Drinking coffee or tea from paper cups may be bad for your health

When dealing with probabilities there are two measures that need to be considered independently: probability and effect. Traditional statistics multiplies them into "expected utility" and works just with the aggregated value. But that's tricky, because effect is not a continuous function. Imagine a pebble falling on your head plotted based on its weight - there'll be sharp discontinuities at "hurts", "commotion" and "death".

At society's level there are also similar discontinuities. Something that may cause tens of million of cases of cancer over time should be in a separate category from a medicine that may suddenly kill a few hundred people, even though the latter has a bigger emotional impact.

I've seen so many photos of dead fish filled with plastic that it must be a concern to the food supply chain.

And absence of evidence != evidence of absence.

The most important is hormone-like compounds like Bisphenol A (BPA) because hormones are chemical compounds that are used as signals and its effect cascade multiplied by billions in the body, so super small amounts can affect you enormously.

They are being replaced, but new compounds also have hormone like response.

Because biology works by "shape is function" lots of chemical compounds can affect your body because they resemble the one we need for our body's normal function, and the body receptors are confused.

This has extensively been proven that happens, what we don't know is what dose could be ok. For example, you can use(without problems) fleece outside clothing if there is not a big part of your skin in contact with the fleece, like what happened with kid's pajamas, that was very problematic.

Probing that on humans is something similar to covid vaccine testing. It is extremely expensive and bureaucratic process and only gives us statistical results. Knowing exactly what happened is extremely difficult or impossible in practice because there are hundreds of chemical compounds, and they interfere with each other creating factorial combinations. But we know it breaks havoc in your body for sure.

You also should avoid heat because it makes chemical diffusion exponentially higher. When you eat your soda can, the PET layer,is at ambient temperature. When you eat coffee or tea, it is hot.

Microplastics that have been generated from plastics containing BPA that are then lodged into the food chain from a very low level will have serious consequences, as BPA is an endocrine disrupter, and shown to negatively affect many physiologial systems including human sperm [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08906...

edit for context:

In practice several plastics compounds are chemically too 'similar' to estrogen (the 'female' hormone).

The plastics with these estrogen like compounds typical either mechanically breakdown (microplastics) or leach due to chemical breakdown (e.g. caused by contact with high temperature liquids or acidic solutions).

Once absorbed it may confuse your body as a 'pseudo estrogen' hormone. This acts as an endocrine disruptor, potentially more so for Males of animal species because of their hormonal profile.

We used glass bottles for milk when our kids were young. The only people to ever break them was us: around 3 total during the course of raising 3 kids.

It's effects on people's hormones are just starting to be understood and known.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor

Wood and metal utensils just feel better in the hand than plastic ones.

I'm not sure whether the eureka moment you're talking about has already happened, with our discovery of just how prevalent microplastics are everywhere in the environment now.

The only plastics in kitchen necessary for me are cling wraps. There are a few other hings out of my control: the nob of the pot lid and the dish soap container. But they all have viable alternatives if the manufacturers are willing.

Plastic cups, plates, bowls are unsafe close to heat sources, a lot harder to clean than everything else, and just feels cheap. I really don't get the popularity of plastics in kitchen.

When the harmful effects of asbestos were first learned, sick and dead people showed up and then a relationship between asbestos dose and illness was subsequently established.

While it still a valuable discover, I think it's too early to make any conclusions yet due to fairly limited source.

If you can avoid both at the same time, terrific! If you can only avoid one, avoid the germs. They will kill you faster.

(Ideally, you also work at reducing/limiting how much exposure you have to the thing poisoning you. Edit: One possible solution here is to drink your coffee cold, such as frappuccino drinks. Even in the same cup, it should be far less of an issue.)