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Plastics, let alone microplastics, are a rather small problem that seem to get a lot of airspace. There are no established health effects of microplastics. The

Plastics, let alone microplastics, are a rather small problem that seem to get a lot of airspace. There are no established health effects of microplastics. There are magnitudes worse health problems in e.g. both under and overnutrition that cause a lot less panic and fuss. https://www.undp.org/kosovo/blog/microplastics-human-health-how-much-do-they-harm-us https://www.undp.org/kosovo/blog/microplastics-human-health-...

CharlesW 3y ago
> There are no established health effects of microplastics. It'd be more true to say, "There are no established significant health effects of microplastics on humans." FWIW, the article you linked to doesn't say "no effects", but "limited evidence for significant adverse health impacts". This seems concerning: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9885170/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9885170/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- appplication 3y ago
  When reading research papers, ‘significant’ is usually meant to mean ‘statistically correlated’ which varies from our typical lay definition of ‘very impactful’, which would be described using the term ‘effect size’
broscillator 3y ago
A lot of issues like you mention can be a big problem on the population level, but not in an individual level if you're conscious of what you eat. This doesn't seem to be the case with microplastics, they seem to be in everything. You might call it panic to minimize it, and you'd be right to do so if we here were in charge of nutrition for a population; but I'm guessing most of us are in charge of our own nutrition and maybe a family's, so the information to deal with that is pretty valuable.
s1gnp0st 3y ago
This is an outright lie. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35399297/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35399297/
RyEgswuCsn 3y ago
Just be patient. It takes some time for academic influencers to start jumping on the bandwagon.
rdsubhas 3y ago
Over/under nutrition is locally controllable. Micro plastics is like CO2. Spread out everywhere, can't be sequestered or reversed. Rather than saying it's not a problem now — it's worth saying what's the threshold beyond which health complications begin (that number can't be infinity), and based on current growth levels how far we're off from it. If that's like at current rate of growth we still have 5000 years, then yeah I would agree with you and ignore the news. But just saying retrogressively that there is no conclusive evidence based on what we're eating so far – unfortunately sounds only politically correct, without considering the spirit of doing science (exploring the horizons / where the limits are).
ramblenode 3y ago
> There are no established health effects of microplastics. An equally true statement is that there is no established safe concentration of microplastics in tissue.

CharlesW 3y ago

> There are no established health effects of microplastics. It'd be more true to say, "There are no established significant health effects of microplastics on humans." FWIW, the article you linked to doesn't say "no effects", but "limited evidence for significant adverse health impacts". This seems concerning: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9885170/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9885170/

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
appplication 3y ago
When reading research papers, ‘significant’ is usually meant to mean ‘statistically correlated’ which varies from our typical lay definition of ‘very impactful’, which would be described using the term ‘effect size’

broscillator 3y ago

A lot of issues like you mention can be a big problem on the population level, but not in an individual level if you're conscious of what you eat. This doesn't seem to be the case with microplastics, they seem to be in everything. You might call it panic to minimize it, and you'd be right to do so if we here were in charge of nutrition for a population; but I'm guessing most of us are in charge of our own nutrition and maybe a family's, so the information to deal with that is pretty valuable.

s1gnp0st 3y ago

This is an outright lie. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35399297/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35399297/

RyEgswuCsn 3y ago

Just be patient. It takes some time for academic influencers to start jumping on the bandwagon.

rdsubhas 3y ago

Over/under nutrition is locally controllable. Micro plastics is like CO2. Spread out everywhere, can't be sequestered or reversed. Rather than saying it's not a problem now — it's worth saying what's the threshold beyond which health complications begin (that number can't be infinity), and based on current growth levels how far we're off from it. If that's like at current rate of growth we still have 5000 years, then yeah I would agree with you and ignore the news. But just saying retrogressively that there is no conclusive evidence based on what we're eating so far – unfortunately sounds only politically correct, without considering the spirit of doing science (exploring the horizons / where the limits are).

ramblenode 3y ago

> There are no established health effects of microplastics. An equally true statement is that there is no established safe concentration of microplastics in tissue.