Good evening and a very, very, very Merry Christmas.

I hope you're enjoying it by being surrounded with friends and family, a warm tree, good food.

And thank you so much for tuning in. You could literally be doing anything else,

but here you are watching Facts Matter on Christmas Day. Thank you.

And I will in turn bring you something good.

Usually during the holidays, I look through my old notebooks looking for stories that are important, but that we might have missed during the year because the news cycle is just so tumultuous. Sometimes the news cycle is just so fast that even though a story might really be consequential, it does not get the coverage it deserves even from me.

And so today, I will present to you one such story that I found in my research. In 2023,

the U.S. Geological Survey, which is a U.S. agency, it published a study, you can see it up on

your screen, showing that at least 45% of American tap water contains what are known as Forever Chemicals.

That paper, it was the culmination of a five-year-long study conducted across the entirety of the U.S. from 2016 up until 2021,

and it found that these toxic forever chemicals were present, again, in at least 45% of the tap water coming out of the

kitchen sinks or the bathroom sinks in American homes. Furthermore, what was perhaps even the

more surprising revelation in this paper was that this was actually the first government study

of its kind, which is mind-blowing, despite the fact that forever chemicals have been known to be present in the waterways in America for the past 50 years now.

Somehow, this type of a study had never been conducted before until the year 2016.

In fact, according to the United States Geological Survey, which is, again, the government agency

behind this research, they wrote that, quote, this study marks the first time anyone has tested

for and compared PFAS in tap water from both private and government regulated public water

supplies on a broad scale throughout the United States. That is wild. And so today,

let's dig into the details of their research together right after you take a super quick moment

to smash those like and subscribe buttons so that this information can reach ever more people

via the YouTube algorithm. Thank you so much for that. Now to start with, as I mentioned just a moment ago,

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