Something You Should Know - The Fascinating Science of Color & What You Need to Know About Your Tap Water?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations.

Starting point is 00:00:17 You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, does it really matter what shampoo you use? Then, color. Why is color so important? And do you see the same colors I see?

Starting point is 00:00:44 I think if you could put your brain in my skull, but see something with my eyes, then it seems probably true. That you would go, oh, you were calling that red, that's wild. That's not how I think of red if I think of my own idealized red. Also, you might find a dryer sheet in your mailbox. I'll tell you why it's in there and who put it there. And consumer reports recently tested random samples of tap water, and you may not like what they found. We specifically looked for a newer set of chemicals known as PFAS. It's a type of chemical that's used in a lot of common products like batteries. But in recent years, it's been found in drinking water supplies around the U.S. All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new

Starting point is 00:01:36 ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool.

Starting point is 00:02:07 And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts.

Starting point is 00:02:39 And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. I'm going to start today with something I've been thinking about lately. Every time I get in the shower and I see there, we have multiple bottles of shampoo in the shower, and I wonder, is there really any difference? Because some of those bottles cost a lot more than some of those other bottles. So I looked into it, and the answer as to whether or not all shampoos are the same is, it depends on what you want from your shampoo. If, like me, all you want is clean hair,

Starting point is 00:03:21 then it turns out it doesn't really matter much which shampoo you do, according to a study. In the study, samples of unwashed hair were collected and tested by washing them in a range of shampoos and then looking at them under a microscope to look at the surface of the hair and see if any dirt or oil remained. And the study found that all the hair samples, regardless of which shampoo was used or how much it cost, were equally clean after washing. However, some people like a thicker shampoo. Interestingly, thicker products do not work any better than the thinner brands, yet the general

Starting point is 00:04:00 belief is that there is a connection between the thickness of the shampoo and the quality of the shampoo, and that encourages the shampoo industry to thicken their products. Well, those thickening compounds cost money, and that increases the price of the shampoo. In general, though, if what you want is clean hair, pretty much shampoo is shampoo, and getting a cheap one can save you quite a bit of money over the long run. And that is something you should know. Color is a big deal to people. We agonize over what color to paint a room or what color carpet to put down on the floor. We notice people's eye color, hair color, a beautiful blue sky, a pretty red dress, autumn in New England.

Starting point is 00:04:51 The world is full of color and we notice it and interact with those colors all the time. But why? Why is color so important? And do you see the same colors I see? How do colors affect people? Are there colors in front of us that we simply cannot see, but other creatures can? Adam Rogers has taken a look at color and our relationship to it. Adam is senior correspondent at Wired and author of a book called Full Spectrum, How the Science of Color Made Us Modern. Hey, Adam, welcome.

Starting point is 00:05:28 Thank you very much. I appreciate you having me. So why is color so important to people? Why do we notice it? Why do we incorporate it into all areas of our life from, you know, the color on the walls to the flowers in the garden to everything. I mean, color's a big deal. Why? Yeah, that's fascinating, isn't it? Some of it is straight-ahead aesthetics, of course, where we attach meanings to colors that, you know, that are completely culturally dependent. Different colors mean different things to different people, and they mean things to individuals. They have colors that are our favorites for some reason that have to do with our personal

Starting point is 00:06:05 experiences and what we liked as a child and what we saw as a kid. But also I think it's something much deeper than that. All living things use color as information as well as something aesthetic. We learn things about our environment from it. And it's really easy when you get into evolutionary neuroscience to tell yourself just so stories about like, oh, you know, color vision evolved so that our primate ancestors could see red fruit against the green background of trees or something. It's probably not true because primates don't actually see color that well. Our color vision is kind of a fluke. But the point I'm trying to make is that color has what a lot of different fields will use this word, and they'll mean a lot of different things

Starting point is 00:06:44 by it, has salience. It has importance. We glean information about our environment around us from it. And so you can imagine that there's kind of some inbuilt process in our minds and our cognition that make color a way that we infer meaning about the world. Is color really that individual or are there colors that pretty much everyone likes or everyone dislikes? So there's a ton wrapped up in that question. Some of it is, what colors do people, a lot of people like? So even if you do surveys of like favorite colors, favorite in terms of the things that we find most pleasing, that we would, as you say, have the cars painted that color. It's hard to know how much of those are revealed preferences and how much of

Starting point is 00:07:28 those are marketed. Color has been so heavily marketed and been such an important piece of the way the stuff that human beings consume and buy, especially starting with the kind of late 19th century and into the 20th and 21st, as marketers became more and more sophisticated about trying to get people to buy new consumables, when the technology behind those consumables doesn't change that often, how do you try to convince somebody that something is new? The thing that they arrived at in the early 20th century was you could make it in a different color. So there's some marketing push there. The most popular color, for example, for cars, if you just go by what color cars bought the most, is white. And it has been for years.

Starting point is 00:08:12 And I find that really surprising, but I also think it's possible that's because a lot of them go to fleets. So it's hard to know whether that's because people really like white cars, or it's because fleets buy white cars because they're cheaper or easier to clean or easier to hose off or whatever, right? So it's hard to know which ones are more popular for people than others. And of course, those change over time. Every year, Pantone names the color of the year, you know, and that's supposed to tell us something about what the national mood is or something. But I'm not sure that it really does as much as it says something about just trends and you know when somebody says oh websites the color for your app should be blue because people find that trustworthy

Starting point is 00:08:49 and is that is that true is blue trustworthy or is it cold i i don't know but i do think that the the deeper question there too is whether when we talk about those colors whether the if i say blue and you say blue if we're talking about the same blue so it may well be that even if we both have a color that we'd identify in our heads as something that we find aesthetically pleasing, that we're both referring to kind of a different thing. hard to understand that entire chunks of the fields of linguistics and neuroscience have been built to try to both use color as a tool to understand the brain, and then also understand the brain better to try to figure out how color works. Yeah, well, I imagine too that it makes a difference what the color is for. You might want a color on your wall, but that doesn't mean that that's a great color for your car. I mean, it really depends on the application. That's such a key insight, because when researchers who understand color and understand information theory and understand neuroscience go and, for example, interview people in their own languages and try to figure out which colors they have names for and which colors they don't.

Starting point is 00:09:58 Just as a side example, in English, there's only one basic color term for blue. A basic color term is a word that only means the color. In English, we talk about blue. But in Russian, they have two words, two basic color terms for blue, one referring to what an English speaker would call light blue and another one referring to what an English speaker would call dark blue. Why do they have different words for those colors? What level of information do they get from having those different words and why do they need different amounts of information to talk about color? Something I've always wondered, and I think everybody has wondered, is are there colors that we just don't see? That other creatures, other species can see colors that we can't even

Starting point is 00:10:42 imagine? There are a lot of living things out there that can see way more colors than we do. We're actually pretty terrible at seeing colors in a lot of respects. Insects and birds tend to see into the ultraviolet, and they see those as colors, things that are totally invisible to us. And a lot of reptiles can perceive infrared,

Starting point is 00:11:00 a wavelength that we mostly just perceive as heat, but they see it as a color. But their experience of the colored world is totally different than ours, which I think is super exciting. How do we know that? How do we know that they can see colors that we can't see? If we can't see them, how would we know anybody else can see them? Yeah, isn't that frustrating? One of the ways is that you can figure out what their photoreceptors are, what peak wavelengths their photoreceptors are tuned to. So for example, honeybees, you can dissect their eyes. You can figure out that they actually see a lot less of the things that we would call reds, and they see a lot more into the ultraviolet and

Starting point is 00:11:37 spend more time in kind of the blue-green part of the universe. I talked to a researcher who studies butterflies, who spends a lot of time, because the butterfly eye is a super weird eye, and they see colors that we don't, which you can imagine, because butterfly wings have all those different colors, too. It's got to be doing something for them. And you can put out, like, test strips of colors that they'll respond differently to, even though the human eye can't perceive the differences in them. I've always wondered if the red I see is the red you see, that if I were looking at a red rose, but looked at it through your eye, would I see something entirely different than what I think of as a red rose? Isn't that enraging, that problem? In some respects, there's

Starting point is 00:12:23 no chance that the reds could be the same, because the meat that you think with is different than the meat that I think with and see with. And so they'd have to be different. And what we've just agreed to do, you and I both agreed to say, like, yeah, that's red, right? You think that's red. I think that's red. OK, cool. Whatever you're seeing there is red. Whatever I'm seeing there is red.

Starting point is 00:12:41 So in that respect, it doesn't matter because we've linguistically agreed to call that red. It's only a problem. And this gets to be a problem. You see this as a problem with any, let's say, any couple of people who live in a house together trying to choose what color to paint the living room walls, as you've said, as one of them will say, well, that's more of a blue green. And the other one will say, I don't know, I think that's more of a greenish blue. And that's such a subtle distinction. I think about that a lot because there were two Crayola crayons in that 64-pack that we grew up with, that there was a blue-green and a green-blue. And I used to try to puzzle over what made one a blue-green and one a green-blue. And there is a difference. And you might even be able, you and I might be able to look at those

Starting point is 00:13:22 two paint swatches or whatever and say, yeah, those are different colors. And in fact, like before this book, I wrote a book about booze and some of the science of alcohol. And one of the differences between a master sommelier and a schmo like me who likes a glass of wine, but isn't a pro at tasting notes, is that the sommelier knows a lot more words to describe different tastes. And that's a really hard problem too. It's the same object metaphor problem that colors have, where the words are trying, well, you know, that tastes like strawberries. What does a strawberry taste like? Well, it tastes like strawberries. It's hard to, you can tell you

Starting point is 00:13:55 what the molecule is that's strawberry tasting, but the only way that you know what that molecule is, is that it tastes like strawberries. And similarly with colors, if you and I are both talking about red, and if I say, well, what color is that, though? It's like, well, it's red, it's reddish. Are they different reds? Maybe, but we're going to just agree for the sake of argument, I suppose, that we'll somehow like, you could put your brain in my skull, but see something with my eyes, then it seems probably true that you would go, oh, you were calling that red. That's wild. That's not how I think of red if I think of my own idealized red. Yeah, but would I say that's my blue? Or would I say, geez, I've never seen that before? You probably don't say that's my blue. That range of difference isn't really there. I will say, if you do a test where you shine a colored light into a person's eye, and you give them controls of the knobs for what light that is, and you tell them to choose the perfect yellow.

Starting point is 00:15:04 So you say, okay, tune the knobs. So not greenish and not bluish, but yellow, just yellow, a perfect yellow. People, and you do that with hundreds of different people, you give them a chance to do that. They'll all choose about the same yellow. But if you ask them to do the same thing with a green, so not yellowish and not bluish, but green, getting into that grue region of space again, their answers vary. It's a huge variation. So even right there, you can see that some colors maybe we'd have more agreement on than

Starting point is 00:15:36 other colors. And that's due to just quirks of the system. Color is the topic on the table. And my guest is Adam Rogers, senior correspondent at Wired and author of the book Full Spectrum, How the Science of Color Made Us Modern. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining,

Starting point is 00:16:07 a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest.

Starting point is 00:16:35 Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control

Starting point is 00:16:58 not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Adam, we hear things like, you know,

Starting point is 00:17:33 this is a calming color. This is an anxiety-provoking color, as if colors generally have an effect on people. Do they? Or, you know, there was that thing about, you know, if you paint prisons pink that, you know, that calms prisoners down. What about that? Yeah, that's all. Sometimes that's described as chromotherapy as well, or they'll try to use it for therapeutic reasons. I will say my read of that science is that no, it's probably not true. But I will say, like, a thing that maybe would make you at least intuitively figure that's probably not right are the different cultural uses for colors, the different cultural symbolisms. And just as a straight example, like the color white

Starting point is 00:18:15 in some Asian cultures is much more associated with funerals and grief than it is with the sort of purity and virginity that it often is in Western cultures, right? So totally different color meanings. Even in North American culture, until the sort of late 1800s, all the symbolism about pink was masculine and very macho, and then it sort of transitioned in the late 19th and early 20th century into being seen as something that was a more feminine color. But there is this sense, and we've heard for a long time, that, you know, if you walk into a room that is earth tone,

Starting point is 00:18:53 that that's a more calming, natural environment, as opposed to walking into a room that's painted bright pink, which is going to be more shocking and alarming. That humans, because we are of this earth, earth tones calm us down. And is that all gobbledygook? You used a couple of interesting words there. You're talking about sort of earth tones and being sort of darker and more subtle and then a bright pink. But brightness and saturation and kind of value of color, that is how much color is there and how bright is it, are actually different phenomena of color than the hue itself, than the wavelength of the color. It's harder to imagine a bright earth tone, I guess.

Starting point is 00:19:39 So it may well be that it's sort of the amount of light and the amount of saturation that we're talking about rather than the color itself. I think probably you and I would agree that if you and I walked into a room that was And that in fact, even within my lifetime, a room painted in avocado green and orange would have been seen as a very calming and fashionable and relaxing living space. Whereas if I walked into it now, I would find it kind of aggressively ugly. It does seem that humans have a unique relationship with color in the sense that we value color. We attach value to certain colors. We want to be surrounded by certain colors. We admire other colors.

Starting point is 00:20:33 And other species don't seem to have anything like that relationship, at least as far as I can tell. You don't really find other species out there that try to make colors and change the colors around them to suit. So there's something going on there, and that has been true of human beings since we turned into human beings, since we became those humans. And you see that on the coast of South Africa in a cave called Blombos,

Starting point is 00:21:03 where there have been a lot of really tremendous archaeological finds, finding an abalone shell. So this would be tens of thousands of years old, an abalone shell. And inside the shell, they also found signs of both ochre and trabecular bone, which is the kind of bloody, fatty bone, like you might spongy stuff like inside the spine. And the hypothesis here is that this was a workshop. They were making ochre into a pigment, into a paint, essentially, that you could color a cave wall with, or even your own body, a person's body with. So that, you know, that predates almost every other technology, trying to be able to make natural stuff into a color that we can use and change. There's been an argument in kind of aesthetic circles and philosophical circles for since the Greeks really started this argument about which was in some way respect more important form or color, whether one of those things, whether the shape of things and the patterns of them were somehow more true or more authentic, gave you a better perspective of what something was in the world or what the world

Starting point is 00:22:05 looked like than colors. It's like truth and beauty, like that old philosophical question, too. Form without color, you get meaning from it, for sure. I mean, everybody has watched a black and white movie and understood the emotions and the story that it was conveying. And color without form, you get feelings and an almost psychedelic vibe of colors changing, and that will make your brain do stuff. You'll feel like you're present somewhere, but it's the two together. It's in form, color, and in color form that give you a more fully developed and understandable world. It does seem though, not to beat a dead horse here, but that if you walk into a room that's painted all black, you have a reaction to that. That's a human reaction.

Starting point is 00:22:59 And I think you'd have the same reaction 40 years ago or 100 years ago as you would today. There's something about the color, that color of a room, and maybe therefore other colors of rooms, that does affect your mind. Well, let me suggest that you and I have both walked into rooms that were painted all black, but also were full of people dressed very elegantly, some of them ordering $20 cocktails, and the music was playing with a very fast beat. And both of us thought that room was super awesome. And we were very excited to be there. And it was going to be a lot of fun because our friends were there. And similarly, we've both seen images of rooms that were all black and thought, oh, the serial killer is about to jump out from behind that closet wall. The person who I'm watching should probably leave that room. So I would say there's some contextual information that you probably want in that all black room.

Starting point is 00:23:51 Also, I find it interesting that you chose black there. Because when you were talking about earth tones and pink, that becomes a complicated subject. But as soon as we start talking about black and white, we're talking about another axis in that color space. We're talking about an absence of light and a presence of light as well So, you know being in darkness versus being in light I think does have a different cultural significance and a different feeling for for us if you can't see versus if you can And in fact, it's a whole different It's a whole different neural pathway in the brain processing how much light there is and how much light there isn't that then gets? Reintegrated with what color that light is

Starting point is 00:24:25 somewhere in the back of the head. In all the research you did about color, is there something about one story or something that really hit you that you think we should hear? I will admit I'm now super annoying about all this stuff, and I'll go on forever, but I will tell one story that I I'm just fascinated by I love this the painter Mark Rothko who famously did these fields of color you may know this art they would often look like just a big panel of one

Starting point is 00:24:53 color over another and the painting had a certain kind of often had a certain luminosity to them he mixed his own pigments and paints and would do interesting stuff with varnishes too or not use a varnish to make these make the the paintings have a give you an emotional feeling when you look at them as you say that you would there'd be a big difference between looking at a Rothko that was gray and black like a moonscape versus one that was red and green or something like that and they were really huge they're iconic modern art and Rothko did a series of rooms three walls would have a big giant paintings on them and you're supposed to sit and just sort of experience them and he did one of these for harvard in this kind of dining room meeting room

Starting point is 00:25:28 that they had and then um the harvard started to use the room as much more of a regularly used dining room they opened the windows and the sun would stream right in the paintings got damaged because the ultraviolet light coming in damaged the pigment it turned out he used some pigments that were particularly vulnerable to damage from ultraviolet light. Some of the paintings got ripped because people would bump into them. So these are super valuable Mark Rothko paintings. They got super messed up. Harvard finally put them in storage.

Starting point is 00:25:55 And then a few years ago, they decided to try to restore them. Usually what you would do when you were going to do a restoration like that is you would take off the varnish and put on a new varnish. But these didn't have any varnish on them at all. And in restoration of paintings, the rule is you want to do as little as possible to the original you don't want to just go repaint it because that messes it up so when they tried to show the paintings again they had this problem they didn't know what to do about it because they couldn't fix the paintings but they also didn't look the way they used to so what the researchers who were working on it did is they decided to use digitally projected light what they were going to do is shine light onto the painting so that they would look like they

Starting point is 00:26:29 used to. But if you just shined a picture onto the painting, that wouldn't work because that light would then interact with, it would bounce off and be absorbed by the, whatever was left on those giant canvases. And so it would look totally different again. So what they had to do was take samples of what the paintings had used to look like. So what they had accessible to them was Rothko had painted more than three and not put them all on display. He kept one. So they had an old one that they could look at the colors of the pigments that he had used and then essentially restore digitally what the colors would have been. And so they went through all this process where they could figure out, okay, here's what color we're trying to get to.

Starting point is 00:27:05 And then they could kind of subtract the color that was already on the canvases from the color that they wanted. And this is a process that your mind and your eye do all the time, is try to subtract the color of the illuminance, the light around something, from the thing that you're actually seeing so that you can infer essentially what color the thing actually is and the best example I can give you for this just in parentheses is if I show you a picture of an egg under red light that egg is gonna look red but you're gonna know unless there's some cue that says it's Easter probably because there's red everywhere else in the image

Starting point is 00:27:37 that that's actually a white egg because we know what color most eggs are even though some eggs come in brown and speckled and all that stuff I know all that but basically your brain will do what's will do what a video camera would be white balancing, right? We'll say like, okay, I get it. That's not a red egg. That's an egg. And the light is red. So here they had to do that actively.

Starting point is 00:27:52 They had to say, we're going to shine a light on the paintings using a digital projector mapped to all the different regions of the paintings because there were kind of figures in front. There was like big purple gateways in front of big kind of dark red backgrounds we're going to shine light on it that will change the way the painting looks so that it looks the way it used to when Rothko originally painted it and they put those on display they actually were able to figure out how to do it and shine the digital projectors on it and they the the thing that was most popular about the display apparently because these are big big epic paintings you know they make the size of a room and when they finally showed them again, people would arrive to be looking at the paintings at about

Starting point is 00:28:29 four o'clock when they would turn off the projectors. So they'd be able to see the difference. You'd be able to see this artificial recreation of what the Rothko's used to look like. And then they would turn it off and you'd be able to see what the Rothko's look like now, which is also not what the Rothkoos used to look like. I love that, the kind of obsession of detail of how color works and trying to understand how the brain and the eye perceive color and then taking advantage of that to remake an artistic experience. Well, when you stop and think about how important color is,

Starting point is 00:29:01 on so many different levels, how important color is to people. It's really interesting to get some insight into why that is and how it all works. Adam Rogers has been my guest. He is a senior correspondent at Wired, and the book is called Full Spectrum, How the Science of Color Made Us Modern. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Adam. Thank you for being here. honestly honest advice. Then we have a, but am I wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from, but am I wrong? And finally wrap up your week with fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to don't blame me,

Starting point is 00:29:59 but am I wrong on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed,

Starting point is 00:30:31 but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. I think there's a general sense that people in the United States have is that the tap water coming into your home is safe to drink. Unless you live in an area that has well-documented problems with their water supply, we have been reassured many times that your local water supply is tested, it must meet federal standards, and that it is safe to drink. Well, in the May 2021 issue of Consumer Reports, there's an investigative piece that seems

Starting point is 00:31:13 to show that there may be some doubt, at least in some places, about just how safe the water is. Ryan Felton is an investigative reporter for Consumer Reports and lead author of this article, and he joins me to discuss this and what you can do to protect yourself. Hey, Ryan, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you so much for having me on. So let's start by laying down some groundwork here. Explain what water you tested, where you tested it, and what you tested

Starting point is 00:31:46 it for. Consumer Reports, we recently tested tap water of 120 locations across the United States. We specifically looked for four particular heavy metals that are more commonly known like lead, arsenic, mercury, and cadmium, and also tested for a newer set of chemicals known as PFAS, P-F-A-S. And it's a type of chemical that's used in a lot of common products. Think of like batteries, for example. But in recent years, over the last 20 years, really, it's been found in drinking water supplies around the U.S. And as more research is done into the potential health effects of exposure to PFAS, researchers are finding a lot to be concerned about in terms of just links to a wide array of potential health issues. So, but when your water company reports that, and they put out their report card that they've tested their water and all is well,

Starting point is 00:32:59 does that mean everything is well in your house? It's a very particular house-by-house specific situation. So you wind up in a scenario where, you know, one house could have an unusually high level of lead at one period of time in a system that reports its lead levels are safe and meet federal drinking water standards. So it really is a challenging situation. Then where do the contaminants come from? If the water supply leaves the water treatment place perfectly safe, and in your house it's got lead in it, well, where did that lead come from?

Starting point is 00:33:42 So water systems will treat for lead, but when that water leaves the plant and gets funneled into a drinking water system, it could pick up potentially harmful levels of lead along the way as a result of old pipes that are in the ground. For a long time, the federal government has banned the use of lead pipes, but there still are millions of them in the ground around the United States. It could basically erode that pipe along the way and basically leach lead off of the pipes and it enters into the water by the time it hits your home.

Starting point is 00:34:24 When we get water out of our tap, how good should it be? off of the pipes and it enters into the water by the time it hits your home. When we get water out of our tap, how good should it be? I mean, what's the goal here at the local water treatment facility? Is it crystal clear, clean, pure water, or should we expect something less or what? One thing that I think people may sometimes when they see stories like this, you know, I think that there's a scenario where someone might come away thinking that it's possible to get pure, totally cleansed water. That isn't a thing. Also, if you wipe out water, if you treat it in a way where you remove everything, you know, then you're losing some of the beneficial minerals and why we drink water in the first place. So, I mean, that's I think one thing to underscore is that there's no perfectly pure water. But that said, a lot of drinking water that's supplied to Americans does meet standards that are considered safe for consumption. So,

Starting point is 00:35:27 you know, to your point about what our results show, to me, it underscored the challenges that do exist. Lead and arsenic, we had a handful of cases that were concerning, but for the most part, they were just measurable levels that were well within federal safety safe drinking water standards. You know, the hope would be that it would be zero for those two particular contaminants. But for the most part, the vast majority, it was extremely small measurable levels. I think the more concerning thing is the level of PFAS chemicals that were found in about 40 percent of homes that were tested, the samples exceeded, at that particular moment, standards for PFAS that scientists at organizations like Consumer

Starting point is 00:36:13 Reports and others would like to see. Because as it stands now, outside of a few particular states, there really is no regulation in drinking water for PFAS chemicals. So to see it show up in so many systems and to see the levels that we did, that aspect of it is definitely concerning. So these PFAS chemicals, for which there aren't a whole lot of standards, do we know what the potential harms are? What does it do to people if you ingest a lot of PFAS chemicals? There's a wide array of things that PFAS, health concerns that PFAS have been linked to.

Starting point is 00:36:57 Thyroid issues, learning delays in children, some forms of cancer. These are all associated links or probable causes. And where does this stuff come from? Is there any sense of how it gets in the drinking water? You know, one thing that we set out to do was look at known sites where PFAS contamination has been found and military establishments, for example, these types of chemicals are used in firefighting foam. So if you have places that do firefighting training exercises and they spray a bunch of foam into the ground and then it gets washed out and seeps into the ground and then, you know, makes its way into the soil and water that way. That's one example.

Starting point is 00:37:46 Other manufacturers that use it in products that rely on PFAS, which it's a really expansive list of things, like I said earlier, batteries, nonstick cooking pans, fast food packaging. The main thing that they're known for is that they just don't break down, which can be beneficial for fast food packaging. The main thing is that they're known for is that they just don't break down, which can be beneficial for fast food packaging. It's a great way to stop grease from seeping out of your packaging. So not everybody gets their water from a city water supply. A lot of people have their own wells on their property. Should they be concerned as well? And I think that that's one thing to underscore too with our research and findings is that we focused on community water systems in the U.S.,

Starting point is 00:38:34 which are your typical, what people think of when they think of a public drinking water system. But those systems don't cover the 12 to 14 million people that are estimated to be on private wells, which are much more prone to potential issues from runoff types of contamination like what I'm describing. So is this a problem that has to be solved at the source? Does the city water supply or your town water supply, do they have to solve this problem? Or knowing this, can an individual do something with filtering the water or whatever? There's a number of products that can treat for this. One type of system that can be pricier is known as reverse osmosis. And the way that I sort of like

Starting point is 00:39:25 to think about it is that it just kind of zaps the water of impure type chemicals. And so there are treatment processes that exist. But I think to your point about what water filters do, it does sort of, it does bring back a point about our findings, which is while we did have a number of systems that had concerning levels, there were many systems that had low, if not any, level of PFAS that was detectable at all. So it is possible to treat for this and get it to levels that are within limits defined as safe by leading researchers in this area. But if I have a water filter pitcher in my house, a typical one I would buy at the supermarket or the drugstore or wherever, and I put tap water in it, am I good to go? I think home filters are more typically focused on the types of other things that we tested like lead and arsenic and those sorts of minerals that make water taste kind of heavy.

Starting point is 00:40:32 This is really a case by case sort of thing when it comes to what sort of water is coming into your house. There are some communities that we found will offer free testing of your water. I think that that's something to encourage for a lot of people is if it is available to you, if you can afford it or if your community is offering free tests, I think it's a great way to really get the clearest sense of, you know, how much peace of mind you can have. PFAS isn't a regulated set of chemicals for the most part. So, you know, I think actually connecting with your water system to ask questions and see what sort of resources are available to learn about the specific water that's going into your home

Starting point is 00:41:13 is a great tool to, you know, really empower the types of decisions that people make every day about the water that they are drinking. What about, I don't know if you looked at this, but what about bottled water? Are we safe from PFAS chemicals if we drink bottled water? That's actually a really terrific question because one thing that started us on doing this reporting was a series of stories that I wrote about bottled water. Because as I think most people know, when a drinking water crisis happens, bottled water is what's immediately considered as the alternative in the interim while the crisis is addressed. But they're surprisingly, given the size of the bottled water industry, not that much known about it in terms of what sort of product it's putting out. You're putting a lot of faith in the company when you buy it. Companies will release bottled

Starting point is 00:42:16 water quality reports that do some explaining, but in terms of what regulators are looking for, it's nowhere near the level of information that's provided about your tap water. So we actually did do a series of testing of several, I want to say almost 50 brands of bottled water for those same sorts of chemicals. And there was a noticeable level of PFAS in some sparkling water brands that we tested for. There are some efforts around companies to make it known that they are testing for PFAS. I know, for example, that Massachusetts, their regulator publishes the results of PFAS testing among some bottled water companies. So there is some

Starting point is 00:43:07 effort to raise awareness around it. And our testing, I think, helped illuminate what sort of problem might exist with bottled water. You know, I think for the most part, though, the vast majority of bottled water meets standards. But generally, even though maybe the bottled water industry doesn't release as much information as some would like, but you're saying that based on your tests that you're probably pretty safe with it. What our testing showed is that while bottled water is not necessarily safer than tap water, for the specific brands that we tested, you know, from the specific lots that we tested. The results were extremely encouraging and especially for the non-carbonated brands. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:43:56 Well, it certainly sounds as if without blowing this problem out of proportion, it must be a problem or consumer reports wouldn't do this testing of water and then publish the results in your magazine. So clearly this is something that people might want to pay attention to, but so like, what do you do? The thing that I think is most useful to be aware of is just that in some communities there are challenges. And if you have concerns, there are people that are supposed to, if you are on a drinking water system, be there to answer the types of questions that you might have. So if you are concerned, I would say the best thing to do is to ask questions and find out as much information as you need to feel

Starting point is 00:44:46 comfortable from your local regulator or utility that handles your water processing. And so just to be clear, you tested water from 120 locations around the United States. Out of those 120 locations, how many had problems? What's the percentage? What's the big snapshot here? Among all the five groups of chemicals that we tested for, if you consider the fact that most scientists would say that there's no safe level of lead, that there's no safe exposure level to arsenic. The vast majority had something to be concerned about. I think the levels that we saw among lead and arsenic

Starting point is 00:45:34 were for the most part within feasible safe limits. The PFAS levels, about 40% of the locations that were tested had concerning levels of PFAS. And that's what I think is the most important fact out of these test results. This is one of those things, this whole thing about PFAS chemicals that's been so under the radar. I mean, I've never heard of it before. before, and I would almost think to dismiss it as not being much, except that if Consumer Reports does a big investigative article about it in their magazine, maybe it's something worth paying attention to. Ryan Felton has been my guest.

Starting point is 00:46:17 He is an investigative reporter for Consumer Reports. He's lead author of the article about water, which you will find in the May 2021 issue of Consumer Reports. Thanks for being here, Ryan. It is possible that you could find a dryer sheet in your mailbox. Apparently, letter carriers sometimes put them in there to repel bees and wasps, who sometimes make nests in mailboxes because they don't want to get stung. Apparently, bees and wasps don't like the strong, concentrated, and artificial smell of dryer sheets, and they don't like the texture of them either,

Starting point is 00:46:58 so they leave. There was a thread on Reddit from a mail carrier that talked about this and how effective he thinks it is. I didn't find any scientific research on this, but, you know, if the guys on the front lines are using them to repel bees and wasps, they just might work. So if you find a dryer sheet in your mailbox, your letter carrier probably put it in there, and now you know why. And that is something you should know. Show your support for this podcast by leaving a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. It really helps us so we can continue to bring you all these things you should know. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

Starting point is 00:47:44 Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer,

Starting point is 00:48:16 unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Contained herein are the heresies of Redolph Buntwine,

Starting point is 00:48:45 erstwhile monk turned travelling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favoured children. The heresies of Redolph Buntwine, wherever podcasts are available.

Something You Should Know - The Fascinating Science of Color & What You Need to Know About Your Tap Water?

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.