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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The ones I read the most about are not the final products (Teflon) but the surfactants used to help make the Teflon. For ELI5 purposes, a surfactant acts like a “soap”. It’s not really reacting but it’s changing the behavior of things near membranes.
Initial testing in the 1940s showed no *acute* toxicity but those were at low levels. Because your body can’t digest or metabolize it then the substances will just keep building up in your body over time. Too much of a foreign substance in your body will start to have an effect eventually, if only because it “gets in the way”. So, the long term effects have not been good. It eventually messes with your hormones. And clean up is really hard because the molecules are almost designed not to be cleaned up.
This might have been ELI4, maybe someone can chime in with more details.
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