Microplastics make their way from the gut to other organs, researchers find
medicalxpress.com
medicalxpress.com
Then I remember I smoke cigarettes and drink too much and I will likely expire before I'm 70 anyways.
Don't know why I'm putting money into retirement, but then again God is cruel and I'll end up being be old, weak, dumb, and defenseless at 90. With no children to be my advocate, I'd likely end up being a victim of elder abuse. Hope my gluttonous and slothful life helps me avoid the nightmarish nursing homes.
[0] https://www.cuspuk.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Plastic-Pi...
With all due respect, you might be a little depressed ?
There's a reason researchers use mice, and that's because physiologically, they are tiny humans.
In an absence of evidence, we cannot make one claim or another. "In mice" is just a good indicator that actual human research is needed.
I'm not a biologist so I'll leave the theory and research to qualified people.
Toss a mouse in a vacuum, expose them to high levels of radiation, etc and the underlying similarities between mammal biology tells you quite a bit. Try and cure baldness and no it’s not that helpful in terms of if something works but it’s a great check it see if you accidentally made a neurotoxin.
So in this case we have quite strong evidence that microplastics from food can get into human bloodstreams. Is it worth testing? That just comes down to an arbitrary assessment of just much you’re willing to spend to reduce what little uncertainty remains.
If not, how do we know that things that are harmful to mice are harmful to humans any more often than things that are helpful to mice are helpful to humans?
> However, in 2000, the warning labels were removed because scientists learned that rodents, unlike humans, have a unique combination of high pH, high calcium phosphate, and high protein levels in their urine.[36][37] One or more of the proteins that are more prevalent in male rats combine with calcium phosphate and saccharin to produce microcrystals that damage the lining of the bladder. Over time, the rat's bladder responds to this damage by overproducing cells to repair the damage, which leads to tumor formation. Since this does not occur in humans, there is no elevated risk of bladder cancer.[38]
It would be nice if Starbucks made its product line more appealing, but it seems that their strategy centers around high-sugar items that could be more addictive, so I can understand why the concerns of tea drinkers is an afterthought.
Similarly, I would love a matcha latte that wasn’t full of sugar, but as far as I can tell they have no unsweetened soy milk option.
I guess many reading this would say: shocker, Starbucks isn’t healthy.
I found this (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10151227/) , but it's a wildly broad overview, and includes claims both dubious and entirely believable, buried in tons of uninteresting stuff about how plastic can spread and how common it is.