Forever Chemicals: The 60-Year PFAS Cover-Up Hiding in Your Drinking Water

0:02Darin Olien:Welcome to Super Life with me, Darin Olien, a podcast where we explore, discover, and share solutions that promote a healthier life and a better world. Together, we'll ignite possibilities, inspire change, and build sovereignty, creating a roadmap towards a super life for you and for all. Get ready to start living your super life.

0:34Darin Olien:By 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. Over 500 toothpaste tubes have been thrown away since I've started this ad. You don't think of these small little things, but they add up a lot over time, and we can do something about it. That ends up to be over a billion plastic toothpaste tubes a year alone. that ultimately end up in our environment and in our waterways and ultimately ends up in the ocean. Do you want to add to this or do you want to do something different? Plus, maybe that exposure to that plastic, getting the plasticizers and the endocrine disruptors and then putting that toothpaste in your mouth also is not a good idea.

1:22Darin Olien:There's some great solutions. You can DIY stuff. I've got many of these in my fatal conveniences, But the easy ones that I use every day and I'm about to travel a lot more and the traveling makes them really easy. I go to bite. I bite down on a little tablet, which is not interacting with any plastics because it's in a glass bottle and it's refillable and reusable and sustainable. And there's no unwanted toxic fluorides, flow agents and solvents in my mouth. So my favorite is this Bite Toothpaste. 100 % home, compostable pouches, subscription models. You don't even have to think about it again.

2:08Darin Olien:You're helping you by putting clean products in your mouth and you're helping the environment because Bite Toothpaste is one of the best companies I've seen looking at all aspects of their supply chain and their refillable, reusable, sustainable, regenerative practices. So Bite is offering you, all my listeners, 20 % off your first order. Go to trybite.com, T-R-Y-B-I-T-E forward slash Darren20 or just use the promo code Darren20, D-A-R-I-N, and you can get 20 % off your first order with a great new toothpaste without using the tube. If I took a blood sample from you right now, from almost everyone listening to this, I'd find forever chemicals in it.

2:5899 % of Americans and really globally, even including newborns, have chemicals that were engineered so that they don't break down ever. Not in the water, not in the soil, not in you. And in April 2024, for the first time in history, this country finally set a legal limit on how much of that stuff is allowed to come out of your kitchen tap. Then, 13 months later, the same agency that wrote the rule went into the federal courtroom and asked the judge to throw most of it out before the public even had a chance to comment. The judge said no, so they did it another way. That's what today's episode is all about.

3:46Not to make you afraid of your faucet, the opposite. Because by the end of this, you're going to know exactly what happened, exactly what's in the science, and exactly what you can do about it yourself this week. So that your family's water doesn't depend on whether the government does the right thing or not. If you notice, most of my fatal conveniences are about what you can do. Because here's the truth I keep coming back to. You don't wait. Either do I. Because we care. When we have a solution, we take it. You don't wait for Washington. You don't wait for the chemical company. You take your health back into your hands today.

4:29Let's go. This is Solo Super Live Podcast with me, Darren O 'Lean. And if you've known me for a while, you know that a framework, one of them that I come from, is that of fatal conveniences. I wrote a book on it. This is deeply meaningful to me. I had a father that suffered from it. Fatal conveniences are the things we've built in our modern world to make it easy, sure. But many of them, most of them, have hidden biological costs to them. And we never agreed to pay them. PFAS, unfortunately, is one of the purest forms of fatal conveniences I've ever covered. Covered it a lot, and I will not stop until it is out of our ecosystems, our bodies, and everywhere.

5:16Forever Chemicals, PFAS, per - or polyfluoral alkali substances. Thousands of them. Thousands of them. The chemistry is carbon as the backbone bolted together fluorine atoms. And that combination of carbon and fluorine bonded chemical is one of the strongest we've ever seen. They created it and the science community has ever seen in organic chemistry, period. That's why it's magic. That's why it works. That's why your eggs, I don't eat eggs, but those of you that do, that's why they slide off the pan. That's why when it rains, it beads off your jacket. That's why grease doesn't soak through that burger freaking wrapper and fast food packaging.

6:08That's why the firefighting foam smothers a jet fuel fire. And it's exactly why, and plus wrinkle-free shirts, you name it, it's everywhere. And it's exactly why they never leave. These substances never leave the environment and never leave us. So what do we do? Here's the thing. The bond that never breaks. The thing that makes a nonstick pan nonstick is the same thing that makes a forever chemical forever. The carbon-fluorine bond doesn't care whether it's a frying pan or in your liver. It's just that. It holds. It keeps together. Nature has no enzyme for this because the science community created this.

6:57Your body has no enzyme for it. There's no way that we know of at this point to break it down. The half-life of PFOAs, PFOS, in a human being is measured in years and years and years. You drink it on Tuesday, and a piece of that Tuesday is still in you in 2030, 2040. You name it. Guess what? It also accumulates. So the convenience was real. It's really good at its job. Nobody's denying that at all. But we built an entire civilization on a molecule with no exit plan, no understanding of ecology and biology. And now it's in the rain. It's in the Arctic. It's in the breast milk. It's in the drinking water.

7:46And by the Environmental Working Group's latest count, about 176 million Americans drinking water. That's 176 million people that are being exposed to it continuously from the drinking water alone. More than half of the country from the tap water. Okay, so let me walk you through the timeline because the details matter on this. And this is some of the stuff that makes me crazy. the bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, on April 10th of 2024, the EPA finalizes the first ever national legally enforceable drinking water standards for PFAS. Six chemicals. Even though there's thousands, they made a step. PFOA, PFOSs, the two old workhorses that were the backbone of the Teflon and Scotchgard chemicals, capped at four parts per trillion each.

8:46And then there's, of course, many others, PFNAs, PFHXs, the Gen X, the ones that keep being created. But they also capped that at 10 parts per trillion and created a hazardous index, which is a smart tool that says these chemicals show up together. So we're going to regulate this mixture of craziness. So four parts per trillion. Let me put that in perspective. That's roughly four drops in 20 Olympic swimming pools. Four drops. That's how toxic the agency, the agency's own scientists conclude these things are. Again, four drops in four Olympic swimming pools. That is what they created as a safe level, functionally zero, and four is just the lowest number a lab can reliably measure.

9:45From my perspective and for looking at this chemical, we should not have this in any way, in any proximity close to our biology, our ecology, you name it. However, the EPA said this rule would protect about 100 million people, preventing thousands of premature deaths and tens of thousands of serious, serious illnesses. Water utilities got three years to test, five years to fix. Deadline, April 2029. Then the administration changed. May 14th, 2025, new EPA administer Lee Zeldin announces the agency will keep the PFOA and PFOS limits, but push the compliance deadline from 2029 to 2031 and rescinded the limits on the other four.

10:40The PFHXSs, the PFNAs, the Gen X, all of these things. And the hazard index mixtures completely changed. They stated the reasons were, before we continue the pod, I want to share something.

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12:32Darin Olien:Go to manavitality.com. That's M-A-N-N-A vitality.com. Use the code DAREN20 and you get 20 % off your order. This isn't about health. It's about living in harmony with your greatest and highest potential. Previous administration cut corners, failed to follow the law, the real subtext. Water utilities, chemical manufacturers had sued to kill the rule, and the new EPA decided to stop defending most of it. Here's the thing. There was a backdoor. Here's the part almost no one reported. The EPA didn't just announce a rollback. It went to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the court which industry was already suing and asked the judge to simply vacate the four standards, wipe them out of the court order.

13:25No proposed rule, no public comment, nothing, period. No health analysis, just judge, please delete this. Think about what that means. They said one thing and then behind the scenes, without you knowing, they started changing things. This I see a lot. In my PFAS discovery over the last couple decades and the chemical world, they say one thing, they get the PR and then behind the scenes, they're changing. The Safe Drinking Water Act has something called an anti-backsliding provision, which sounds good. It is good. It says in plain English that any revision to a drinking water standard has to, quote unquote, maintain or provide for greater protection of the health of persons.

14:17You're not allowed to make water less safe. So the agency tried to get a court to do what the agency itself may not legally be allowed to do. January 21st, 2026, the court said no. The judges wrote, The merits of the party's positions are not so clear as to warrant summary action, and ordered the EPA to go on record about which parts of the rule it was abandoning. So the agency went the front door route. May 18, 2026, two proposed rules. One rescinds the four PFAS standards and the other lets utilities delay PFAS and PFOAs and changes the compliance to 2031 from 2029. Public hearing July 7th. Comment period closed July 20th.

15:12Ten state attorneys, generals, Minnesota, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina, Wisconsin filed formal opposition, calling it arbitrary and illegal, noting that the EPA never analyzed the health impact of removing the protectants. And here's the kicker. The EPA's own estimate, only about 8 % of the U.S. water systems currently use the kind of advanced filter systems that removes PFAS. So when you push the deadline two more years and eliminate four of the six limits, you're not streamlining. You're telling us, tens of millions of people, to keep drinking the crap, keep drinking the chemicals.

15:59As I recorded this, September 2026, a final rule could drop any day, and the court case over the original rule is still pending, which is why I'm talking about it. Now, I want to zoom out for a second, because if you think this rollback is one-off, a single bad decision, you're missing the story. The story of PFAS is a 60-year-old study of people who knew and chose not to tell you about the dangers of PFAS. They knew in 1961. In 2023, researchers at UC San Francisco published a paper called The Devil They Knew. They went through internal DuPont and 3M documents that came out in litigation. Here's what they found.

16:50In 1961, DuPont's own chief toxicology found that Teflon chemical enlarged the livers of rats at very low doses. So again, in 1970, a DuPont-funded lab found that PFOAs were highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested. So again, they know something's going on. They're naming it, but they're not taking full responsibility. In 1979, dogs exposed to PFOAs died within two days. 1980, DuPont and 3M found that two of the eight pregnant women working on the PFOA's line had children with birth defects. They did not disclose that either. 1991, an internal memo stated, quote, we know of no evidence of birth defects caused by C8, which is the form of the PFOAs at DuPont.

17:491991, a company press release, C8, PFOAs, has no known toxic or ill health effects in humans. 2004, EPA fines DuPont$16.45 million. At that time, the largest civil penalty in an agency's history for hiding what it is that they knew. This is crazy because this is, again, the similar playbook that the tobacco industry used because it's a public relations nightmare. And it didn't stop with the companies. In January 2018, the CDC's Toxic Substance Agency had a report ready to publish saying PFAS was dangerous at levels roughly six times lower than the EPA was telling people was safe. Emails obtained by reporters showed a White House aide writing, quote, the public media and congressional reaction to these new numbers is going to be huge.

18:54And, quote, we cannot seem to get the agency ATSDR to realize the potential public relations nightmare this is going to be. The report was buried for months. It only came out after a bipartisan outcry in Congress. So when I look at 2025 and 2026, an agency trying to erase standards through a courtroom instead of public process, the EPA's Office of Research and Development being dismantled while the same administration claims its PFAS work is gold standard science. Several PFAS toxicology assessments that were already underway sitting unreleased. A new rule to limit PFAS discharges from chemical plants that was ready in early 2025 still hasn't been issued.

19:48I don't see a new story. I see the same freaking story. All right, everyone, I'm going to pause the episode right here. We have just uncovered the infuriating 60-year history of corporate cover-up and backdoor politics and these rollbacks that is actively keeping us and keeping these forever chemicals exposed to us through our water. But the most important question is, what are these chemicals actually doing to our biology? Over on Patreon, in the second half of this episode, we are going to dive deep into the hard science. Yep, we're going to nerd out a little bit. I'm breaking down exactly what the evidence says about cancer risks, immune suppression, and the shocking truth about what absorbs through the skin in the shower.

20:41More importantly, I'm giving you the exact step-by-step solutions to filter your home and protect your family today. because we are not waiting around for the government to save us. So don't be bummed about what they're not doing. To unlock the rest of this conversation and get those solutions, head over to patreon.com forward slash Darren O 'Lean right now. That's patreon.com slash Darren O 'Lean, D-A-R-I-N-O-L-I-E-N. Click the link in the show notes, type it in, and I'll see you right over there to finish the deep dive and take back our health from all of this nonsense. Let's build that super life right now together.