is it possible that then we don't fully understand the resilience of the human body? It is certainly possible, when the article can state that:
> the health effects of consuming micro- and nanoplastics remain unclear
[0]: https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2020/212/3/incidence-childhoo...
[1]: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/11/why-are-male-testo...
[1] https://www.healthymale.org.au/news/obesity-overweight-can-i...
[2] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and...
We don't have enough information. We don't know how they collected their data, we don't know how they analyzed it, even if we did most of us don't know enough to judge those methods etc.
Most "science" is honestly worthless crap done by some random person mainly because they want a PhD or are trying to pad their publication count. They look for some arbitrary thing to test, half-assedly design a study, collect as little data as they can get away with, do a little p-hacking and such to make sure the results are significant (otherwise the time was wasted) then they publish.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/12/13/whats-on-...
I don't have pans with teflon anymore. I avoid plastic bottles for beverages, which means I almost never drink any soda. I got rid of almost all my Tupperware and use paper bags or boxes made of steel when possible. And even though I grew up using the microwave a lot as a teen, I somehow ended up never owning one myself after moving out.
Yet for some reason I still managed to survive.
> I suspect improvements in communications media... But this is an interesting take. So wifi is hurting us after all haha
In some cases, we have just been uncovering what the businesses selling a toxic product already knew but covered up for a quick buck - even using sophisticated and “scientific” arguments.
In many cases, we just need the right incentive from the regulators. To prioritize long term thinking.
a good thought exercise, but a distraction from the question at hand, which is, do we have convincing evidence that it's plastics?
Besides, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle dictates that lawmakers should anticipate risks instead of allowing everything "because it's profitable" only to ban it 30 years later.
Then again, we also reduced coal use in cities, we burn less wood in our houses, etc.
As an extreme example, we actually can't state with 100% confidence that exercise is good for your health, it's just too hard to prove. But nobody with a sane mind will doubt it.
Doubt. It depends what definition you use for "health" but we know for a fact that a sedentary lifestyle has negative effects and that an active lifestyle has positive effects. Those assertions are indisputable.
Sometimes wonder if these arguments are just devil’s advocating. I mean do you avoid heating food in plastic for you and yours? Or are you so scientific that you believe it’s fine until proven otherwise?
Said another way, if you were to bet money, which way would you bet - that plastics are benign?
Otherwise where does it end? What other things should I assume are dangerous despite no evidence? Or are you saying I should latch on to whatever baseless hysteria is popular at the moment?
I'm not a betting man. I think plastics have been around for a long time and as far as I know we haven't proven that they have a negative effect. If they did have a significant negative effect I'm pretty sure we would have proven it by now. So maybe they have an insignificant negative effect. I'm okay with that risk. If I weren't I wouldn't have time to do anything other than worry about and avoid shit that might have an insignificant negative effect - not to mention things that we know have a significant negative effect such as alcohol.
Honestly if you drink alcohol and you worry about microplastics you're just hypocritical.
That’s correct. Some people feel powerless to address the bigger elephants in the room.
Being obsessively anti-plastic (or anything) shouldn’t be a coping mechanism (but that’s what it is, not hypocrisy).
But I’m suggesting that as a society, we can easily have the collective will to uncover and address issues - more research on plastic, more education on alcohol, etc.
Because we know what short term thinking unregulated actors can do, intentionally or unintentionally.
They are unavoidable, doesn't matter what you eat. Fish, vegetables, meat, whatever you can think of it has microplastics.
If you want to expend a bunch of energy trying to minimize it go ahead and good luck. Personally I don't see the point.
1. nano/microplastics kill kidney cells in a lab environment
2. nano/microplastics come from microwaving containers
Regardless of whether you agree with the conclusion _you_ are drawing from reading the article, the article is saying those things.
In order to make a real-world-ish experiment, we'd have to start experimenting on children. I feel that while you're expressing outrage at a potentially real thing, you're also being unreasonable in that.
Sorry in advance if this comes off as harsh.
On a more controversial take, consider the deep-seated hate the 'educated' laptop-class 'geniuses' have for those plebs who notice that their children's behavior completely changes after a battery of vaccinations, or indeed how so many people ended up with injuries after taking the 'completely safe' Covid vaccines.
/s kinda
So I don't know if you haven't read the article till the end (because this caveat of the concentration comes later after the sensational part you emphasized) or you are purposely trying to mislead others.
The discrepancy of their result ("three-quarters of cultured embryonic kidney cells had died" with reality also clearly points to something very wrong with this "study". That high level of cell mortality is not observed anywhere in reality.
It’s sort of a worrying study for me personally. Because bottle feeding only really works so well because you can microwave, both for cleaning and for heating, modern bottles so easily. If you have to go back to glass containers it’ll be a literal nightmare for most parents.
By the time they could hold their own bottle we used plastic both for safe surface temperatures on the bottle and in case they threw it or dropped it as you mentioned.
I was guessing the commenter was referring to the expense of buying glass bottles, because they cost about double, and that "literal nightmare" was hyperbole.
See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277241662..., (Micro/nano glass pollution as an emerging pollutant in near future)
Now microplastics is all the rage so you see these studies, next you will see Micro-X whatever it is. The fact is that this is a headline grabbing study without any meaning and that did not show anything actually. They even say it in their study (but this does nto make headlines) that the study does not show at what concentration microplastics become a problem, just that at very unreasonably high concentrations they used it caoused cell death in petry cells. Almost Everything will cause cell damage at very high concentrations
Pfft who am I kidding, what an insane idea. People would just complain that the model has some unknowable flaw, and is therefore entirely useless.
But animal studies don’t supersede human health outcome studies which the person above is suggesting. Animal studies, like in vitro studies, are at the bottom of the hierarchy of evidence.
Not trying to be dismissive, but statements like that reminds me of "Miracle Drug Ivermectin[0]/Industrial Bleach[1] Cures Covid After XX Hours"
[0] https://www.monash.edu/discovery-institute/news-and-events/n... [1] https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavi...
We're not seeing them having severe kidney problems - easily detectable ones. They could still have damage or accululated crap on their kidneys.
In any case, the article doesn't say kids kidneys die in 2 days. It says lab kindey cells die when exposed to such microplastics, and microwave setups produce those microplastics.
Meaning: kids are exposed to kindney damaging microplastics through this mechanism. The extend of the damage, as the article also states, remains to be evaluated.
This is still the problem, then. The damage is based on the amount.
You could demonstrate that kidney cells die when exposed to cyanide, and apple pips have cyanide in them, and you might say "kids are exposed to kidney damaging cyanide through this mechanism. The extent of the damage remains to be seen".
If someone challenged that by saying that kids who eat apples aren't all dying of cyanide-induced kidney failure, you could also say we're just not seeing easily detectable ones.
But you'd be absorbing (and re-emitting) entirely the wrong impression without the supporting contextual info that genuinely links the two together. We don't create more and more unusual hypotheticals to explain a belief in things or effects that we don't know exist. We demonstrate why we think they should exist and go from there.
> Exposure modeling results suggested that the highest estimated daily intake was 20.3 ng/kg·day for infants drinking microwaved water and 22.1 ng/kg·day for toddlers consuming microwaved dairy products from polypropylene containers.
> Furthermore, an in vitro study conducted to assess the cell viability showed that the extracted microplastics and nanoplastics released from the plastic container can cause the death of 76.70 and 77.18% of human embryonic kidney cells (HEK293T) at 1000 μg/mL concentration after exposure of 48 and 72 h, respectively.
If I'm reading this right, they exposed these HEK293T kidney cells to far higher concentrations (1000 μg is 1000000 ng, and that's per mL) than toddlers would be exposed to from these containers. So the fact that the cells die doesn't really mean much, since exposure to too much of anything will cause cells to die.
The real question is whether the exposure you'd receive from occasional microwaving would be enough to ever cause any meaningful health problems. Unfortunately papers like these always like to talk about dramatic metrics like 'billions of nanoplastics' without putting that into any meaningful context.
I'm no doctor or microbiologist or anything, but there definitely seems to be a strong connection between "things that cause cellular damage" and "increased risk of cancer with long term exposure".
I bet water kills cells in a petri dish. It's just a really useless test to do, that at absolute best gives a vague hint at something that may be true.
It's not useful to talk about in any capacity other than "let's explore this further with better experiments".
Unrealistically high doses imply absolutely nothing about lower doses.
> Unrealistically high doses imply absolutely nothing about lower doses.
The example they give of nuclear radiation is a clear illustration of how a useful hint can be drawn from the high-level example of harm, a pattern which microplastics might very well follow.
Sending an astronaut to the center of the Sun and concluding their death is from radiation would be a pretty bad model.
Hitting a person with a car would be a pretty bad model for a fly landing on them.
The first model is bad because the sun is doing more than just exposing them to radiation.
The second model is bad because there's a nonlinear response to force applied to a human body.
Ionizing radiation is also a great example of something everything on the planet is exposed to all the time and we're fine. So clearly the fact that you'll die standing next to the molten core in Chernobyl does not imply that you'll die from background radiation.
Similarly, showing that an extreme dose of microplastics is harmful does not imply that a normal dose of microplastics is. It might be, but we don't know because we've only tested extreme dosages, apparently.
We also don't know that it works the same way in the body as it does in a test tube.
And yet here we are with a comment thread of heated debate over a plastics exposure study that's 50 million times greater than realistic exposure levels. When or if a realistic exposure study is done we may find that a plastic cup is more like a transcontinental flight than living near a reactor meltdown. Let's find out before we jump to conclusions either way.
> whether the exposure you'd receive from occasional microwaving would be enough to ever cause any meaningful health problems
Another question worth asking:
How much of the ~20 ng/kg/day makes its way to the kidney cells? Said another way, if one were to consume a liquid concoction with a certain concentration of nano/micro-plastics, what would the total negative effect be? How much would simply be excreted? That answer for babies vs adults may also vary.
[1] SI Unit rules and style conventions, https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/checklist.html
#15 Unit spacing
There is a space between the numerical value and unit symbol, even when the value is used in an adjectival sense, except in the case of superscript units for plane angle.
That made laugh. Like you said, it doesn't pass the sniff test.
That should be the first thing any scientist does with their results - Does this match up with what we current know about X?
If it doesn't, you need to go back and find out what's wrong with your model.
Then they added the in-vitro test results.
One can imagine it's not trivial to run a trial on toddlers to discover how bad nanoplastics are to their kidneys...
It's far more likely to effect people eating microwave dinners, reheating food/meals in plastic containers, and even then those are different tougher plastics, that said it might be reason enough to just invest in glass containers for food storage.
I guess they would do it by finger touch then.
> After two days, just 23% of kidney cells exposed to the highest concentrations had managed to survive
So they used concentrations that they believe toddlers might accumulate over two days and it killed 3/4 of the kidney cells?
Given that we’re not seeing toddlers around the world have kidney problems after consuming two days worth of micro plastics, let alone multiple years worth, this model doesn’t seem at all representative of real-world outcomes.
Still concerning, but when the results are so far removed from real world observations I don’t know what to make of the whole situation.