Sneaky Places At Home Hiding Toxic PFAS Forever Chemicals

By now you’ve heard about PFAS chemicals - the “forever chemicals” most notably associated with non-stick cookware. Its also with plastics pollution and endocrine dysfunction.

But PFAS can be found in many common household items and it is linked to many chronic diseases down the line.

If you have infants or toddlers at home, it's especially important to consider the chemicals that could be in your carpet. For example, rugs are a major source of PFAS exposure for little ones who are likely to put their hands in their mouths after touching the material. 

What are PFAS?

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, is a class of thousands of man-made substances that are common in everyday objects. Peer-reviewed studies have linked them to some cancers, decreased fertility, thyroid disease, and developmental delays, among other health issues.  linked to serious health issues like testicular and kidney cancer, liver damage, thyroid disease, and more, are also hiding out in some pretty surprising places in our everyday lives.

Thanks to their super-strong carbon–fluorine (C–F) bonds, PFAS are extremely stable, making them persistent and resistant to degradation.

PFAS last for decades without breaking down, earning them the "forever chemicals" nickname.

Sneaky places at home that hide PFAS

It may be impossible to completely avoid PFAS, but there are a few simple ways to reduce your exposure. By tackling some of the sneaky places they hide:

Wall paint: One study at Duke University last year found PFAS in six of 10 popular paint brands sampled. The study also determined that in some brands there was off-gassing of PFAS, which reduces the overall concentration of the chemical in the paint on the wall, but disperses it into the air, where it can be inhaled.

Food packaging: PFAS were developed in the 1940s to resist heat, grease, stains, and water. That means they've ended up in a lot of food packaging. That includes pizza boxes, microwave popcorn bags, some wrappers, and grease-resistant paper.

A 2019 study found that people had lower PFAS levels in their blood after eating at home, and higher levels after eating fast food or at restaurants.

Nonstick cookware: The coating used in nonstick cookware usually contains PFAS, and they can easily leach into your food at high heat and once the coating gets scratched.

In fact, overheating nonstick cookware at 570°F or higher leads to the release of harmful chemicals that can cause an illness called "Teflon flu," or polymer fume fever.

In makeup: Cosmetics that are smoothing, long-wear, or waterproof are the ones most likely to contain PFAS chemicals. Without it, your mascara would run. It's a good idea to read ingredient labels (look for any ingredients with ‘fluoro’ in the name).

The Green Science Policy Institute keeps a list of PFAS-free products, including cosmetics brands.

In dental floss: for years, dental floss brands have used PFAS chemicals, which is concerning since it’s a product that goes in our mouths! A 2019 study found that women who flossed with Oral-B Glide had higher levels of a specific PFAS chemical in their blood than women who didn’t use that particular floss. Make sure your floss is PFAS-free!

Soft contact lenses: a random sampling of 18 popular brands of soft lenses sent to an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)-certified lab all tested positive for PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

Menstrual care products: Mamavation and Environmental Health News conducted a study of PFAS in menstrual care products, including tampons, pads, sanitary napkins and period underwear, and found most of them contaminated to one degree or another with the forever chemicals.

Clothing and textiles: One of the ways fabrics become water resistant is by using PFAS chemicals! Jackets, raincoats, backpacks, and other outdoor gear are often treated with these chemicals.

These fabrics shed fibers that can travel through the house as dust, eventually getting ingested or inhaled.

These same chemicals are used in stain-resistant treatments for upholstered furniture, carpeting, and even curtains. There’s no easy way to know if your items have been treated, especially if they’re older. When it comes time to replace them, seek out brands that don’t use PFAS chemicals.

House dust: Those floaters in the air you see are made up of many things, including chemicals breaking down from various household products, including PFAS. One study found that certain PFAS chemicals were detected in 97-100% of samples! One straightforward solution is to keep your house as clean as possible. Use a water-damp cloth to remove dust (referred to as wet dusting), is a simple way to lower PFAS exposure in your home. lingers in the air and allows humans to breathe the chemicals into their lungs or ingest them. By cleaning regularly, along with opening windows to allow for airflow and ventilation, you can keep dust levels low in your home and reduce the amount of PFAS you swallow.

Tap water: Communities located near military bases, such as Newburgh, New York, often find their water supplies contaminated with PFAS. The pollution can also affect local fish populations and the people who eat them.

PFAS levels in community tap water in Massachusetts reveals a trend of increasing contamination, with total fluorinated compounds exhibiting a 5- to 320-fold rise over 25 years.

People living near military bases are more vulnerable to water contamination. For example, it emerged through internal U.S. documents obtained by journalist Jon Mitchell for The Japan Times that accidental leaks of PFOS-containing fire extinguishing foam at Kadena Air Base may be linked to the contamination of drinking water on the island.

Cellphones / Fingerprint-resistant smartphone screens: PFAS are used in pretty much anything to make things more resistant to grease and water. The circuit boards, semiconductors, and insulated wiring that use PFAS, as well as the touch screen, which has PFAS coating to resist fingerprints.

Studies on quats: Can Hand Sanitisers Harm Your Fertility?

“Quats,” short for quaternary ammonium compounds. They’ve been part of cleaning products for decades.

Because they were invented before most toxin regulations came into place, quats are mostly “grandfathered” into the chemicals used today.

Researchers are finding more and more about the harms of quats, including on fertility. In this article, we go over what research has found out about quats.

According to a pivotal study by researchers from Virginia Tech University and the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine, quats is a common ingredient in cleaning supplies that undermined fertility in both male and female mice.

the study

For the study, the researchers exposed female and male mice to quats. These were a mixture of two common quats  – alkyl dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride (ADBAC) and didecyl dimethyl ammonium chloride (DDAC).

After five weeks of daily exposure to the quat mix, female mice spent significantly less time in heat, and after eight weeks of exposure, ovulated less frequently and produced fewer viable embryos than female mice in the control group, the scientists reported.

They found that quats appeared to impair the reproductive systems of male mice even more dramatically.

quats were used to clean the mice cages and floors

The scientists fed small amounts of the quat mix to one group of male mice for eight days.

A second group of males wasn’t dosed deliberately but for seven weeks was housed in a facility where lab staffers conducted routine cleaning with the disinfectants.

In both groups, the male mice showed lower sperm concentrations and fewer swimming sperm than a control group of mice that was not exposed to the two quat chemicals under investigation.

You can read the study published in the journal Reproductive Toxicology here.

quats harm on fertility

This adds to earlier studies linking quats to fertility risks. An earlier study by research teams from Virginia Tech and Washington State University, found that female mice exposed to the quat combination took longer to achieve pregnancy, developed fewer pregnancies. and gave birth to smaller litters.

That December 2014 study has an interesting origin story. One of its lead researchers, Hrubec, noticed that the mice in her lab were reproducing less frequently. She only discovered the link after suspecting her lab assistants’ habit of wetting their hands with quat-laced disinfectant before handling the mice!

That brought Hrubec to an article in the journal Nature about Patricia Hunt, a prominent geneticist at Washington State, who had made similar observations in her own lab in 2005.

(Hunt is famed for another lab accident, back in 1998, that led her to discover that the endocrine-disrupting chemical bisphenol A was leaching from her lab animals’ plastic water bottles into their bodies. She told EWG in 2008 that BPA exposure scrambled the chromosomes in the animals’ eggs, rendering them infertile.)

post-pandemic increase in exposure to quats

During the pandemic, many people loaded up on disinfectants, hand sanitizers, and sanitizing wipes to keep possible viruses at bay.

It even changed many people’s habits to preferring sanitisers over simple hand washing, believing that the chemical wash helps them avoid getting sick.

However, now people are exposed to quats because of widespread use of these chemicals in homes, offices, stores, schools, medical facilities and elsewhere. EWG’s research on school cleaning supplies revealed quat-containing cleaners used in multiple school districts in California.

Quats are well-documented allergens and can cause otherwise healthy individuals to develop asthma.

It is highly ironic if, in a bid to rid ourselves of exposure to possible viruses, we expose ourselves to definite toxins and develop lung diseases and breathing difficulties instead.

References

1. Exposure to common quaternary ammonium disinfectants decreases fertility in mice, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0890623814001920

2. EWG’s Guide to Healthy Cleaning lists more than 250 cleaning products that contain quats.

Study: Scrotal temperature is increased in disposable plastic lined nappies

The one study that does give cloth diapers a leg up in health benefits for baby boys appeared in the October 2000 issue of the Disease in Childhood medical journal. In that article,

Disposable plastic-lined nappies have a long line of problems.

The study

German researchers measured the scrotal skin temperature in 48 healthy children aged 0–55 months (three age groups) for two 24 hour periods in randomised order (either cotton or disposable plastic lined nappies) using a portable, miniature recorder.

They found that the scrotal skin temperatures of baby boys were significantly higher when they wore disposable diapers than when they wore cloth.

They highlighted how the usual physiological testicular cooling mechanism is blunted and often completely abolished during plastic nappy use. Your baby’s bits are not able to regulate itself in a hot plastic nappy.

Higher scrotal temperatures, lower sperm counts

They suggest that prolonged use of disposable diapers as infants was an "important factor" contributing to the decline of sperm production among adult males. To make healthy sperm, you need a good environment for the sperm-producing parts of the body; that is, scrotal hypothermia is an important factor for normal spermatogenesis.

“Male reproductive health has deteriorated in recent decades. (…) increased testicular temperature in early childhood, due to the use of modern disposable plastic lined nappies (diapers), could be an important factor contributing to this decline.”

The interesting thing is that Proctor & Gamble conducted its own study and also found that scrotal skin temperatures increased for boys in disposable diapers.

References

1. Partsch C, Aukamp M, Sippell WG. Scrotal temperature is increased in disposable plastic lined nappies. Archives of Disease in Childhood 2000;83:364-368.

Study: Tight Underwear Harms Spermogenesis

Men who wear boxer shorts have higher sperm concentrations than men who wear tighter fitting underwear, according to recent research published in the journal Human Reproduction.

You can tell the fertility of a man by the underpants he prefers to wear, as researchers continue to gather data on how the style (and material) of underpants affect testicular function (i.e., sperm production).

The study

Researchers surveyed 656 male partners of couples seeking infertility treatment at a fertility center (this was in Boston, MA, USA, between 2000 and 2017). The men were an average age of 35.5 years old.

They completed a questionnaire on what style of underwear they had most frequently worn during the last 3 months using the following categories: ‘boxers’, ‘jockeys’, ‘bikinis’, ‘briefs’ or ‘other’.

For those of us unfamiliar with men’s fashion, the definitions were: "jockeys are longer than briefs, with length falling right above the knee, briefs generally extend to the middle of the thigh.”

They then analysed the men’s semen samples for reproductive hormone levels and neutral comet assays for sperm DNA damage.

What did the study conclude?

They found the type of underwear worn was significantly associated with sperm concentration, total sperm count and total motile count (Table II).

Compared to men who reported not usually wearing boxers (e.g. wore tighter underwear), men who reported most frequently wearing boxers had 25% (95% CI = 7, 31%) higher sperm concentration, 17% (95% CI = 0, 28) higher total sperm count and 33% (95% CI = 5, 41%) higher total motile count.

Men who reported most frequently wearing boxers also tended to have a higher percentage of motile sperm and a higher sperm count, compared to those who did not, although these differences failed to reach statistical significance (check out Table II in the study).

When all the non-boxer underwear types were examined separately, the largest differences in sperm concentration were found for men who reported wearing jockeys and briefs compared to those wearing most frequently boxers.

The differences were less pronounced with other types of underwear (Supplementary Fig. S1).

Men who reported most frequently wearing boxers had higher sperm concentration and total count, and lower FSH levels, compared to men who did not.

Boxer-wearing men had lower FSH hormones

Boxer shorts-wearing men had lower levels of follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), compared to men who most frequently wore briefs, "bikinis" (very brief briefs), "jockeys" (underwear that finishes just above the knee) or other tight-fitting underwear.

Though FSH stimulates sperm production, the researchers say that these findings suggest that it kicks into gear when it needs to compensate for testicular damage from increasing scrotal temperatures and decreasing sperm counts and concentration.

The impact of material

It goes without saying that the clothing (shirts, trousers and undertrousers) can effect heat regulation.

The type of material also affects heat regulation, as well as at least one other mechanism: electrostatic regulation. Check out these studies on how polyester underwear reduce sperm health.

Men’s fertility epidemic

Researchers have been raising the alarm on the plummeting sperm levels across Western societies in the last century. Environmental and lifestyle factors have been directly linked to poorer testicular function, such as increased exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals (Bergman et al., 2013; Hauser et al., 2015), higher prevalence of obesity (Finucane et al., 2011; Sermondade et al., 2013), deteriorating diet quality (Wong et al., 2000; USDA, 2017) and elevated scrotal temperatures (Ahmad et al., 2012; Zhang et al., 2015), among others.

Sperm production takes about three months from start to finish, so take the action to switch out your wardrobe, as it may take that long for your sperm quality to improve. For a long time the spotlight (and burden) lay pretty much on female fertility. However, a male fertility crisis has been looming, perhaps just below sight.

If you found this study interesting, check out my full guide to EMFs and your microbiome. It’s free, and you’ll find facts and resources on how electromagnetic fields can impact very basic cellular functions in your body.

References & Resources:

1. Link to the study: Lidia Mínguez-Alarcón, Audrey J Gaskins, Yu-Han Chiu, Carmen Messerlian, Paige L Williams, Jennifer B Ford, Irene Souter, Russ Hauser, Jorge E Chavarro, Type of underwear worn and markers of testicular function among men attending a fertility center, Human Reproduction, Volume 33, Issue 9, September 2018, Pages 1749–1756, https://doi.org/10.1093/humrep/dey259

2. Read how polyester underwear lowers sperm counts https://www.melaniechua.com/blog/2023/study-polyester-underwear-decreases-sperm-count-and-motility

Study: Polyester Underwear Decreases Sperm Count and Motility

Your daily choice of underwear really can have an impact on your fertility, and men, it has a direct effect on your sperm.

The study

Twenty-four dogs were divided into two equal groups, one of which wore cotton underpants and the other polyester ones.[1]

Seven dogs wearing nothing were used as controls. The underwear was fashioned to fit loosely in the scrotal area so as to avoid its insulating effect.

The dogs wore these continuously for 24 months during which the researchers measured the semen character, testicular temperature, hormones (serum testosterone, follicle stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone, prolactin) and testicular biopsy were examined.

The study results

By the end of 24 months, the dogs wearing polyester underpants had lower sperm count and slower sperms.

After removing the polyester underpants, semen improved gradually to normal in 10 dogs. However, sperm counts remained low for two dogs.

other studies on the effects of wearing polyester clothing

In another study done in 2007 by the same researcher, the electrostatic potential from polyester garments was found to have an 'injurious effect on the ovarian and placental function,' which in turn caused low serum progesterone and spontaneous abortions.

The strong dyes used on synthetic fabrics, subjects tested contracted lymphomatoid dermatitis and different other cutaneous reactions.

Another study in 1992 checked out how polyester worn as a sling could work as a contraceptive for men. Fourteen men wore “polyester slings” for 12 months. The researchers tracked the semen character, testicular size, rectal-testicular temperature difference, serum reproductive hormones and testicular biopsy.

They also measured the electrostatic potentials generated between the scrotum and the polyester.

By the end of the 12 months, all men became azoospermic with an average of 139.6 +/- 20.8 sd days, with decrease in both testicular volume (P less than 0.05) and rectal-testicular temperature difference!

After the men gave up wearing the polyester sling underwear, it took an average of period of 156.6 +/- 14.8 sd days for their sperm to return to average.

The researchers concluded:

“The azoospermic effect of the polyester sling seems to be due to two mechanisms: 1) the creation of an electrostatic field across the intrascrotal structures, and 2) disordered thermoregulation. To conclude, fertile men can be rendered azoospermic by wearing the polyester sling. It is a safe, reversible, acceptable and inexpensive method of contraception in men.”

I don’t know about but that "polyester sling” sounds like most underwear to me.

What does this mean for your health?

Clothing can disrupt the electrostatic potentials generated by the polyester fabric play a role in it.

The lymphatic system becomes overwhelmed with yet another source of toxins; the toxic polyester fabrics that we wear directly on our largest organ, our skin. It slows down and becomes sluggish, leading to inflammation and disease.

Sperm production takes about three months from start to finish, so take the action to switch out your wardrobe, as it may take that long for your sperm quality to improve. For a long time the spotlight (and burden) lay pretty much on female fertility. However, a male fertility crisis has been looming, perhaps just below sight.

If you found this study interesting, check out my full guide to EMFs and your microbiome. It’s free, and you’ll find facts and resources on how electromagnetic fields can impact very basic cellular functions in your body.

References

1. Shafik A. Effect of different types of textile fabric on spermatogenesis: an experimental study. Urol Res. 1993;21(5):367-70. doi: 10.1007/BF00296839. PMID: 8279095. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8279095/

2. Shafik A. Contraceptive efficacy of polyester-induced azoospermia in normal men. Contraception. 1992 May;45(5):439-51. doi: 10.1016/0010-7824(92)90157-o. PMID: 1623716. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1623716/

3. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23631520-600-were-heading-for-a-male-fertility-crisis-and-were-not-prepared/