Anyone know chemistry? I'm lost!!

[Pippa_the_Prius]

  Good Morning friends 
I've been interested in the EPA's developments on regulations for "forever chemicals" or PFAS. I wrote a little paper one it just to try and wrap my head around it but I'm still so lost on if fluorinated carbon atoms are a sure-fire tell of a PFAS or if it's two or more in a chain.

Has anyone else learned about these? Here's my paper I wrote to try and understand, it's cited appropriately.

I always worry about chemicals in our food! But there's only so much you can do.

-NOTE-

I've also learned that the main pesticide breaks down into PFAS so there's that!

[Thorn]

Hi, I majored in biochemistry in 2023 and I've been working as a lab tech for almost a year at this point. I'm not an expert on PFAS by any means, but I know a bit about chemistry from that angle. The citations look pretty decent, but from what I'm seeing in the paper, there's a lot more in depth research you could do if you want to learn more about this topic. To get started,

that looks into how PFAS as a class of chemicals are defined and categorized. It's very jargon heavy, but it has more specifics around the current discussions in the field over how and why different chemicals are included under the PFAS umbrella. This paper goes over how and why some types of PFAS chemicals are used in the first place. This EPA site provides a good general plain language overview of the topic at hand.

goes in further depth about how PFAS chemicals affect food and the environment as they progressively build up in a food chain, and

goes into the health effects of some types of PFAS on humans. A series of panel publications from 2011-2012 also discuss how some types of PFAS have been linked to the development of

,

,

,

, and

. There has been an interest in the scientific community in trying to mitigate these issues, especially through means of cleaning up polluted areas. In recent studies, some bacteria have been found to break down PFAS, even though the chemicals were traditionally thought to be stable and thus near impossible to break down.

All of this is just a quick overview based on a couple of google searches I ran at 1 in the morning. I'd strongly advise looking further into this topic and at more resources if this is a topic that interests you, but these should serve as good starting points.

[Pippa_the_Prius]

Thank you! I've been looking into them more and there's so much info out there it can be so confusing so I really appreciate the articles provided and the input from someone who knows much more about this type of stuff!