Plastic Found Inside More Than 50% of Plaques from Clogged Arteries
sciencealert.com
sciencealert.com
- 21.7±24.5 μg per milligram is 0% to 4.62% by weight
- 5.2±2.4 μg per milligram is 0% to 0.76% by weight
This means that some patients' plaque contained up to 5% plastic.
PVC - from plumbing? It's hard to imagine other environmental sources. We're not drinking from PVC cups or eating from PVC plates. I personally would have expected to see particulates from food prep surfaces (teflon pans disintegrating during cooking) since ingestion is a likely path into the body.
Polyethylene - perhaps it's polyethylene terephthalate. Basically any soda or water bottle.
See https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/heart-scan/about...
Basically, if you have high calcium in the walls of your arteries, you are at higher risk for heart attacks.
But the increased calcium is just a sign of damage to the artery. We don't say that calcium causes heart disease.
In the same way, already damaged arteries might be taking up more micro and nano plastics, and the presence of these in the arteries, is a sign of damage much like calcium, and not a cause.
Note, that microplastics are ubiquitous in the environment, so likely everyone has been exposed to them, which supports the hypothesis that this may be a sign and the cause of the disease.
Some of the other headlines:
>Radical Plan to Stop 'Doomsday Glacier' Melting to Cost $50 Billion
>Breakthrough: Model Organs Built With Cells From Living Fetuses
>Startling Exception Discovered to 200-Year-Old Law of Physics
do not say covid do not say covid do not say co...
</inside head>
* Forever chemicals
* Sedentary lifestyle
* State sponsored disinformation campaigns
* High fructose corn syrup
* Long covid
* Child gambling
* Hyper-addictive social media
Let's hope millenials and gen z can solve a few of these before it poisons generations.
I say this as a Zoloft patient but there are endless supplements and drugs intended to make our lives better by some metric. "Not satisfied with life? Turn down your emotional intensity with mood stabilizers so you can continue going to your dead end job, just to barely make it every month!"
1. Avoid fast food
2. Don’t use plastic water bottles and food packaging
3. Store leftovers in glass
4. Eat less canned food (?)
Do any of those seem wrong? Any others to add?
I can't imagine anyone is going to recommend consuming more micro plastics; but as far as how to improve your overall wellbeing this is probably 15 or 16 on the list.
Most people would be better off focusing on getting control of their diet, exercise, sleep, and stress before fretting over this - imho; not a doctor.
Your washer and dryer - ensure your dryer is able to capture the lint it creates and your dryer ventilation is ducted somewhere you aren't breathing, not just venting into your household. Get a high quality air purifier with a high CADR rate and a decent filter, make sure when you clean the prefilter you aren't just breathing all the dust you create doing so. Use natural fibers rather than synthetic in clothing, bedding, bags, etc and when you do use synthetic be mindful of differences in various textiles and how easily and how much they shed.
Use a water filter in your water bottle like a Sawyer filter, Katadyn filter, or Epic water filter.
Stay away from any places that automobiles drive. The tires are partially plastic and wear away onto the road and into the air.
Perhaps consider starting a grassroots campaign a la the French Revolution targeted at the worst polluters, make sure you follow the French Revolution's playbook closely and don't miss any of the important aspects.
[0] - https://e360.yale.edu/features/tire-pollution-toxic-chemical...
Here are more ways you can ingest them. https://www.earthday.org/you-are-what-you-eat-plastics-in-ou... Apples and carrots were not expected to be the most contaminated.
This is 100% true. Feeding animals (mostly swine) garbage is usually perfectly legal and not really regulated. They claim to strip off packaging using automated processing but they are doing this on an industrial scale and no one is really watching them.
As a culture we collectively don't want gas prices to go up because so many people rely on internal combustion engines for daily transportation. But it should be clear that many of the funds we are using to subsidize cheap oil and gas are the same funds still subsidizing cheap plastics.
(The same extends also to some of the other "toxic" chemicals polluting our environment: there are a bunch of chemicals in our economies that exist primarily to feed gas/oil refining, or as by-products of it such as working with plastics, that we'd collectively love to see a reduction in because of known harm to waterways or to soil.)
A lot of people claim that they want market solutions: one of the easiest market solutions to climate change is to start by forcing gas prices to rise. Remove subsidies. Set limits on new refinery construction. Set refining limits on existing plants. We could do it slowly and in a controlled fashion and give the market time to adjust, rather than waiting for the subsidized low prices to collapse on their own (as they did fifty years back in the 1970s oil crisis) and let the market panic all at once.
(We also don't have to do it in supply-side regulations if you think that's too heavy handed in manipulating the market. The old ideas of trying to bring externalities into the market more directly such as "carbon taxes" or "price ratcheting" [where once prices go above certain increments they are never allowed to drop again below those points] are still options. The point is: raise gas prices slowly somehow now [better yet, yesterday], don't wait for a bubble to burst or a crisis point to snowball.)
The tools to do it today are there if we just had the willpower to try it. Many people are addicted to cheap oil and gas and will kick and scream if we tried it, though.
In searching for a non-paywalled copy of the actual study, I found that other news outlets like CNN seem to be doing the same thing.
I'd be surprised if blood tests don't include a microplastics section in the coming years.
We've been living with plastics for decades. I don't see people dropping dead around me. Life expectancy around the world has been steadily growing, not the other way around. When exactly are these micro/nano plastics supposed to kill me? When I'm 90?
Nope, that's not the issue, and I'll happily take every vaccine going or even a plastic artificial heart if needs be.
It's terrifying because it doesn't break down. The calcium at least is more understandable.
PVC comes in both rigid and flexible forms, and is used to make water pipes, plastic bottles, flooring, and packaging. Polyethylene is the most commonly produced plastic, used for plastic bags, films, and bottles, too."
Note however that chemists have gotten incredibly good at detecting tiny amounts of things, so an amount being "measurable" in no way implies that it is clinically significant.