6 ms·
What Do We Know About the Microplastics Inside Us?
- tantalor 4mo agotldr, not much because we can't measure it to begin with
- Agrue8u 4mo agodid 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.
- culi 4mo agoNot 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.
- MarkusQ 4mo agoVery 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.
- radiusvector 4mo agoDid she debunk that article that was around microplastics in human testicles?
- Kuraj 4mo agoWait, there's more to this than a meme?
- wxw 4mo agoSome stand out takeaways: > 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?
- culi 4mo agoThis is a great interview, though I'd caution against reading it like a literature review. It's just the views and opinions of a single (relevant and qualified) expert
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- The_Blade 4mo agoone word: microplastics
- godwinson__4-8 4mo ago[flagged]
- ChrisClark 4mo agoyes
- ButlerianJihad 4mo agoPlease show us on the doll where the microplastics hurt you, for the jury please.
- mythrwy 4mo agoThe doll is missing that part!
- AyanamiKaine 4mo agoMicroplastics 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.
- app13 4mo agoI participated in research from 2017-2022 that found similar results regarding bio-interactions, generally. Learned a lot about making microfludic flow cells at least
- codybontecou 4mo agoCan microplastics never get small enough to interact with T cells?
- Retric 4mo agoThere’s a transition point where things stop being micro plastics, then nano plastics, and become specific chemicals. Those molecules may be toxic but the interactions are distinct from microplastics or nano plastics.
- tristor 4mo agoUnknown 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.
- andrenotgiant 4mo agoI 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.
- ButlerianJihad 4mo agoEven 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.
- estearum 4mo agoYes, 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.
- ButlerianJihad 4mo agoPersonally, 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.
- skyq 4mo agoI have grown to accept it. It is part of me now
- danteocualesjr 4mo agowe have recently transitioned to only using glass bottles in our family.
- mrpeek 4mo agoWe’re going to find out at an autopsy.
- chaseadam17 4mo ago[dead]
- odyssey7 4mo agoWe 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.
- skaushik92 4mo agoWhen there's such a large and obvious profit disincentive, we should probably question whether its a capabilities problem or a willful ignorance problem.
- mrkn1 4mo agofwiw 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
- mcmcmc 4mo agoIt is proven that it tastes hella good though
- 1970-01-01 4mo agoWould have loved to see the effects broken down by plastic, as the term "plastics" is as non-specific as "metals" and "organic"
- exactlyright 4mo ago[flagged]
- 1970-01-01 4mo ago>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 holds the glass panel. Silicon is the glass itself. Yale editors, do your job. She worked "a crazy amount of details", and so can you!
- zug_zug 4mo ago" 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."
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- neptvn 4mo agoSo 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".
- Fedot 4mo agoThe 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.
- tsoukase 4mo agoMicroplastics 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.