Study links high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease to plastics | Hacker News Reader

Study links high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease to plastics

news.ucr.edu

143 pointsrustoo66 comments

Everytime I've seen something about plastics being a health risk, it's not the main polymer (eg. PET, LDPE, HDPE, etc.) that's pointed out, it's the plasticizers. Because plasticizers are not chemically bound to the polymer, it does make sense that they are more likely to have a biological effect than the polymers, as the polymer is generally a fairly stable molecule chain.

The polymers themselves can degrade, though. Especially with plastic items that have been exposed to the sun for long periods of time, the polymers can break down. I wonder if this degradation could also be a health risk, as many polymers are hydrocarbons, which do have known health risks.

LDPE/HDPE don't need plasticisers.

I wonder if this degradation could also be a health risk, as many polymers are hydrocarbons, which do have known health risks.

Would you consider wax and vaseline as "health risks? Or mineral oil? Those are basically polyethylene but at much lower molecular weights. The hydrocarbons you're probably thinking of (octane and below) are even lower, but e.g. propane and butane aren't actually particularly toxic.

> Would you consider wax and vaseline as "health risks? Or mineral oil?

I would consider anything we didn't have in our environment until very recently a health risk, simply because it's a form of "testing previously untested inputs in production"

Edit: To be clear, in the context of evolution, I would eyeball "very recently" at about 100,000 years.

Over a century is "very recently"?

Relative to the 200,000 to 6 million years we have been in this shape? Yes.

It certainly is if we're looking at the rise in obesity and cvd.

If it takes a long time to have an effect and is linked to many other comorbidities (as will be the case for obesity at least).

And some epigenetic changes take effect on the subsequent generations and not the current one.

From the point of view of evolution and natural selection, yes, it is not even the blink of an eye.

Mineral oil does have some health risks (potential endocrine disruption and carcinogen).

Waxes are a huge category. I would guess some do and some don't. Beeswax for example has 300 chemicals in it, some may be beneficial and some could be harmful.

Vaseline is supposed to be largely safe. There are various grades of petroleum jelly, some of which could be carcinogenic.

Beeswax has been in our environment for millions of years. Not so for the other substances you mentioned.

But not in the quantities or frequency that it is available today through agriculture.

Exactly. A person today could eat honey and use beeswax in food every day if they wanted to. This would not have been available to anyone 10k years ago.

Many substances have been in our environment for millions of years. Lead has been around for ages. A substance being "natural" or having been around for 100,000+ years does not necessarily correlate to safe.

I would far more trust a new substance that has been tested thoughtfully.

Technically, it wouldn't be a new substance if thoroughly tested. It would need to be tested for at least a generation to study epigenetic effects.

I would prefer older substances that have a large battery of testing. This time also allows some group-think or other new product bias to dissipate.

This sounds an awful lot like asking job candidates for 10 years of experience in a technology that is only 2 years old. Nothing new will ever be created again.

I'm just saying, if it's new then it's basically being tested in prod.

Reminds me of my "Uranium is 100% all-natural!" quip.

People have burned peat or used lead for centuries, which is horrible for your health. Just because humans have had something in the environment historically doesn't mean it's safe.

I had a different scale in mind. I'm not talking about "historically", but "evolutionarily", so on the order of millions of years, not hundreds.

I don't think centuries is long enough. We don't seem to have finished evolving our coping strategies for alcohol and lactose and it is probably 20,000 years since those were added to our environment. And in both cases, we already had a head start - there has been trace amounts of alcohol in overripe fruit and lactose in breast milk, basically forever.

Evolution only corrects as much as is required for reproduction; and as far as reproduction is concerned, avoidance is just as good of a response as tolerance.

Humans have evolved to cope with lactose and alcohol. Getting sick is that response. This is the same in how we've evolved to live with fire. Not because evolution can magically make us invincible to chemical combustion -- instead we have pain receptors and learn to avoid it.

A minor quibble, though I agree with your point overall: lactose intolerance is not an adaptive response to something harmful in lactose (the way getting sick from alcohol is), it's more of an efficiency hack: since mammals normally only consume lactose as babies, our bodies stop producing the lactase enzyme around the time we stop breast-feeding, so we stop being able to digest this type of sugar, which we would normally never encounter again (or no more than trace amounts).

Some 20k years ago, some of our ancestors started consuming milk even in adulthood, and it turned out a few of them had a mutation that allowed them to continue producing lactase even in adulthood. Since milk is actually a very nutritious substance if you can farm it, these people thrived and passed on their genes, in some areas.

That's a good point.

I was thinking more generally: "someone drinks milk, they get sick, they don't drink it, don't die".

Yes, but it's interesting to contrast with alcohol sickness. The reason people without lactase get sick from lactose is because the lactose passes most of their digestive tract intact, and is then broken down by bacteria in their intestines, releasing gas, causing mechanical pressures on their intestines that are perceived as pain and other symptoms.

In the case of alcohol, our body detects the alck of balance and other neural impacts, classifies this as a poisoning, and it tries to provoke vomiting to eliminate as much as possible of the poison. It's explicitly an adaptive response that we developed to survive consumption of poisonous substances.

It's a different biological means to the same evolutionary ends. Maybe the additional involuntary processes associated with alcohol were evolutionarily necessary because humans also experience other feelings which induce the consumption of alcohol. I mean, milk is fine, but we don't call it happy-hour when we drink milk. :)

Havent rotten fruits been around since forever?

Our evolutionary ancestors could’ve involuntarily consumed alcohol way before 20k BC.

Involuntarily on 1 Jan 20,000 BC, but voluntarily ever since 2 Jan 20,000 BC.

I think it’s aromatic hydrocarbons, rings like cyclohexane and hybridized rings like benzene, that tend to be greater risk with chronic exposure.

Rubber is similar to plastic in many regards. Here's how chemicals in rubber car tires find their way into water supplies and kill salmon. Lots of salmon. Most of this stuff we don't find out about for like 50 years, and usually on a fluke discovery. We trusted the science at the time.

https://www.science.org/content/article/common-tire-chemical...

FYI - Tires use synthetic rubber, which is just more plastic. Natural rubber would be way too expensive and difficult to extract at mass scale.

Good to see this study coming out. There's surprisingly little research like this considering how ubiquitous pthalates and plastics are in our food/drink and physical environments.

In the late noughties everyone switched off BPA to other plastics that, as far as I can tell, are just less studied.

The average consumer also needs to be aware that the bar for a 'new' substance is actually fairly low depending on the country's regulations.

Very often they just have to prove that the substance is not bio-toxic, which roughly translates to "we injected X into the subdermy or blood stream of 20x bunnies and none of them died".

There are some studies that show the replacements are even more potent.

https://www.epa.gov/sciencematters/are-bpa-substitutes-any-s...

BPA is near omnipresent still.

Those laser printed receipts that virtually every business hands you when you buy anything, are dusted with BPA to help the print develop.

> Those laser printed receipts that virtually every business hands you when you buy anything, are dusted with BPA to help the print develop.

Not in the EU anymore, as of 2nd January of 2020[0]:

> As of the 2nd of January 2020, thermal paper (commonly used to make till receipts) with a Bisphenol A (BPA) concentration equal to or higher than 0.02% can no longer be sold in Europe, effectively banning its use.

I'm hoping that they're not just switching to BPB/BPF/BPS etc.

[0] https://planetark.org/newsroom/archive/4892

Unfortunately, I'd eager that they're doing exactly that.

>BPS in thermal paper The receipts we receive when we buy groceries, prescriptions, gas, clothing, restaurant meals, and much more are generally printed on thermal paper coated with either Bisphenol-A (BPA) or its chemical cousin Bisphenol-S (BPS)

To be clear on terminology, those receipts are thermal prints. They use a heated print element and paper that turns dark where heated.

BTW these should never be placed in with other paper for recycling as the chemicals in the thermal paper will contaminate the rest of the paper.

Thank you for that recycling tidbit; why that isn't listed anywhere in my local recycling program, I'm not sure.

Anyone know what I as a consumer what can I do to reduce my risk? Not use plastic water bottles? Not use plastic food containers? Not use plastic knives and forks? Plastic bags? Plastic storage containers?

There probably isn't enough research to make any of those claims conclusively yet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

Learn what PP, ABS, PET, HDPE and LDPE are (the safest plastics), how to spot/identify what items are made out of it, and avoid literally everything else plastic that isn't one of these.

Everything you mentioned are actually mostly polyethylene (PE), polypropylene or PET with the exception of plastic utensils which are sometimes made from a hard form of polystyrene, and some takeout food containers.

Besides a general reduction in plastic use, one thing to consider is that plasticizers are more prone to escape the bulk plastic via liquids and under heat. Try to avoid heat and try to use plastics when they will remain dry.

It’s actually easier than you think to mostly cut out plastic from food and drink. If you mostly cook at home— use paper/cloth bags at the grocery store, buy unprocessed foods, get meat, fish, deli, cheese etc paper wrapped, get drinks in aluminum or glass bottles, use only glass to store and drink water with at home. Some plastic use on processed foods is unavoidable but I’m trying to reduce exposure as much as possible. Another thing is to switch out your shampoo, soaps, dish washing liquid etc. for EWG certified products with no pthalates, parabens etc. Also vinegar instead of disinfectants to clean surfaces in the home.

Lots of 'paper' wrapping use a thin coat of plastic to keep the paper from leaking, at least where I live. Glass bottles are pretty rare for drinks these days, though avoiding sugary drinks and drinking tap water instead of bottle water fixes much of that (well, that and alcohol, I suppose).

Also, not sure why you would recommend vinegar instead of alcohol. Vinegar is barely a disinfectant, and often leaves residue of its own.

Any recently-built home probably has plastic water supply pipes throughout. They're crazy easy (so, less and less-skilled labor required, so cheaper) to install, and the material's cheap. Unless you custom-build and pay a lot extra for copper, that's almost certainly what you're getting.

Most anything canned in aluminum or steel is in contact with the plastic liner that ~all cans have. Veggies, beans, sauces, beer, et c.

> Glass bottles are pretty rare for drinks these days

You pay extra for it, but you can still easily find mineral water in glass. Soda, too, at least for Coca Cola and a bunch of alternative brands, is easy to find in glass. Beer and wine, obviously, though, at least for wine you pay a premium to get low-end wine in glass rather than in a plastic bag ("box wine").

But many don’t. It’s usually a wax backing at my grocery store.

Glass isn’t all that uncommon and aluminum is ubiquitous.

Alcohol works too, just make sure it has no methanol that kids and pets might lick.

if you mean single use plastic food containers and bottles then yes, that is good for more than just personal plastic exposure.

Otherwise, definitely don’t heat or use hot stuff in plastics.

Unfortunately many non-plastic containers food comes in have linings that can be plastic

Because phthalates are ubiquitous, it's good to take a "best bang for your buck" approach when it comes to reducing your exposure to them. The two major things to watch out for are making sure to never heat plastic containers, as other commenters have pointed out, but the second is to very closely watch what you put on your skin. Many cosmetics contain phthalates, and many phthalates are readily absorbed by the skin.

It's also important to note that the systemic effects of phthalates include endocrine disruption, and the consequences of the endocrine system being disrupted are potentially severe. There's evidence to link declining testosterone levels in males to plasticizers.

* Avoid the use of plastic containers for food/drinks if you can.

* If you must use a plastic container, definitely don't heat it up, don't use it for oily foods, wash it before putting your food in it, and try to avoid mechanical stress/deformation while your food is in it.

* Avoid canned food if you can, unless you know that the can doesn't have an endocrine-disrupting liner.

* Avoid touching receipts if you can.

* If you must touch a receipt, make sure your hands are dry while you're touching it, and wash your hands afterward.

* Don't buy a new car (outgassing plasticizers are what give it that new car smell).

* Don't use scented candles/soap.

* Clean up dust in your house regularly.

Pretty sure new car smell these days is just a special deodorant type spray. That’s why refurb cars now come with new car smell too

Could have figured this out years ago if we didn’t put epidemiological studies on a pedestal. Now excuse me, I have some egg yolks to eat.

I saw just the other day that microplastics cross the blood brain barrier in mice anyhow.

https://newatlas.com/environment/microplastics-blood-brain-b...

One of the widest uses of DCHP is in medicine/hospitals.

Edit: DCHP (a phthalate) not DHCP

Or IT

You are joking from my typo but it is actually true. All those computer cables are heavily impregnated with phthalates and usually sitting in warm areas. Do not put them in your mouth, and wash your hands after touching.

Goes doubly for the kiddos who seem to love putting everything in their mouth.

What are they used for? My medical building has a prop 65 warning before you enter explicitly calling that out.

Anything that is a flexible tube or cable (including those put inside the body)

The masses should have access to this kind of information so that they will be aware of what is happening.

It's open access, so, here you go.

https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP9262

We've known about cholesterol and cardiovascular risks and how to reduce them for decades. The problem isn't access to information, it's false information creating incorrect or purposefully conflicting narratives which confuse and debase science.

Dietary cholesterol is actually pretty weakly correlated with cardiovascular disease, and yet people have significantly changed their behaviors (for the worse, most likely) in the years since this mistaken science proliferated - the infamous replacement of high-fat diets with high-sugar ones.

> Dietary cholesterol is actually pretty weakly correlated with cardiovascular disease

This is exactly what I'm talking about - the opposite of what you say is actually true.

You're working on old research. All newer research points to no correlation. Even worse, all attempts to reduce CVD by reducing blood cholesterol have completely failed as well, in several large scale clinically controlled trials.

Here is an example of such a modern study:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6024687/

> For years, dietary cholesterol was implicated in increasing blood cholesterol levels leading to the elevated risk of CVD. To date, extensive research did not show evidence to support a role of dietary cholesterol in the development of CVD.

> The investigator’s work and publication costs are funded by an institutional start-up fund.

That's why. New "research" is mostly paid-for industry propaganda, and you've found a piece of it.

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