did read,
>e360: Do we really eat a credit card’s worth of plastic each week?
>Rauert: That has absolutely been debunked
and
>...we found is that lipids and fats will give you a false positive for polyethylene. Lipids are made up of the same building blocks as polyethylene, so when we analyze them, they look identical in our analysis instrument.
>I know it is easy to say we don’t have enough information yet, but we do know about [the health risks from] these chemicals that are in all the plastics that your food is wrapped in.
Not just because we can't measure it but because its hard to say what's due to the plastic and what's due to additives in the plastics
> And while we know a lot about the impact of chemicals added to plastic — such as phthalates, which have been shown to impact fertility, or bisphenols, which have been linked to Type 2 diabetes — we know very little about what effect the plastic particles themselves might be having.
Very nice to see someone actually looking at the issue objectively instead of the unholy blend of clickbait, shoddy "science" and either fear mongering or blind denialism we usually see.
Getting to the point where we're actually able to measure something real is good progress.
> We assessed how reliable current measures are for trying to find microplastics in blood. And what we found is that lipids and fats will give you a false positive for polyethylene.
> We worked with an architect, and we built the lab pretty much from scratch. [...] So we ended up going with stainless steel. It was the only way to not have any plastics.
> I don’t think we’ve got really good evidence at all for what effects [microplastics particles on their own] might be having on human bodies. If we’re eating plastics, what size and what type of plastic can actually get into the bloodstream?
Microplastics have always fascinated me, because I keep seeing article after article about how much microplastic exists around us, but far less strong evidence about its actual effects. That is not to say there are no effects, of course. Maybe we just have not found them yet.
A friend of mine worked on her bachelor’s thesis about the effects of microplastics on the immune system, specifically T cells. Her result was that the microplastic particles she studied were too large to interact with T cells.
She probably will not publish this result because she thinks it is not interesting enough. Classic file-drawer problem in academic science.
While I encourage her to do it anyways as a negative results is also interesting but she wanted results that are worthing of headlines in magazines.
There’s a transition point where things stop being micro plastics and become chemicals. Those molecules may be toxic but the interactions are distinct from microplastics.
Unknown to me, but something useful to know is that there is something smaller than microplastics called nanoplastics. The distinguishing factor is that nanoplastics are particles smaller than 1 micron, while microplastics are particles between 1 micron and around 5 millimeters. As your other respondent notes, at some point you're talking about single molecules. As plastics is an entire category and not a single thing, there's no one size where that happens, but some polymers have chains that are as little as 0.01 (1/100th of a) micron in size.
As far as I am aware, we have yet to have effective, replicable research on what if any biointeractions exist with nanoplastic particles, including single polymer chains.
Once microplastics fall apart futher, to nano-plastic, it will start to get absorbed by T cells because they want to destroy any invaders. Once absorbed, T-Cell start to produce H2O2 to destroy anything they absorbed. Unfortunately, plastics are mostly chemically neutral and so, it cannot be destroyed like that.
T-Cells produce more H2O2, eventually it leaks outside and start inflamation of surrunding tissue. There is research about it.
AKA nanoplastic-induced oxidative stress, but it's actually macrophages (and neutrophils), not T-cells.
The reason this is problem is because cells can never destroy nano-plastic so they keep self destroying forever (chronic inflammation).
I still have my doubts about actual scale of this, especially how we still haven't solved pm2.5 pollution or even asbestos. You are most likely to inhale it due to plastic abundance in environment, just like thousands of other things. It doesn't even have ICD yet.
It's not really analogous. One of the hypothesized ways that microplastics are harmful is that they disrupt the immune system; there has been evidence found of this in bivalves. Another is that they cause inflammation, which is also mediated by T-cells. A null result on the impact of microplastics on human T-cells is directly relevant to these hypotheses.
The mechanism of harm for asbestos is known to be that the fibers enter the lungs and can't be expelled, eventually leading to cancer. Its interaction with T-cells is quite irrelevant there.
>>> Also, unfortunately, a result that industry and the anti-regulation crowd will use to say microplastics are harmless.
>> also, asbestos is too small to interact with T-cells, so it must be safe.
> It's not really analogous.
Ironically, this is missing the point. They were commenting on flawed reasoning. This shouldn't need to be spelled out, as it's part of the conversation context.
> She probably will not publish this result because she thinks it is not interesting enough. Classic file-drawer problem in academic science.
It's truly insane that everyone in the academic class understands the fundamental problems of herding and sampling bias and yet every incentive is in place to do this.
Having lived this reality, people respond to incentives. Your have to very fundamentally re-architect the incentives and career progression in academia to make publication of null results more common. The other side of this is reducing the time and hassle of publication. Right now I’m unlikely to battle for 1.5-3 years to get something through peer review for a result that nobody will find interesting.
I think this is exactly what the person you are replying to is saying; everyone knows it, but the people in charge of setting up the incentives still don’t seem interested in changing the incentives.
It wouldn't take much time for her to publish it then move on to something that looks good on a resumé, but it could actively work against her if she published something that doesn't substantiate the status quo. If you get labeled a science denier, because you published a negative result for a politically-charged subject, even when you agree with the overall cause, it'll be nearly impossible to get a job in the field, even with a flawless resumé.
I expect many researchers are using fresh lab-made microplastics, which are indeed mostly harmless. However part of the problem is that real-world plastics are chemical sponges that absorb toxins (heavy metals, PCBs, etc) from the environment and deliver them in a concentrated dose into the body.
>However part of the problem is that real-world plastics are chemical sponges that absorb toxins (heavy metals, PCBs, etc) from the environment and deliver them in a concentrated dose into the body.
> Her result was that the microplastic particles she studied were too large to interact with T cells.
Her "result" of what? Was there an actual experiment and what was it's scope or was this by surveying literature?
Microplastics are of a pretty large range of size, and then there are nanoplastics below that.
I'm also not an expert, but a quick search shows a number of results of microplastics affecting T cells, some directly and some in terms of immune signaling, so this negative result doesn't seem that definitive.
(as usual, the difficulty is in teasing out in vivo effects)
> I'm not an expert but I'm going to condescend about an expert's "results" anyway.
I mean it's a detail free second hand anecdote about someone's informal discussion of their bachelor's thesis. Which part of that is the basis of a good scientific conversation?
> but far less strong evidence about its actual effects.
Yeah, but we shouldn't take absence of evidence as evidence of absence. The fact is that it's just really really hard to establish a causal relationship, even if it's there, because of all the cofounders. Heck even if you constructed a study with a known poison, like lead, and you might not see the results in a single study. You could give 50 participants water with flint levels of lead in it for a month, and you might not get scientifically significant result just due to the wide variance in a population.
Or another example is just thinking how hard it would be construct a study with a control, when every single construction material has plastics in it and they are floating in the air around us all the time (as mentioned in the article). Could it affect mental or reproductive wellbeing? Certainly. Can we construct a study to establish either way? Not easily.
And one of the plasticizers they talk about, pthalates, are known to be endocrine disruptors (i.e. mess with hormones).
One thing I learned from this article is that even though the plastic particles themselves are poorly studied the chemical additives, such as phthalates and bisphenols, are very well studied and are known toxins. So even if the tiniest plastic particles (smaller than the ones your friend studied, that can cross from your gut into your bloodstream), don't affect your health at all, you still don't want to ingest these things because of the other chemicals in them.
I think hate of plastics is an emergent form of elitism.
Upwardly mobile middle/upper class people who've sort of "maxed out" the amount of personal identity they can buy with regular plastic things can unlock a new level of identity by deciding that plastics are bad for them and eliminating plastics from their life, a process which conveniently requires buying a whole new set of things that distinguish them from their peers.
This is the only way I can explain how irrational and inconsistent plastic-haters behavior is. There is so much invisible plastic in their life that they don't seem to care about.
Even more so: plastics are not a specific chemical and they are not a specific material. Plastic is a category of materials that is very broad and very wide. You can make plastics out of almost anything. Therefore, to hate on plastics is to basically hate on an entire category of engineering and material design but not to actually know what a plastic is... sheer ignorance.
Yes, it's a category of materials that is overwhelmingly populated by a much more specific, ultra-cheap and therefore ultra-pervasive, set of chemicals which are shown in study after study to have worrying characteristics.
Anything that shows evidence of omnipresence, endocrine disruption, bioaccumulation, and inter-generational transmission should be extremely, extremely closely scrutinized.
To think otherwise is absolute braindead contrarianism, full-stop.
Personally, I think that the Microplastics Moral Panic is a textbook study of F.U.D.
There is practically nothing that ordinary people can do for prevention, mitigation, diagnosis or treatment of microplastics in our bodies, so I therefore conclude that it is futile and wasteful to worry or argue about it, unless you have abundant free time and resources to get paranoid strangers all in a frenzy, for no good reason.
This is a fine argument against banning plastics. This is unrelated to "Personally, I think that the Microplastics Moral Panic is a textbook study of F.U.D." though.
If microplastics are a case of FUD, then there's nothing to look into. How and why would anyone discover anything surrounding a case of moral panic/FUD? By definition, there's nothing to discover.
I half-assed try to avoid plastic in contact with (especially very) hot food or drink, and avoid it in long-term food containers, in no small part because I've seen things like plastic cooking spoons losing non-microscopic parts of themselves in food, and I find the stains plastic storage containers acquire after a little use kinda worrisome (I'd rather my reusable storage containers not be that permeable, thank you very much), but otherwise agree that any real amount of effort to avoid microplastics would probably do more good if it took the form of a 20-minute jog per week, i.e. "don't even consider worrying about it unless you've really, really got all your other health stuff sorted out"
Like I'm pretty sure the bigger health risk with a plastic soda straw is the soda, not the straw, you know?
> requires buying a whole new set of things that distinguish them from their peers
No, it requires buying a whole new set of things to fit in with and be accepted by their peers, to distinguish themselves from the outgroup, the plastic users.
I don’t necessarily believe this is some emergent elitism; I see it more as a modern religion with many many rules about eating and consumption (using plastic is now a sin).
Like any religion, sinners (for example plastic users) are mostly pitied because they are ignorant, but those who know and choose to use plastic anyway, well, it’s OK to hate them.
I've addressed this idea in a sibling comment. I think at least some superstition is inevitable in any subculture. Consider how many tech 'holy wars' might involve baseless beliefs about how a text editor or programming language or whatever being not only superior because of personal preference but because it's inherently more optimized. Treating anti-micro-plastics as a "religion" rather than a subculture based on a meme deserves a bit more nuance.
1. Is it based on inherently irrational, unfactual beliefs, e.g. like anti-vaccination or anti-5G myths?
2. If we consider religion as a way to explain complex phenomena using just-so stories (the pop anthropology / layman idea of primitive man inventing Zeus to explain lightning), then what intellectual or emotional need does anti-microplastics belief validate?
All culture is shared ignorance. These comparisons to religion are inverted. Religion was born out of cultures needing to herd their people.
You're right that the debate about plastics is mostly meaningless noise by people who don't really care. Taking advantage of uncertainty while it still exists is a lucrative game.
None of this is comparable to software. Writing software is a choice and the users don't have to care beyond the UI. It's apathy, not ignorance, that holds software back. Text editors and programming languages are not usually the highest priority choice to make. The majority of software tends to be specialized one-off solutions. We don't exactly have chemists cooking up their own kitchenware materials on the weekend.
> Treating anti-micro-plastics as a "religion" rather than a subculture based on a meme deserves a bit more nuance.
Agreed, and I think we satisfy your two conditions and many more.
If I read you right, question 1 pertains to irrationality, and question 2 pertains to powerful storytelling.
OK here’s one example that shows you are on the right track, but there is still more.
My ex-wife is gluten free. This single choice never comes alone. in my ex-wife’s case, she also believes in the healing power of crystals and essential oils. (Irrationality checkbox); I cannot describe her vision of cosmic creation but I guarantee it involves witchcraft/folk
magic and differs from
traditional dogma (Storytelling checkbox).
BUT THERE IS AT LEAST ONE MORE VERY IMPORTANT CHECKBOX! A good religion also prescribes a proper way to behave and act in the world for maximum benefit in the afterlife. In these newer religions, the afterlife is “the health of the planet”, so one must do everything in this life to ensure you do not hurt that future.
To be fair, that wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list of criteria for what constitutes a religion, nor is the second one really a criterion for inclusion, just a couple of points I was thinking of. For the first, I would hesitate to label microplastics skepticism as baseless as the other two examples I listed, as there seems to be some studies that suggest they're not great for the human body? But sure, forming an entire belief system about how they're the anti-panacea for all of modern ills is certainly unfounded.
The second is more prescriptive-suggesting than descriptive. What motivates the desire to create single scapegoats for all of modern ills? Maybe a breakdown in public trust in science, lack of comprehensive medical education, spread of misinformation, political polarization (lots of these health fads end up embroiled in culture wars), etc. So that's a host of issues to work on. And at the same time, the anxieties they are preoccupied with- widespread changes to people's bodies, for one - do need explanations for, otherwise people will flock to just-so stories.
I don't get this whole attitude. Moving away from plastics in our kitchen was basically zero extra cost. Something busted, and we replaced it with non-plastic. Even bamboo scrubbers don't cost more than plastic (maybe even a little less) and I can't see any particular longevity difference.
I think the fact that I volunteer to clean up trash on public lands and know that weathered plastic is the period worst period to remove makes me move away from plastic in general.
Plus, a solid $3 wooden spoon is just a joy to cook with. They outlast the plastic ones, too.
Microplastic ingestion? Well, I'm not sure the effects or the relative quantity compared to tire shed and other industrial factors. But if I were forced by some diety to bet my life on if plastics in the kitchen or on clothing had a negative health effect, I'd make that bet.
But the main thing I don't get about the attitude stems from the fact that I don't really care what other people use in their kitchens. I recommend it.
Things like glass food storage containers are really expensive compared to plastic. And they still have plastic lids; like, I don't know what you'd even do without at least the seal-part being some kind of plastic, I guess you'd need to use natural-sourced wax to make it seal, or something?
And on the topic of cost, I'm certain my kids have broken between 50 and 100 glass and ceramic drinking cups, storage containers, plates, and bowls in a little over a decade. They destroy plastic items at a way, way lower rate. Consider the use case of packing a kid's lunchbox. Plastic is... very tempting, for practical reasons. And cheaper.
Last I checked, plastic vs. wood on an otherwise identical stamped metal Victoronix knife costs you an extra $15-$20, which is a notable percentage of the total cost of the item. I sprung for the wood on my latest replacement just for the aesthetics, but it cost enough more that I did give it a good think first.
> Even bamboo scrubbers don't cost more than plastic (maybe even a little less) and I can't see any particular longevity difference.
Are those actually just bamboo? Maybe they are, I dunno, I can't recall seeing one. Lots of the "bamboo" materials I've encountered have turned out to contain (at least some) plastic.
> Plus, a solid $3 wooden spoon is just a joy to cook with. They outlast the plastic ones, too.
That's just true. Plastic spoons for cooking suck, wood and (where it makes sense and won't damage other things) metal are way better. Wooden ones aren't even expensive. The popularity of plastic ones is baffling.
One thing that's surprised me is the cost and/or total lack of availability of glass blender jars, even on fairly high-end brands (both the fake-high-end ones that are just expensive, and the actually-good ones). I remember my parents' assuredly cheapest-thing-in-the-store blender that they probably bought in the 70s or 80s had a glass jar, because that was just... standard. Meanwhile my as-awesome-as-I'd-hoped-thank-god expensive-ass Vitamix came with a plastic jar, and they do not make glass replacements. (I'm just checking and it looks like they might finally make one in stainless, though? Still, I'd prefer glass because being able to see what's going on in there is very nice, but I'm gonna have to look into that...)
> That's just true. Plastic spoons for cooking suck, wood and (where it makes sense and won't damage other things) metal are way better.
If you have ever used nice commercial high-temp silicone spatula, it's an incredibly versatile and easy to clean spoon for cooking. A bit expensive at like $20 though. Pair with nice nonstick pan and polycarbonate cutting board (dishwashable) for the easiest and most out of fashion cooking and cleaning experience.
> One thing that's surprised me is the cost and/or total lack of availability of glass blender jars
My cheapest in the store oyster blender is glass, I think they mostly still are.
> If you have ever used nice commercial high-temp silicone spatula, it's an incredibly versatile and easy to clean spoon for cooking. A bit expensive at like $20 though. Pair with nice nonstick pan and polycarbonate cutting board (dishwashable) for the easiest and most out of fashion cooking and cleaning experience.
Those, I do use! My wife insists on keeping one non-stick pan, mostly for eggs (I just cook them in stainless, whatever) so we've got a couple around for that specific use case, but I grab them sometimes for other things, too. They're great for scraping little bits of sauce out of the edge of a pan, things like that.
> My cheapest in the store oyster blender is glass, I think they mostly still are.
Ha! Really? I killed one blender before upgrading (the old "buy a cheap one, and if you wear out out, buy the expensive one" approach) and that was also plastic, but it probably wasn't Oyster. Hm.
All of those were glass when I was a kid, it seems really weird to me that the pricey ones are usually plastic now. I'm not even (that) worried about the health effects of it, I mostly just like the way the contents move & pour in glass better, the plastic's too "sticky" (though I do cringe a little when we blend a near-boiling sauce in the plastic jar)
I don't have a good answer for kids breaking stuff.
And I do wonder what glues are used in the bamboo scrubbers, but I have no way of finding out. The scrapers are at least a solid single piece. They're either definitely bamboo or some very skillfully-engineered plastic to look exactly like it. ;)
There are a lot of cheap glass blenders on [ONLINE STORE]. But yeah, the high end ones--maybe they're trying to avoid that 50s look.
We just run with the plastic lids with glass tupperware. The only other sensible replacement we've found is reused jars and Ball jars, but all those lids have plastic liners, too. We don't cook the lids and food contact is limited. Would be nice to have something else. Silicone lids? We have some of those we picked up for Ball jars at some point. But this seems like a lower potential issue than cooking with plastic materials.
For really inexpensive stuff like blenders and glass containers is the second-hand store.
Around the time that I became a parent, I remember a friend’s wife emphatically telling me why one should never ever give fruit juice to a child. Later in the evening, she recounted an anecdote where a bout of constipation was cured with prune juice. I could not help myself from commenting “but isn’t that fruit?”
somehow this thread reminds me of that conversation.
Sorry if I offended you; fwiw I was describing a phenomenon that I observe. My own attitude about this whole situation was left unspecified, so I’ll add a few notes here: I do actively pick up litter (sometimes bigtime: I cleared a derelict boat from a lake today!) and I try to not litter. I try to respect the planet. I do use a lot of plastic.
First of all, yes, performatively following health fads has always been a thing for people with money.
But do you honestly believe this is what's going on at a large scale? What an absurd reaction to other people doing something that you don't like or don't understand. Nobody who isn't a paid influencer is sneering at you for using the wrong materials in your kitchen.
If you feel sneered that, that's your problem and not anyone else's. Are you going to start plasticmaxing, like rolling coal but for food containers?
I think you're doing the thing that you are accusing other people of doing. Creating an artificial distinction between "us" and "them", so that you can feel like you are part of the "us". It's just that in this case you want to feel like some kind of rational rebel, one of the final chosen few with common sense, in an increasingly irrational world.
You could just liken it to any pop health, dietary, or environmental fad instead of trying to portray a banal "people turn consumer choices into personal identity/lifestyle" trend as a whole new class of phenomenon. Crunchy hippies shop organic and audiophiles buy gold-plated premium wires; every subculture has at least a little bit of superstition.
Are you sure it's all irrational? I, for one, prefer other materials for many things because they are more durable, hygenic or simply feels nicer. Seems perfectly rational to me. An irrational choice would be something like carrying a heavy canvas tent with wooden poles just because you hate plastic. Do you know anyone who does that?
Health in general has always worked like this, from supplements, to organic food, to avoiding ultra-processed foods, to gluten-free diets, pretty much every popular health fad has no provable causative effect on health.
Most of human behavior is irrational. If we were all perfectly rational, we would have healthy diet and exercise habits from the get go, and we'd have plenty of time to prepare food and exercise, because we wouldn't waste any time on entertainment.
>pretty much every popular health fad has no provable causative effect on health.
Isn't this almost true by definition? If it actually works, it's not a "fad", just "science" or whatever. Advice like "eat more vegetables" and "don't drink alcohol" probably do work, but they're ingrained enough that nobody thinks they're "fads".
The late 1800's health craze centered around Battle Creek, Michigan has had long lasting cultural and dietary impact, but I think most people would still call it a fad, because the core tenants were only popular for a short time.
Besides, the breakfast cereal movement it created quickly devolved from the Kellogg's and Post's original healthy cereals, Corn Flakes and Grape Nuts respectively, into the sugar-laden craze of 1950's cereals. Even Graham crackers were healthy and bland at the time, but we now associate them with cinnamon and sugar.
If someone comes out with a study that shows, all other things being equal, decreasing or increasing the amount of ultra-processed foods causes a respective increase or decrease in health, then I will rethink my stance.
Until then, I'll keep eating foods consisting of proven healthy ingredients, even if they are classified as Nova 4 ultra-processed, such as lasagna made using my great grandmother's recipe or ancient Mayan dishes like pavo con achiote and also cochinita pibil, while avoiding foods that are proven unhealthy despite the not-ultra-processed Nova 3 and lower status, like Cronuts, potato chips, and bacon cheeseburgers.
I don't know why their ingredients are classified as Nova 4, or why the processing level is defined by ingredients, in the first place. Lasagna contains ricotta which is made from whey, and whey automatically makes something Nova 4. Many ancient Mayan dishes contain achiote seeds, also known as annatto, which also automatically makes something Nova 4.
Achiote seeds add a bright red to yellow color, depending on the concentration, and add a mild earthy flavor. This puts it in the Nova 4 ultra-processed foods category, ostensibly because the color can make food more attractive. This is as opposed saffron stigmas, used in some traditional European dishes, which add a bright red to yellow color, depending on the concentration, and add a mild earthy flavor. Why adding achiote makes something ultraprocessed and adding saffron doesn't isn't explained, but I wonder if there's a predilection toward traditional European foods.
The Nova classification only counts fresh fruits and vegetables as unprocessed, which is Nova 1, so almost all foods are processed foods, Nova 3, or processed ingredients, Nova 2.
I eat healthy food and avoid unhealthy food, but the Nova classification system is so poorly done that it is meaningless. Even going off of actual levels of processing, instead of the ingredients, doesn't help much. One of the earliest processed foods, hominy, is much healthier than the unprocessed counterpart, and when Italians relied on polenta made from unprocessed corn, they became malnourished and suffered from pellagra, while those in America relying on the otherwise identical grits, made from hominy, weren't malnourished.
That's why I go off of actual research proving which ingredients are healthy based on the effects of adding them to or removing them from a diet that otherwise stays consistent in volume and calories, instead of the vibes-based categories the Nova classifications use, and the vague research showing that rich healthy people who exercise eat some things and poor unhealthy people who don't exercise eat other things, but never showing that eating some things actually makes you more healthy and eating other things actually makes you less healthy.
If similar levels of research into ultra-processed foods were applied to other statistics, they'd find that ice cream sales lead to drowning and owning a Ferrari makes you rich.
Interesting theory but doesn't really coincide with on the ground facts. We know there has been an increase in hormonal issues. We can barely even get anyone to stop heating up and microwaving plastic to be ingested, which we know causes issues. The European Food Safety Authority completed a re-evaluation into the risks of BPA in 2023, concluding that its tolerable daily intake should be greatly reduced. BPA was everywhere, every can and receipt. Just because people can't identify all the ways plastic is ubiquitously ingested in their life, it means they're hypocritical and don't care about the unknowns?
Why was that we used to be able to ban environmental toxins such as leaded gasoline without this weird psycho-political analysis that has become the fashion in some circles?
I've picked up enough plastics off the beaches of the world already. Plastic ruins ecosystems and is a scourge on this planet. It's too late to fix, it's everywhere. 8 million tonnes of plastics enter the oceans every year, and it just keeps accumulating. We're ruining marine ecosystems.
We don’t fully understand even some of the most obvious pathologies. If a disease isn’t glaringly obvious and coupled with profit incentive, God help you. The question of what microplastics do to us is simply beyond the capabilities of both modern medicine and academic research institutions.
When there's such a large and obvious profit disincentive, we should probably question whether its a capabilities problem or a willful ignorance problem.
fwiw kimchi-derived probiotic bacterium (Leuconostoc mesenteroides CBA3656) was shown to bind nanoplastics and help mice excrete more of them. But it’s not yet proven that eating kimchi removes microplastics from humans
Exactly. If you fart in a cup and then move it to your pelvis without letting any air leak out and then release it, that doesn’t count as a queef regardless of whether or not you had a vagina.
>Even when you put a glass panel in the window, you have silicon holding the glass in. We tested all these different brands of silicon to try to find ones that had low levels of phthalates. It was a crazy amount of detail that we went to, but it was really worth it.
Silicone hold the glass panel. Silicon is the glass itself. Editors, do your job.
" We tested about 30 different construction materials trying to find some that didn’t contain plastics, but also didn’t contain plastic [additives] such as phthalates, but we couldn’t find any. Everything had either plastics or phthalates in them."
So the article seems to pose more questions than it answers. I was expecting some observations from the plastic-free lab they built, and at least some evidence of the comparative impact vs. other labs that use plastic to study blood and other fluids (besides the 100-times-plastic/phthalates concentration in the air).
What exactly are they studying in the lab? The biggest takeaway from all this is that "we [still] don’t have enough information yet".
The latest studies I read suggested that while microplastics are found in our bodies, there's still no clear evidence of how harmful they are. So I don't think it's as scary as it's often portrayed.
Microplastics are even suspected for the low sperm count and power of men after the 70's. We can attribute to them any effect we observe today. It's insane. Let's accept that we cannot causaly link MPs with anything because we do not control the exposure and cannot perform a randomised trial. That is more scientific and sincere.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 26.9 ms ] threadand >...we found is that lipids and fats will give you a false positive for polyethylene. Lipids are made up of the same building blocks as polyethylene, so when we analyze them, they look identical in our analysis instrument. >I know it is easy to say we don’t have enough information yet, but we do know about [the health risks from] these chemicals that are in all the plastics that your food is wrapped in.
> And while we know a lot about the impact of chemicals added to plastic — such as phthalates, which have been shown to impact fertility, or bisphenols, which have been linked to Type 2 diabetes — we know very little about what effect the plastic particles themselves might be having.
Getting to the point where we're actually able to measure something real is good progress.
> We assessed how reliable current measures are for trying to find microplastics in blood. And what we found is that lipids and fats will give you a false positive for polyethylene.
> We worked with an architect, and we built the lab pretty much from scratch. [...] So we ended up going with stainless steel. It was the only way to not have any plastics.
> I don’t think we’ve got really good evidence at all for what effects [microplastics particles on their own] might be having on human bodies. If we’re eating plastics, what size and what type of plastic can actually get into the bloodstream?
A friend of mine worked on her bachelor’s thesis about the effects of microplastics on the immune system, specifically T cells. Her result was that the microplastic particles she studied were too large to interact with T cells.
She probably will not publish this result because she thinks it is not interesting enough. Classic file-drawer problem in academic science.
While I encourage her to do it anyways as a negative results is also interesting but she wanted results that are worthing of headlines in magazines.
Learned a lot about making microfludic flow cells at least
As far as I am aware, we have yet to have effective, replicable research on what if any biointeractions exist with nanoplastic particles, including single polymer chains.
TIL thermoplastic pellets are “microplastics” :)
The reason this is problem is because cells can never destroy nano-plastic so they keep self destroying forever (chronic inflammation).
I still have my doubts about actual scale of this, especially how we still haven't solved pm2.5 pollution or even asbestos. You are most likely to inhale it due to plastic abundance in environment, just like thousands of other things. It doesn't even have ICD yet.
(/s)
Too bad common discourse is too distracted to consider nanoplastics…
By the time the public tires of microplastics debates, they’ll be in no mood to relitigate nanoplastics
Also, unfortunately, a result that industry and the anti-regulation crowd will use to say microplastics are harmless.
The mechanism of harm for asbestos is known to be that the fibers enter the lungs and can't be expelled, eventually leading to cancer. Its interaction with T-cells is quite irrelevant there.
>>> Also, unfortunately, a result that industry and the anti-regulation crowd will use to say microplastics are harmless.
>> also, asbestos is too small to interact with T-cells, so it must be safe.
> It's not really analogous.
Ironically, this is missing the point. They were commenting on flawed reasoning. This shouldn't need to be spelled out, as it's part of the conversation context.
Sometimes comments are a variation on https://www.instagram.com/p/DY2DRKDhqaa
It's truly insane that everyone in the academic class understands the fundamental problems of herding and sampling bias and yet every incentive is in place to do this.
Careful, you're starting to sound dangerously close to an Austrian economist!
[ ;) ]
China seems to make some strides for their own academics, thinking loudly about moving away from glam publications as career incentives: https://www.ft.com/content/64a811f1-b132-4211-8a8c-2252cf964...
It's supposedly about the worry of leaking state secrets, but it will have positive outcomes apart from that.
Anyway, the people setting the incentives are the ones handing out the grants.
It wouldn't take much time for her to publish it then move on to something that looks good on a resumé, but it could actively work against her if she published something that doesn't substantiate the status quo. If you get labeled a science denier, because you published a negative result for a politically-charged subject, even when you agree with the overall cause, it'll be nearly impossible to get a job in the field, even with a flawless resumé.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/923529
>https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/923529
But your linked study only talks about biofilms and E.coli?
Her "result" of what? Was there an actual experiment and what was it's scope or was this by surveying literature?
Microplastics are of a pretty large range of size, and then there are nanoplastics below that.
I'm also not an expert, but a quick search shows a number of results of microplastics affecting T cells, some directly and some in terms of immune signaling, so this negative result doesn't seem that definitive.
(as usual, the difficulty is in teasing out in vivo effects)
Very informative, thank you for your comment. You have truly contributed to the conversation. Good job.
I mean it's a detail free second hand anecdote about someone's informal discussion of their bachelor's thesis. Which part of that is the basis of a good scientific conversation?
Yeah, but we shouldn't take absence of evidence as evidence of absence. The fact is that it's just really really hard to establish a causal relationship, even if it's there, because of all the cofounders. Heck even if you constructed a study with a known poison, like lead, and you might not see the results in a single study. You could give 50 participants water with flint levels of lead in it for a month, and you might not get scientifically significant result just due to the wide variance in a population.
Or another example is just thinking how hard it would be construct a study with a control, when every single construction material has plastics in it and they are floating in the air around us all the time (as mentioned in the article). Could it affect mental or reproductive wellbeing? Certainly. Can we construct a study to establish either way? Not easily.
And one of the plasticizers they talk about, pthalates, are known to be endocrine disruptors (i.e. mess with hormones).
Upwardly mobile middle/upper class people who've sort of "maxed out" the amount of personal identity they can buy with regular plastic things can unlock a new level of identity by deciding that plastics are bad for them and eliminating plastics from their life, a process which conveniently requires buying a whole new set of things that distinguish them from their peers.
This is the only way I can explain how irrational and inconsistent plastic-haters behavior is. There is so much invisible plastic in their life that they don't seem to care about.
Anything that shows evidence of omnipresence, endocrine disruption, bioaccumulation, and inter-generational transmission should be extremely, extremely closely scrutinized.
To think otherwise is absolute braindead contrarianism, full-stop.
There is practically nothing that ordinary people can do for prevention, mitigation, diagnosis or treatment of microplastics in our bodies, so I therefore conclude that it is futile and wasteful to worry or argue about it, unless you have abundant free time and resources to get paranoid strangers all in a frenzy, for no good reason.
What about those advocating for smoking bans in shared spaces?
Cholera outbreaks near the city water wells?
Or are microplastics special in some way?
Discover what plastic is harmful and we can't start to talk.
If microplastics are a case of FUD, then there's nothing to look into. How and why would anyone discover anything surrounding a case of moral panic/FUD? By definition, there's nothing to discover.
Like I'm pretty sure the bigger health risk with a plastic soda straw is the soda, not the straw, you know?
No, it requires buying a whole new set of things to fit in with and be accepted by their peers, to distinguish themselves from the outgroup, the plastic users.
I don’t necessarily believe this is some emergent elitism; I see it more as a modern religion with many many rules about eating and consumption (using plastic is now a sin).
Like any religion, sinners (for example plastic users) are mostly pitied because they are ignorant, but those who know and choose to use plastic anyway, well, it’s OK to hate them.
1. Is it based on inherently irrational, unfactual beliefs, e.g. like anti-vaccination or anti-5G myths?
2. If we consider religion as a way to explain complex phenomena using just-so stories (the pop anthropology / layman idea of primitive man inventing Zeus to explain lightning), then what intellectual or emotional need does anti-microplastics belief validate?
You're right that the debate about plastics is mostly meaningless noise by people who don't really care. Taking advantage of uncertainty while it still exists is a lucrative game.
None of this is comparable to software. Writing software is a choice and the users don't have to care beyond the UI. It's apathy, not ignorance, that holds software back. Text editors and programming languages are not usually the highest priority choice to make. The majority of software tends to be specialized one-off solutions. We don't exactly have chemists cooking up their own kitchenware materials on the weekend.
Agreed, and I think we satisfy your two conditions and many more.
If I read you right, question 1 pertains to irrationality, and question 2 pertains to powerful storytelling.
OK here’s one example that shows you are on the right track, but there is still more.
My ex-wife is gluten free. This single choice never comes alone. in my ex-wife’s case, she also believes in the healing power of crystals and essential oils. (Irrationality checkbox); I cannot describe her vision of cosmic creation but I guarantee it involves witchcraft/folk magic and differs from traditional dogma (Storytelling checkbox).
BUT THERE IS AT LEAST ONE MORE VERY IMPORTANT CHECKBOX! A good religion also prescribes a proper way to behave and act in the world for maximum benefit in the afterlife. In these newer religions, the afterlife is “the health of the planet”, so one must do everything in this life to ensure you do not hurt that future.
The second is more prescriptive-suggesting than descriptive. What motivates the desire to create single scapegoats for all of modern ills? Maybe a breakdown in public trust in science, lack of comprehensive medical education, spread of misinformation, political polarization (lots of these health fads end up embroiled in culture wars), etc. So that's a host of issues to work on. And at the same time, the anxieties they are preoccupied with- widespread changes to people's bodies, for one - do need explanations for, otherwise people will flock to just-so stories.
I think the fact that I volunteer to clean up trash on public lands and know that weathered plastic is the period worst period to remove makes me move away from plastic in general.
Plus, a solid $3 wooden spoon is just a joy to cook with. They outlast the plastic ones, too.
Microplastic ingestion? Well, I'm not sure the effects or the relative quantity compared to tire shed and other industrial factors. But if I were forced by some diety to bet my life on if plastics in the kitchen or on clothing had a negative health effect, I'd make that bet.
But the main thing I don't get about the attitude stems from the fact that I don't really care what other people use in their kitchens. I recommend it.
Just please don't litter. :)
And on the topic of cost, I'm certain my kids have broken between 50 and 100 glass and ceramic drinking cups, storage containers, plates, and bowls in a little over a decade. They destroy plastic items at a way, way lower rate. Consider the use case of packing a kid's lunchbox. Plastic is... very tempting, for practical reasons. And cheaper.
Last I checked, plastic vs. wood on an otherwise identical stamped metal Victoronix knife costs you an extra $15-$20, which is a notable percentage of the total cost of the item. I sprung for the wood on my latest replacement just for the aesthetics, but it cost enough more that I did give it a good think first.
> Even bamboo scrubbers don't cost more than plastic (maybe even a little less) and I can't see any particular longevity difference.
Are those actually just bamboo? Maybe they are, I dunno, I can't recall seeing one. Lots of the "bamboo" materials I've encountered have turned out to contain (at least some) plastic.
> Plus, a solid $3 wooden spoon is just a joy to cook with. They outlast the plastic ones, too.
That's just true. Plastic spoons for cooking suck, wood and (where it makes sense and won't damage other things) metal are way better. Wooden ones aren't even expensive. The popularity of plastic ones is baffling.
One thing that's surprised me is the cost and/or total lack of availability of glass blender jars, even on fairly high-end brands (both the fake-high-end ones that are just expensive, and the actually-good ones). I remember my parents' assuredly cheapest-thing-in-the-store blender that they probably bought in the 70s or 80s had a glass jar, because that was just... standard. Meanwhile my as-awesome-as-I'd-hoped-thank-god expensive-ass Vitamix came with a plastic jar, and they do not make glass replacements. (I'm just checking and it looks like they might finally make one in stainless, though? Still, I'd prefer glass because being able to see what's going on in there is very nice, but I'm gonna have to look into that...)
> That's just true. Plastic spoons for cooking suck, wood and (where it makes sense and won't damage other things) metal are way better.
If you have ever used nice commercial high-temp silicone spatula, it's an incredibly versatile and easy to clean spoon for cooking. A bit expensive at like $20 though. Pair with nice nonstick pan and polycarbonate cutting board (dishwashable) for the easiest and most out of fashion cooking and cleaning experience.
> One thing that's surprised me is the cost and/or total lack of availability of glass blender jars
My cheapest in the store oyster blender is glass, I think they mostly still are.
Those, I do use! My wife insists on keeping one non-stick pan, mostly for eggs (I just cook them in stainless, whatever) so we've got a couple around for that specific use case, but I grab them sometimes for other things, too. They're great for scraping little bits of sauce out of the edge of a pan, things like that.
> My cheapest in the store oyster blender is glass, I think they mostly still are.
Ha! Really? I killed one blender before upgrading (the old "buy a cheap one, and if you wear out out, buy the expensive one" approach) and that was also plastic, but it probably wasn't Oyster. Hm.
All of those were glass when I was a kid, it seems really weird to me that the pricey ones are usually plastic now. I'm not even (that) worried about the health effects of it, I mostly just like the way the contents move & pour in glass better, the plastic's too "sticky" (though I do cringe a little when we blend a near-boiling sauce in the plastic jar)
And I do wonder what glues are used in the bamboo scrubbers, but I have no way of finding out. The scrapers are at least a solid single piece. They're either definitely bamboo or some very skillfully-engineered plastic to look exactly like it. ;)
There are a lot of cheap glass blenders on [ONLINE STORE]. But yeah, the high end ones--maybe they're trying to avoid that 50s look.
We just run with the plastic lids with glass tupperware. The only other sensible replacement we've found is reused jars and Ball jars, but all those lids have plastic liners, too. We don't cook the lids and food contact is limited. Would be nice to have something else. Silicone lids? We have some of those we picked up for Ball jars at some point. But this seems like a lower potential issue than cooking with plastic materials.
For really inexpensive stuff like blenders and glass containers is the second-hand store.
somehow this thread reminds me of that conversation.
Sorry if I offended you; fwiw I was describing a phenomenon that I observe. My own attitude about this whole situation was left unspecified, so I’ll add a few notes here: I do actively pick up litter (sometimes bigtime: I cleared a derelict boat from a lake today!) and I try to not litter. I try to respect the planet. I do use a lot of plastic.
First of all, yes, performatively following health fads has always been a thing for people with money.
But do you honestly believe this is what's going on at a large scale? What an absurd reaction to other people doing something that you don't like or don't understand. Nobody who isn't a paid influencer is sneering at you for using the wrong materials in your kitchen.
If you feel sneered that, that's your problem and not anyone else's. Are you going to start plasticmaxing, like rolling coal but for food containers?
I think you're doing the thing that you are accusing other people of doing. Creating an artificial distinction between "us" and "them", so that you can feel like you are part of the "us". It's just that in this case you want to feel like some kind of rational rebel, one of the final chosen few with common sense, in an increasingly irrational world.
Huh? You think it's hypocritical for people not to "seem to care about" things that, by your own definition, they are ignorant of?
Most of human behavior is irrational. If we were all perfectly rational, we would have healthy diet and exercise habits from the get go, and we'd have plenty of time to prepare food and exercise, because we wouldn't waste any time on entertainment.
Isn't this almost true by definition? If it actually works, it's not a "fad", just "science" or whatever. Advice like "eat more vegetables" and "don't drink alcohol" probably do work, but they're ingrained enough that nobody thinks they're "fads".
Besides, the breakfast cereal movement it created quickly devolved from the Kellogg's and Post's original healthy cereals, Corn Flakes and Grape Nuts respectively, into the sugar-laden craze of 1950's cereals. Even Graham crackers were healthy and bland at the time, but we now associate them with cinnamon and sugar.
Until then, I'll keep eating foods consisting of proven healthy ingredients, even if they are classified as Nova 4 ultra-processed, such as lasagna made using my great grandmother's recipe or ancient Mayan dishes like pavo con achiote and also cochinita pibil, while avoiding foods that are proven unhealthy despite the not-ultra-processed Nova 3 and lower status, like Cronuts, potato chips, and bacon cheeseburgers.
Achiote seeds add a bright red to yellow color, depending on the concentration, and add a mild earthy flavor. This puts it in the Nova 4 ultra-processed foods category, ostensibly because the color can make food more attractive. This is as opposed saffron stigmas, used in some traditional European dishes, which add a bright red to yellow color, depending on the concentration, and add a mild earthy flavor. Why adding achiote makes something ultraprocessed and adding saffron doesn't isn't explained, but I wonder if there's a predilection toward traditional European foods.
The Nova classification only counts fresh fruits and vegetables as unprocessed, which is Nova 1, so almost all foods are processed foods, Nova 3, or processed ingredients, Nova 2.
I eat healthy food and avoid unhealthy food, but the Nova classification system is so poorly done that it is meaningless. Even going off of actual levels of processing, instead of the ingredients, doesn't help much. One of the earliest processed foods, hominy, is much healthier than the unprocessed counterpart, and when Italians relied on polenta made from unprocessed corn, they became malnourished and suffered from pellagra, while those in America relying on the otherwise identical grits, made from hominy, weren't malnourished.
That's why I go off of actual research proving which ingredients are healthy based on the effects of adding them to or removing them from a diet that otherwise stays consistent in volume and calories, instead of the vibes-based categories the Nova classifications use, and the vague research showing that rich healthy people who exercise eat some things and poor unhealthy people who don't exercise eat other things, but never showing that eating some things actually makes you more healthy and eating other things actually makes you less healthy.
If similar levels of research into ultra-processed foods were applied to other statistics, they'd find that ice cream sales lead to drowning and owning a Ferrari makes you rich.
Words have meaning.
Silicone hold the glass panel. Silicon is the glass itself. Editors, do your job.
What exactly are they studying in the lab? The biggest takeaway from all this is that "we [still] don’t have enough information yet".