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.
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
(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.
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.
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.
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.
Marketing, eg https://www.americanchemistry.com
"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.