5 ms·

"Microplastics found in X" has become a pretty weird sport. The phenomenon is worth studying, but it's not hugely surprising given how ubiquitous they are (ano

"Microplastics found in X" has become a pretty weird sport. The phenomenon is worth studying, but it's not hugely surprising given how ubiquitous they are (another thing you find in every human, probably in higher quantities, is sand). But despite tons of scrutiny, there are no studies showing that it's actually hurting us. We've done some really sketchy things in the early days of industry (leaded gasoline, etc), and have gotten into this overdrive where we're jumping the gun on a lot of substances that are probably not bad. Every year, you have several headlines in the mold of "X is everywhere and might be killing us"... but never really followed by that "oh yeah, it was really killing us" part.

adamredwoods 2y ago
Immediate consequences versus long-term consequences. Leaded gasoline is still being studied on how impactful it was. https://dupri.duke.edu/news-events/news/20th-century-lead-exposure-damaged-american-mental-health https://dupri.duke.edu/news-events/news/20th-century-lead-ex...
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  Lead is highly toxic. Plastic is not necessarily toxic at all.
  - adamredwoods 2y ago
    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/indiana-plastics-fire-spewed-toxic-chemicals-epa-finds-benzene-rcna79778 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/indiana-plastics-fire-s... >> A plastics fire in Indiana spewed various toxic chemicals into the air, including hydrogen cyanide and benzene, according to test results from the Environmental Protection Agency. >> Officials said Friday that air monitors detected hydrogen cyanide, benzene, chlorine, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds in the ground-level smoke.
    - mavhc 2y ago
      Don't set fire to your brain then, problem solved.
      - Spooky23 2y ago
        Or leave a PET water bottle in the car.
        CamperBob2 2y ago
        Because that's exactly like setting it on fire.
        Spooky23 2y ago
        People don't typically set plastic on fire to inhale the smoke. But leaving a water bottle in a car, where there are often significant thermal changes, results in a leaching of some of those chemicals into the water. Because it's often clear, folks often think that plastic is inert like glass. It is far from it.
        CamperBob2 2y ago
        The (sub)topic is lead, though. If lead is still being used in plastic water bottles, then I'm with you, that's just nuts. Obviously water bottles should be made from plastics that don't leach anything harmful into the water when left in a hot car. To the extent they do, it should be easy to come up with specific arguments to prohibit specific substances. Just blaming "plastics" in general is a category error, since not all plastics are proven to be harmful in this regard.
    - rpdillon 2y ago
      Burning things can change their toxicity.
    - adamredwoods 2y ago
      Or more specifically, not all plastics are the same. So are they all safe? https://www.bennettplastics.com/is-it-safe-to-microwave-my-food-in-plastic https://www.bennettplastics.com/is-it-safe-to-microwave-my-f... Do we except polystyrene as carcinogenic, if consumed? So don't eat it. Yet we've banned lead paint, because paint chips flake off. So eating paint chips or inhaling paint dust causes lead toxicity. Admittedly we don't think plastic is nearly as toxic, but some scientists argue it's understudied. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsomega.2c03453 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsomega.2c03453 >> These adverse effects of PS-MPs [polystyrene] on human kidney and liver cells suggest that ingesting microplastics may lead to toxicological problems on cell metabolism and cell–cell interactions. Because exposing human kidney and liver cells to microplastics results in morphological, metabolic, proliferative changes and cellular stress, these results indicate the potential undesirable effects of microplastics on human health. Lead has been around for a long time, and well studied. The cumulative "we" are just now coming to terms with microplastics. I think the concern is valid for what these microplastics might be doing to our cells. https://sustainability.yale.edu/explainers/yale-experts-explain-microplastics https://sustainability.yale.edu/explainers/yale-experts-expl... >> Anastas goes on to explain that our bodies are accustomed to breaking down, processing, and disposing of natural polymers every day, but newer man-made polymers come with many unknowns. “We just don’t know to what degree these human-made polymers are different and affect our bodies differently,” Anastas explains. “Our bodies evolved to process all of these other natural polymers over countless years, but our bodies and the environment have not been given the chance to evolve to process these man-made polymers.”
  - metalmangler 2y ago
    lead was the additive of choice to reduce plastics flamability in household items like venitian blinds and other stuff, when it degrades it drops a whitish dust, that is largely lead, also certain plastics react with food and other common things in a home, and react, producing byproducts that are bad for us, and of course, plastic itself is never totaly benign my preference is to have as little of the stuff around as possible, but that is harder and harder to do
klipt 2y ago
We already know cancer rates are going up for young people. What's changed, apart from all the extra chemicals floating in our blood?
- t0bia_s 2y ago
  Depression and massive vaccination with experimental mRNA vaccines.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - lostlogin 2y ago
    Use of mRNA vaccines is fairly recent, can you show even a correlation between them and cancer rates? How is depression causing childhood cancers?
    - t0bia_s 2y ago
      First, we should have randomized independend studies about side effects of new vaccines, which takes about 3 years to make. Did we have something like that during 2021 few months after developing new vaccine when milion of doses was distributed? Look at graphs in 15-44y catgeory. Still increasing mortality since 2020. Why? https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
      - lostlogin 2y ago
        No one thinks that the best drug launch method is do it untested. Isn’t that curve you show trending down?
        t0bia_s 2y ago
        Frightened mind is easily manipulated. In 15-44y category its going up with excessive deaths.
- 2y ago
WWLink 2y ago
> Every year, you have several headlines in the mold of "X is everywhere and might be killing us"... but never really followed by that "oh yeah, it was really killing us" part. Asbestos? Cigarette smoke? BRUH lol.
- xboxnolifes 2y ago
  Pretty sure they mean since leaded gas was banned. Asbestos was around the same time, and cigarette awareness started decades prior.
xkcd-sucks 2y ago
The "getting bonked on the head a lot might be killing us" narrative has progressed rapidly in the past 20 years, fwiw, and you'd think we would have noticed it earlier given it is visually evident postmortem and doesn't depend on technology
- HPsquared 2y ago
  I refer you to BMJ 2018;363:k5094, "Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial" Conclusion: "Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention." It's hard to scientifically prove some things!
  - lostlogin 2y ago
    Spoiler: the aircraft never took off. I’m not sure that they are as clever as they think they are. Maybe I’m not academic enough for the joke. https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094 https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
    - jsmith45 2y ago
      The whole point of the study is to show the limitations of a Randomized Controlled trial. This study shows the difficulty in studying the effectiveness of entrenched practices, especially when there is good reason to suspect that not using the practice will result in extremely significant harm at high probability. Here we have a study with enormous self-selection bias. They did ask candidates mid-flight in commercial aircraft if they would be willing to participate at their current altitude and speed, and obviously all declined. On the other hand a number of candidates found on private planes that were not moving were willing to participate. This study also shows how statistical techniques can be misused, as here in a study where the adverse results in question occurred in literally zero participants of the control group is obviously worthless, but one can still run the stats to conclude no statistically significant difference was detected. Lastly it brings up questions about best available evidence. Many researchers tend to automatically assume that an RCT is better than other evidence. Now if they read the study closely and notice flaws they often change their mind, but if they just skim the abstract they can miss this. This is an example of a case where the only available RCT is total garbage, and we have far better evidence in the form of accident statistics from skydivers. Accidents where no chute was packed, or the chute (and any backups) completely fail to deploy are a very good proxy in practice for jumping without one at all.
bilater 2y ago
Agreed. I think its something to look into but surely the boomers who went through the plastic industry in the 60s had it way worse when we had way less stringent standards and were getting exposed to and even eating now banned substances. If they survived it..and by survive I mean lived to a healthy 80-100 year life for the most part then we probably will be fine.
gm678 2y ago
> Everything that goes into our bodies gets filtered through our livers and kidneys, so maybe it’s not a big surprise that bits of plastic find their way into those organs. Same with our hearts; microplastics end up in our blood and can get stuck in our clogged arteries. > But our brains are designed to keep things out ... researchers behind the brain plastics study think the tiny shards of plastic hitch a ride on fat molecules to get [past the blood-brain barrier] inside brain cells ... The researchers estimated that the average brain studied had about seven grams of microplastics in it. Having 7g of _anything_ foreign inside my brain seems like cause for concern to me.
sertraline 2y ago
There is no sound evidence of having so much microplastics in the brain. The studies that show it are very broad, incomplete and did not check for false positives. "The main analytical method used in this study was pyrolysis gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. This method can give false results when used to measure plastics because fats (which the brain is mainly made of) give the same pyrolysis products as polyethylene (the main plastic reported)" And then you have something like this: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32882126

adamredwoods 2y ago

Immediate consequences versus long-term consequences. Leaded gasoline is still being studied on how impactful it was. https://dupri.duke.edu/news-events/news/20th-century-lead-exposure-damaged-american-mental-health https://dupri.duke.edu/news-events/news/20th-century-lead-ex...

CamperBob2 2y ago
Lead is highly toxic. Plastic is not necessarily toxic at all.
- adamredwoods 2y ago
  https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/indiana-plastics-fire-spewed-toxic-chemicals-epa-finds-benzene-rcna79778 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/indiana-plastics-fire-s... >> A plastics fire in Indiana spewed various toxic chemicals into the air, including hydrogen cyanide and benzene, according to test results from the Environmental Protection Agency. >> Officials said Friday that air monitors detected hydrogen cyanide, benzene, chlorine, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds in the ground-level smoke.
  - mavhc 2y ago
    Don't set fire to your brain then, problem solved.
    - Spooky23 2y ago
      Or leave a PET water bottle in the car.
      - CamperBob2 2y ago
        Because that's exactly like setting it on fire.
        Spooky23 2y ago
        People don't typically set plastic on fire to inhale the smoke. But leaving a water bottle in a car, where there are often significant thermal changes, results in a leaching of some of those chemicals into the water. Because it's often clear, folks often think that plastic is inert like glass. It is far from it.
        CamperBob2 2y ago
        The (sub)topic is lead, though. If lead is still being used in plastic water bottles, then I'm with you, that's just nuts. Obviously water bottles should be made from plastics that don't leach anything harmful into the water when left in a hot car. To the extent they do, it should be easy to come up with specific arguments to prohibit specific substances. Just blaming "plastics" in general is a category error, since not all plastics are proven to be harmful in this regard.
  - rpdillon 2y ago
    Burning things can change their toxicity.
  - adamredwoods 2y ago
    Or more specifically, not all plastics are the same. So are they all safe? https://www.bennettplastics.com/is-it-safe-to-microwave-my-food-in-plastic https://www.bennettplastics.com/is-it-safe-to-microwave-my-f... Do we except polystyrene as carcinogenic, if consumed? So don't eat it. Yet we've banned lead paint, because paint chips flake off. So eating paint chips or inhaling paint dust causes lead toxicity. Admittedly we don't think plastic is nearly as toxic, but some scientists argue it's understudied. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsomega.2c03453 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsomega.2c03453 >> These adverse effects of PS-MPs [polystyrene] on human kidney and liver cells suggest that ingesting microplastics may lead to toxicological problems on cell metabolism and cell–cell interactions. Because exposing human kidney and liver cells to microplastics results in morphological, metabolic, proliferative changes and cellular stress, these results indicate the potential undesirable effects of microplastics on human health. Lead has been around for a long time, and well studied. The cumulative "we" are just now coming to terms with microplastics. I think the concern is valid for what these microplastics might be doing to our cells. https://sustainability.yale.edu/explainers/yale-experts-explain-microplastics https://sustainability.yale.edu/explainers/yale-experts-expl... >> Anastas goes on to explain that our bodies are accustomed to breaking down, processing, and disposing of natural polymers every day, but newer man-made polymers come with many unknowns. “We just don’t know to what degree these human-made polymers are different and affect our bodies differently,” Anastas explains. “Our bodies evolved to process all of these other natural polymers over countless years, but our bodies and the environment have not been given the chance to evolve to process these man-made polymers.”
- metalmangler 2y ago
  lead was the additive of choice to reduce plastics flamability in household items like venitian blinds and other stuff, when it degrades it drops a whitish dust, that is largely lead, also certain plastics react with food and other common things in a home, and react, producing byproducts that are bad for us, and of course, plastic itself is never totaly benign my preference is to have as little of the stuff around as possible, but that is harder and harder to do

klipt 2y ago

We already know cancer rates are going up for young people. What's changed, apart from all the extra chemicals floating in our blood?

t0bia_s 2y ago
Depression and massive vaccination with experimental mRNA vaccines.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- lostlogin 2y ago
  Use of mRNA vaccines is fairly recent, can you show even a correlation between them and cancer rates? How is depression causing childhood cancers?
  - t0bia_s 2y ago
    First, we should have randomized independend studies about side effects of new vaccines, which takes about 3 years to make. Did we have something like that during 2021 few months after developing new vaccine when milion of doses was distributed? Look at graphs in 15-44y catgeory. Still increasing mortality since 2020. Why? https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
    - lostlogin 2y ago
      No one thinks that the best drug launch method is do it untested. Isn’t that curve you show trending down?
      - t0bia_s 2y ago
        Frightened mind is easily manipulated. In 15-44y category its going up with excessive deaths.
2y ago

WWLink 2y ago

> Every year, you have several headlines in the mold of "X is everywhere and might be killing us"... but never really followed by that "oh yeah, it was really killing us" part. Asbestos? Cigarette smoke? BRUH lol.

xboxnolifes 2y ago
Pretty sure they mean since leaded gas was banned. Asbestos was around the same time, and cigarette awareness started decades prior.

xkcd-sucks 2y ago

The "getting bonked on the head a lot might be killing us" narrative has progressed rapidly in the past 20 years, fwiw, and you'd think we would have noticed it earlier given it is visually evident postmortem and doesn't depend on technology

HPsquared 2y ago
I refer you to BMJ 2018;363:k5094, "Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial" Conclusion: "Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention." It's hard to scientifically prove some things!
- lostlogin 2y ago
  Spoiler: the aircraft never took off. I’m not sure that they are as clever as they think they are. Maybe I’m not academic enough for the joke. https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094 https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
  - jsmith45 2y ago
    The whole point of the study is to show the limitations of a Randomized Controlled trial. This study shows the difficulty in studying the effectiveness of entrenched practices, especially when there is good reason to suspect that not using the practice will result in extremely significant harm at high probability. Here we have a study with enormous self-selection bias. They did ask candidates mid-flight in commercial aircraft if they would be willing to participate at their current altitude and speed, and obviously all declined. On the other hand a number of candidates found on private planes that were not moving were willing to participate. This study also shows how statistical techniques can be misused, as here in a study where the adverse results in question occurred in literally zero participants of the control group is obviously worthless, but one can still run the stats to conclude no statistically significant difference was detected. Lastly it brings up questions about best available evidence. Many researchers tend to automatically assume that an RCT is better than other evidence. Now if they read the study closely and notice flaws they often change their mind, but if they just skim the abstract they can miss this. This is an example of a case where the only available RCT is total garbage, and we have far better evidence in the form of accident statistics from skydivers. Accidents where no chute was packed, or the chute (and any backups) completely fail to deploy are a very good proxy in practice for jumping without one at all.

bilater 2y ago

Agreed. I think its something to look into but surely the boomers who went through the plastic industry in the 60s had it way worse when we had way less stringent standards and were getting exposed to and even eating now banned substances. If they survived it..and by survive I mean lived to a healthy 80-100 year life for the most part then we probably will be fine.

gm678 2y ago

> Everything that goes into our bodies gets filtered through our livers and kidneys, so maybe it’s not a big surprise that bits of plastic find their way into those organs. Same with our hearts; microplastics end up in our blood and can get stuck in our clogged arteries. > But our brains are designed to keep things out ... researchers behind the brain plastics study think the tiny shards of plastic hitch a ride on fat molecules to get [past the blood-brain barrier] inside brain cells ... The researchers estimated that the average brain studied had about seven grams of microplastics in it. Having 7g of _anything_ foreign inside my brain seems like cause for concern to me.

sertraline 2y ago

There is no sound evidence of having so much microplastics in the brain. The studies that show it are very broad, incomplete and did not check for false positives. "The main analytical method used in this study was pyrolysis gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. This method can give false results when used to measure plastics because fats (which the brain is mainly made of) give the same pyrolysis products as polyethylene (the main plastic reported)" And then you have something like this: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32882126