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For the love of god, stop microwaving plastic
- yuturs 3y agoOften wondered about styrofoam (which I hate but often resort to when on business travel, for takeout). Does it have better or worse properties than the plastic mentioned here?
- deanCommie 3y agoI've noticed most places on the west coast have completely eliminated Styrofoam for a biodegradeable alternative
- graiz 3y agoStyrofoam is plastic. Dow Chemical got a fancy trademark but microwaving it is just as awful. It's extruded polystyrene foam, I would avoid eating food out of it (even if it's not microwaved).
- red-iron-pine 3y agoits a plastic. its just mixed with air -- foam -- to give it a better structure. take a lighter to some, at a distance mind you, go slow, and it'll melt down into a plastic-y resin. used to do that all the time to make terrain for tabletop gaming.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- MostlyStable 3y agoI am so tired of articles like this. Yeah, micro and nano plastics being ingested are probably not great, and, if it's easy for someone to make the change to avoid them, then great. But, as the article points out, the impacts of these plastics in real life is completely unknown, and considering that these plastics have literally been in use for the better part of a century, that puts a pretty strict upper limit on how bad they can be. If they were more than trivially harmful, we would know by now. Again, if making the change is easy for you, then by all means do so. And we should absolutely keep investigating. But for lots of parents, it is _not_ easy to make the change. Avoiding plastics can be extremely expensive, and articles like this almost definitely increase the stress and anxiety on parents completely out of proportion of the actual level of risk.
- SoftTalker 3y agoAlso you don't need to heat baby food, and you don't need to heat formula. It should not be cold, but room temperature is fine. It was a godsend when our pediatrican told us this. He said just use powdered formula, mix it with room temperature water at feeding time. No need to refrigerate premixed formula, no need to heat it up, no need to carry it around in a cooler when you're on the go.
- barbazoo 3y agoI wonder where that came from. It's kinda obvious that baby food doesn't need to be heated up beyond body temperature but it's definitely a thing people tell you when you have kids.
- 9991 3y agoThe powder is not sterile. The advice I got was to mix it with 80C water to sterilize it and wait for it to cool.
- jhbadger 3y agoBut that doesn't make sense. As a microbiologist, I can tell you that plenty of bacteria can survive 80C. if you were were worried about sterility, you'd boil the mixture for several minutes (even so, there are extremophiles that can survive that but they aren't in general dangerous)
- 9991 3y agoSterilize was the wrong word, but a that high of a temperature will kill the germs that most commonly infect the infant human gut. You may have heard about cronobacter contamination being an issue a while back. If 80C doesn’t kill everything, but those germs pass through harmlessly, then it’s not a problem. If that doesn’t make sense to you as a microbiologist, you should let the US FDA know. https://www.fda.gov/food/foodborne-pathogens/cronobacter-sakazakii https://www.fda.gov/food/foodborne-pathogens/cronobacter-sak...
- djaouen 3y ago[flagged]
- _8j50 3y agoWhat about prepared frozen meals or "steam in the bag" meals that are in plastic? This and the whole microplastics alarmism is hard to buy without an explanation of how exactly plastics cause harm to cells. A substance must cause cell death in order for cancerous replication errors to happen right?
- rieg3c 3y agothe article talks about how they compared cells in a very nano-plastic concentrated formula and a diluted one, and the concentrated one caused way more cell deaths plus, it isn't just about cancer, microplastics are known to disrupt your hormones, so the danger is pretty clear why not just take it seriously instead of calling it "plastic alarmism"? we're polluting the entire world with these particles
- _8j50 3y agoBecause I need evidence to believe stuff, not just claims. Everything causes cancer according to random scientists out to get published. There was even a front page post recently of a study about most foods having had a research claiming they cause cancer. Correlation is not causation. Be specific. Endocrine disruption claim is the only thing i see in that article not cellular harm. "These things are sneaky" is not good enough. It's like saying bananas are bad because they're radioactive. You can swim in the coolant water of a nuclear reactor and come out just fine. Plastics have been ubiqutous since around the time human life expectancy started skyrocketing. Where is the rise in mortality or cancer rates associated strictly with plastic microwaving people and how exactly is the harm caused? I do not have to accept lazy science or claims that have alarmism without specific evidence. This might be legit but it seems no one has learned from climate change, how making a lot of "trust me" claims has the opposite effect. Reasonable presumptions and speculations are not evidence. And if there is evidence, I would like to make this about FDA's incompetence not consumers' negligence.
- rieg3c 3y agoLook up Dr Shanna Swan work
- romusha 3y ago"stop this, stop that, you peasant, let our overlord billionaires live in peace"
- mitchbob 3y agohttps://archive.ph/ewPRp https://archive.ph/ewPRp
- graiz 3y agoIt's not just microwaving plastic. Microwaving plastic is particularly bad but people need to understand that this stuff is all over our food chain, not just the packaging either. Wild Salmon, Organic Chicken, and other foods are now showing up because the micro-plastic is in the food chain. To those saying that the effects of plastic are unknown... False. Do some basic searching for medical studies on this and there are tons papers on the impacts to biology, immunology, endocrine system, reproductive systems, etc.
- rieg3c 3y agoexactly, i don't know how people still say that "effects are unkown" when there's so much evidence
- 3LazTjBv-f 3y agoIf there is so much of them maybe link a few, with most significant results? I think general audience is a bit de-sanitized to "X impact on Y" research after drinking coffee was shown to do literally everything, thanks to studies with tiny participants count and widespread p-hacking. BTW how do you even find control group when micro-plastics are already everywhere?
- graiz 3y agoI avoided linking examples because a skeptic will always find faults in cherry picked examples. I encourage you to read a few studies with an open mind and draw your own conclusion. Many of these studies I've seen do address your concerns around control groups.
- petercslau 3y agoMicrowave delivers UV radiation?
- dreamcompiler 3y agoYeah, no. I noticed that silly line too. Microwave ovens deliver microwaves. That doesn't mean microwaves can't disintegrate plastic -- maybe they can -- but there's no UV in a microwave oven.
- romusha 3y agoIt's a bad science article
- eggy 3y agoI always found it interesting that the plastics we think of - nylon, polyethylene, Teflon, etc. - are man-made and that there are actually naturally occurring plastics, or polymers such as pectin, cellulose, silk, and wool. The shapes, opacity, and colors of man-made objects made of plastic were what I always thought of, not pectin or wool, or our own protein and DNA in our bodies. The synthetic vs. natural dichotomy or phrasing made that seem non-intuitive. I am not saying microplastics or polymers are not harmful. It just makes me think of it as less of an alien molecule or structure because it's man-made when I became aware of what polymer, or plastic, actually meant. I am also hoping that maybe there is less of concern to worry, but not that they are not doing harm. I am old enough to remember milk delivered in glass bottles, paper bags, and wax paper liquid containers before plastic took over. Even soda was in glass bottles. All of my children were breast fed and raised with glassware and steel utensils. I buy the wax paper containers of milk and juices, so who knows what's in those? Even the article mentions they don't know accumulation levels yet, and what does microplastics and nanoparticles in the 4.2 million to 1.2 billion particles respectively plastic shed per square centimeter mean in terms of molarity in a liter of blood and does it accumulate and keep building up? A lot of unanswered questions and another thing to add to the dread pile.
- im3w1l 3y agoPectin, ceullose, silk and wool. All of those will be degraded when left out. Man-made plastics will not. That's why we love them and that's why we fear them.
- adrian_b 3y agoStrictly speaking, plastics are only the polymers that can be used to make things by plastic deformation. There are two kind of plastics, thermoplastics, which are heated until they become soft and then molded in the desired form. Besides the thermoplastic polymers, this kind of behavior is also exhibited by metals and glasses. The second kind of plastics are the thermoset polymers, which are first made in a soft form, then molded in the desired form, and then they are hardened by various methods, e.g. by baking. Besides the thermoset polymers, this kind of behavior is also exhibited by ceramics and cements. So while the plastics are polymers, many polymers are not plastics. Most polymers that are made by the living beings are not plastics. Those that have a linear structure suitable for thermoplastics are degraded by heat, so they cannot be heated enough to become soft. Those that have a cross-linked structure like thermosets are already hardened and they cannot be reverted to a soft state. So substances like wool, silk, leather, wood are not plastics, even if they are polymers. One of the few natural plastics is beeswax, which has been used for many millennia as a thermoplastic material. Other examples are various kinds of pitch or resin extracted from plants, or bitumen.
- frob 3y ago"Millions" sounds like a huge number until you remember that Avogadro's number is six hundred thousand million million million. A cup of milk is on the order of a mole of particles (+/- 90%), so that's only slightly more than one part in a trillion.
- frob 3y agoScratch that. I was off by a factor of a million. It's slightly more than one part in a quintillion.
- freedomben 3y agoThe article doesn't distinguish between polyethylenes and polypropylenes. Are they equally problematic or is it assumed we're talking about polyethylenes since the focus is on disposable plastics?