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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Most of the time, we measure a health effect but we don’t really know why. But a big reason is probably how PFAS partitions, or what substances it groups with in the body. Most substances group with water or fats. PFAS is weird because it groups with proteins. Since proteins are what perform most of our body’s chemical reactions, PFAS can have an effect by changing how well these proteins work. That might show up as changes in which of our genes are active, or it might affect the proteins that do other reactions more directly, like those which make fatty acids, or those which break down toxins in the liver. We don’t have a ton of direct evidence that I know of how these effects happen. But there are studies that try to model how PFAS interacts with certain proteins (“molecular docking” studies) to see where and how strong PFAS sticks to them.
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