Microplastics detected in human blood in new study

It's mostly pigs. Remember that they're omnivores, so they eat the same things humans eat. Cattle eat grass, they're also fed grain commercially, and after the mad cow outbreaks, cattle are no longer fed meat and bone meal. Chickens mostly eat grain and worms, though I assume they're getting some meat and bone meal.

Found this on youtube. I grew up around farms, and it looks about right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrRprZ8C93g

Also, classic scene from Snatch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xUynRdzzsM

Anecdote is not data.

Extrapolating one video filmed by a non objective part, in one "farm" as a proof that everybody is doing the same is just lying to yourself. Anybody could feed pigs gross things to videotape it.

Seems like a bit of a dangerous game of broken telephone though, if The Creator is giving very specific tips to barely literate people in the desert and then never bothering to check back to clarify.

Maybe Moses was told "Be careful with consuming those underground fossil fuels" and, lacking context, he wrote down: "Be careful with eating those underground ancient insects" - which turned into a ban on eating grasshoppers.

Worse, there are unacceptable lead levels in the glazing of any dishware coming from China (which is most of it). These are levels considered unsafe for children by FDA standards (which aren't as stringent as EU standards).

There are very few safe brands in this regard. One from France and one from Turkey, at least on the US market.

That's nuts. Why are heavy metals even showing up in these? Are the herbs/spices just picking the metals up from the soil and then they become concentrated because of the drying? Do plants end up concentrating heavy metals in the seeds?

> HFCS isn't used much in Europe,

Maybe in the past, but these days when I do grocery shopping in Poland, most products have it

HFCS is "high" in fructose in relative terms but is actually quite similar to "normal" sugar (55% fructose vs 50% fructose). I think you're right that the real culprit is probably that sugar is being shoved into everything, including staples like bread.

I think it's not about HFCS specifically, but rather the norm that was established by the availability of cheap (via a subsidized corn industry in the US) sugars that could be placed in anything. As far as I understand, HFCS does not have any biochemical effects that are different from other added sugars. It's more the economics and culture it created for food production.

Vast quantities of extra calories are needed for large segments of the population to be obese. That kind of surplus is very recent and absolutely required for an obesity epidemic.

So we absolutely have the root cause, but not perhaps the only one.

> Monocausal thinking doesn’t suit a complex system.

Sounds like a good argument for climate sceptics.

There's plenty of evidence about harms of sugar: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-drinks/....

Sure. I omitted a thousand other factors for brevity.

What else has changed in human behaviour since, say 1900?

Cars? Americans drive everywhere. Europeans, not so much.

The rise of offices and people working less laborious jobs?

It's both sides, energy in (more sugar than in 1900 by a massive margin), and energy out (a more sedentary life style).

And here we are in 2022.

Sugar is easily stored by the body as fat, so when in > out, it's fat++

Not specifically testosterone or world-wide:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7967748/

>> In a further study, following 28 days exposure by oral gavage (100 μL PS-MPs (10 mg/mL)) PS-MPs (0.5, 4, 10 μm) bioaccumulate in mice testis altering spermatogenesis progression, SPZ morphology, testosterone biosynthesis and body weights and inducing inflammatory response [73]; interestingly, in vitro MPs enter into germ cells, Sertoli and Leydig cells [73].

There's no mention of "sudden change" in parent's post. The reference is to "modern age", which is consistent: shift from manual to sedentary job, increase of processed foods, increase of food availability, increase of pressure from industry to eat more and more processed foods; it's a very linear phenomenon.

Probably yes, you can click a button and have pretty much anything you need delivered the same day (in some places).

Not everywhere, but it certainly seems like that's happened in the US. Most people I know (from here in the UK) who have been on trips to the US have come back shocked at both the portion sizes and the lack of opportunities for exercise in everyday activities (apparently this is a lot to do with a culture of driving everywhere). And if it was a longer trip (weeks/months), they've often also put on a noticeable amount of weight that they then quickly lose once they're back home.

Yes? Suburban, car-centric lifestyles have become the norm.

Average american calorie consumption was up 24% between 1961 and 2013.

Can you increase your caloric intake by 24% without putting on weight?

edit: src https://www.businessinsider.com/daily-calories-americans-eat...

Changes in food, availability, cost, marketing, etc would be obvious things that could cause it.

Whereas plastics -- When you look at the staggering amount of plastics pollution coming out of rivers in East and South East Asian and the subcontinent, it correlates pretty well with some of the lowest obesity rates in the world.

Unlimited free refills on sodas at restaurants didn't become normal to the point of being the expected default, IIRC, until the mid 90s or later.

I think the effects of the unlimited-refills thing, and (relatedly) of to-go soda cup sizes becoming insanely large, doesn't explain the whole thing but probably is a big enough factor to be worth looking at.

Maybe it's a combination of sedentary jobs and also sedentary leisure. In the 1970s or 1980s people didn't have the plethora of activities we have today that involve staring at a screen.

Obesity has become far more socially acceptable since the 70's/80's. Being the "fat kid" at school was a big deal back then. Now it is completely normal in many places.

It's a minor argument for something that tends to come up. It's come up a few times on HN some studies that show sperm quality is much lower in obese men, and that there are more obese men. There also tend to be small effect sizes that suggest within the healthy weight bin, sperm quality has dropped a small amount over time. But its naive to think that this means it still isn't a weight effect.

The bin argument is basically saying that if the entire population gets fatter, you would expect the average weight within a bin to go up, even if some people move into the next. This depends somewhat on the shape of the curve, and the bins. But on a whole it's simply saying that the average weight of people between X lbs and Y lbs is higher than it was before.

Really what it's saying is that the bins obfuscate what could be better analyzed as a continuous variable effect. The bins are arbitrary and misleading. People can fall within the same bin at t1 and t2 but be fatter at t2.

> I think obesity is a huge factor, maybe 80%. But I don't know why you feel so strongly that every other explanation is completely false.

The evidence and effect size is simply extremely strong, and the prevalence of obesity is very high. I estimate obesity to account for more than 90% of the sperm effect and diet to account for more than 90% of the obesity effect.

I'm not opposed to the idea that plastics might have some small single digit effect size. Nor am I opposed to the idea that we might see an inflection point where more plastics start being significantly worse. But for now, it seems to be a tiny, unimportant part of the story.

BMI was always intended to be used at a population level because because you get lean and jacked outliers who have an obese BMI. I wonder if it has issues at the population level as lifestyles change and people engage in less strenuous physical activity.

I have never looked into testosterone before. After some research, I cannot find anything to support your claim about what's happened since the 60s, but it sounds unreasonable to me. Average levels appear to have been dropping since the 80s, but not by such a significant scale as you claim. I did however find this harvard article with the following passage:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/mens-health/obesity-unhealthy...

> Obesity lowers testosterone levels. For example, a 2007 study of 1,667 men ages 40 and above found that each one-point increase in BMI was associated with a 2% decrease in testosterone. In addition, a 2008 study of 1,862 men ages 30 and above found that waist circumference was an even stronger predictor of low testosterone levels than BMI. A four-inch increase in waist size increased a man's odds of having a low testosterone level by 75%; for comparison, 10 years of aging increased the odds by only 36%. All in all, waist circumference was the strongest single predictor of developing symptoms of testosterone deficiency.

Here is a story [0] to support your claim, with testosterone levels declining 1% per year on average [1]

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2017/10/02/youre-not-t...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/health-testosterone-levels-d...

I would be very wary about that. Plastic seems highly likely to be the kind of thing that will, at some level of bio accumulation, cause cancer. I just don't think it's a substantial factor in obesity or sperm declines at the moment.

> we care about how bad...compared to Y amount of sugar intake

Microplastic pollution has an effect on the entire biosphere of the planet. It's just another factor contributing to the accelerating global extinction event we've set in motion.