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Comment by bestouff | Hacker News Reader

Note that they seem to only appear in processed food. That's kind of OK of you cook yourself apparently.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230103-how-plastic-is-g...

> Plastic particles can also contaminate food crops directly. A 2020 study found microplastics and nanoplastics in fruit and vegetables sold by supermarkets and in produce sold by local sellers in Catania in Sicily, Italy. Apples were the most contaminated fruit, and carrots had the highest levels of microplastics among the sampled vegetables.

> According to research by Willie Peijnenburg, professor of environmental toxicology and biodiversity at Leiden University in the Netherlands, crops absorb nanoplastic particles – minuscule fragments measuring between 1-100nm in size, or about 1,000 to 100 times smaller than a human blood cell – from surrounding water and soil through tiny cracks in their roots.

Isn't there also limited to no evidence of harms from these in humans?

I mean, what would you even use as the control group? They're in every single human at this point.

I'll happily sign up to be mega-dosed with them for a trial, but they've tried that in mice and found pretty much no issues.

Microplastics are pretty widely understood to be endocrine disruptors.

Source?

Same here. Where are the challenge trials? Even if these effects exist, they're so small that I wouldn't lose any sleep over it

Assume it's bad until proven otherwise.

Thought experiment: How would you go about proving that water is not bad?

Put a human in a beef jerky dehydrator for a few days?

Water is bad for you in doses that are trivial to acquire and consume. You've seen a pint glass before? Drink 12 of those in under 3 hours if you want to give yourself water poisoning and end up in the emergency room.

However we can also demonstrate that water is good for you in moderate doses. We have yet to demonstrate that any amount of plastic is good for you.

You can't prove safe, you can only prove "no harms we know of yet."

You can require companies to do at least some due dilligence, though, to give a reasonable amount of comfort it is. "It's safe" is a falsifiable claim.

But that could change over time with further understanding. No point panicking today over something not known to be harmful. The effect size is clearly very small. If I wanted to better my health in an actually measurable way I'd be much better served by dropping alcohol and refined sugars than worrying about microplastics.

> But that could change over time with further understanding.

That's not a good excuse not to bother at all. It's an argument for periodic reassessment of common additives.

Isn't there also limited to no evidence of harms from these in humans?

nope, tons of evidence of harm

That's not true, they gave examples of raw meats (and how they were packed):

Perdue Ground Chicken Breast (foam tray with plastic wrap) 9,985

Trader Joe’s Ground Pork 80% Lean 20% Fat (plastic wrap) 5,503

Stop & Shop Ground Beef 80% Lean 20% Fat (paperboard with plastic wrap) 2,729

And dairy:

Tuscan Dairy Farms Whole Milk (plastic) 10,932

Land O’Lakes Butter Salted (paper wrap/cardboard) 581

These numbers are much lower than some of the others, but they are not only in processed food.

> These numbers are much lower than some of the others, but they are not only in processed food.

Meat and dairy are heavily processed foods, and plastics are likely the least concerning thing about consuming them.

"processed" is a term that exists on a spectrum, it's rare to find any food item outside of vegetables or nuts that is truly "unprocessed." In general, meat and dairy are not considered heavily processed. Most sources consider raw meat purchasable at grocery stores unprocessed.

Yeah and even then for nuts like cashews and almonds you have to remove the outer layer and wash them to remove the more bitter (or toxic) components.

I would consider ground beef less processed than that, since it does not require a detox step (though it may be wise to cook it before consumption)

Ground beef is absolutely not "less processed" than nuts.

Processing means stuff being added and/or removed. Cows, or as they are euphamistically known as "beef", have all sorts of vitamins, growth hormones and other disgusting shit (often literally) added to their diet and bodies. It also has to be cooked, usually in oil, which generates even more Maillard reaction, and thus cancers, etc.

Almost all animal products can be considered ultra-high processed. It's on an entirely different level than whole fruits and vegetables.

Grinding meat, pasteurizing milk, churning cream are all processes that occur in a processing facility.

They're not "ultra-processed" or "ready to eat", but they're definitely processed foods.

Unless you eat anything pork. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPbF45-ZB5M

Cows too are fed candy (with wrapper)

https://www.motherjones.com/food/2013/12/cow-feed-chicken-po...

That video of pigs being fed plastic it is in a facility in North Carolina, USA, run by Smithfield Foods, a Chinese-owned entity, the largest pork producer in the United States.

I have searched for to know what happened with that facility, but the only article that I've been able to find, and that it is showed as first result in the search engine, is from fayobserver[1], labeled as USA Today Network, saying a "do not worry".

Legal or not, it's an outrage. Did the FDA allowed this in the end?

From their web[2] << Headquartered in Smithfield, Virginia, Smithfield Foods is an American food company dedicated to producing Good food. Responsibly.® >>

[1] https://fayobserver.com/story/news/2022/05/05/nc-pig-feed-pl...

[2] www smithfieldfoods com

CR only tested processed food so that's not really a conclusion you can make.

easily disproven by reading the orignal Consumer Reports post (as opposed to the Reuters article that this thread links to)

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/the...

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