Name: What you need to know about 'forever chemicals'
Uploaded: 2026-02-20T18:15:00.000Z
Duration: 4 min 27 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

There's plenty of emotive news articles and social media posts about forever chemicals.

Some talk of baby food teeming with toxic additives, others about these chemicals being found in our blood or organs.

I'm Mark Miudovnik, I'm a material scientist and I'm really interested in whether our lifestyles are toxic.

You might have heard of something called pfas, short for perfluoro alkyl and polyfluoro alkyl substances.

These man made chemicals are widely used to enhance everyday items because they're resistant to heat, water and grease.

You'll find them in things like floor cleaners, fast food wrappers and waterproof clothes.

In a typical day we can encounter them pretty much everywhere.

But these substances have picked up a disturbing nickname.

Forever chemicals because they resist being broken down in nature and so stay in the environment forever.

Time for breakfast and you might fry an egg using a non stick pan.

This fabulous space age invention makes cooking and washing up so easy.

But it's PFAS that provides the magic non stick.

That said, nonstick pans are generally considered safe unless heated to over 260 degrees Celsius.

So don't overheat them and definitely don't clean them with steel wool.

This can release the non stick coating into your food and or the environment.

Unfortunately, that's not the only source of forever chemicals in your breakfast.

PFAS have been found in rice, meat, fish, butter, they're even in coffee.

They've also been found in the water we drink.

They were detected in 99% of samples of bottled water from 15 countries around the world.

And our personal care routines bring us into contact with yet more pfas.

These forever chemicals are prized by cosmetic companies for creating long lasting finishes in makeups and creams.

While some brands are phasing them out due to health concerns, others are sticking with them.

You leave your house and buy a coffee in a takeaway cup coated with the same family of chemicals.

In your office, you'll probably sit on a stain resistant chair or sofa again coated with pfas.

So what is this everyday exposure to chemicals doing to our bodies?

In one study in Singapore, researchers found that higher PFAS exposure might be linked to decreased fertility in women.

Other research linked pfas to testicular and kidney cancers, though this hasn't been categorically proven as cause.

Now to be clear, the specific PFAS that were studied aren't used in the UK anymore.

But the bigger issue is we still don't fully know how harmful other pfas might be.

Individually, regulators in the UK deem most chemicals in our products safe at low levels, but

assessing how hundreds of them interact over months, years or even decades as they accumulate in our bodies requires huge amounts of scientific research because there are thousands of pfas, which we're exposed to in a lot of different ways, and

the types of chemicals change over time, so still we know enough for it to be concerning.

For people exposed to high levels of pfas, the increased risk of disease has now been established in the courts.

In Sweden, having raised levels of PFAS in the blood is deemed to be a personal injury.

You can reduce your personal exposure to chemicals with known risks by reading product labels and questioning marketing claims.

For instance, you can choose not to buy a miraculous stain repellent sofa or a super long lasting cosmetic or a waterproof paper straw.

Once you find out they contain PFAS in the kitchen, you might decide you're willing to accept PFAS exposure by using non stick pans because you think the benefits of using less oil outweigh the risks.

Our bodies are resilient, but they're not indestructible.

By understanding the everyday chemicals we encounter, we can begin to understand the risks and benefits each product brings and so control our personal chemical footprint.

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