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Comment by arsome | Hacker News Reader

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

Assume it's bad until proven otherwise.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Source?

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