Study finds billions of nanoplastics released when microwaving containers
news.unl.edu
news.unl.edu
> 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.
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.
/s kinda
So while your point 1. is technically true, it comes with the caveat of heavy concentrations.
We know of thousands of "factors" that become dangerous or toxic in big concentrations but are innocuous or even beneficial in small doses. I'm not saying that plastic is either of these but to leave out the dose concentration is clearly misrepresenting from your part.
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.
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.
You don't need to "heat" it, but some babies are more receptive if its not cold.
Years ago I was in a kitchen shop with an out of town friend and we saw some Sous Vide equipment. I told her that we had one and that you could either plastic bags or vacuum sealed bags to cook in the water. Her reaction was an immediate "absolutely not." That's when I realized that she worked in a lab that focused on plastics. Her big call out was that there's been studies on heat and how it relates to plastic breakdowns, but those are at high temperatures. There wasn't much related to lower level heats applied for longer periods of time. Based on what she knew from the other studies, she refused to go near anything like Sous Vide as she assumed it was way too risky.
Remember how they they could not find a control group for PFAS anywhere on the planet, I'm sure this is true for all common pollutants.
Edit: OK, I replaced the link to the article about Everest with a link to the article about all the other places.
Funny that you mention Everest. My first thought on Everest is rainbow valley, not untouched by humanity.
Second… if you are at the level that a bag with meat in it for 2 hours at 140 degrees is too risky… you had better get working on that cabin in the woods.
Second, this is coming from someone that works in a research lab in plastics. So pretty well educated.
Anything else you want to be condescending and dismissive about? I'm sure we'd all appreciate hearing more about how you know better than the rest of us and please - make sure you lecture us about how much better you are with your logic and understanding of the world. We early await your amazing contributions. <3
Sorta like those construction workers that are full of bravado at 25, and can barely get out of a chair at 50 because they wrecked their body with improper lifting technique.
A good technique and steady approach goes a long way and there are many jobs in construction that don't break the body - crane operator, bobcat | front end loader | etc. operator.
Push up slab building have been around for decades now, if you can avoid being squashed under a giant mass of concrete (not that common) you're not going to be putting your back out (unless you're running at jobs like a bull at a gate).
Anybody that stays in such an industry for 20+ years has (generally) worked smarter and not destroyed their body - they're still in the industry but moved onto machine operations, management, supervision, health and safety, etc.
The fact is the science has not looked at risks of sous vide plastics. There's maybe no money for such research, unless like in this article the professor became a father and had to microwave food for his newborn baby. In their research, they showed that those particular nanoplastics cause kidney damage, but only in vitro (EDIT: Ah yes, a quick Google shows a horrifying 2023 study that says nanoplastics do get absorbed into the bloodstream...). That's like a doubly indirect argument for concerns about sous vide.
I think a more nuanced answer is that we just don't know, and so it is reasonable to invoke the precautionary principle. Other people, when made aware of the risks, might go ahead but that's their informed choice to do so.
So unless there's a series of studies that shows, "Sous vide produces X amount of polyethylene nanoplastics, and adult/child/rat consumption shows measurable harm", the best we have is precautionary principle and informed risk. It would be nice to have something definitive like "Cigarette smoking causes lung cancer", or more recently from WHO "Drinking alcohol causes breast and gastro/rectal cancer", but we don't have that scientific closure to an open question for sous vide yet.
...where you use a wood stove and inhale far more proven carcinogens instead?
In genernal there does seem to be little discussion of relative risks, trade-offs - plus a tendency towards romanticizing older tech as well as a big dose of the naturalistic fallacy.
However I think research into microplastics is important and I'm personally reducing plastic use when it's easy and low-effort.
I also rather enjoy a nice wood fire when I'm camping.
Those bags are almost certainly polyethyelene without any additives, which is safe and has been in widespread use for almost a century.
Petroleum jelly is far more reactive than PE, although it's substantially the same chemical structure, yet most of us regularly use it on our skin.
If the biggest concern about sous vide is the plastic, then I think that's a very strong argument for its safety, as I'm sure you get far worse byproducts from other more common cooking processes like baking or frying.
For plastics we have no evolved tolerance.
Based on what evidence?
What do you think happens when you overheat animal fat or oils in a cooking vessel and "season" it? It forms a plastic. We've been living and eating alongside that type of plastic since we learned to cook food as a species.
i was told by a doctor once that the general rule is to never put anything on your skin you wouldn't also eat, inject or inhale. your skin is your body's largest organ, and allows many types of molecules to pass through it in either direction. if you rub it on there, you may as well be injecting it, the effect is the same, except, in most cases, the magnitude
I'd probably also avoid eating most moisturizers, those probably aren't great to eat.
Anti-fungal creams to fight toe fungus probably aren't for eating as well.
In small quantities it's a strong laxative. In larger quantities it's a chocking risk.
I think I've used it maybe a handful of times in my whole life; once a year at the very most. Do you mind expanding on your statement here?
It is plausible that plastic will be the next tobacco/leaded gasoline. Time will tell however.
More like lead, since it's impossible to remove the microplastics from our environment.
Tobacco you can just stop, I know it's addictive and all, but at least the issue is psychological, not physical.
Then again, maybe it goes under the known carcinogenic effects when food is cooked at high temperature.
This all happens in the same "step" of seasoning, over time, but when learning to season I was taught it was several distinct things that had to be allowed time to run their course.
Pans where the seasoning was done at too low a temp or aborted early, usually both to avoid smoke, have a distinctly tacky or even sticky feel to their surface. This is probably the more straightforward polymer you're thinking of. I believe these actually handle acid better though. When you get the acid reaction it's definitely the iron part of the seasoning involved. Tastes like old coins.
Maybe you could share what these chemists told you?
Avoiding this exposure will be easy for me, because I was never very comfortable microwaving plastic. I've seen companies lie about their stuff being "microwave safe" too many times.
I thought cast iron would be too much work and got a decent carbon steel pan to replace the non-stick crap I was always replacing, and I don't mind the extra care. I'm not sure that cast iron would take any more effort than what I'm doing now.
Most of the foods I cook are basic meats and veggies so it's usually quite easy to clean for those.
Just apply a little heat, then use a bamboo/wood spatula to scrape the stuck food, then rinse (if needed) and wipe clean.
For me, the biggest problem with Cast iron is the weight. I’m a big guy, with physical strength commensurate to my size, and cast iron pans are cumbersome to deal with. I have a 9” pan that I leave on the stove for daily use, but I don’t want to have cast iron cookware exclusively.
Seek out better cast iron cookware. For example, Lodge brand stuff is very heavy and poorly balanced. Compare to a Wagner cast iron pan of similar size made a century ago: it is significantly lighter, and well-balanced. I'm sure there must be modern cast iron cookware that can offer the same experience, but probably not new for $30.
I have problems with my hands and those heavy Lodge pans are annoying (good value though). My old Wagner stuff is no more cumbersome than my nice stainless steel pans, and, for meats at least, is a pleasure to cook with.
You can definitely damage a pan leaving it wet, so of course make sure to heat it up on the stove after washing and drying to cook off any remnants of water. I'll usually put on a very thin layer of Crisco if I've used soap.
Maybe this specific one, but microplastics are in everything you eat and drink, the presented article merely points out that this specific use case produces lost of micro plastics which are ingested by children.
Can you elaborate? Like is it somehow worse to buy a bottle of water and refill it periodically over the course of a year, than to let the original contents sit in my house for a year and then drink it? If so, I'm guessing the extra handling (squishing, crunching) is the main culprit? Or does leeching occur more readily when the contents are refreshed, as opposed to static contents that already reached equilibrium? Or is the pH (or other characteristics) of the original contents less likely to cause leeching than arbitrary contents?
The better wording of 'stop reusing bottled water bottles' to avoid plastics would be 'use glass or metal water bottles'.
I do drink a lot of bottled water, and while I don't reuse bottles I'm still considering how much just pouring the water from the bottles into a glass would help.
A good thing to know is that any surface that get hot enough will release a bit into the food. Cast iron generally leech iron, stainless steel leech iron, nickel, and chromium, and ceramic leech whatever coating it has similar to non-stick. There has actually been studies done on cast iron on people with iron deficiencies, with gains in haemoglobin concentration.
Are they?
The article points out that effects of nanoplastics on humans are still unclear.
They're inert long chain polymers, and amongst other things you need to show bioavailability in the area t you propose would cause damage at sufficient concentrations.
In the current case: how efficiently do nanoplastics cross from the digestive system to the blood stream, how long do they persist before being filtered out by the kidneys, do they retain their structure in the blood stream unchanged, is their a lower limit on toxicity.
i.e. injecting someone with enough pure water will also damage their organs, exposing kidney cells to silica dust in solution in huge concentration would also kill them but there's no way for it to get there in vivo.
So the issue here is we're not really talking about a unique threat, just a vector of an existing one. In terms of bioactive compounds which could find their way to the placenta, metals and carbonaceous soot are going to be a lot worse then inert plastics (of note: the paper involved notes that the primary possible mechanism is the microplastic acting as a carrier delivering bioactive molecule - not the material itself).
It is also worth noting that in the same study, 2 of the studied placental samples showed no microplastic contamination. Which is to say, given the transport mechanism proposed - inhalation of particles - it's quite likely that the medium is not things ingested in the GI tract, but rather airborne contaminants.
Which would make a lot more sense, seeing as how if micro or nanoparticles were routingly migrating through the gut, we'd suffer serious problems with bacterial infection, or just dealing with something like soluble fiber (which is essentially a plastic - long chain cellulose - that isn't digested).
So the question isn't "why not avoid it?" it's, "are you even avoiding it?" The GI tract is a relatively robust system that's very good at rejecting the external world from it. Whereas your lungs are pretty much a direct link to the blood from the atmosphere.
[1] https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2020/smd/air-pollution-par...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
Or you could just not buy that lead testing kit or Geiger counter and live in ignorant bliss. People lived without them for quite some time.
Just as a single data point, all our kitchenware today is:
glass, borosilicate glass, pyrex(the US made ones are not borosilicate),
stainless, titanium, cast iron (that we season ourselves),
wood (but not bamboo -- too much glue in there), silicone (for mats and mittens).
Almost no plastic anywhere.
Also silicone products are commonly mixed with plastic fillers that have the same issues as normal plastics. Pure platinum cured silicone products are premium products and somewhat rare.
Our cutlery and cooking utensils are stainless, but when possible we use plain wood spoons (not the kind that is glued).
Is there a good alternative to stainless for these things? let me know.
I am aware of silicone issues, it's usually not in contact with our food.
I can't imagine a stock pot size would be cheap.
Our mental models and economic organization are simply not geared to long term, insidius, slow cooking phenomena. If a profitable and desirable convenience is not immediately and obviously harmful it assumed to be "ok" for the long term and at scale.
At some point we might have to switch to a thinking pattern where every and any technology that is applied at planetary scale must undergo a long and exhaustive testing process before being deployed.
This will have a dampening effect on innovation in certain areas, but we must accept that moving "fast and breaking things" at planetary scale is no longer a viable strategy.
A few buy a Tesla to save the environment. The majority buy a Tesla because it has “self driving”, it appeals to their vanity, FOMO, etc.
A few buy bitcoin because it’s a necessary tool to curb fiat devaluation and other forms of corruption. Most buy bitcoin because “number go up”, appeal to greed, and even the worst intentioned actors engage simply out of self interest.
Whether Tesla and bitcoin are “the right thing” is not the point. They illustrate the right strategy, where a desired new behavior is adopted at scale even by those with no interest, or even opposing interests.
The hard part is not figuring out what new behavior is needed. It’s figuring out how to bring about wide scale adoption.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_generation_sustainabil...
In some sense the amount of damage that will cumulate till that transition process is complete is secondary to it actually happening (for which there is not guarantee)
In any case, given that such views are nowhere yet close to being common ground truth that is widely accepted the next decades will likely see enormous strife, debate and ideological movements (maybe even religious ones).
A defining moment in our social evolutiom that a lot of us that grew up in the age of carefree consumerist ignorance probably did not see coming.
The problem is that the entities that are tasked with protecting us from shortsighted and other problematic paths are not doing that. Either they're incapable because they're not invested with the necessary authority to do their jobs, or they're influenced by those who would gain from harmful scenarios, or both.
It never was, and we knew it. Whole civilization went extinct when they depleted their sources of food or energy (e.g. wood) or poisoned themselves.
It's not ignorance. People in power took deliberate decisions to prioritize their interests.
E.g. "COAL CONSUMPTION AFFECTING CLIMATE" was published on 1912 https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/ROTWKG19120814....
(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_scie... )
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.
If in doubt shouldn't that be enough for at least a warning label?
So to make any sort of sensible decision you need to know how bad these plastic particles really are, to weigh that against the cost of avoiding them.
(I get that this isn't your personal argument; I'm trying to figure out why this argument might seem plausible to other laymen.)
If microplastics is a problem, I would expect studies to have shown up linking microplastics to cancer in the elderly, or to dementia, or heart disease, or any of the other very widely spread health issues that could arise after decades of exposure in a population.
I'm not an expert, but wouldn't you need just a scalpel, a microscope and lots of donated tissue samples?
This is because plastics became common when a lot of other industrial practices and materials became common in the environment, many of which we know contribute to diseases of modernity.
Microplastic pollution is likely easily confused with other forms of pollutants that were easier to detect historically, and thus care way more about. This would include lead poisoning or carbon monoxide or other chemicals that mimic hormones in the endocrine system.
So why isn't this an argument for disregarding microplastics as being marginal? Because there are microplastics on the larger end which exhibit effects on the endocrine system more definitively than smaller plastics, and these results are easier to report because these plastics are easier to observe.
But with the presence of smaller plastics everywhere, which we would have to know because larger plastics always break down into smaller ones over time, to both understand that they are a common water pollutant yet also observe them in biological tissue requires more precise modalities than historically have been available when microplastic pollution could have started.
It's possible that it might be only "larger" microplastics that have an effect on health, and smaller ones end up being flushed out before they have an effect, or end up not mimicking any hormone and just end up being an chronic inflammatory like pollen would be to those allergic to it.
But that cutoff is quite arbitrary if we rely on just the microplastics that are easy to observe as the only ones that affect our health. A better idea would be to suspect smaller plastics and then gather evidence on their effect on tissues over other pollutants, as the ability to sample them becomes available.
On the contrary.
To your point, I don't have any particular reason to think that trace quantities of plastics going through my digestive system are going to cause any harm to me. Obviously if I have specific reason for concern I'll be careful (I'm not, like, going to eat off of asbestos plates...) but otherwise I'm not going to think about it much.
So I'm not worried about things larger than a bacteria, unless proven otherwise.
The other issue is with quantity. We all have lead or radioactive isotopes embedded in the body. Or, we can breath in small quantities of carbon monoxide, form example from a passing by car. That doesn't immediately cause problems, the quantity matters.
What are you basing this off of? From my perspective, the body is decidedly not good at ignoring substances. There are thousands of poisonous or cancerous chemicals. Things like mercury or lead build up in the body to the point of causing severe harm. Anything that can be made small enough will enter your body, and the body was only “designed” to tolerate a narrow band of substances that are encountered in the natural world.
Like most people I lick my fingers after eating chips and don't sterilize my hands in advance, hands covered with whatever I've recently been touching (including the plastic bag that the chips came in...).
I have an air purifier at home, but there's all sorts of detritus kicked up in the air from materials around the house that my body is constantly inhaling (not to mention the exhaust and tire particulates that I get from cars driving by me or whatever is being produced in the construction site down the street).
I absolutely agree that there are plenty of things out there that are bad for you, at least in sufficient concentration. But every breath you take and every bite you eat is consuming at least some trace amounts of particles that your body doesn't need, from all sorts of sources.
It may well be that nanoparticles of plastics are particularly bad for you (in the concentrations that are normally consumed) but my heuristic is to not worry too much about things like this unless given concrete reason to.
> and the body was only “designed” to tolerate a narrow band of substances that are encountered in the natural world.
It may absolutely be that nanoparticles of plastic are so harmful that eating off of plastic plates is a really bad idea, but my heuristic would be to not worry too much about it.
"You don't know what you don't know"; additionally asking too many questions makes you a "health nut" or "health freak", as portrayed by popular media.
Generally I assume that I consume microscopic inedible dirt/mineral/etc particles all the time without know it and they most likely pass through my digestive system. I know of course that digestion is complex and that many of these likely are absorbed to varying degrees. I try to not cook with plastic generally but I also do not go out of my way too much to avoid it - same as me not trying to eat vegetables with dirt on them but not being anal about making sure all vegetables I consume are dirt-free
Either they need to do more testing/whitelisting rather than observing/blacklisting, or there needs to be better communication about the limits of these regulators.
I feel the same way about those Teflon pans as well. I don’t have any evidence, I just… don’t trust ‘em.
Is something wrong here? Was something bad done? I would see a problem if I blindly trusted it.
Personally, I was told for a long time to ignore my intuition and it actually got me into trouble quite a few times, I take a more balanced attitude towards it now.
Marketing, eg https://www.americanchemistry.com
That plastics are incredibly stable. That is why they last so long.
EDIT: Chem engineer here
I'm far more concerned about the non-plastic additives, added to plastic than the actual polymer.
> After two days, just 23% of kidney cells exposed to the highest concentrations had managed to survive — a much higher mortality rate than that observed in earlier studies of micro- and nanoplastic toxicity.
surprised I didn't see more studies like this when researching for avoiding plastics with our baby... its not like these are new materials/ technologies... right?
You need a much more rigorous study to determine toxicity to a full-size living organism. Much more costly and much less likely to get funding...
I still see microwave popcorn bags, teflon pans and plastic tea bags in shops. The local municipality still pretend that it's all being recycled. It needs to be phased out of food industry leaded fuel as phased out of gas.
It really doesn't need to be just as cheaper for a lot of applications if reuse is an option. What we need is reusable containers that are standard sizes. It used to be a thing several generations ago where glass milk and beer bottles would be returned, the consumer would be paid a small amount for each bottle and then they got washed and reused. The thing is we still have glass bottles for beer today but the marketing people have made it so they're all different shapes so it wouldn't be possible to reuse a bottle for a different brand. What we need is a shipping/docker container model for packaging. The marketing people keep ruining it. Every packet is made like a tiktok clip with shiny bright colors and weird shapes. With cigarettes at least where I live the govt had no problem taxing cigarettes and banning shiny packaging in favour of plain text labels. We can also get rid of the recycling meme, you know the American Indian with the single-tear, who was actually an Italian hired by the companies making all the waste. So much of the plastic shit is created by marketing people.
Some areas it would be difficult to replace plastic for instance powertools which need to be light and strong. But it would still help if they all used a standard battery interface.
No, we need goods with extremely long life, even if they get expensive.
Just think about how absurdly much has changed in the past 30 years in terms of consumption and lifestyle. Trying to figure out what might even possibly be causing something is just going to leave you with an endless series of "The evidence is inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship between [a] and [b]."
This seems like unrealistic use of a microwave. The liquids are likely boiling for well over a minute. Are people really boiling liquids in the containers they’re serving their infant children?
I’m not especially plastic-phobic but I also don’t think a reasonable person would think it is a good idea to boil liquids in their children’s bottles regardless of heating source.
Popular milk bottle brand instructing users how to sterilize their product with the microwave.
Boiling milk bottles is a very common way of sterilization as well.
Maybe I should dump every single child plastic drink/dinnerware for 18/10 stainless steel.
Unfortunately, avoiding plastics with a child is very difficult. We never microwaved anything, and generally prefer glass bottles, but breast pumps use all plastic containers and we definitely have warmed those in hot water before.
It's been found in at least 2 different manufacturer's cups that were specifically made for children.
I had a situation where (and thankfully nobody was hurt) I had cooked a stew and the enameled coating from the pot I was using had popped off a 2cm x 2cm area section into the stew at sometime during the cooking process. We didn't detect it until we had served half the food.
Most consumer plastics are low grade polymers that, in their pure state, resemble glass fiber. They're only made useful through the addition of plasticizers (flexibility), flame retardants (increase melting point, reduce chance to burn), stiffeners (durability), colorants, antioxidants, fillers (reduce cost and change density), blowing agents (foam plastics like polystyrene), and more.
These additives are responsible for most of the negative health outcomes, and many of the remaining problems (like microplastics) stem from the unstable nature of the base polymer that these additives try to address.
These additives and the poor properties of the original material are also a problem in industry, where the financial problems that stem from them can't be swept under te rug like they can with human health or environmental impact.
To address that industry has several grades of plastic, some you're familiar with, but there are advanced plastics like PEEK and PEI that we don't see in consumer products yet. As you move up in sophistication to materials like PEEK and PEI, they inherently have the properties we associate with the chemical cocktail commonly referred to as "plastic"
https://i.imgur.com/NwqhfVl.png
This means that they're more stable in almost all dimensions and in a wide range of temperatures, and don't leech additives because there are no additives in them.
AND the good news is that you can buy food storage products made of advanced plastic, namely PEI. https://www.webstaurantstore.com/cambro-66hp150-h-pan-1-6-si... You can actually cook in these up to 300°f without leeching materials into your food. It's really awesome
What's the status of silicone? Silicone container covers are available, which won't seal but will work to prevent spatter.
Since I don't have any of those yet, and all my glass or ceramic containers have plastic lids, I've been avoiding my microwave. Instead, I've steam-reheated ceramic and glass food containers, uncovered, in a pressure cooker. It's not as quick, but there's little to no plastic exposure (except the silicone sealing ring, if that leaches microplastics into the steam, but it's still probably vastly less than reheating with a plastic lid on) and it heats more evenly too.
I commented about a month ago in a related thread and would like to know if the study measured a thought I had: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36534508
To reiterate, is there a difference between adding boiling or near boiling water or other liquid from a kettle to a plastic container vs putting a container full of water in microwave oven? Is there local heating that happens in the plastic that causes it to shed more than just heated water alone?
Why did we start even buying plastic containers for this purpose?
I'm trying to find a solution to my Aeropress that tastes as good. Taking suggestions? (I've tried Chemex and french press, haven't been able to get the same flavor)
I only microwave 30 sec, frown on microwaving more than a minute. My wife microwaves for 2 minutes or more! The latter is a problem because I know (some of) the food gets unevenly hot (while the other parts are still cold) that it melts the plastic.
If gazillions femtoplastics killed toddlers left and right, that'd be kinda hard to miss hmmyes?
Of course there is no single cause behind this, and many have been suggested - microplastics, hormonal agents in plastics, more food, higher amounts of processed food, overusage of medication. It may even be the cause that progress from other unrelated changes (like the lead bans) "mask" bad effects getting worse.
The problem is, some of the effects take decades to show up in general population, and because microplastics are everywhere on the planet there isn't even a control group any more.
I've never owned one, traditional cooking, food taste better and insert other conspiracies...
Defrosting is a funny one, most people don't know you can roast frozen chunks of meat perfectly fine.
You can reverse sear a frozen steak too. (it works, I've done it)
I sound like a tosser, but you know, food is one of the greatest things humans have to experience. (and perhaps the reason we exist at all)
I also prefer home cooking, but resent the implication that my cooking is inferior because I sometimes use a microwave.
At this point I just don't give a damn, microplastic away.
Oils degrade and/or dissolve with heat.
Plastics are polymers, oils are not. Oils have specific chain lengths, polymers have no specific length. Both are hydrocarbons, but almost everything we interact with is, so that's not saying much.
Saying something degrades with heat means very little - everything degrades with heat. The question is how much heat.
I suppose people generally aren’t concerned about this sort of stuff.
People still eat off Teflon cookware, which I would never use.
Finally some years I gave in and bought one. 2 months later it broke. Never replaced it. Good riddance.
I just use the stove/oven. It is slower but I understand it.
1. I feel that as with many products, microwaves are also maximized for perceived customer happiness - this means food hot ASAP. So, they're probably pushing out the legal maximum of energy in microwave form. "Better" microwaves are probably worse for this.
2. I notice a distinct flavor to microwaved _meats_ specifically - maybe this is true about all proteins, but I'm not entirely sure. It's very pronounced in more flavorless chicken dishes when I notice it. I've read (on some stackexchange site) that chicken can change when re-heated. I don't need to know what it is. I trust the tongue evolution gave me.
3. I have always noticed - no matter what type of plastic, all plastics impart a taste to water once the water has been sitting for some time. I imagine heat speeds up this process. Maybe, microwaves do too. Again, the tongue.
Based on these points, I:
- avoid microwaves like the plague to start with. Air fryers and mini-ovens FTW! Sometimes it's far and above the best choice; e.g. microwaving nachos vs. burning them with the broiler and wasting a LOT of energy in the process.
- never microwave with/in plastics. So, no TV dinners EVER, and pyrex/glass/ceramic containers.
- generally microwave at 70% or less power rather than the default 100% - usually on a program of progressive power reduction (see below)
- constantly stir/move food around - prevent hot-spots (see next bullet)
- immediately stop the microwave when I hear any popping sounds - it's a good heuristic that some part of the food is boiling hot, and the heat needs to be evened out
One piece of advice is to familiarize with the power settings and "programmed cooking" methods of a microwave. I often will heat food on a program of 70% power for 1 min, followed by 50% power for 1 min, followed by 40% power for 1 min.
I hope some of this helps someone. I feel like I'm the anti-microwave evangelist of the house - my wife heckles me about it constantly. I can't wait to send out this link in the AM!
If you want the microwave to actually reduce the power output rather than using pulse width modulation, you need to make sure you've got an inverter microwave.
Which is to say, that's a very specific claim for a professor to make without publishing any papers about it.
Are you comparing those meats to other ways of heating that don't get the surface particularly hot?
A lot of people find that tasty, and it certainly adds a lot of tastes. However, searing the meat always adds carcinogens, so…
The safest method is probably boiling.
I feel the same. Water from most plastic bottles tastes very different from the same brand & "type" in a glass bottle. Thinking about this, I should eventually do some experiments (e.g. ABX and fully blind). Especially since summer heat should impact this during transport.
For plastic dishes, I avoid these for hot(!) foods as well. At least my SO's cheap plastic outdoor dishes add some flavour. Though for fridge storage or cold foods I never noticed the plastic flavour. I still prefer glassware for practical reasons (except weight) and (highly subjective) fell like it's just nicer, but e.g. at BBQs I (luckily!) nothing ever tasted like plastic only because a salad was in a plastic bowl; same for use-once plastic stuff used at some events, luckily the short contact never contaminated the taste (which means this could be placebo except for really bad plastic ware!).
Just out of curiosity: Do you also taste milk changing its taste long before others notice? Maybe we have a similar sensitivity that's also affecting "plastic flavour"?
As for hot spots in the microwave, that's just a drawback of the tech imho (or our old-ish, non-inverter microwave with a poor radiation pattern), and except for reducing these (70% and stirring), I live with that. Though we basically never prepare raw food in the microwave, only reheat leftovers or boil water/milk. So actual food safety is less an issue for us. On especially lazy days (and with highly unevenly heating food like yesterdays home-made lasagna) I even skip the cold parts and put them in the microwave again; I'm pretty sure this is safe.
my gut feeling tells me this out of order state of particles must be causing some problem along with plastic. I never use microwave for more than 20 seconds even on ceramic plates, albeit never on plastic. I still can have cancer from other sources that i have not identified yet :)