They call them “forever chemicals,” because they’re so chemically stable they pretty much never go away, but you could just as easily call them “everywhere chemicals” because they’re everywhere—maybe even “everybody chemicals,” because we all have them inside of us too.
A new scientific study shows that every single American probably has at least one PFAS chemical in their blood, and a majority of people have at least five.
That’s really not good. Just how bad we don’t know, because the way we test chemicals for harmful effects is still hopelessly outdated, and does nothing to reflect the unpleasant truth that we’re never exposed to chemicals in isolation. More on that in a moment.
PFAS—per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, to give them their proper name—are a broad class of chemicals that have a wide variety of uses: everything from plastics and non-stick coatings to fire retardants and even personal-care products. That means your plastic water bottle, your heavily scratched non-stick pan, your car seating and also your contact lenses and mascara are all likely to contain PFAS in one form or another; and when you take a sip, cook a steak, drive somewhere, put your lenses in or make your eyes look pretty, you’re getting a dose of PFAS.
As I said, PFAS are referred to as “forever chemicals”, because they’re highly stable and don’t decay in the environment. They persist and accumulate: in the water, in the soil, in snow and in animals and plants. Quantities multiply at each higher level of the food chain, as larger animals consume smaller ones. A recent study of freshwater fish in the US showed they can contain up to 280 times the levels of PFAS found in commercially farmed fish. Eating just a single fish caught in a US lake or river could provide the equivalent dose of PFAS from a year’s daily consumption of shop-bought fish.
The harmful effects of PFAS have been known about for decades. In fact, the manufacturers of PFAS—companies like 3M and DuPont—knew the chemicals were seriously harmful almost as soon as they created them in the late 1940s, but then they hid internal safety data from regulators for the better part of 40 years, and lied to employees who believed, with good reason, the chemicals were doing them serious damage. We only know the companies did this because of huge class-action lawsuits that turned over company records and allowed a systematic pattern of deception, all for profit, to be established beyond a shadow of a doubt. When I say “profit,” I mean tens of billions of dollars.
For example, in 1961, an internal company report by DuPont stated that Teflon had “the ability to increase the size of the liver of rats at low doses” and should be handled “with extreme care”, avoiding all contact with the skin. An internal memo from the DuPont-funded Haskell Laboratory, dating to 1970, noted that the PFAS compound C8 was “highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested”.
In another private report to DuPont nine years later, Haskell described how dogs exposed to a single dose of another kind of PFAS “died two days after ingestion”. In 1980, there were reports of birth defects among the children of female employees working on C8. Instead of telling employees or regulators, DuPont reassured its employees that C8 “has a lower toxicity, like table salt.” A press release from 1991, in response to reports of groundwater contamination near a DuPont manufacturing facility, was no less blithe: “C-8 has no known toxic or ill health effects in humans at concentration levels detected.”
In recent years, DuPont and 3M have been tied up in litigation with potential damages worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Both companies could now go bust—and they deserve to.
Today, in 2026, we know that PFAS are associated with more or less every kind of chronic disease there is, from obesity and metabolic problems to heart disease, cancer and reduced fertility, maybe cognitive problems too. PFAS chemicals are endocrine-disruptors, meaning they disrupt the body’s crucial hormone balance, and this can have effects like reducing testosterone and sperm counts in men, effects that have started to receive increased attention. Exposure can be equally disastrous for women’s reproductive health. Recent research from Singapore showed that women with the highest levels of PFAS in their blood had a 40% lower chance of bringing a live baby to full term than women with the lowest levels.
In the new study I mentioned at the beginning, researchers looked at 10,000 American blood samples and found that 98.8% of all samples contained at least one PFAS, but only 19 samples contained a single PFAS.
The vast majority contained multiple PFAS chemicals, and a majority contained five or more.
A total of 58 different unique PFAS combinations were detected among the samples.
So what does this mean? First of all, it shows that most research on PFAS, which focuses on individual chemicals, is unlikely to give us an accurate picture of their effects in and on our bodies. Most Americans have multiple PFAS chemicals in their bodies at once. This is a weakness of chemical-safety research more generally: Scientists consider chemicals in isolation, without investigating how they behave in the kind of mixtures that are typically found in our bodies. Some chemicals can aggressively enhance the effects of others; other chemicals can radically diminish them.
Thankfully, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promised a new approach to chemical regulation and to safety research. If he can ensure chemicals are studied and regulated in a way that more accurately captures their true effects in the environment and inside us, that will be a change with the potential for profound effects on the health of the average American.
However, the second Trump administration’s record on PFAS so far is decidedly mixed. On the one hand, the EPA has maintained strict Biden-era limits on two PFAS compounds in drinking water. At the same time, the agency has extended compliance deadlines for water systems that are judged to be “struggling” to meet those limits, and it’s also rescinded standards for four other compounds because of apparent procedural flaws that left the standards open to legal challenge. Critics are calling this an “industry-friendly rollback,” despite protestations from the EPA that it will reimpose more rigorous standards. The EPA has also licensed new PFAS-based pesticides, which critics say have not been properly tested. There are some 70+ PFAS-based pesticides in use today.
As the new study shows, PFAS exposure is a problem that affects all Americans, and only determined action at the state and especially the federal level can come anywhere close to solving it.
In the meantime, though, there are things you can do as an individual to reduce your exposure to PFAS and the amount of these harmful chemicals in your body.
First of all, reduce your reliance on plastics and products with non-stick coatings, including frying pans and also clothing. Filter your water. Avoid high-risk foods like freshwater fish. Buy organic local foods as much as you can. Exercise and sweat—sweat is one of the principal routes out of your body for toxins—and also lose weight if you’re overweight. Harmful chemicals like PFAS are lipophilic, more often than not, which means they’re attracted to fats and end up being stored in your fat tissue. Breaking down excess fat tissue mobilises harmful stored chemicals, allowing them to be excreted from the body. Losing blood or donating it can also have a big effect. One of the reasons women tend to have lower levels of PFAS chemicals in their blood—about 25% less—is because women lose a significant quantity of bloody each month for decades of their life. Blood donation is being used as a detoxification method for firefighters suffering from chronic exposure to PFAS through retardants and foams.
One Response
I never lie, well, except to the fed gov, and all wimmins, I also enjoy fast cars, hot wimmins, cold beer and monster trucks.
I also run off pure alcohol and meaness, so, Im sure there are chemicals in there