[HN Gopher] Journal that published faulty black plastic study re...
___________________________________________________________________
Journal that published faulty black plastic study removed from
science index
Author : namanyayg
Score : 84 points
Date : 2024-12-23 14:46 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| latentcall wrote:
| I doubt this matters for the general population. My folks had
| already thrown out their black plastic utensils.
| deskr wrote:
| Sadly you don't even need a mistaken research to cause damage.
| One nutter on youtube is enough.
| lores wrote:
| Good. Not catching a simple multiplication error is a terrible
| indictment of their peer review process. On the other hand, peer
| review is doomed and getting more doomed by the day, and I expect
| more and more journals will fail if the quality criteria get
| fairly applied.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I never thought of peer review as being meant to verify
| calculations.
|
| But rather to ensure the experimental methodology was sound, it
| cites the appropriate previous work, that it is significant
| enough, etc.
|
| I actually think that calculation verification and statistical
| significance verification is a great idea, but shouldn't be
| done by "peers", but rather someone who specializes only in
| that. More of a type of auditor.
| burkaman wrote:
| I don't think peer reviewers need to be redoing every
| calculation, but you might expect them to be familiar enough
| with the field that "toxins in kitchen utensils are close to
| the EPA limit" would be surprising enough that they'd
| question it and double check it.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| How many researchers do you think are working on cookware
| toxins? "Peer" is used broadly here.
|
| The article made waves because it didn't surprise _anyone_
| , because in fact a ton of household staples are full of
| toxins (spices are full of lead, etc).
| pessimizer wrote:
| > The article made waves because it didn't surprise
| anyone
|
| So the reason it made waves is because it confirmed
| everyone's previous biases. Which is why people defend it
| even when that "confirmation" was based on an error of
| simple arithmetic.
|
| Reminds me of a bunch of studies that were taken out by
| Excel errors, like that economics failure about national
| debt going higher than GDP being some sort of trigger for
| societal failure. The people who boosted that study were
| the people who were saying the same thing, with no study,
| for no other reason than that the numbers are of a
| similar magnitude. After it was shown that the study
| showed no such thing, its supporters insisted that it was
| still true because _of course it was true._
|
| https://stanfordreview.org/clarifying-the-implications-
| of-th...
| burkaman wrote:
| I don't agree that it didn't surprise anyone. Flame
| retardants are surprising, black plastic being worse than
| others is surprising, common household tools nearly at
| the legal toxin limit is surprising. Even the general
| idea of plastic being potentially bad for you is still
| new information for a lot of people.
|
| Your comment is the first time I've ever heard anything
| about lead in spices, and I read a lot of news. In my
| experience, very few things are actually "common
| knowledge", it just seems that way when everyone in our
| particular social circles knows something.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > common household tools nearly at the legal toxin limit
| is surprising
|
| Personally, I would expect a lot of products to be near a
| lot of limits for various toxins. Especially around food,
| my expectation is for limits to be safe with a nice-sized
| buffer, sometimes too big of a buffer. The point of
| having limits is that products inside them are fine.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Not catching a simple multiplication error is a terrible
| indictment of their peer review process_
|
| Most papers are full of errors nobody ever catches (or cares to
| catch).
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Yes, as an academic scientist when I occasionally need to
| actually reproduce something from published literature to use
| in my own research- I almost always find at least half a
| dozen errors, even in a well respected journal. The only way
| to really find such errors is to painstakingly reproduce the
| work, and that is not part of the publication process- it
| would double the time and cost.
| wyager wrote:
| "Peer review" has been next to useless in most fields for the
| last 50-100 years at least. We need a new epistemic benchmark.
| PunchTornado wrote:
| I reviewed articles and never verified their calculations
| because it is not part of what a reviewer should do. A reviewer
| should never try and replicate the experiment or crunch
| numbers. It should look at the methodology, background,
| significance, possible enhancements etc.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Peer review is not an important part of the scientific method
| actually. It's not even necessary. There was no peer review for
| most of what we now take for granted in science. The Journal
| Nature did not make peer review standard until 1973.
|
| Science is about making reality the arbiter of truth. What is
| true is what you can demonstrate in an experiment pretty much
| anywhere. Science is self-correcting not because other
| scientists take a look at your work before it gets published,
| but because a theory that is not backed up by reality will be
| harder to build on, make worse predictions, and generally not
| be useful for actual work. It doesn't matter how much "hype"
| built up around LK-99 for example, because you could not build
| anything out of it, because it didn't work as claimed, and no
| amount of belief can overcome that.
|
| Science is self correcting because the universe is not
| convinced by rhetoric, and will only ever follow it's own
| rules.
|
| Tellingly, scientists who have been around for a while do not
| consider a published paper as especially meaningful. They do
| not consider peer review as vouching for a paper's correctness.
| They have seen hundreds of papers pass peer review and make it
| into Science and Nature and turn out to be bunk. No scientific
| process will be perfect, so some amount of papers should be
| expected to be wrong, no matter how genuinely careful and
| perfect the scientists who wrote it were.
|
| It's really sad how over-indexed the lay-public has gotten on
| peer review. It's just not how science works. It can still be
| somewhat useful for more popular journals who have to pick and
| choose what to publish anyway, but it's only useful if the peer
| reviewers are themselves domain experts in a rigorous and
| formalized scientific discipline.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| As an academic scientist that does peer review- I would never
| consider redoing math unless the conclusion seemed suspicious.
| Peer reviewers don't have a lot of time and need to assume good
| faith and careful basic competency from the authors. We spend
| realistically about an hour to review a study that might have
| taken a whole team of authors half a decade. Mostly we are
| looking to confirm that the work is presented clearly, and that
| the evidence is sufficient to support the conclusions. Peer
| review is little more than proofreading from an unbiased 3rd
| party.
| userbinator wrote:
| In the case of these journals, "peer" simply means "someone who
| shares the same agenda", and they won't care about the science
| or even the numerical results as long as the conclusion agrees
| with their ideology. The extremist envrionmentalists have been
| pushing their idiotic agenda for far too long, and it's good to
| see the sane people are now pushing back.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The study was off by a factor of 10, and the levels of flame
| retardants found was actually under the FDA guidelines for
| maximum daily exposure.
|
| However, in my own assessment, my maximum daily exposure to
| ingested flame retardants should be zero, rather than some off
| the cuff figure that was certainly done with appeasing industry
| in mind.
|
| So yes, I still ditched my plastic cookware in favor of stainless
| steel and silicone, and am still happy that the erroneous study
| got my attention.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Agree. I was not shocked by the levels of flame retardants but
| that they were present at all.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Why should this be shocking?
|
| 1) Make thing that operates on hot surfaces/ near fire
|
| 2) Materials thing is made of known for being flammable
|
| 3) Add extra chemicals to help stop thing from catching on
| fire
|
| Seems pretty logical to me.
| Reason077 wrote:
| Because many of these flame retardants are not only
| environmentally toxic, but seriously incompatible with
| human life.
|
| They shouldn't be present in products designed to come in
| contact with food, when many good alternatives are
| available (inherently heat-resistant thermoplastics,
| silicone, stainless steel, etc)
| pfdietz wrote:
| > but seriously incompatible with human life.
|
| There is no good evidence of this for the chemical in
| question.
| tannedNerd wrote:
| So give it your kids raw then! Should do them no harm
| right?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Teach your kids it's ok to make shit up when it's in a
| good cause. Should do them no harm, right?
| Reason077 wrote:
| Brominated Flame Retardants?! It's pretty widely accepted
| that these are highly toxic. The question regulators have
| been looking at [1] is how dangerous they are when used
| in domestic furniture, curtains, etc, where children
| might be exposed and it might be present in household
| dust. At least when used in these products, the presence
| of BFRs hopefully does more good than harm, by preventing
| fires.
|
| But nobody ever thought anyone would actually be crazy
| enough to put BFRs in _kitchen utensils_ , where
| perfectly good, and cheap, alternatives exist!
|
| [1] https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-
| under-t...
| pfdietz wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decabromodiphenyl_ether
|
| > In 2004, ATSDR wrote "Nothing definite is known about
| the health effects of PBDEs in people. Practically all of
| the available information is from studies of laboratory
| animals. Animal studies indicate that commercial decaBDE
| mixtures are generally much less toxic than the products
| containing lower brominated PBDEs. DecaBDE is expected to
| have relatively little effect on the health of humans."
|
| But I'm sure you're right. After all, history tells us
| that if someone is widely accepted to be a witch, they
| must be a witch.
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| For my part, I'm certain your counter-argument is the
| more accurate take. After all, history tells us that such
| studies are never quietly funded by the industries most
| likely to profit off of positive results, without regard
| to human cost.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The flame retardants are not intentionally added to the
| materials.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| You forgot:
|
| 4) Profit
|
| Then it's entirely not shocking.
| croes wrote:
| The problem were not the flame retardants per se but the
| black plastic added from other recycled electronic devices
| to get the black color flame retardants.
| burkaman wrote:
| Wood is also known for being flammable, but wooden cooking
| tools are very common. I think anyone who cooks a lot has
| an intuitive understanding that just touching something hot
| is not enough to make anything in a kitchen catch on fire,
| and that home kitchen fires are relatively rare even with a
| gas stove involved. So it is surprising to learn that there
| are flame retardants in these tools because they clearly
| aren't necessary.
| hollerith wrote:
| The flame retardants were added to the plastic cases of
| electronics, which at the end of their lives got recycled
| into kitchen utensils.
|
| That is why white plastic utensils are not being called
| out: although white utensils are common, white
| electronics cases are rare, so the white utensils do not
| have high levels of retardants.
| burkaman wrote:
| I understand, I'm just explaining why the average person
| wouldn't expect to find flame retardants in kitchen
| tools. It is not a logical assumption like the other
| comment claimed.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > my maximum daily exposure to ingested flame retardants should
| be zero
|
| What does this even mean? You refuse to eat anything that could
| possibly put out of a fire, or if included within anything
| else, could slow down the progress of fire when that thing
| burns?
|
| I don't understand taking pride in irrationality. If you have
| some evidence (or even some reasonable suspicion) that the
| specific chemical could be harmful in the amount that you
| consume it, avoid it. It's weird for me to brag that I'd avoid
| something despite any evidence, because somebody mentioned it
| once and I refuse to let it go. What if what you replace it
| with causes cancer, but has no effect on fires?
| whatshisface wrote:
| They obviously meant halogenated, dangerous flame retardants,
| which are approved for use in consumer electronics but not
| utensils, not water...
|
| If there was a thread on the respiratory hazards of airborne
| micron-sized particles, I guarantee that someone in the
| comments section would say "I can't believe these
| unscientific yokels are afraid of clouds."
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| "Dangerous" depends on dose, and zero is impossible.
|
| If someone has a plan to inhale no micron-sized particles,
| their plan will not work.
| whatshisface wrote:
| When people say "zero" they mean "negligible," because a
| negligible deviation for zero is negligible. :-)
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Well if that's the plan, distinguishing actual zero from
| negligible, step one is figuring out whether the leeching
| from the existing products is negligible or not. No
| assuming that non-zero presence means much.
| raydiak wrote:
| So, taking some simple measures to reduce the amount of
| scientifically proven harmful synthetic chemicals a
| person puts in their mouth...is unscientific because you
| want to quibble about the statistical precision of the
| wording of a conversational comment. The American FDA
| says "it's not enough to worry about, trust us" while
| Americans now ingest up to a shopping bag worth of
| plastic each month, companies like Dow and DuPont spend
| literal millions per year lobbying, and the multi-
| trillion-dollar healthcare industry controls a double-
| digit percentage of the American economy and labor force.
| This must be the kind of thinking which results from
| excessive consumption of flame retardants and Brawndo.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I didn't say that, thanks for asking.
|
| I just think that going for "zero" is usually a flawed
| plan. Things are tradeoffs and decisions should recognize
| that. Everything is toxic in different ways. Some options
| are clearly better than others, but the analysis needs
| more effort than looking at a single number.
| raydiak wrote:
| Actually I think going for zero would be an admirable
| goal here, if pursued in a healthy balance stopping short
| of obsessive phobia-driven mania. But that aside, nobody
| is denying that there are other sources of various
| harmful substances besides kitchen utensils. In no way,
| shape, or form does that invalidate the perfectly logical
| sentiment of "I wish I could have zero synthetic plastics
| and flame retardants entering my body so I at least
| stopped putting plastic utensils in my mouth and food."
| You do not need more studies, measurements, thresholds,
| comparison of relative contribution of various sources,
| or a feasibility analysis of sealing yourself in a giant
| glass terrarium to justify every word of that basic
| sentiment including "zero."
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Stopping a single source is not going to stop you from
| ingesting synthetic plastics and flame retardants. And
| you need to replace the utensils with something else, the
| cost of which might be worse in not only money but
| possibly health too, if you make a snap decision based on
| a single factor instead of the entire picture.
|
| And sometimes the exposure already is effectively zero,
| making any action at all a waste of time.
|
| I don't know if this case is safe or not, but acting
| based on a single variable is a bad idea, especially
| without keeping reasonable expectations at the forefront.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| It's not irrational to avoid exposure to unknown or poorly
| studied chemicals. Avoiding something for which one has no
| evidence in either direction is a good risk avoidance
| strategy. In general, when it comes to my body, I prefer a
| whitelist vs a blacklist approach.
| tantalor wrote:
| It is rational (you have a cogent reason for doing do) but
| the reasoning is specious, because you are singling out one
| specific thing to avoid. If you listed all such substances
| fitting the criteria "unknown or poorly studied" then you
| would have to live in a bubble to avoid them all.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| The point is to single out and avoid whatever is
| realistically possible, for you. Like you said, you would
| have to live in a bubble to avoid them all!
| arcticbull wrote:
| > What does this even mean? You refuse to eat anything that
| could possibly put out of a fire, or if included within
| anything else, could slow down the progress of fire when that
| thing burns?
|
| Brominated flame retardants. Polybrominated diphenyl ethers
| were called out in the study.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybrominated_diphenyl_ethers
| croes wrote:
| How much of the limit would you eat?
|
| Is 99% okay, or 80%, or 10%?
|
| Especially when the intake could easily be avoided by not
| using recycled electronic's enclosures.
|
| How much risk are you willing to take for a company's profit?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| At an individual level, sure - there is tons of conflicting
| information out there so you just need to use your best
| judgement to decide what to do for you.
|
| At a broader level, though, I am certainly _not_ happy this
| erroneous study got my (and many other people 's) attention,
| _because it 's conclusions were complete bullshit_. I don't
| understand these kinds of unscientific apologetics - it's the
| exact same kind of thinking that leads people down the road of
| "Sure, that study of vaccine implications in autism may have
| been completely fraudulent, but I'm still glad it got my
| attention because it informed me of all the random chemicals in
| vaccines!"
|
| I personally did _not_ ditch my plastic cookware, and I 'm glad
| I didn't, because so far there is zero actual evidence that one
| needs to.
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| On the flipside, blindly accepting industry safety standards
| is how we ended up with lead paint and asbestos everywhere.
| Insufficient evidence of harm is not the same as proof of no
| harm.
|
| We can live in a world of nuance where we refute the specific
| claims of this study while still making choices to
| proactively avoid potential harm from plastic products. Many
| other valid studies are finding microplastic in our bodies
| and environment at levels we didn't remotely suspect before.
| croes wrote:
| So 8% of the limit of toxic is okay for you even if they can
| be made with 0%?
|
| Where was the problem with 80% then, it's still below the
| limit.
|
| It adds up with all other sources of harmful materials.
|
| Less is better
| ars wrote:
| Did you catch the part that most of the plasticware had zero
| flame retardant?
|
| Rather they were just a few outliers that completely threw the
| average off?
| croes wrote:
| Wasn't that most didn't contain flame retardants recycled
| from electronic devices?
|
| The problem isn't the flame retardant but the source and for
| black kitchen utensils they sometimes used old plastic from
| TVs and such
| Thorrez wrote:
| An off-by-10x multiplication error in a published paper?
|
| How about this off-by-100x multiplication error I discovered in a
| published paper[1]?
|
| AFAIK, that paper hasn't been retracted. I was meaning to contact
| the author and publisher, but never got around to it. A
| mitigating factor is that the error is made in regard to a side
| topic of the paper, not the main topic of the paper.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27419018
| seltzered_ wrote:
| The article is framed in a weird way. Theres a number of
| journals which have been deranked recently (mdpi, 'frontiers
| in' https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/finland-
| downgrades... ) Also, the author said they plan to issue a
| correction.
|
| See https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/black-plastic
|
| "Lead author Megan Liu, science and policy manager at Toxic-
| Free Future, described the mistake as a "typo" and said her co-
| authors have submitted a correction to the journal. The error
| remains in the online version but Liu said she anticipates it
| will be updated soon.
|
| "However, it is important to note that this does not impact our
| results," Liu told National Post. "The levels of flame
| retardants that we found in black plastic household items are
| still of high concern, and our recommendations remain the
| same.""
|
| The correction/corrigendum note is here:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004565352...
| vinni2 wrote:
| I trashed all my black plastic utensils and bought stainless
| steel ones. I can't decide if I did the right thing or not.
| mentalgear wrote:
| It is. Stainless steel or glass (chemically inert) are far
| superior. Even 10x less flame retardants and other chemicals
| are still way too much. Not to mention the FDA exposure levels
| being too high.
| vinni2 wrote:
| So paper was still right to warn us about it but not for the
| right reasons.
| tredre3 wrote:
| The paper was right and for the right reasons. They just
| decided to lie to catch more headlines (nobody would have
| cared about it being high but under the FDA limit). It was
| just more effective to say "oopsie our bad but it changes
| nothing to our recommendations".
|
| I'm sure the authors weight the impact on their reputation
| versus the benefits of catching more headlines for the
| public good.
|
| I think it all worked as intended.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Stainless steel production makes hexavalent chromium, and
| glass can chip and be ingested without realizing. All hazards
| in moderation.
| jjulius wrote:
| Yes, but you're leaving out some important context, context
| which still renders them safer than black plastic.
|
| Regarding stainless steel, that's during production of the
| item, not during cooking. You'd have to be welding, or
| using heat hot enough to cut through the steel, to release
| it in your own kitchen.
|
| Regarding glass, you can check for chips and the condition
| of your glass far better than you can for microplastics.
| One is also likely to leech (plastics) over the course of
| its life, while one is not (glass).
| aeonik wrote:
| It's not necessarily just heat.
|
| Salt, acid, alkaline solutions could potentially lower
| the temperature at which hexavalent Chromium appears.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I did, too. I did not have very many though. What I learned is
| you can poach an egg in a steel ladle. Worth the $5?
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| Considering how much more aggressive you can get with stainless
| steel during cooking and cleaning versus plastic/nonstick I'd
| say you still did good
| terribleperson wrote:
| As someone who cooks only occasionally, my black plastic
| utensils wear like shit and are impossible to get odors out of.
| I much prefer the stainless steel ones, or even wood. Wood
| honestly wears better than plastic, except it doesn't melt.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Ah, the revenge of the mighty plastic industry pulling its
| strings.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Do you think the error is fake somehow, or do you think this is
| too much punishment for the number of retractions the journal
| has had?
| ajdude wrote:
| When this study was first published, Adam Ragusea did a video on
| it[1]. 12 minutes in, he points out that he thinks there is a
| basic arithmetic error in the paper. This was well before
| anything was on the news, and he was the only one talking about
| that before everything blew up. I'm surprised more people didn't
| catch it.
|
| [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=58HUM40gDPU
| johnea wrote:
| I never read any of these articles, but I also never use plastic
| cookware.
|
| Heat does leach plastisizers and other chemicals into food.
|
| Microplastics do move from cookware into food.
|
| I have a set of pots/pans and accompanying utensils, all
| stainless, that I've used for decades, and plan to use for the
| rest of my life.
|
| This also constitutes a reduction in constantly produced plastic
| waste.
|
| Try not to use ANY plastic...
| dang wrote:
| Related (in reverse order):
|
| _Huge math error corrected in black plastic study; authors say
| it doesn 't matter_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42437201 - Dec 2024 (112
| comments)
|
| _A simple math error sparked a panic about black plastic kitchen
| utensils_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42400008 - Dec
| 2024 (176 comments)
|
| _Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41996156 - Oct 2024 (845
| comments)
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