You know, the rectum has very soft tissue that is going to be much more absorbent than the skin on most of your body.
Wiping your ass with these chemicals is going to cause a large amount of them to be absorbed.
All toilet paper from across the globe checked for toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” contained the compounds, and the waste flushed down toilets and sent to sewage treatment plants probably creates a significant source of water pollution, new research has found.
Once in the wastewater plant, the chemicals can be packed in sewage sludge that is eventually spread on cropland as fertilizer, or spilt into waterways.
“Toilet paper should be considered as a potentially major source of PFAS entering wastewater treatment systems,” the study’s authors wrote.
PFAS are a class of about 14,000 chemicals typically used to make thousands of consumer products resist water, stains and heat. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down, and they are linked to cancer, fetal complications, liver disease, kidney disease, autoimmune disorders and other serious health issues.
The study checked 21 major toilet paper brands in North America, western Europe, Africa, Central America and South America, but it did not name the brands.
The peer-reviewed University of Florida report did not consider the health implications of people wiping with contaminated toilet paper. PFAS can be dermally absorbed, but no research on how it may enter the body during the wiping process exists. However, that exposure is “definitely worth investigating, said David Andrews, senior scientist with the Environmental Working group, a public health non-profit that tracks PFAS pollution.
Brands that used recycled paper had just as much PFAS as those that did not, and it may be that there is no avoiding PFAS in toilet paper, said Jake Thompson, the study’s lead author and a University of Florida grad student
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The average American uses 57 pounds of toilet paper a year and more than 19bn pounds of toilet paper flushed every year in the US. The study also checked wastewater at eight wastewater treatment plants and found it is likely that 6:2 diPAP in toilet paper represents much of the compound found in wastewater.
There are some things about the culture of Asia and Eastern Europe (and so on) that I like and some things I don’t like, but the Western toilet paper thing is just wacko.
People all over the world never used toilet paper – they washed their ass with water. Frankly, using toilet paper is not remotely hygienic. If you just think about the consistency of your shits, there is no way you are going to remove the majority of the poop from your ass with a piece of paper, unless you’ve got very runny stool. For any solid shit, you’re mostly just rubbing it all over your ass with this dry paper – especially if you are a man and have a hairy ass. You’re just rubbing the shit onto your cheeks.
I don’t mean to be graphic, but this is disgusting. You have to use water if you want to clean your ass properly.
The Japanese and other Asians use this thing:
That’s the easiest and most technological solution. But in the rest of the world – really anywhere that is not America or Western Europe – people use other methods of employing water to wash the ass.
Among other things, this makes it much easier to poop in public places.
In Asia and Latin America, they have a hose you can use to wash your ass, but you can also usually just spray the toilet with the hose before sitting down, so you know it’s clean. This makes life much, much easier, as virtually everyone in America ends up shaping their life around not wanting to take a dump anywhere other than their own home, which among other things, often makes it so people don’t want to work long hours. Men’s careers are being seriously affected by this toilet paper scam.
Americans only started using toilet paper about 150 years ago, and the original reason was usually that there was no running water. It’s just a strange phenomenon of history that toilet paper – rubbing shit around your ass and cheeks with dry paper – has become a mainstay of culture.
If right-wingers ever took over the US government, I would launch a program to get the population off of toilet paper. I’ve been planning this for years, but this new information about PUFAs in the paper just add urgency to the issue.