of people do care, but there's not really a way for them to express that in the market. You can't just buy the more expensive product and trust that it's going to be more ethically produced.

It's a societal problem that can't be solved by individual consumers.

Non-regulatory solutions also doesn't empower the market to optimize cost in a productive way (which would cut into profits). In the current economy for the vast majority of products we have two options 1) a cheap option made in horrendous inhumane conditions and 2) a luxury good made in a process that's inherently limited in aim and scope. Globalism basically exports the suffering of the most unregulated markets to the entire planet.

Consumers can't compete on an individual level against giant mega corporations actively obfuscating information from them even if they had lots of free time and weren't overburdened already. And corporations can lobby to even get obvious terms redefined (Assembled in America) so everyone needs to understand lawyer speak to even make sense of the information they do receive.

And that is without even getting into misinformation campaigns.

Or maybe people aren't stupid but they don't give a shit.

I did not say anything about stupidity. Nobody has the time, energy and even financial means to individually tackle all the issues out there. Putting the burdens on consumers is an excuse used by companies to externalize costs to the buyer, plain and simple.

I don't know how helpful this will end up being.

Endocrine disruptors are airborne and globally ubiquitous in the form of micro-plastics. All drinking water in the world is contaminated with it. [1]

I'm really not meaning to be dramatic on this, but we've completely missed the boat on this one while we were arguing about climate change, and it's much too late to do anything about it now.[2]

[https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/wash-documents...]

[https://www.salon.com/2022/01/16/bpa-plastics-harmful/]

I'll let the chemistry people comment on this one but phtalates are used as a 'plasticizer' they are not plastic itself as in a micro-plastic bead

I am not sure how much of these plasticizers survives on the microplastic that you refer to. in our water supply or in airborne polyester fibers? Those are major sources of microplastic contamination but I am not sure they are major sources of _plasticizer_ contamination.

In this case there is mounting evidence against phthalates and bisphenols as endocrine disruptors. This is the stuff getting into your blood stream through ingestion or skin absorption mostly from plastic containers, hygiene products, etc.

This is one of the problems, we are missing studies that can demonstrate sources and source contribution to this problem.

>This is one of the problems, we are missing studies that can demonstrate sources and source contribution to this problem.

This is why I hate when people compare climate change to other problems (like GP did).

Sure, there's a lot of microplastics out there, but the science is still out on what that means for us. Meanwhile we know how bad Climate Change is, so if we have limited resources to fight problems, definitely fight the one you know is bad, even if it's not as engaging as thinking about your own sperm.

Only thing I’d add is that at no point was I claiming that climate change was not serious or urgent.

My point is that people at large generally don’t care enough to be really bothered by climate change, so there’s no budget in the limited attention we as a species are willing to set aside for inconvenient truths to consider much else.

> the science is still out

Same thing I heard for decades about AGW. And still do. In fact, they probably make up a majority in Congress. There were decades of people out there saying the science was still out to worry warts asking about the wisdom of dumping gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere.

We don’t have to worry about someones grandchildren starving in 2060 if they aren’t going to be born in the first place.

I know more than a few white conservatives who have had to use IVF, and the AGW-denying IVF doctor I know rants about phthalates/plastics even though it’s good for her business. We have a 100X more opportunity to convince them of plastics action than we do of climate action.

Are you trying to give a masterclass on logical fallacies?

>Same thing I heard for decades about AGW.In fact, they probably make up a majority in Congress. There were decades of people out there saying the science was still out to worry warts asking about the wisdom of dumping gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere.

People can deny the science, but C02 concentration is the mechanism for global climate eras and we've known that for almost 200 years [1]. I don't care who believes in science because that has no impact on whether it is correct or not (only you, my fellow scientist, can determine that for yourself).

There is no agreed-upon mechanism for how microplastics harm humans, but again to the point of science, if you can point me to proof, I'd love to see it.

Long story short, you are very likely making a false comparison between those two topics.

>We don’t have to worry about someones grandchildren starving in 2060 if they aren’t going to be born in the first place.

Sure, and again, show me the proof/model that this is going to lead to the end of mankind. I's love to see it.

>I know more than a few white conservatives who have had to use IVF, and the AGW-denying IVF doctor I know rants about phthalates/plastics even though it’s good for her business. We have a 100X more opportunity to convince them of plastics action than we do of climate action.

We have a 1,000,000x better chance of convincing them that Trump is an immortal demigod, doesn't mean we should do it.

Again, we should dedicate effort to things that we know matter even if it requires effort.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S163107131...

> microplastics harm humans

In any normal universe, the onus of proof would be on you to prove dumping it into our environment is safe.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where your world-view in Congressionally safe. Enjoy.

>Are you trying to give a masterclass on logical fallacies?

So yes?

And again, I'm not saying it's good/safe, it's just in a resource-limited world the only problem is global warming.

>the science seems to indicate it's much more likely that humanity will die off with a quiet whimper in a few generations.

You didn't include a link to support the claim that humans only have "a few hundred years left at most". I think this is extremely unlikely to be true. What is your recommended reading?

This is purely speculation without a reference, I’ll edit to clarify. I did have this in the original post:

“It's worth noting that this is not a mainstream view, and that the UN projects a level population out to 2300”

I’ll clarify above regardless.

Well yeah it's not UN's policy to cause mass panics now, is it.

As another commenter pointed out, plasticizers are not plastics. It's disingenuous to link health issues with plasticizers to microplastics. Additionally, we should not extrapolate concerns with BPA plastics releasing chemicals when placed under specific stressors (e.g. heat) to all plastics in the environment. There have been no studies I'm aware of that link microplastics to endocrine disruption. Even the first article you linked specifically states that the primary concern with microplastics is likely a physical (not chemical) one.

The slowdown in population growth has been a topic of world leaders for quite some time. This isn't a topic of interest because world leaders are somehow concerned about the cause (e.g. chemicals in the environment). In fact, the cause is well known and due to fairly straight forward anthropologic factors. As quality of life improves, population growth declines. This happens in nature as well. Populations under stress tend to reproduce more. World leaders are interested in modeling/understanding this as it has macroeconomic effects (e.g. Japan's decade long struggles with stock market decline). This is also why the US and the west in general has went so heavy on quantitative easing for the past decade. They are trying to stave off deflation. Unfortunately, COVID and the associated supply shocks caused that plan to go off the rails a bit...

Finally, I'm not sure what climate change policy has to do with any of this.

Environmental may be one such reason but we should never omit obesity as a cause for any health problem.

> A bidirectional relationship between testosterone and obesity underpins this association indicated by the hypogonadal-obesity cycle and evidence weight loss can lead to increased testosterone levels.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25982085/

> we should never omit obesity

Not to say this is not a contributor but this is arguably a US, UK, and Gulf countries problem. Everywhere else we see the same statistical drops without significant obesity incidence.

Obesity can also be related to environmental exposures.

Phthalates sem very hard to avoid: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/phthalates-health_b_2464248

Yeah trying to avoid toxic chemicals as a consumer is nearly impossible. We've been doing a home renovation and have been attempting to use zero or low VOC products and it's incredibly difficult and expensive. The effort it requires to do the research and sourcing for every product you use in your life is basically impossible for most people.

I can't count how many times I have ordered a mineral water (to avoid chlorine in tap water to which I am sensitive) and received it in a glass contaminated with a PFAS-coated paper straw.

It has nothing to do with being savvy.

Additionally that water probably came from a plastic bottle.

Lately I've been seeing straws made from a compostable plant based polyester. It's unclear whether they are still using problematic plasticizers in them.

Isn't this just pure BS tho? No "savvy consumer" can really avoid these chemicals. Merely by being outside in a major city or indoors in a modern home or wearing modern synthetic fiber clothing, etc, etc you are likely getting exposed. Short of literally making your own wool clothing in the middle of the woods you can't reasonably escape this stuff.

Blaming individuals is the most successful strategy for keeping status quo while allowing activists to flourish. So go buy metal straws, recycle your plastic, eat less meat, cut up six pack holders, and be "a savvy customer"!

This is a "non-constructive proof". It's trivial to say "regulators need to get serious" but it's non-trivial to actually get that to happen. With the current corrupt+uninformed regulators in place, just pushing them to "regulate more" results in a mix of regulatory capture and/or uninformed regulation made by non-technical experts. How do you propose that actually useful regulation get enacted?

Consumers can voluntarily reduce their exposure to phthalates AND the industry can be regulated. Regulators aren't going to save consumers if consumers refuse to get educated or practice restraint.

You are missing my point, irrespective of consumer action, the industry is actively using dark patterns to avoid revenue loss.

The industry knows that sales would tank if a product lists anything with phthalate suffixes. Much like they know that water bottles sell like hot cakes when you add 'BPA free'.

This is not about ignorant cosumers this is an actively hostile industry.

As a hypothetical P&G, and J&J would absolutely tank the S&P100 if all hygiene products with phthalates were to be removed. So the alternative is for regulators to turn a blind eye until public outcry or a class action case kicks them into action.

> Regulators aren't going to save consumers if consumers refuse to get educated or practice restraint

That's literally the job of regulators, see asbestos or cancer causing pesticides that have been banned or severely restricted. Do you expect all consumers to have degrees in chemistry and read papers to make risk assessments about the 10,000s of chemicals they come into contact daily?

Nope, not saying that.

Before asbestos or cancer causing pesticides were regulated, they were perfectly fine to sell and use, but they were not in fact safe for people. In most cases, regulation lags science. In quite a few cases, things we know probably aren't safe are not regulated at all, or not sufficiently regulated. Regulation has many inputs: good science is one of them, but expediency is another, and so is corruption, and frankly so is incompetence. In any case, because the regulatory status of a substance has no relationship to whether or not it will kill you, it is safest if we have good regulation AND people do as much due diligence as they are comfortable with. Ultimately, it's your health, so you have to take responsibility for it.

I've been a very health/environmentally conscious consumer for 30 years, but I don't have time to keep up with every possible thing, nor do I want to be exhausting myself trying to urge other consumers to shift their buying choices ever so slightly. Expecting consumers to do everything is market fundamentalism and it's often a meme put around by industry to shirk responsibility. My environmental footprint is already way below average. I'm tired of sacrificing my life on the altar of market economics waiting for everyone else to catch up, while industry pours money in lobbying, PR, and advertising to maintain an increasingly dystopian status quo.

Why do people even buy "most hygiene products"? They're all bullshit, bad-smelling chemical industry effluent. A gallon of concentrated Just Plain Old Soap® retails for $40 and stands dilutions 10-to-1, is enough for all personal and household uses for an entire family for years.