Spent five weeks in early summer 2024 working out of the NFDG office to test popular Silicon Valley foods and beverages for plastic chemicals. We wanted to know: How many plastic chemicals are we consuming, and how bad are they for us?

Learnings about plastic chemical research:

1. Plastic chemical researchers are very gracious and open to sharing their learnings, even with naive newcomers. In our initial chats with experts, I was really pleasantly surprised to experience such consistent support and enthusiasm for what we were trying to do.
2. There are no 'smoking gun' studies in plastic chemical toxicology for humans (or if there are, we were unable to find any after months of research and speaking to experts!). A causal link is impossible to prove ethically, and even if researchers found a link in a lab setting, real life effects of plastic chemicals in context with co-exposures to other chemicals could look very different.
3. Plastic chemicals are ubiquitous. Not only do they exist in all kinds of human-made things like clothes and shampoo, they also get passed into the environment — they're in the air, the water, the land.
4. Lots of people can do a 7/10 job at plastic chemical testing, but only a few can do a 10/10 job. Eliminating sources of contamination is the biggest technical challenge in plastic chemical testing — even something like wearing scented hand lotion can throw off results. Someone who does a 10/10 job more efficiently identifies and removes sourced of contamination, using judgment they've built through extensive practical experience.
5. In science reporting it's possible to write something that, while objectively true, gives the wrong impression because it lacks the proper context. A paper could have something like an alarmingly high number quantifying phthalate levels, but on closer inspection that number is actually in nanograms and orders of magnitude below the levels of phthalates that were linked with negative effects in the literature.

Other learnings:

1. Don't confuse kindess for clarity
2. Post weekly summaries of your work
3. Create initial assumptions and find a way to test them ASAP