When I hear talking about forever chemicals, they are usually described as “chemicals are not affected by naturally occurring reactions, and that accumulate in the bodies of living beings”. By accumulating, they cause all sorts of health issues.
What I don’t understand is how they cause these health issues. If these chemicals do not participate in regular reactions, how do they cause issues?
I am not claiming that the research in the subject is wrong, I am missing the link between “these things don’t react with anything” and “these things still cause all sorts of health problems”.
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A piece of glass jabbed into your gut will not chemically react with any part of your body, but that doesn’t mean it won’t disrupt your health.
A piece of glass jabbed into your gut will not chemically react with any part of your body, but that doesn’t mean it won’t disrupt your health.
A piece of glass jabbed into your gut will not chemically react with any part of your body, but that doesn’t mean it won’t disrupt your health.
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competitive inhibitors obstruct enzyme activity without getting “used up” doing that.
Let’s make up a forever chemical called anti-starch, it’s a competitive inhibitor for amylase, the enzyme that breaks starch into sugar that we can then absorb and use. At a “normal” level of presence, 1/100 times your amylase enzyme tries to digest a starch it latches onto an anti-starch instead, translating to a 1% reduction in how efficiently you digest starch, so you only get 99% of the energy out of a potato.
But because it builds up indefinitely as you get older that ratio starts to go up and up and eventually you’re only like 20-30% effective at digesting starch, and can die of starvation despite eating thousands of calories of potatoes.
This same thing can happen with literally any substance that is “competitive” with a natural substance – hormone receptors, enzymes, even neurotransmitters. These substances are essentially just clogging the pipeline and making our systems less and less efficient over time. Most of the time this is easily solved by just making more of the appropriate receptor/enzyme – in the above anti-starch example your body would just make more amylase until it was able to digest at 100% efficiency – but some things are harder to fix or upgrade to overcome the clog, and so they eventually degrade function so far that you can’t survive.
competitive inhibitors obstruct enzyme activity without getting “used up” doing that.
Let’s make up a forever chemical called anti-starch, it’s a competitive inhibitor for amylase, the enzyme that breaks starch into sugar that we can then absorb and use. At a “normal” level of presence, 1/100 times your amylase enzyme tries to digest a starch it latches onto an anti-starch instead, translating to a 1% reduction in how efficiently you digest starch, so you only get 99% of the energy out of a potato.
But because it builds up indefinitely as you get older that ratio starts to go up and up and eventually you’re only like 20-30% effective at digesting starch, and can die of starvation despite eating thousands of calories of potatoes.
This same thing can happen with literally any substance that is “competitive” with a natural substance – hormone receptors, enzymes, even neurotransmitters. These substances are essentially just clogging the pipeline and making our systems less and less efficient over time. Most of the time this is easily solved by just making more of the appropriate receptor/enzyme – in the above anti-starch example your body would just make more amylase until it was able to digest at 100% efficiency – but some things are harder to fix or upgrade to overcome the clog, and so they eventually degrade function so far that you can’t survive.
competitive inhibitors obstruct enzyme activity without getting “used up” doing that.
Let’s make up a forever chemical called anti-starch, it’s a competitive inhibitor for amylase, the enzyme that breaks starch into sugar that we can then absorb and use. At a “normal” level of presence, 1/100 times your amylase enzyme tries to digest a starch it latches onto an anti-starch instead, translating to a 1% reduction in how efficiently you digest starch, so you only get 99% of the energy out of a potato.
But because it builds up indefinitely as you get older that ratio starts to go up and up and eventually you’re only like 20-30% effective at digesting starch, and can die of starvation despite eating thousands of calories of potatoes.
This same thing can happen with literally any substance that is “competitive” with a natural substance – hormone receptors, enzymes, even neurotransmitters. These substances are essentially just clogging the pipeline and making our systems less and less efficient over time. Most of the time this is easily solved by just making more of the appropriate receptor/enzyme – in the above anti-starch example your body would just make more amylase until it was able to digest at 100% efficiency – but some things are harder to fix or upgrade to overcome the clog, and so they eventually degrade function so far that you can’t survive.
The PFAS chemicals we know the most about are toxic at very low exposure levels to humans and wildlife. Some of them, like pfos are bioaccumulative, which means their concentration builds up in your cells over time.
Not all the toxicology is published, but PFOS scared a lot of people when they realized how low those levels were.
Medically, PFOS causes liver & thyroid damage, lowered fertility, increases obesity, hormone suppression and antibody suppression.
Each individual PFAS chemical has its own toxicology characteristics.
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