New study finds microplastics infiltrate all systems of body, alter behaviour
sustainableplastics.com
sustainableplastics.com
The first is the Flynn effect, which was rising IQ levels decade over decade, which halted and then reserved for most Western nations around 1990s/2000s and is now declining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
The second is the dropping fertility/sperm counts/hormone issues/etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_infertility_crisis
I think microplastics along with forever chemicals/PFAS are two of the likely culprits and are probably fairly easy to deal with.
I wonder what else could be contributing?
probably fairly easy to deal with.
Ban plastic food containers for any type of long-term storage or anything that gets heated up (and different plastics have different microplastic shedding profiles, so ban the worst first) and also ban PFAS in anything that gets close to food. It will increase costs, but the alternative is we poison ourselves, so it is sort of needed. Phase it in so that industries have time to adapt.
Sure, everything is multi factor. Saying things are complex is a way to ensure there is no action taken ever.
> And the plastics are already in the ecosystem and circulating for a very long time even if we banned all plastics today - which we won’t and instead every year we produce and use more
Sure, but the sooner we act, once we know for sure this is a significant contributor, the sooner we stop making the problem worse.
I want my children to be able to have children, don't you?
Human ingenuity knows no bounds and it will be a market opportunity for new entrants and innovators.
- are the overall costs of plastics (namely pollution and its environmental and health effects) higher than the costs of banning plastics? Seems like a clear yes.
- what are the redistributive effects? Seems like: consumers are net winners (lower health effects, some or all financial costs of switching away from plastics are passed down to consumers through higher prices); some firms are losers (mainly those who produced plastics or used a lot of them) and some are winners (newcomers, producers of no plastics solutions, transporters).
God, I wish I could go back to non-plastic packaging. Natural peanut butter I can still find in glass, as I can for my jelly. But mayonnaise, ketchup and countless other items are in plastic-only containers.
One idea is to stop consuming these, given they are not food and are not nutritious in the first place.
Your body (and mind) will thank you.
Plastic food packaging is crazy to me, but also lowers the cost of food because of transportation. I would love to see a situation where you buy food in glass bottles and take thise cleaned glass bottles back to the store for resuse, for example. On plastic, on strategy for healthy eating is to be as strict as you can about buying food packaged in plastic. This is getting harder, but it forces you to get the majority of your food from the produce and butcher. Of course, one lived in places (like DC) where such a strategy might seem less possible.
Synthetic fibres in clothing (like that cotton-poly blend shirt you're most likely wearing) and motor vehicle tyres are some of the bigger sources. These both also release particles directly into the atmosphere allowing them to get absolutely everywhere, unlike plastic in landfills that probably has a harder time escaping into the wider environment.
Can you give me some citations? I know that microwaving plastic containers is about the worst thing you can do with regards to microplastics, because it releases tons of them right into your food:
https://www.wired.com/story/for-the-love-of-god-stop-microwa...
This is a hot area of research but that means it’s a hotbed of flawed and sensationalist research. Dunking embryonic cells in a bath of ridiculous concentrations of nanoplastic chemicals and watching them die is cute and a tired, stupid trick. If you put any of your cells in your favorite drinking water they’re going to lyse. It doesn’t prove shit.
For tyre particulate : https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/101707/9/Tyr...
I hate to be that guy, but it's easy to say costs increase is a lesser problem when you are not in the lower end of the economic spectrum. What would happen to people who barely survive today? Corporations won't decrease their profit, gained by using cheap plastic, for the greater good.
But more concretely, there is evidence that conservatives out reproduce liberals in the US and in part it is related to the urban - country divide and that could also be related to both pollution, but also likely cost of living: https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-conservative-fertility-advant...
An example would be people who go onto Twixxer to find out what they are supposed to be mad about today. I understand that there are legitimate issues which need a spotlight put on them and social media can be a great tool for that. But it also thrives on that level of anger and energy, so there is a decent amount of less-than-dire issues being flogged just for engagement.
If enough people are just entertaining their brain away/being directed by an algorithm more often than not, I can see this moving the needle on general intelligence since "the brain is a muscle" and not using it means you can lose it over time.
AFAIK there are some studies that show that dysgenics are at least not the only effect in play (e.g. this study https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1718793115). But I am far from an expert on the topic.
We see obesity becoming increasingly normalized. People feel powerless to stop it and that we should just accept it.
It feels to me like there is something besides diet changes happening to us. That's part of it, but I wonder if microplastics or some kind of gut biome disruption is playing a role as well.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/19/environm...
https://www.webmd.com/obesity/what-to-know-obesogens
These so called "obesogens" just increase the propensity towards obesity and depending on exposure and your sensitivity to then, you can overcome them or not via exercise and dieting and other means.
It sounds callous but if you go to Africa or visit a prisoner of war camp you won’t find many fat people and so blaming chemicals in America for so many fat people doesn’t make much sense to me.
In the 40s, 50s, and 60s most people did manual labor and even office jobs were not as sedentary since you couldn’t just sit at a computer.
Here’s another simple overlooked example, grocery shopping, before the rise of superstores you’d go into town and visit 4 different stores. The butcher, the hardware store, the grocer, the pharmacist etc. now it’s all in one big store all next to each other.
Here’s another example lawn mowing. Back then most people had manual lawnmowers.
Here’s another example the moving of goods. Go look up a picture of the manual labor involved in being a stevedore back then versus now and that’ll give you an idea of how much less physical exertion is needed these days even in jobs that are still considered manual labor.
Overall I think solely blaming plastic for obesity is an oversimplification and assuredly wrong, although it could have some affect there are a lot of other things going on.
Declines in fertility and IQ are most likely due to obesity so it’s a big issue.
I also just had this thought about declining levels of fertility in humans. If it’s being caused by external factors like plastic or any pollution we’d expect to see similar effects in all other mammals especially ones close to human populations.
I wasn’t able to find any studies backing this up with just a cursory search, but it is likely the easiest way to add or detract from the plastic hypothesis.
I do know that not all but most studies comparing fertility between decades found that when controlling for obesity the differences were not statistically significant between time periods.
Which happens to be the cheap thing in industrialized mass produced Western food chains. Cheap in terms of dollars and personal time.
So obesity is really an economic problem.
We should come down like a ton of bricks on fast food and require they offer healthier options at low prices, subsidized by taxes on their unhealthier options.
But until very recently, I would absolutely have still chosen the unhealthy option. I'm not sure how much impact 20% on a bag of Doritos is really going to have.
To me, substitutability is key.
If you tax unhealthy food, but unhealthy food is the only option (from physical, financial, and time perspectives), people just pay more to eat unhealthy food.
If you tax unhealthy food, but also require healthier and low-cost options at the same establishment, then people begin to have options. I.e. do I want a $10 Big Mac or a $3 grilled chicken sandwich?
Even getting the Big Mac less often would be a net win.
And I call bullshit if McDonald's tries the "But it's impossible to run healthy food through our supply chain..." argument.
Cigarettes are a great example of missing substitutability.
If you smoke, and the price of cigarettes increases, what options do you have?
My version of an anti-smoking campaign would have drastically boosted the price of cigarettes and used to tax to decrease the price of nicotine patches or gum.
If there aren't alternatives at the point of sale, there aren't alternatives.
I agree. But most of my bad food choices are made in supermarkets. Next time you're at a checkout, look for the healthy trolleys and the unhealthy trolleys. Honestly, the difference is stark. (When I go on a health kick, I find it amazing how many aisles I just don't need to walk down. So much processed food).
On the tax point I'm going to try to argue you away from the concept of hypothecated tax, because I think it's almost always a bad idea. Money is fungible, and taxation all goes into a single pot. Tying tax and spending together is a rhetorical trick, meant to manipulate public opinion - whenever you see a politician doing that, there's a good chance they're trying to con you.
If we're going to put a sin tax on something, we should do it because it's the right thing to do. If we're going to fund a health programme, we should do it because it's the right thing to do. But these decisions are orthagonal. Tying them just unnecessarily binds government's hands wrt future policy changes. Worst-case, you end up funding obsolete health programmes, "because that's what the tax is for".
For practical purposes you either need to eat modestly at McDonalds or more realistically not eat at McDonalds very much.
When we eat out, we easily eat 1000+ calories. That's over half the daily calorie budget of a 5'5 woman. Yet it's just one of the meals people eat in a day.
People like to come up with a bunch of reasons for why we eat too much or why the food we eat is somehow making us fatter than it might otherwise but we gloss over how trivial it is to overeat caloric dense foods even if "obesogens" and microplastics never existed.
Fast forward a little bit and their lobbyists have convinced government to further incentivize healthy options by paying Restaurants that implement absolutely meaningless standards that do nothing for anything and we are actually subsidizing giant asses whose milkshake brings all the obesity adjacent diseases to the yard.
If you actually want to disincentivize negative things you have to either actually forbid them or just make it more expensive. Incentives will always be gamed and end up as free giveways. See bullshit carbon credits.
Want people to eat fewer big macs? Tax them at 100% and watch most of the cheap fast food implode and cease to exist. Want those people not to starve watch in amazement at a virtue of UBI you can tax things out of existence that destroy people's health without starving people.
Starvation mode is a myth. Well, kinda. You do enter "starvation mode" where your metabolism significantly slows down, but only if you're actually starving. Simply eating in a caloric deficit will not do anything to your metabolism.
The beginning of this article talks about that in great detail:
And that the amount you would have to limit yourself to with a completely sedentary life (like many people have) and still be in a caloric deficit is just not sustainable for people and would make you feel absolutely miserable and also unlikely to get enough vitamins and minerals and cause other health problems.
because let's be honest, telling people to eat less is not going to stop them from eating junk, just less junk.
"Just eating less" I don't think is really enough for most cases. You need to also be active and exercise along with, and even better, be eating the right balance of macros.
I would say you need to do maybe 2 of the 3 to lose or maintain weight, and doing all 3 will certainly allow you to lose weight. But doing just 1 is unlikely to see results.
To lose weight, you need to eat in a caloric deficit, that's it. Excercising just burns extra calories which allows you to eat more while staying in a deficit.
And macros / less junk food are, of course, important for health, but if we're speaking strictly about weight loss, no, it doesn't matter. FWIW, you can eat only a Big Mac and 3 Snickers bars every day, and you'll still lose weight, because that's about ~1800 kcal, which is a deficit for most people.
> the amount you would have to limit yourself to with a completely sedentary life (like many people have) and still be in a caloric deficit is just not sustainable for people and would make you feel absolutely miserable and also unlikely to get enough vitamins and minerals and cause other health problems.
That depends on what you eat really, there are a lot of foods that don't have a lot of calories while still being very nourishing, and many of them are just normal foods, not some special "fitness stuff"
---
The article I linked in my above comment is actually a great explanation of why "just eating less" is enough for most people, I highly recommend you read it if you haven't already.
We have to be taught the value of exercise and being physically active because most people don’t default to that.
Just look up 'hormonal weight gain' to see that it isn't just about eating less. Then look at research into the influence of chemicals/micro plastics on those hormones.
Yes, all calories have to go in through the mouth. How those calories are processed, however, is influenced by a great many factors.
I feel compelled to assume that we can't possibly be extracting every calorie from certain types of food. Caloriometers work differently from human digestive systems.
But yeah, human digestion is pretty efficient. Muscles are far less efficient though, around 30%, which is a neat fact.
The pervasive obsession with avoiding this truth is concerning and has had a detrimental effect on society. How many of us know someone who passed away from COVID due to this kind of unhealthiness? Primary Care Physicians and health professionals out there need to step it up and be truthful with people.
I can acknowledge the extreme cases where this may not be possible, but 9/10 times we can take ownership of our lives whatever the situation, clean our diets and get out there and exercise.
Say that someone was failing at university because they have no motivation. And they have no motivation because they have depression. Then a vocal minority would always butt in with the following truism:
- Failing university courses is caused by not studying enough. There is no subverting the fact that you need to study the material in order to not fail the course.
This is of course a completely useless advice/truism.
Now say that someone overeats because they have depression. Or because of some pathology caused by microplastics. Or let's just say that there is a possibility that a different environment (no microplastics) would lead to them not overeating. Do you still want to derail this conversation with irrelevant “thermodynamics” truisms?
"I am failing because I am not studying enough."
Granted, I could introspect on what was preventing me from studying, leverage additional college resources, align to my learning styles, etc.
But until I accepted the above as an honest objective truth, and a path to change, I wasn't able to be successful.
Many commenters like to slight of hand their possibly objective comments about calories as making their comments about moral or will-power failings just as objective, when it’s not a transitive property.
― Luhmann, Niklas (1990), The Cognitive Program of Constructivism and a Reality that Remains Unknown. In: Krohn W., Küppers G. & Nowotny H. (eds.) Selforganization. Portrait of a scientific revolution. Kluwer, Dordrecht: pp. 64–85, p. 66
I'd say more, but frankly, I'm only on hackernews rn because I can't bloody sleep and doing more than copy pasting would wake me up too much
Personally I avoid "sugary" food and drinks like the plague. I also don't snack and do regular exercise and sometimes don't eat dinner. I'm at a healthy weight in my 40s. How many adults that are obese have a healthy relationship with food and do regular exercise / fast? Obese children I have sympathy for, I'm uncertain how I feel about obese adults. I don't know if their metabolism is ultra slow, or they are just not taking care of themselves. Its complicated...
Regardless of the cause of the obesity epidemic, it should be addressed compassionately and efficaciously. What makes that difficult (at least in the US) is that the most efficacious treatments aren't aligned with how the healthcare system works. Maybe you won't blame being fat on diet and exercise, but there's almost certainly a diet and excercise plan that will make you lose weight.
First-line treatment should be, - Walk/jog 30 min, 3x per week. Pace for a mildly elevated heart rate. - Eliminate super sweet foods from regular diet. No more than 3x per week. This could be VERY hard for sugar-addicted folks, so start small and work up. - Fast occasionally. Intermittent is great, but longer is even better. - Take a multivitamin.
The end goal is to replace your sweet craving with a fat craving and be ok feeling hungry for periods of time.
High fructose corn syrup is relatively new.
So are many sugar substitutes.
Why would you not have sympathy for someone suffering? Even if it's theoretically their own doing most people don't want to be obese.
If it's environmental pollutants, shouldn't lab or wild animals be getting fatter as well? Yet they're not: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-get...
A US comedian once commented that when he went to Europe 20 years ago, he noticed that people only ate three meals a day.
What a concept!
The number of meals is a very small part of the entire diet and lifestyle matrix.
Cars?
Based on what many people have in their shopping carts and the sugar water many people are constantly chugging, I see no reason to think anything other than excess calories is the cause. And lack of exercise as an exacerbating factor.
When I used to weight train, during my cuts (weight loss phases), I had much more success with a high fat/low carb diet than I ever did calorie counting (which naturally makes you avoid fat since they have a higher calorie density).
[0] Not an expert but this is my layman's understanding after reading lots of books on the subject.
Under my doctor's supervision, I went on the keto diet. I eat high fat foods and meats, and I lost about 50 lbs in 2 months. My weight stabilized over the following months within a healthy range. Additionally, chronic pain, concentration, and energy levels all improved. Most of this is due to the weight loss, but not all of it. Sugar can cause inflammation in high quantities, and it can also cause an increase in blood pressure. Sugars are also metabolized by cancer cells while ketones are not, which would explain the rise in cancer rates as sugar consumption has increased across the planet. My liver function improved, cholesterol levels improved, blood sugar stabilized, and insulin resistance went down.
I personally believe that there is some kind of difference among humans in how we digest things that goes beyond the microbiome. Some people can eat high amounts of carbohydrates and sugars without negative consequences beyond tooth decay. Other people cannot eat any sugar without incurring weight gain and cognitive problems.
Well sure, obesity is a result of a lot of factors, some genetic, but a lot of it is the food environment surrounding people. The lack of easy access to healthy foods or education on how to buy and prepare them, plus economic pressures all play into this.
Yup. It is hard to pull all the factors apart because they contribute to each other. If you are obese, I understand it screws up your hormones which makes it easier to stay obese. Also if you have exposure to chemicals which cause you to have a tendency towards being obese you are more likely to seek out a bad food environment - e.g. crave McDonald's fries, etc.
So you sort of just need to work on each factor and over time, it will change. For many, we already have significantly accumulations of forever chemicals or microplastics so it may take a generation to truly fix.
This doesn't exist anywhere in the world. You either have easy access to healthy food or no access to food at all.
Healthy food is so much cheaper, more abundant and easier to source in all situations than processed junk.
The idea that people don't know how to eat healthy or can't afford to is a convenient lie.
"In aquatic invertebrates, microplastics cause a decline in feeding behavior and fertility, slow down larval growth and development, increase oxygen consumption, and stimulate the production of reactive oxygen species. In fish, the microplastics may cause structural damage to the intestine, liver, gills, and brain, while affecting metabolic balance, behavior, and fertility; the degree of these harmful effects depends on the particle sizes and doses, as well as the exposure parameters"
From a quick search: https://www.livescience.com/10277-obesity-rise-animals.html
[1]gas stoves and ranges, overhead fans, etc. and of course when they released a trial balloon they accused people of conspiracy theory thinking -but here we are. Meanwhile sweeteners and fillers are everywhere.
Unlike smoking, half the class is already fat. NGOs and media would frame it as a psychological harm to those children, fat-shaming, or who knows what else. It would be a political landmine.
No, this should be confronted as _the_ health threat of the next 20 - 30 years. It's more consequential than anything else, Health-wise, productivity-wise, medical costs, quality of life --All these shoppers in their electric 4-wheeled scooters. It's insane that this is not a declared crisis.
Being a cop is a very sedentary position in most of America. Unless you are a city cop out walking around you are probably in your car most of the day.
What I am saying is that, for many and an increasing number of people, something is wrong - calorie surplus or not - with that they're ingesting. Even the physiology of being "fat" in the 1950s looked absolutely nothing like obesity does today. The "processed" part is the difference, though, so we certainly agree on that point.
Don’t you think that could have been the reason their health continued to fail?
Then I did calorie counting with MyFitnessPal and ate at a 500 cal deficit, and I lost weight. It works. But I pretty much had to stop eating out because I couldn't know the numbers on restaurant meals. I was basically eating raw food half the time, just to make it easier to calculate.
I'm surprised there's no government initiative to help people do calorie counting. Open up-to-date database, force restaurants to feed it nutritional info, etc.
it could always be worse
A controlled study is impossible to do, but the correlations and trend lines should show up when comparing across different population wide exposures to PFAs and microplastics.
That's another reason I think it is important to keep granular data of localized IQ, fertility, and trends in reproductive choice. People are worried about what it will reveal. We should instead be worried about what we're missing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kogi_people
But none of those populations can actually be used for testing, because you would need to collect relevant data on them starting 50 years ago, and we don't have any time machines.
Same point in time where people started to get cell phones and be always connected to the internet.
It's a classic "jacking off butterflies" response. That's a reference to the TV show Childrens Hospital, in which one of the doctors finds a cure for cancer and it's butterfly semen. One of the other characters says something along the lines of "We both know cancer is an amalgam of unique conditions, it should be impossible to find a single cure" but they brush it off and starting jacking off butterflies. That's how I feel whenever people try to reduce complex social phenomena to a single simplistic cause. "We both know it can't be just this one thing, but let's pretend it is because that's easier to solve."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9134445/
The plastic brain: neurotoxicity of micro- and nanoplastics:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7282048/
Phalates in plastics reduce IQ significantly:
Plus, the obsessive focus on IQ reeks of bad social science.
You are making my original statements into a straw man argument. I didn't say they are fully responsible, but rather I think they are contributors.
I even asked in my original post what else could be contributing:
> I think microplastics along with forever chemicals/PFAS are two of the likely culprits and are probably fairly easy to deal with. > > I wonder what else could be contributing?
Lead does reduce IQ and increase crime. Here is a meta-analysis that tries to tease out how much lead was responsible for crime and homicide:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016604622...
Banning lead gasoline was the right thing regardless. It was causing harm. It is hard at the time to know exactly how much.
You then wrote:
> You throw obesity in there too, and doesn't it seem like folks are trying to pin all of society's ills on a single issue?
I do think we are poisoning ourselves in probably a few different ways -- we have made so many novel chemicals without significant safety testing that a good chunk of them are probably harmful and can also likely build up over time. If we can continue to deal with these harmful chemicals that have clear links to negative health outcomes, we will be better off as a society.
The trick is to keep studying them and then act on those studies to mitigate the harms of those chemicals.
The world is complex and there is usually not a singular cause of everything. But that doesn't mean we should just throw our arms up and say, oh no, I can not do anything it is all just too complex or overwhelming. No, instead you just have to do, as Anna says in Frozen II, "the next right thing:"
And yet the study you shared about lead actually proves my point. The meta-analysis showed that the impact of lead on crime is overstated in the literature. And I know a number of sociologists/criminologists, and (though this is anecdotal) they take the lead hypothesis far less seriously than this meta-analysis does. Partially that's due to the fact that this was written by economists, the natural enemy of sociologists. But I digress.
My argument is that simple "scientific" answers to complex social problems get overstated, while the messy stuff gets overlooked. It's a cognitive bias that especially affects the kinds of people on this website, because it substitutes complex social scientific problems with "simple" chemical cause and effects. It doesn't means we we shouldn't address the very real public health crisis. But remember, Rome wasn't built in a day, and it wasn't destroyed by lead pipes. That's a myth.
And don’t you think there’s disproportion in your asking for a total and convincing argument to believe otherwise, while also claiming that the basis of your doubt is some scene from a TV series that performs bathroom humor?
Canola is an industry term, not Latin plant name, but why would culture repressed by toxic ersatz foodstuffs and microplastics care to know about brassica seeds?
1: https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdire...
2: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jns.12261
The Wikipedia article on the Flynn effect mentions air pollution. Though this is a little surprising because in some parts of the West, air pollution has decreased since the introduction of acid rain controls in the 1980s, while the decline shows up generally after the 90s.
In 1900 lots of people lived with low access to information or highly sensory stimulating environments. By 1950 there was a lot more stimulus and info. TV, comic books, color movies, rock & roll, fear of nuclear armageddon. By 2000 we're overloaded. Cable TV, computers, cheap and rapid long distance communication, fear of climate armageddon. Maybe the cognitive load has just become too much. Two beers might make you better at darts, but 20 won't.
Everything I've read about plastic recycling points to it being ineffective and requiring massive amounts of fossil fuel to move the waste around the globe, often with much of it just getting burned or dumped into the environment anyway. Despite that, the aisles of grocery stores are still packed full of single-use plastic bottles, containers, wrappers, etc.
Are any countries making a legitimate effort to drastically reduce the use of plastics? It seems like we had a pretty good system years ago in requiring people to leave a deposit for bottles when purchasing beer or pop to incentivize return + reuse.
I'm not- show me the direct harm it is causing on an individual level. We can all agree they are a nuisance but it is hard to show how they are outright harming people. Studies like this are a step towards that proof.
The harm should be obvious to the layman IMHO in order to be legislated away. Otherwise, it should be left up to personal choice.
Individual scientists are wrong a lot. Science as a process continues to be the (imperfect) reigning world champ of truth discovery, no matter what contrarianism du jour memes are spreading over the internet.
Tell the horrifying plastic story (if there is one)
These were uncovered over the course of years by statistical analysis, prompted by suspicions created by (noisy, often non-human) information about the mechanisms.
Similarly, we have tons of data supporting a bunch of theories of micro plastic harm in the lab. The waiting revelation isn’t going to be “omg all these people are sick and we didn’t know it,” it’s going to be “all these people have been sick and we didn’t know why.”
Which is exactly the form of the sperm quality/fertility theory as well as obesity. We know these compounds cause fertility and metabolism issues in cell cultures and in animal models. We know we are facing civilization-scale problems with obesity and fertility. Drawing the connection between these types of observations is always extremely noisy because there are obviously trillions of variables affecting “does a specific individual become infertile or obese,” or “does a person have an elevated risk of birth defects.”
I’m not necessarily on the side of an immediate and total ban, but this “we’ll see the problems if they exist” attitude is profoundly ignorant and arrogant. The historical examples appear obvious to you because you saw the results of extremely deep study prompted from initially low-quality suspicions.
I'm not sure if this is sarcasm but if it's not, this is really the peak of anti-intellectualism ideology, i.e., that if a thing is not immediately obvious without studying then we should remain ignorant of it. I don't think that kind of opinion is a good fit for this forum to be honest, which has learning and information sharing as an important goal, so I will have to flag your message, which is an extremely rare thing for me to do (actually this may be my first time ever)
I'm not sure if you're willfully ignorant or just saw an opportunity to pass a pejorative and took it.
I didn't say we should "ignore it". I said we shouldn't allow scientists to exclusively decide what should or should not be legal.
> The mice in the study began to move peculiarly, and to exhibit behaviours reminiscent of dementia in humans
I know this is only _in mice_ but the policy we have of "let industry do what they want and if we find out it's harming humans in 30 years we'll do something about it" has not proven to work out so well in the past (lead, DDT, CFCs, cigarettes).
Moreover, the main ingredient in making plastics is derived from fossil fuels (specifically crude oil and natural gas).
Heck I wouldn't trust paper food packaging because I'm not sure they would use a wax liner instead of some fancy PFAS forever chemical.
I think the most common sources are:
* Plastic netting * Plastics from countries without any/lacking waste infrastructure
There are differences in statistics between EU countries, they might tell something interesting.
EDIT: "considered to be at risk of missing one or more material-specific targets, with plastic being the most critical material:
Plastics: Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia and Spain" https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM%3A20...
That's the thing. Plastic is modern lead. It's easily moldable, but causes subtle health problems.
These comments read like Reddit/TikTok. Lots of frantic fearful hand waving, not a lot of evidence presented.
There are thousands of plastics, and a blanket statement like this is simply false. We should be working to figure out which plastics are toxic, and why. You're essentially looking at lead and coming to the conclusion that "Metal is toxic, we all know this."
If it was comparable to lead in terms of identifying toxicity, we wouldn’t be having this debate.
So actually plastic is worse than lead in that it’s more insidious, some want to slowly kill things but it’s nearly impossible to tell which. If only it were like lead and upfront about it.
So no, they are not saying “metal is toxic”. That is extending the analogy to another topic: identification
The parent hand-waved away the substantial differences between various plastics and made bold blanket statements on plastics as a whole that may or may not be true.
There's plenty of material out there to cite with and providing a cite that supported your understanding would help the discussion. Here's a random one:
According to the European Parliament, ~63% of microplastics come from laundering synthetic clothes and car tires [1].
1. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/201...
https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/nebraska-study-...
And they're everywhere. I bought a sweater a couple of years ago. It's made from recycled PET bottles. It felt like a nice thing a couple of years ago. Now I realize that every time I wash it I'm releasing micro plastics into the sewer that might not get filtered out.
This proliferation of plastic is not rational, certainly not wholesome. It is purely the downstream effect of plastic being cheap to produce, it is primarily a technological phenomenon.
For other applications plastics are an outright miracle material though. Imagine if all drinks came in glass bottles; all cases and other structural parts were made of metal or wood; all elastic members were made of rubber or treated wood. The added need for shipping alone would probably outweigh the CO2 impact from current plastics production. As it is you get plastics almost for free while refining oil. Not to mention the insane demand there would be for metals, wood and rubber.
> Imagine if all drinks came in glass bottles
I can totally imagine. Glass bottles with deposit. Return them when empty, reclaim deposit. Most plastic bottles are also, I don't know, for crap products (?). Sodas, energy drinks. We could just drink more water.
> plastics are an outright miracle material though
Absolutely. There's certainly "good" applications of plastic. I don't dispute that.
The charger I bought this weekend was in a cardboard box. Inside that cardboard box was a plastic shimmy bracket, keeping things in place. The charger had a plastic film adhered to it, but not the whole thing, just like the on the sides kind of. The cable was tied together with a velcro band (plastic from the futor!). On the plugs of the cable were little plastic protector caps. The box itself was wrapped in plastic of course. There was a booklet, not plastic.
The material world we've surrounded ourselves with really is made of plastic, disposable trash.
On the other hand, this system incentivised using plastic bottles instead of glass, because of less hassle with returning.
> Everything I've read about plastic recycling points to it being ineffective...
There is one effective way to recycle plastic into energy called "waste incineration".
Also, glass is heavier, and requires a lot of energy to be made, so it would require a production chain that ships back empty containers.
The best silver bullet solution would be to have local canteen, a bit like in the army or at school, where you just get a subscription with a calendar (not on demand, you plan the meals you'll get), so it reduces waste and costs.
We should just stop eating at home, with individual fridges, ovens, kitchens etc, this is highly inefficient.
Yes, this is collectivization, but it's the best solution for an economy of scale. Individualism was never a good solution, individualism is often very wasteful.
Call me a communist or a socialist, I don't really care.
Weird that you're getting downvoted for this. HN is on a weird one recently
Blame people like Reagan and Milton Friedman for this. It's a highly political problem.
Inequality is already somewhat caused by individualism, but climate change is also caused by climate change. For example, if China wants to reduce its co2 emissions, you only have to convince Chinese leaders, and it's done just by snapping fingers.
In the US, you have to make it profitable, which is doable, but it's more complicated and lobbyists will also be a big barrier to change.
I loathe the chinese leadership, but being a democratic modern industrialized nation doesn't mean you will see decisions that make sense.
You also have to keep in mind the American entrepreneurial culture or DNA which has born fruit unlike any other system, and is even responsible for the very platform we're using right now. That's all about this idea that any individual can change the world.
A big lunch and a small dinner would probably be a good change for lots of us.
And if you think something is a good change, make it for yourself and don’t impose it on someone else. Vast majority of people given the choice will pick independence and purchasing/making their own food whenever they want, not being dependent on their work or state cafeteria.
Parent is getting downvoted because the vast majority of people won’t agree with that nonsense. Leave it in the 1900s.
Germans have a meal called Abendbrot which means "evening bread".
When COVID hit, Germans struggled to cook food at home, even leading to house fires https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-pandemic-reveals-germans-p...
My wife's startup does not have a canteen, so the Germans order in fast food. She is British like me so she has a small lunch and a big dinner.
> How expensive is food in Germany that people have no independence to buy and prepare food?
It is cheap but the work canteen is also often cheap. People have independence to buy and prepare food, they just don't want to.
> vast majority of people won’t agree with that nonsense. Leave it in the 1900s.
I don't think this is worthy of a response.
I.e. we can still follow your idea but at a village or family level. So why buy butter in a plastic tub when your neighbour next door has a cow and butter churning machine? Heck have a big enough multi-generational household compound and you can keep it all in-family!
We shouldn’t be borrowing from a dead communist dictator’s playbook. Clearly it didn’t work out for him and the vast majority of people didn’t want that.
I didn't think I needed to elaborate that any idea coming from communist dictators (let alone the self-styled Genius of The Carpathians) should not be the basis of our policies.
The vast majority of people don’t want to choose your wet dream when they have the choice between their own private house versus a local canteen on a schedule. Nobody likes other people so much that they’d choose to be stuck in a school cafeteria environment for their food or their children’s food forever. Life is not perpetual kindergarten where everyone’s together all the time. Life is competition and mutually-beneficial cooperation in some things, and friends are made on the basis of mutual desire. Not forced socialization and collectives. What you are proposing results in mass starvation when the systems of incentives and motivations collapse.
More local farms and more vertical farms and more greenhouses and more victory gardens are the best path. I leave it to families and individuals to choose what options they want and to buy food whenever they want. With more production, all the options will get cheaper as we flood the world with more fresh produce from better and more localized supply chains owing to incoming innovations in vertical and greenhouse farming. Not interested in going back to top-down control structures from the 1900s.
What’s next? Restricting the caloric intake of political pariahs? Restricting the options available at the local canteen to give the best options to the friends of the party and everyone in charge? Lol
This is a really sad, myopic view of life. Thankfully, it is wrong
It is ironic that you are peddling such fearful narratives given your name
https://24.kg/english/272281__Production_and_sale_of_plastic...
https://24.kg/english/272323__Kyrgyzstan_to_fine_for_sale_an...
https://fortune.com/well/2023/08/24/paper-straws-harmful-for...
CFC's coming out of your hairspray is WAY different than removing the plastic keeping your food fresh.
Stop with the black and white thinking. There is NO alternative that is free of some negative consequence. You're already seeing this with EV's. Every single "green" replacement introduces new problems that are often worse than what they've replaced.
I think it's because those two things can be used to scold consumers and thus inculcate the belief that the final link in the production-consumption chain bears all the blame.
I mean I have seen signs encouraging people to use reusable bags at the checkout line. But is it a problem that literally everything in the store (except mushrooms I guess) is wrapped in plastic? Apparently it is not.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/08/28/paper-...
Should I be alarmed? If so, what can I even do? If I'm understanding these studies correctly, these microplastics are everywhere. In our bodies, in our water supplies, in our food. And we can't even get rid of them.
Obviously we should continue to gather more information and remediate what we can but I think there is also a problem with fear-based behavior that just spreads anxiety baselessly.
Part of the issue, though. They often take food that’s above room temperature, bowls might get scratched by utensils, containers might be used in the microwave.
Personally, I find the argument that the data we currently have is not enough to force us to make such changes absolutely understandable - but at the same time, I find this kind of inertia unwarranted in the age where the world looked almost unrecognisable just a decade ago.
It’s enough to make you feel nihilistic. A big part of me feels like these are government problems, as the average person is preoccupied with paying the bills, feeding their kids, and all the other trivialities that we deal with on a daily basis.
That said, most governments are mired in bureaucracy at best, or downright dysfunctional (or anti environmental) at the worst.
So… what’s a guy to do besides “chop wood, carry water” while trying to enjoy life as best I can?
I think I and a lot of people around me got used to the relative comfort in life. To the sceptics this may sounds like just more scaremongering, but let's face it, it _has_ been getting worse in many more ways than we wanted or expected over the last decade. The least we can do to try to revert this trend is to attend a march, send an e-mail or try to spare some time to vote. Nobody can ignore the fact, that it will not reverse itself on its own.
etc. Establish your principles and live as closely to that as you can, and tune out what is outside of your control. Seriously. Block it. No one needs to see this shit every day.
Sure its a real problem and we shouldn't be complacent. But is your faucet suddenly killing you or not? Maybe it's actually not. And maybe you should confirm that it is before being afraid of it after reading articles online.
And what about when those people vote for their immediate rather than their long term needs? The man who just wants to pay his bills and feed his kids wants cheap food and cheap gas, and for prices not to go up. His politicians can't affect the sort of change you're suggesting because their opponents who promise more cheap garbage win too many votes.
In truth, we're doing pretty ok. There's just still lots of room for improvement.
A) The research is still very much in its infancy. We don't know how big of a deal microplastics are to human health yet. In a couple years we'll have a better idea.
B) There's not much you can do about them. This is compounded by A). Maybe certain types, sizes, forms of exposure etc. are more significant? We don't know any of this yet.
C) You have a limited capacity for anxiety without going crazy, allocate it wisely. If we want to be anxious about our health, for most people being anxious about diet and exercise habits will yield better returns than just about anything else...!
How will you keep everyone from dying from food-borne illnesses? What about all the items we manufacture that REQUIRE plastics?
We're not using them just because it's fun and we like loading people with plastic bits.
It would be better if disease magically didn't exist too but that's a useless thing to say.
Most of Science is utter junk, driven by the willingness or desperate effort to publish anything to make a career in academia or funded by special interests.
What matters is what can be consistently replicated, observed and explained.
Though I think worrying about it is fruitless as we're more likely to solve global warming than get all the Chemicals and plastic out of our blood globally, and that's worth the worry because there are at least things we can do to mitigate things(assuming political will ever signs)
1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36226432
- Pick a "Big Cause" and go find a job supporting it
- Accept the things you cannot change, kick back, relax, and live the life you got, whatever happens
You don't really want to be in the middle, where you stress about all the bad things, but don't actually do anything about it.
Plastics have enabled us to keep food fresh and have done a lot of things to keep humans living longer and healthier than they ever could in the past. Our modern food preservation couldn't exist without them.
So, yeah we need to be better but I think people should be looking at the overall picture. I don't see an alternative for plastic right now.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9134445/
> In summary, semen quality in men has declined significantly over the last 80 years, with sperm concentration dropping to approximately one seventh of its original value. This timing coincides with the development of plastics.
Not a bad hypothesis.
This hypothesis is not formed merely from “sperm quality has declined since 1940” and “plastic use has gone up since 1940.”
Question then becomes, if you adjust for obesity, how much has male fertility changed since 80 years ago?
(Of course this doesn't fully remove our extremely sedentary lifestyle and highly unnatural food supply either)
Divorce rates and video games are already helping to decline that
The issue is that all commercial ones have steel, which can possible leach into the distilled water + it's not antibacterial.
But if there is a concerning amount and I took steps to remediate I would want to test afterwards to ensure its working. I'm not just looking for peace of mind, I want to know if I have microplastics and how much.
They've been leeching into the environment for so long that you are no longer just concerned about primary sources contaminating your air, food, and water.
It's homogenized, from the deepest parts of the ocean to the tops of the highest mountains, there are microplastics. It's completely penetrated the food cycle.
If you want to avoid drinking microplastics, you'll have to explicitly remove it from your water.
If you want to avoid eating microplastics... I guess grow your own food in a hermetically sealed bubble and water it with your filtered water.
>Using an average calcium concentration in public water supplies of 26 mg/liter and a maximum of 145 mg/liter (Durfor and Becker, 1964) and assuming that the average adult drinks 2 liters of this water daily, then the drinking water could contribute an average of 52 mg/day and a maximum of 290 mg/day. On an average basis this would represent 5% to 10% of the usual daily intake or approximately 6.5% of the adult RDA.
>Therefore, typical drinking water in the United States, Canada, or Europe provides approximately 3% to 7% of the RDA for magnesium intake by a healthy human.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK216589/
I don't think 5% of the RDA really moves the needle either way and those are the major minerals in tap water.
I feel better going back on tap water, fewer stomach issues. I don't have a proper theory that can explain why this is the case, but it's certainly the case.
Most modern buildings use PEX (cross-Linked Polyethylene) tubing for water in homes no more copper pipes like years ago. Basically plastic so it may not be very good.
Rather scary if you ask me...slight behaviour changes in a massive global population such as humans can cause us to make societal level mistakes that could be fatal.
This article cites synthetic rubber from tires as a potential source of micro plastics. Are there any studies that show how much people are exposed to?
Comparisons between rubber from bikes, motorcycles, and different classes of motor vehicles (sedans/cars, trucks, heavy duty trucks or machinery, and even the subclass of EVs).
Even more of a reason to get away from car centric transportation if the levels are several orders of magnitude difference.
https://www.plasticstoday.com/medical/tire-wear-major-source...
in this case, fluorescent polystyrene particles
Did they neglect any effects of the fluorescent dye instead?
The fact that plastics are everywhere, and we have been exposed to them for several generations, should be seen as evidence of their harmlessness; we would've seen many obvious effects if they weren't. I see this as very similar to the sometimes argued link between cellphone radiation (or RF in general) and cancer.
This is simply more fearmongering from those who stand the most to profit from it...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-sperm-counts-...
How true is this? How do microplastics end up in honey, for example? And I thought plastic bottles/wrap etc were stable in the lifespan that they're used for food storage (BPA aside) - is this really claiming that plastic starts to fall apart from the get-go?
Yes.
Microplastics are everywhere. Everywhere on the planet we look, we find microplastics. Just ... everywhere.
Beekeepers are using plastic worker brood foundations, for example. Honey is often stored in plastic buckets and bottles, somewhere in the production process/transport.
And it's not just the honey.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/08/micropla...
Microplastics detected in meat, milk and blood of farm animals
https://www.awi.de/en/about-us/service/press/single-view/ark...
Arctic ice algae heavily contaminated with microplastics
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/24/micropla...
Microplastics found in human blood for first time
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/micro...
Microplastics found in 90 percent of table salt
https://phys.org/news/2020-03-plastic-bags-bottles-microplas...
Opening plastic bags and bottles may generate microplastics
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/micro...
Microplastics are raining down from the sky
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/plastics-remote-places-m...
Plastics are showing up in the world’s most remote places, including Mount Everest
I appreciate the links, but that's not what I asked. I know microplastics are everywhere. Do you have studies showing that plastic begins to distintegrate immediately? What's the working lifetime for a plastic container before it begins to distintegrate and leach microplastics into what's stored in it?
It's an area of active research, so ... I don't. If you find something, let me know.
https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2022/04/nist-study-sho...
NIST Study Shows Everyday Plastic Products Release Trillions of Microscopic Particles Into Water
... when plastic products were exposed to hot water, they released trillions of nanoparticles per liter into the water ...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37343248/
Assessing the Release of Microplastics and Nanoplastics from Plastic Containers and Reusable Food Pouches: Implications for Human Health
... microwave heating caused the highest release of microplastics and nanoplastics into food compared to other usage scenarios such as refrigeration or room-temperature storage. Some containers could release as many as 4.22 million microplastic and 2.11 billion nanoplastic particles from only one square centimeter of plastic area within 3 min of microwave heating.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-020-00171-y
Microplastic release from the degradation of polypropylene feeding bottles during infant formula preparation
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/15/micropla...
WHO launches health review after microplastics found in 90% of bottled water
Researchers find levels of plastic fibres in popular bottled water brands could be twice as high as those found in tap water
Anyway, ignoring the effect on nature since we clearly don't care about it, how damaging would the effect be to people who consume water that way, daily?
bottled water actually has more microplastics than tap water (although both have some).
Oceans release microplastics into the atmosphere
Microplastics are the next lead emissions style issue that’ll end up being linked to widespread socio-behavioral decline and health issues.
Except it’ll be worse due to the far more prevalent and widespread use of plastics. It’ll be as if we used lead to make _everything_ and then found out lead is bad.
anyway, how is it crossing the blood brain barrier? dubious.
lots of things can cause change in behaviour through inflammation. cows milk for example. the solution to this and microplastics and a huge number of diseases will be gaining control of inflammation and metabolism. at the moment we dont even understand how they work.
History rhymes because people don’t ever learn. We deal with one problem or crisis at a time, instead of generalizing what was learned in order to help future generations avoid the same mistakes.
They are also conditions that severely affects the quality of life of those who are afflicted, increasing the risk of severe life-threatening illnesses [1].
Similar to the early years of the AIDS pandemic (which, I might add, is still ongoing), the harms of Long COVID are not widely understood or acknowledged in clinical practice or among the general population.
The parallels between the two are stark: How the CDC and NIH bungled public health advice and research funding, how clinicians are ill-equipped to treat it, how the public is clueless about the long-term harms of post-viral immune dysregulation [0].
See:
[0] https://covid19.nih.gov/covid-19-topics/long-covid
[1] Davis, H.E., McCorkell, L., Vogel, J.M. et al. Long COVID: major findings, mechanisms and recommendations. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2#citeas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries#Nine_boun...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot
Biodiversity loss is the worst of them all.