I just threw out all my dental floss. My daughter has started really wanting to floss her teeth every day, and I encouraged her. I knew that nylon floss was bad for the environment, and I decided I would try to find some better floss next time. I never imagined that it would be really bad for her. Apparently, Oral B floss has extremely high level of PFAS–you know the forever chemical that we have all be worried about in our nonstick pans and rain jackets.
No amount of PFAS are safe. They are known to cause cancer, fetal complications, liver disease, kidney disease, autoimmune disorders and more. PFAS are bad news and they are everywhere. They are in a lot of our clothes, especially those yoga pants you wear every day. Apparently they are in Thinx period underwear (I just threw mine out). They claim they changed the formula to avoid PFAS, but they are just using a similarly bad chemical. They claim that PFAS have “never been a part of its product design.” Obviously they got in there somehow though. They also have nano-silver which I find personally terrifying, but can’t say I understand the science around it.
New York may ban the forever chemicals by the end of the year, but what about all the clothes we already own? Do we throw them all out?
An article today in the Guardian says that Simply Orange juice, the only kind I have bought in the last few years, is so full of PFAS that it is ‘hundreds of times’ above federal limits. I knew they were in microwave popcorn bags, but I didn’t think about juice. It’s mostly about water contamination as you can read about in this terrifying article on freshwater fish.
So we can’t eat fish, we can’t eat chocolate, we can’t drink orange juice, and all of our clothing is poisonous. Just another part of the end of the world?
Even if we can’t get rid of these risks, we can minimize them. I just ordered the EWG Guide to avoiding PFAS to teach me how.