Aw geez. Well that's why science is science. We constantly question and test so that even strongly held, (but stupid), theories or even things science presents as facts, can be scrutinized and changed if necessary. Remember this during the second half of this blog post.
So I guess phthalates and phthalos are not the same things. So what is a phthalate? As the article linked above tells us, phthalates are used in soap, plastic, glue, rubber and, HEY, paints. They are rather ambiguously referred to as "hormone disruptors." How they disrupt hormones, what effects they have, how dangerous it may be, these are not really explained very clearly.
The National Institutes of Health says they are "believed to be" endocrine disruptors. High levels have been "linked to" another ambiguous wording, fertility "issues." They are also linked to behavioural and neurodevelopmental "issues" in children exposed to them IN UTERO. So don't eat KD when you're pregnant I suppose. But speaking for myself, if I ever got pregnant and had the clichéd pickle craving, I wouldn't be pairing my Polski Ogorki with ice cream. Or maybe a better choice would be a BABY dill. heh heh. If you ask me, absolutely nothing goes better with pickles than Kraft Dinner!
But what kind of levels are we talking about here? What's the science? It's not easy to find. The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention says, "the impact of low level exposure on humans is unknown." What does "low level exposure" mean? They don't say.
FDA spokeswoman, Megan McSeveney says, "For a phthalate to be used in food packaging, there must be sufficient information to demonstrate the substance is safe under the intended conditions of use." That sounds reasonable, but again, the safety or danger is in the dosage. Where are the numbers?
Tom Nelton, chemicals-policy director for the Environmental Defense Fund, says about phthalates, "A chemical is not allowed in food unless there is a reasonable certainty it will cause no harm. We don't think the FDA can say there is a reasonable certainty of no harm." So does that mean there should be absolutely none allowed until it can be proven harmless? What if a little bit is harmless? And, yet again, what constitutes a "little bit?"
Going back to the pickles, if you have a family of 6 and you have the jumbo, family-size jar, after 50 people have plunged their unwashed hands in there to fish out a pickle before you, if you are stuck with pulling the last pickle out of the scum slicked juice it's floating in, you just might be eating trace amounts of things not bargained for. But what? I think we all want to know, don't we? We want to know what shit is in our food! We LITERALLY want to know what shit is in our food. The FDA itself allows 9 milligrams or more of rodent shit per kilogram of wheat. Here's a list of 10 ways you will probably eat shit today.
Well, Tom Nelton, there is no reasonable certainty that rat shit will cause no harm. On the contrary, here is a small list of rodent-borne diseases including the friggin' PLAGUE!
So back to the same question: what kind of levels are we talking about here? Of phthalates in KD? Well, to be specific, it wasn't just KD, but since about 80% of the 2 million boxes of mac and cheese eaten each day in the U.S., (and MORE per capita in Canada, (and probably a higher percentage), are KD, please allow me this generalization. A Kraft spokesperson said the phthalate levels in KD are, "more than 1000 times lower than levels that scientific authorities have identified as acceptable." Well, here we go again: exactly WHAT levels? And btw, what authorities?
I checked an article about this same study printed in a Seattle newspaper and found lots of the same concerned language, but no levels listed.
I read an article in the Dallas News written about the study saying that "high" levels of phthalates were found, but, again no quantification.
If you're buying tuna and it's canned white, or albacore tuna, it has on average 0.32 parts per million of mercury in it. This means an adult can safely eat 6-8 ounces 3 times a month. For canned light tuna, which is the safer kind and only has on average 0.12 parts per million mercury in it, an adult can safely eat 6-8 oz. once a week. Do they have stats like this for phthalates?
The study that all of this concern was based on appeared in the New York Times. Here's a New York Times article called, "Please Don't Panic Over the Chemicals in Your Mac and Cheese." It points out that the original story is not clear on the amount of phthalates nor the amount that is dangerous. It also mentions that the source for the story was a website called kleanupkraft.org. The article also includes a comment from associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle, Sheela Sathyanarayana, who says she hasn't run the numbers yet but you'd probably have to eat multiple boxes a day to start seeing clear negative health effects.
Still and all, going back to the first article, where the conclusion was to make Kraft isolate the source of the phthalates and eliminate it, I STILL gotta go with that idea. Even though the dangers are "believed to be," so hypothetical, and not yet clearly defined in action, effect or danger, why not be on the safe side and get rid of them? It won't change the taste of the mac and cheese. I hope. And from a guy who has eaten hundreds, if not thousands of boxes of KD and still has no hundreds if not thousands of boxes of KD and hundreds if not thousands of boxes of KD and still has no neurodevelopmental side effects, I say, yeah, just to be on the safe side, get rid of the phthalates.
Now, the hard part. I'm going to take flack for this, but it seems to me the same logic should apply to some shots that are administered quite commonly, and to be fair, I have seen nobody with hormone issues obviously arising from consumption of Kraft Dinner, and I have seen nobody with cancer, autism, Alzheimer's or madhattedness directly related to a flu shot. But why take the chance?
Thimerosal is the ingredient in some vaccines that contains mercury. It's about half mercury. There is NO safe dose of mercury known to science, but the EPA safety limit is set at 5 mcg per 0.5 ml. dose. That works out to 10 parts per million. This is MUCH higher than the safety levels of tuna although you often hear vaccine supporters comparing the two. A lot of flu vaccines, the FluLaval vaccine, for instance, contain 50 mcg of thimerosal per 0.5 ml. dose. That's 25 mcg of mercury and that, my friends, is a whopping 50 ppm.
People are concerned with this. And rightly so! And before anyone even thinks of calling me one of the most ignorant of modern pejoratives, (antivaxer), why is there ANY mercury in the shots? What is its purpose, and, like the colorant and phthalates in KD, why can't it be removed? Same with formaldehyde. It's a preservative and it causes cancer. Same concentration in most flu shots and some other shots: 50 ppm. Why do I need this injected directly into my body? As long as it doesn't affect the purpose of the flu shot or whatever the vaccine is that contains these toxic ingredients, why take them at ANY level?
I have heard lots of evasive arguments about how the body naturally produces formaldehyde and about tuna and about historical vaccine successes and about how levels are safe and about no links to any negative outcomes and about how people in third world countries need these vaccines, but I have yet to hear an argument better than what I will call the KD gambit because it is a risky argument to put forth in social settings so chock-a-block full of "Antivaxer" haters: If the dangerous ingredients are not necessary, take them the fuck out! How much more obvious can it get? I don't care if the levels are safe, or they are probably safe, or they are not directly linked...blah blah blah, get that shit out of the flu shot. And it's even more immediate an issue for shots because as opposed to orally ingested KD, something injected into the bloodstream is much more efficiently absorbed.
The various vaccines I'm talking about CAN and HAVE BEEN made without these ingredients. Thimerosal-free shots are more expensive, but, if rat shit-free grain was a bit more expensive, wouldn't we all pay a little bit more? In order to mass produce the vaccines, and, (you HAVE to suspect this from Big Pharma, I mean COME ON!), give them a longer shelf life to MAKE MORE MONEY, these preservatives are used. For the love of GOD, why hate people and call them childish names for not wanting dangerous shit shot into their veins? Mandating flu shots would be just like forcing people to eat the Kraft Dinner with the phthalates and dangerous colouring. Okay, maybe the levels are safe, but it's NOT the responsibility of the people to endanger our health, it's the responsibility of the manufacturers of the shots and the mac and cheese to remove the unnecessary, dangerous ingredients.
Now I can just hear the people railing about how if you are infected by phthalates from KD, you won't pass it on to someone else, maybe a kid or an old person and kill them. Well, to me that just adds to the urgency to have the crap removed. Do you know that until very recently, flu shots didn't even come with a list of ingredients? And when a doctor tells you he's going to give you this or that vaccination, how many of us ask about what he or she is pumping into our bloodstreams? Yet we DEMAND phthalate-free mac and cheese. What massively effective social training brought us to this?
I don't want to put any mercury into my body at all. So I stop eating tuna altogether. No more tuna casserole, no more tuna melts, no more tuna in my macaroni salad... none. Ayam, Starkist and Chicken of the Sea start an expensive campaign to force me and thousands like me to eat tuna. They say the tuna population is exploding and they're eating other important fish and disrupting the fragile ocean ecosystem. They call us "Antifishers." Even though I eat salmon and walleye and cod and trout and lots of other fish, I'm ignorantly called an Antifisher. People protest against me and spit that word at me in derision. There are protests and internet memes. "If you don't eat tuna, you might as well move to Japan and kill dolphins." You join one of these protest groups and you call me an Antifisher. Are you a hero, or are you just a soldier for corporate tuna?
The whole Antivaxer business is almost as stupid. I say almost because of the one argument they have in their favour, and that's the fact that people who don't get vaccinated could spread disease. So for people who are constantly around the old, young and more susceptible to disease, there is an element of irresponsibility to not getting vaccinated. I get it. But my question is why do we demand change on the part of the company in the KD scenario saying people shouldn't have to eat dangerous chemicals, yet some of the same people get mad at other people in the vaccine scenario saying they SHOULD have to inject dangerous chemicals into their bodies? If you think corporate brain seeding is not at work here, you are naïve.
I am not writing this to discourage vaccination. At all. I have lots of vaccinations and I am positive most, if not all contained thimerosal. What I want you to ask yourself if you have ever used the word, "antivaxer," or supported an argument against a person concerned with vaccine ingredients, or liked one of a thousand spurious memes online about how if you don't get a flu shot then you should get polio or whatever, think about this: If you met a person who wanted Kraft to remove the phthalates from its products, would you get angry at him/her and call him/her an antiphthal? It would be idiotic, wouldn't it? How about making it mandatory to eat multiple boxes a day? Some of us wouldn't mind so much, but it's still unreasonable.
Anyone who wants to mandate the flu shot has been duped. Big Pharma foams at the mouth at the thought of it. Mandatory! Hoo hoo haaa haaaa! That means a guaranteed market and you can set the price at whatever filthy thieving level you want. I don't even agree with mandatory CLEAN flu shots. If they had no toxic ingredients, you'd be silly not to get one, but making it mandatory is just draconian. Get the shit out of them and I think you'd see a LOT of so called antivaxers getting vaccinated. Maybe even most of them.
It's a far better solution than childishly calling people names, don't you think?
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