For the love of god, stop microwaving plastic

It was a godsend when our pediatrican told us this. He said just use powdered formula, mix it with room temperature water at feeding time. No need to refrigerate premixed formula, no need to heat it up, no need to carry it around in a cooler when you're on the go.

At this point it's unavoidable. But if we're going to fix it there are probably much larger fish to fry here. Of course you should not microwave stuff in plastic anyway just like you shouldnt use a metal utensil on a teflon pan. But these articles are always written like it's One Weird Trick (TM) when the problem is actually everything else.

How can you know it's out of proportion when earlier in your comment you admit that you don't know what the risk is? We have no idea how bad these plastics are for us.

> probably not great

Sounds like it's being minimized for some reason. I'd err on the side of caution when it comes to putting things in your body and your baby's body and developing brain.

There is no big demand on parents to microwave plastic.

What about this test they did though, I wouldn't say "completely" unknown?

> To test what these plastics do to our bodies once they’re consumed, the team bathed human embryonic kidney cells in the plastic roughage shed by the baby-food containers. (The team chose this kind of cell because kidneys have so much contact with ingested plastic.) After two days of exposure to concentrated microplastics and nanoplastics, about 75 percent of the kidney cells died—over three times as many as cells that spent two days in a much more diluted solution.

I think the safest thing to do is just not microwave the food in plastic anymore and slowly move from plastic storage back to glass for instance, which correct me if I'm wrong, doesn't have these issues. It is less convenient but convenience is what puts all this garbage into our bodies.

There's nothing "expensive" about avoiding putting plastics into your microwave. Just don't do it: put your food on a ceramic plate or bowl instead. If the food came in a plastic container, dump the food into a normal bowl or plate instead. It doesn't cost anything at all: owning ceramic plates and bowls is normal, and you can buy them for very cheap.

The only thing "expensive" here is the few seconds it takes to transfer the food to something ceramic, and the extra time it takes to clean it. BFD.

From this we know that they don't instantaneously kill you.

Does it cause cancer? Endocrine disruption? Long-term cognitive issues? That's hard to say, because we don't have much of a control group that hasn't been exposed to these things. But it seems unlikely that it's good for you, and when the cost of avoiding it isn't that high, why volunteer to be a test subject?

Something is causing it and until we know better it’s probably a reasonable assumption it’s plastic.

> If they were more than trivially harmful, we would know by now.

“The Increasing Prevalence in Intersex Variation from Toxicological Dysregulation in Fetal Reproductive Tissue Differentiation and Development by Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5017538/

Sperm counts are dropping globally. Hormone disruption can help explain it. Wild life that live near human populations (and pets, and lab animals on controlled diets) are unexpected getting fatter. Hormone disruption can help explain it. Amphibians are having weird developmental problems caused by, you guessed it, hormonal dysfunction.

Variation in human physiology and psychology scales on a gradient; from subtle differences in brain structure, which might not even be noticeable to others, to macro differences visible to the eye. A chemical that can cause extreme variation of the external genitalia surely also can cause changes in glands and brains. IMO we see signals of the effects of hormonal dysregulation in our society with increasing prevalence.

I think plastics have been quite a bit more than trivially harmful.

There's a huge body of research on endocrine disrupting chemicals, specifically from plastics, going back decades. The science is settled here.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030372072...

The article links sources, but it's trivially googlable.

There's tons of evidence that these chemicals cause problems with sexual development and fertility, there's also lots of evidence that plastic containers leach them when microwaved. As the article states, it is obvious what people need to do. Glass containers are not expensive, and disposable food containers NOT made of plastic were commonplace up through the 90's and they can be again. Switching to glass and aluminum containers when possible is actually better for the environment as well, since they are actually recyclable whereas plastic is guaranteed to end up in a landfill eventually.

>Avoiding plastics can be extremely expensive

Tinfoil instead of plastic wrap, a glass Tupperware set is a few dollars more expensive instead of plastic, aluminum water bottles instead of plastic (actually cheaper than plastic bottles).

My family eliminated plastics from our lives and it cost us basically nothing. In what way is it extremely expensive?

Glass for example takes a huge amount of energy by comparison, if you can reuse it 100s of times then you may break even, but let's face it, where disposable plastics are used, such as microwavable food, glass won't be reusable. Recycled at best, but that still takes lots of energy.

Same for reusable bags, hemp or even heavy duty plastic. Natural fibres need to be reused many times to break even on environmental impact. UK banned disposable plastic bags in favour of reusable bags... and amount of plastic dispensed out for bags increased.

I'm all up for eliminating plastics but not at the price of using substantially more energy (CO2) and water.

I think you might be overestimating the degree that science has the power to answer these questions, especially when it can't be tied to some obvious grant funding source.

We can't even be sure of the link between CO2 and cognition. If you look at the studies, the bulk of them are done by the Navy and they're not super applicable to office/school settings. Of the ones remaining, most of them are too underpowered to convincingly demonstrate either way and the meta analysis is all a mess. This should be one of the most gotcha easy questions we can formulate but because nobody directly makes a high ROI from funding it, Scientists scrabble around for funds.

There was the famous, now retracted study that showed that judges were much more lenient on cases after lunch than before, that was taken down on methodological grounds. But notice that it wasn't taken down because it was inconsistent with previous literature on other fields and the impact of lunch on decision making... because there was no previous literature. We all know there's some pretty sizable effect that lunch has on cognition and the workplace is full of tips and heuristics about how to avoid that post lunch slump or what tasks to schedule after lunch. Plenty of anecdata that there's a effect but again, no money to scientifically characterize the effect.

There are two kind of plastics, thermoplastics, which are heated until they become soft and then molded in the desired form. Besides the thermoplastic polymers, this kind of behavior is also exhibited by metals and glasses.

The second kind of plastics are the thermoset polymers, which are first made in a soft form, then molded in the desired form, and then they are hardened by various methods, e.g. by baking. Besides the thermoset polymers, this kind of behavior is also exhibited by ceramics and cements.

So while the plastics are polymers, many polymers are not plastics.

Most polymers that are made by the living beings are not plastics. Those that have a linear structure suitable for thermoplastics are degraded by heat, so they cannot be heated enough to become soft. Those that have a cross-linked structure like thermosets are already hardened and they cannot be reverted to a soft state.

So substances like wool, silk, leather, wood are not plastics, even if they are polymers.

One of the few natural plastics is beeswax, which has been used for many millennia as a thermoplastic material. Other examples are various kinds of pitch or resin extracted from plants, or bitumen.

BTW how do you even find control group when micro-plastics are already everywhere?

Microwave ovens deliver microwaves. That doesn't mean microwaves can't disintegrate plastic -- maybe they can -- but there's no UV in a microwave oven.

take a lighter to some, at a distance mind you, go slow, and it'll melt down into a plastic-y resin. used to do that all the time to make terrain for tabletop gaming.

plus, it isn't just about cancer, microplastics are known to disrupt your hormones, so the danger is pretty clear

why not just take it seriously instead of calling it "plastic alarmism"? we're polluting the entire world with these particles