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I 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 av

I 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 ago
Also 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    The 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 ago
      But 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 ago
        Sterilize 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...
    - Ferret7446 3y ago
      Pretty much everything we and babies eat are not perfectly sterile (I don't think it's common practice to sterilize the mother's nipples?). I would be surprised if it is normal for baby powder to not be safe to consume without sterilization.
      - cassianoleal 3y ago
        Not only that, but barring babies with compromised immune systems, you really don't want to get too crazy about sterility. They need to be exposed to pathogens in order to develop immune responses!
      - 9991 3y ago
        My doctor recommended it. The packaging on my infant formula recommended it. The US FDA recommends it. https://www.fda.gov/food/foodborne-pathogens/cronobacter-sakazakii https://www.fda.gov/food/foodborne-pathogens/cronobacter-sak... But you do you.
- Auracle 3y ago
  Also, if you start heating up formula they’ll apparently have a hard time going back to room temperature. We used silicone bottles along with a bottle warmer for refrigerated breast milk though. Pro tip: buy a damned bottle warmer in that situation. Don’t try to get by putting hot water in a cup and putting the bottle in that. The $50 is worth your sanity when there’s a crying baby.
- senectus1 3y ago
  when we're young parents warmed expressed or formula milk in a pot with hot water. mostly because it eliminated the potential to make the liquid too hot for the child. but glad we did it that way now anyway.
zer8k 3y ago
Adding to this it also seems like such a small thing to do in the grand scheme of things. Let's say not microwaving your food in plastic removes 10% of your yearly consumption of plastic. That's extremely generous. You still have to contend with nearly everything else you eat, drink, swim in, bathe with, and breathe. Hell, the most amazing thing is somehow even butcher meat has microplastics in it from the processing plant! At this point it's unavoidable. But if we're going to fix it there are probably much larger fish to fry here. Of course you should not microwave stuff in plastic anyway just like you shouldnt use a metal utensil on a teflon pan. But these articles are always written like it's One Weird Trick (TM) when the problem is actually everything else.
user3939382 3y ago
> articles like this almost definitely increase the stress and anxiety on parents completely out of proportion of the actual level of risk How can you know it's out of proportion when earlier in your comment you admit that you don't know what the risk is? We have no idea how bad these plastics are for us. > probably not great Sounds like it's being minimized for some reason. I'd err on the side of caution when it comes to putting things in your body and your baby's body and developing brain. There is no big demand on parents to microwave plastic.
- ksenzee 3y ago
  “Err on the side of caution,” when applied to every single thing in a parent’s life, translates into a great deal of stress and anxiety. Don’t microwave plastics! Don’t feed them box mac & cheese because it has phthalates! Don’t use Himalayan rock salt because it has microplastics! Don’t let your kids touch thermal receipts because they’re covered in BPA! Check plastics before you buy to make sure they’re BPA-free! Actually no, BPA-free plastics can be worse than BPA-containing plastics! Buy glass to be safe! And that’s just the plastics. I could go on all day. Parenting in an internet-connected world is nonstop pressure from well-meaning people who likely don’t realize the additive effect of their well-meant advice.
  - user3939382 3y ago
    Maybe you should be worried about all those things? Maybe we live in a toxic dangerous world that’s been shaped by corporate interests and priorities that are not our own. Because we’re surrounded by all these dangers doesn’t mean that somehow makes them okay to ignore. We have very alarming statistics on our population-scale health outcomes and it’s reasonable to suspect your list is related. Being a parent is a lot of responsibility that’s just the way it is.
    - ksenzee 3y ago
      If you’re surrounded by dangers, you literally have to ignore some of them while you fight off the others. There is no way to fight every problem at once.
barbazoo 3y ago
> the impacts of these plastics in real life is completely unknown What about this test they did though, I wouldn't say "completely" unknown? > To test what these plastics do to our bodies once they’re consumed, the team bathed human embryonic kidney cells in the plastic roughage shed by the baby-food containers. (The team chose this kind of cell because kidneys have so much contact with ingested plastic.) After two days of exposure to concentrated microplastics and nanoplastics, about 75 percent of the kidney cells died—over three times as many as cells that spent two days in a much more diluted solution. I think the safest thing to do is just not microwave the food in plastic anymore and slowly move from plastic storage back to glass for instance, which correct me if I'm wrong, doesn't have these issues. It is less convenient but convenience is what puts all this garbage into our bodies.
- Legend2440 3y ago
  Cells in a petri dish are much more fragile than cells in your body, you can kill them with water that's the wrong salinity or PH.
- TylerE 3y ago
  Guess what happens to the body if you expose to pure oxygen for 48 hours? These "concetrated" tests are BS. Anything is fatal in high enough concentration - as ever the dose makes the poison.
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  They did tests, and they also said, explicitely: "The human health effects of plastic exposure are unclear" Everything else is in vitro and non-obviously harmful endpoints. There is not a single iota of direct negative health impacts in real people.
- jamesdwilson 3y ago
  Heads up, when reheating leftovers, be cautious with glass containers - regular glass like soda-lime glass can explode in the microwave. This is because soda-lime glass contains additives that make it unable to withstand sudden temperature changes from microwave heating. Glass cookware sold specifically for microwave use is a special borosilicate glass that can handle the heat. Check any glass containers closely before microwaving - soda-lime glass is often clear glass like drinking glasses, glass baking dishes, glass Tupperware, etc. Look for labels indicating microwave-safe or borosilicate glass. If unsure, transfer food to a known microwave-safe dish instead.
midoridensha 3y ago
>Avoiding plastics can be extremely expensive There's nothing "expensive" about avoiding putting plastics into your microwave. Just don't do it: put your food on a ceramic plate or bowl instead. If the food came in a plastic container, dump the food into a normal bowl or plate instead. It doesn't cost anything at all: owning ceramic plates and bowls is normal, and you can buy them for very cheap. The only thing "expensive" here is the few seconds it takes to transfer the food to something ceramic, and the extra time it takes to clean it. BFD.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> 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. From this we know that they don't instantaneously kill you. Does it cause cancer? Endocrine disruption? Long-term cognitive issues? That's hard to say, because we don't have much of a control group that hasn't been exposed to these things. But it seems unlikely that it's good for you, and when the cost of avoiding it isn't that high, why volunteer to be a test subject?
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  The ceiling on how bad it can be is much _much_ lower than "it doesn't instantaneously kill you". It also doesn't dramatically decrease fertility, or cause significant increases in cancer rates, etc. etc. etc. Any effects it has, by definition, _have_ to be subtle and minor or else we would know. Subtle like "doesn't obviously appear over the course of decades and across tens of millions of people". That is _extremely_ minor. And because I mentioned fertility and two other people have already mentioned sperm counts, I'm gong to get out in front of that one: We aren't even sure sperm counts are actually decreasing [0], let alone that they are caused by plastics [0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/declining-sperm-count-much-more-than https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/declining-sperm-count-...
  - TylerE 3y ago
    I was with you right up until you mentioned cancer. We haven't understood cancer long enough to know what historical rates actually were, and even if we did, we wouldn't know for sure what a delta (or lack of delta) actually indicates. Like, maybe microplastics are actually pretty cancerous, but overall cancer rates haven't changed that much because as plastics became commonplace, we were getting away from exposure to things like radium and asbestos.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      But the same is true of all of the other things. Maybe sperm count is actually decreasing, maybe it's just staying the same because microplastics make it worse but getting away from exposure to things like radium and lead and mercury make it better. The best you can say is that we don't know, not that we know it doesn't.
Auracle 3y ago
Testosterone and sperm counts way down (and still dropping) in humans. Dog sperm counts are also down, but it’s not happening to livestock. Something is causing it and until we know better it’s probably a reasonable assumption it’s plastic.
- smohare 3y ago
  [dead]
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  The sperm count thing is _dramatically_ overblown: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/declining-sperm-count-much-more-than https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/declining-sperm-count-...
- nonsense_stream 3y ago
  It is more reasonable to hypothesize that domestication cause this naturally, and livestock is only exempt because they are artificially selected the other way.
icantbebothered 3y ago
Past fifty years, maybe. I don’t think current food “safe” plastics are the same as those a century ago. > If they were more than trivially harmful, we would know by now. “The Increasing Prevalence in Intersex Variation from Toxicological Dysregulation in Fetal Reproductive Tissue Differentiation and Development by Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5017538/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5017538/ Sperm counts are dropping globally. Hormone disruption can help explain it. Wild life that live near human populations (and pets, and lab animals on controlled diets) are unexpected getting fatter. Hormone disruption can help explain it. Amphibians are having weird developmental problems caused by, you guessed it, hormonal dysfunction. Variation in human physiology and psychology scales on a gradient; from subtle differences in brain structure, which might not even be noticeable to others, to macro differences visible to the eye. A chemical that can cause extreme variation of the external genitalia surely also can cause changes in glands and brains. IMO we see signals of the effects of hormonal dysregulation in our society with increasing prevalence. I think plastics have been quite a bit more than trivially harmful.
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  We actually are not sure that sperm counts are dropping globally. The quality of evidence is extremely poor: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/declining-sperm-count-much-more-than https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/declining-sperm-count-... But no matter what effect they have, if you can't conclusively prove it after decades and millions of people, it's by definition pretty minor.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Microplastics are rapidly accumulating in the environment and don't break down quickly. If we wait until the effects are significant it may be too late to stop significant future harm.
Dig1t 3y ago
>the impacts of these plastics in real life is completely unknown There's a huge body of research on endocrine disrupting chemicals, specifically from plastics, going back decades. The science is settled here. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0303720721002598?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030372072... The article links sources, but it's trivially googlable. There's tons of evidence that these chemicals cause problems with sexual development and fertility, there's also lots of evidence that plastic containers leach them when microwaved. As the article states, it is obvious what people need to do. Glass containers are not expensive, and disposable food containers NOT made of plastic were commonplace up through the 90's and they can be again. Switching to glass and aluminum containers when possible is actually better for the environment as well, since they are actually recyclable whereas plastic is guaranteed to end up in a landfill eventually. >Avoiding plastics can be extremely expensive Tinfoil instead of plastic wrap, a glass Tupperware set is a few dollars more expensive instead of plastic, aluminum water bottles instead of plastic (actually cheaper than plastic bottles). My family eliminated plastics from our lives and it cost us basically nothing. In what way is it extremely expensive?
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  I'd be very curious how much of that evidence is a) realistic dosages and b) in humans (actual humans not human cells in a dish). My guess is very close to none.
  - dmvdoug 3y ago
    Do you imagine that a human kidney cell in a dish has very different properties than a human kidney cell in a kidney?
    - MostlyStable 3y ago
      Yes. 1000% yes. Individual cells in a petri dish act _dramatically_ different in innumerable ways. For 1 thing, they are much _much_ easier to kill or harm.
- 3y ago
rich_sasha 3y ago
I'd add, plastic pollution is bad and all, but the alternatives are kind of worse, from the point of view of energy and water they require to produce. Glass for example takes a huge amount of energy by comparison, if you can reuse it 100s of times then you may break even, but let's face it, where disposable plastics are used, such as microwavable food, glass won't be reusable. Recycled at best, but that still takes lots of energy. Same for reusable bags, hemp or even heavy duty plastic. Natural fibres need to be reused many times to break even on environmental impact. UK banned disposable plastic bags in favour of reusable bags... and amount of plastic dispensed out for bags increased. I'm all up for eliminating plastics but not at the price of using substantially more energy (CO2) and water.
- TylerE 3y ago
  The real killer with glass is that you lose the product in the glass, which is way more expensive to produce than even glass.
shalmanese 3y ago
> 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. I think you might be overestimating the degree that science has the power to answer these questions, especially when it can't be tied to some obvious grant funding source. We can't even be sure of the link between CO2 and cognition. If you look at the studies, the bulk of them are done by the Navy and they're not super applicable to office/school settings. Of the ones remaining, most of them are too underpowered to convincingly demonstrate either way and the meta analysis is all a mess. This should be one of the most gotcha easy questions we can formulate but because nobody directly makes a high ROI from funding it, Scientists scrabble around for funds. There was the famous, now retracted study that showed that judges were much more lenient on cases after lunch than before, that was taken down on methodological grounds. But notice that it wasn't taken down because it was inconsistent with previous literature on other fields and the impact of lunch on decision making... because there was no previous literature. We all know there's some pretty sizable effect that lunch has on cognition and the workplace is full of tips and heuristics about how to avoid that post lunch slump or what tasks to schedule after lunch. Plenty of anecdata that there's a effect but again, no money to scientifically characterize the effect.

SoftTalker 3y ago

Also 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 ago
I 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    But 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 ago
      Sterilize 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...
  - Ferret7446 3y ago
    Pretty much everything we and babies eat are not perfectly sterile (I don't think it's common practice to sterilize the mother's nipples?). I would be surprised if it is normal for baby powder to not be safe to consume without sterilization.
    - cassianoleal 3y ago
      Not only that, but barring babies with compromised immune systems, you really don't want to get too crazy about sterility. They need to be exposed to pathogens in order to develop immune responses!
    - 9991 3y ago
      My doctor recommended it. The packaging on my infant formula recommended it. The US FDA recommends it. https://www.fda.gov/food/foodborne-pathogens/cronobacter-sakazakii https://www.fda.gov/food/foodborne-pathogens/cronobacter-sak... But you do you.
Auracle 3y ago
Also, if you start heating up formula they’ll apparently have a hard time going back to room temperature. We used silicone bottles along with a bottle warmer for refrigerated breast milk though. Pro tip: buy a damned bottle warmer in that situation. Don’t try to get by putting hot water in a cup and putting the bottle in that. The $50 is worth your sanity when there’s a crying baby.
senectus1 3y ago
when we're young parents warmed expressed or formula milk in a pot with hot water. mostly because it eliminated the potential to make the liquid too hot for the child. but glad we did it that way now anyway.

zer8k 3y ago

Adding to this it also seems like such a small thing to do in the grand scheme of things. Let's say not microwaving your food in plastic removes 10% of your yearly consumption of plastic. That's extremely generous. You still have to contend with nearly everything else you eat, drink, swim in, bathe with, and breathe. Hell, the most amazing thing is somehow even butcher meat has microplastics in it from the processing plant! At this point it's unavoidable. But if we're going to fix it there are probably much larger fish to fry here. Of course you should not microwave stuff in plastic anyway just like you shouldnt use a metal utensil on a teflon pan. But these articles are always written like it's One Weird Trick (TM) when the problem is actually everything else.

user3939382 3y ago

> articles like this almost definitely increase the stress and anxiety on parents completely out of proportion of the actual level of risk How can you know it's out of proportion when earlier in your comment you admit that you don't know what the risk is? We have no idea how bad these plastics are for us. > probably not great Sounds like it's being minimized for some reason. I'd err on the side of caution when it comes to putting things in your body and your baby's body and developing brain. There is no big demand on parents to microwave plastic.

ksenzee 3y ago
“Err on the side of caution,” when applied to every single thing in a parent’s life, translates into a great deal of stress and anxiety. Don’t microwave plastics! Don’t feed them box mac & cheese because it has phthalates! Don’t use Himalayan rock salt because it has microplastics! Don’t let your kids touch thermal receipts because they’re covered in BPA! Check plastics before you buy to make sure they’re BPA-free! Actually no, BPA-free plastics can be worse than BPA-containing plastics! Buy glass to be safe! And that’s just the plastics. I could go on all day. Parenting in an internet-connected world is nonstop pressure from well-meaning people who likely don’t realize the additive effect of their well-meant advice.
- user3939382 3y ago
  Maybe you should be worried about all those things? Maybe we live in a toxic dangerous world that’s been shaped by corporate interests and priorities that are not our own. Because we’re surrounded by all these dangers doesn’t mean that somehow makes them okay to ignore. We have very alarming statistics on our population-scale health outcomes and it’s reasonable to suspect your list is related. Being a parent is a lot of responsibility that’s just the way it is.
  - ksenzee 3y ago
    If you’re surrounded by dangers, you literally have to ignore some of them while you fight off the others. There is no way to fight every problem at once.

barbazoo 3y ago

> the impacts of these plastics in real life is completely unknown What about this test they did though, I wouldn't say "completely" unknown? > To test what these plastics do to our bodies once they’re consumed, the team bathed human embryonic kidney cells in the plastic roughage shed by the baby-food containers. (The team chose this kind of cell because kidneys have so much contact with ingested plastic.) After two days of exposure to concentrated microplastics and nanoplastics, about 75 percent of the kidney cells died—over three times as many as cells that spent two days in a much more diluted solution. I think the safest thing to do is just not microwave the food in plastic anymore and slowly move from plastic storage back to glass for instance, which correct me if I'm wrong, doesn't have these issues. It is less convenient but convenience is what puts all this garbage into our bodies.

Legend2440 3y ago
Cells in a petri dish are much more fragile than cells in your body, you can kill them with water that's the wrong salinity or PH.
TylerE 3y ago
Guess what happens to the body if you expose to pure oxygen for 48 hours? These "concetrated" tests are BS. Anything is fatal in high enough concentration - as ever the dose makes the poison.
MostlyStable 3y ago
They did tests, and they also said, explicitely: "The human health effects of plastic exposure are unclear" Everything else is in vitro and non-obviously harmful endpoints. There is not a single iota of direct negative health impacts in real people.
jamesdwilson 3y ago
Heads up, when reheating leftovers, be cautious with glass containers - regular glass like soda-lime glass can explode in the microwave. This is because soda-lime glass contains additives that make it unable to withstand sudden temperature changes from microwave heating. Glass cookware sold specifically for microwave use is a special borosilicate glass that can handle the heat. Check any glass containers closely before microwaving - soda-lime glass is often clear glass like drinking glasses, glass baking dishes, glass Tupperware, etc. Look for labels indicating microwave-safe or borosilicate glass. If unsure, transfer food to a known microwave-safe dish instead.

midoridensha 3y ago

>Avoiding plastics can be extremely expensive There's nothing "expensive" about avoiding putting plastics into your microwave. Just don't do it: put your food on a ceramic plate or bowl instead. If the food came in a plastic container, dump the food into a normal bowl or plate instead. It doesn't cost anything at all: owning ceramic plates and bowls is normal, and you can buy them for very cheap. The only thing "expensive" here is the few seconds it takes to transfer the food to something ceramic, and the extra time it takes to clean it. BFD.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

MostlyStable 3y ago
The ceiling on how bad it can be is much _much_ lower than "it doesn't instantaneously kill you". It also doesn't dramatically decrease fertility, or cause significant increases in cancer rates, etc. etc. etc. Any effects it has, by definition, _have_ to be subtle and minor or else we would know. Subtle like "doesn't obviously appear over the course of decades and across tens of millions of people". That is _extremely_ minor. And because I mentioned fertility and two other people have already mentioned sperm counts, I'm gong to get out in front of that one: We aren't even sure sperm counts are actually decreasing [0], let alone that they are caused by plastics [0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/declining-sperm-count-much-more-than https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/declining-sperm-count-...
- TylerE 3y ago
  I was with you right up until you mentioned cancer. We haven't understood cancer long enough to know what historical rates actually were, and even if we did, we wouldn't know for sure what a delta (or lack of delta) actually indicates. Like, maybe microplastics are actually pretty cancerous, but overall cancer rates haven't changed that much because as plastics became commonplace, we were getting away from exposure to things like radium and asbestos.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    But the same is true of all of the other things. Maybe sperm count is actually decreasing, maybe it's just staying the same because microplastics make it worse but getting away from exposure to things like radium and lead and mercury make it better. The best you can say is that we don't know, not that we know it doesn't.

Auracle 3y ago

Testosterone and sperm counts way down (and still dropping) in humans. Dog sperm counts are also down, but it’s not happening to livestock. Something is causing it and until we know better it’s probably a reasonable assumption it’s plastic.

smohare 3y ago
[dead]
MostlyStable 3y ago
The sperm count thing is _dramatically_ overblown: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/declining-sperm-count-much-more-than https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/declining-sperm-count-...
nonsense_stream 3y ago
It is more reasonable to hypothesize that domestication cause this naturally, and livestock is only exempt because they are artificially selected the other way.

icantbebothered 3y ago

Past fifty years, maybe. I don’t think current food “safe” plastics are the same as those a century ago. > If they were more than trivially harmful, we would know by now. “The Increasing Prevalence in Intersex Variation from Toxicological Dysregulation in Fetal Reproductive Tissue Differentiation and Development by Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5017538/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5017538/ Sperm counts are dropping globally. Hormone disruption can help explain it. Wild life that live near human populations (and pets, and lab animals on controlled diets) are unexpected getting fatter. Hormone disruption can help explain it. Amphibians are having weird developmental problems caused by, you guessed it, hormonal dysfunction. Variation in human physiology and psychology scales on a gradient; from subtle differences in brain structure, which might not even be noticeable to others, to macro differences visible to the eye. A chemical that can cause extreme variation of the external genitalia surely also can cause changes in glands and brains. IMO we see signals of the effects of hormonal dysregulation in our society with increasing prevalence. I think plastics have been quite a bit more than trivially harmful.

MostlyStable 3y ago
We actually are not sure that sperm counts are dropping globally. The quality of evidence is extremely poor: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/declining-sperm-count-much-more-than https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/declining-sperm-count-... But no matter what effect they have, if you can't conclusively prove it after decades and millions of people, it's by definition pretty minor.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Microplastics are rapidly accumulating in the environment and don't break down quickly. If we wait until the effects are significant it may be too late to stop significant future harm.

Dig1t 3y ago

>the impacts of these plastics in real life is completely unknown There's a huge body of research on endocrine disrupting chemicals, specifically from plastics, going back decades. The science is settled here. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0303720721002598?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030372072... The article links sources, but it's trivially googlable. There's tons of evidence that these chemicals cause problems with sexual development and fertility, there's also lots of evidence that plastic containers leach them when microwaved. As the article states, it is obvious what people need to do. Glass containers are not expensive, and disposable food containers NOT made of plastic were commonplace up through the 90's and they can be again. Switching to glass and aluminum containers when possible is actually better for the environment as well, since they are actually recyclable whereas plastic is guaranteed to end up in a landfill eventually. >Avoiding plastics can be extremely expensive Tinfoil instead of plastic wrap, a glass Tupperware set is a few dollars more expensive instead of plastic, aluminum water bottles instead of plastic (actually cheaper than plastic bottles). My family eliminated plastics from our lives and it cost us basically nothing. In what way is it extremely expensive?

MostlyStable 3y ago
I'd be very curious how much of that evidence is a) realistic dosages and b) in humans (actual humans not human cells in a dish). My guess is very close to none.
- dmvdoug 3y ago
  Do you imagine that a human kidney cell in a dish has very different properties than a human kidney cell in a kidney?
  - MostlyStable 3y ago
    Yes. 1000% yes. Individual cells in a petri dish act _dramatically_ different in innumerable ways. For 1 thing, they are much _much_ easier to kill or harm.
3y ago

rich_sasha 3y ago

I'd add, plastic pollution is bad and all, but the alternatives are kind of worse, from the point of view of energy and water they require to produce. Glass for example takes a huge amount of energy by comparison, if you can reuse it 100s of times then you may break even, but let's face it, where disposable plastics are used, such as microwavable food, glass won't be reusable. Recycled at best, but that still takes lots of energy. Same for reusable bags, hemp or even heavy duty plastic. Natural fibres need to be reused many times to break even on environmental impact. UK banned disposable plastic bags in favour of reusable bags... and amount of plastic dispensed out for bags increased. I'm all up for eliminating plastics but not at the price of using substantially more energy (CO2) and water.

TylerE 3y ago
The real killer with glass is that you lose the product in the glass, which is way more expensive to produce than even glass.

shalmanese 3y ago

> 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. I think you might be overestimating the degree that science has the power to answer these questions, especially when it can't be tied to some obvious grant funding source. We can't even be sure of the link between CO2 and cognition. If you look at the studies, the bulk of them are done by the Navy and they're not super applicable to office/school settings. Of the ones remaining, most of them are too underpowered to convincingly demonstrate either way and the meta analysis is all a mess. This should be one of the most gotcha easy questions we can formulate but because nobody directly makes a high ROI from funding it, Scientists scrabble around for funds. There was the famous, now retracted study that showed that judges were much more lenient on cases after lunch than before, that was taken down on methodological grounds. But notice that it wasn't taken down because it was inconsistent with previous literature on other fields and the impact of lunch on decision making... because there was no previous literature. We all know there's some pretty sizable effect that lunch has on cognition and the workplace is full of tips and heuristics about how to avoid that post lunch slump or what tasks to schedule after lunch. Plenty of anecdata that there's a effect but again, no money to scientifically characterize the effect.