Microplastics Are Everywhere - Here’s How to Avoid Eating Them
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It'd be better if we had a source that really helped people to understand the facts around the different types of plastics. Surely not all leach microplastics if they're used in medical settings for IVs and catheters.
We've been eating TV dinners for what, over sixty years now, yet people are claiming that plastic is responsible for stuff like gender dysphoria which barely existed outside of drag until about five or ten years ago.
Obesity is even more laughable. The fat and thin people I know don't differ in whether they use tupperware or eat takeaways. They just eat different amounts.
We probably shouldn't fill the environment with this stuff, but I think that worrying about heating up leftovers in your microwave is an overreaction.
Given the massive prevalence of plastic on just about all our food, if it was really such a threat I would expect life expectancies to have dropped.
Personally I regard this all as fear mongering.
We are seeing population-scale effects exactly identical to what we see in animal models and in Petri dishes. Hormone disruption, which you’d expect to see metabolic disorders (like obesity), changes in sexuality (in animals we see a reduction in sexual dimorphism — plausibly connected to gender dysphoria), and fertility problems.
We don’t know for certain this stuff is bad, but I am absolutely sure that your confidence is unwarranted.
Ah, yes. That nontoxic mercury not at all turning our hatters mad.
I would suspect consuming multiples more dissolved sugar day and night and sedentary lifestyles way before hormone disruption. Especially considering reducing caloric consumption leads to losing weight.
God forbid if you connect the massively increasing youth LGBT identification rates to any biological or environmental factors - it must be 100% due to cultural change!
but when they clump together, or when large sheets of them fall apart, you get particles. microplastics. still inert, no chemical reactions. but they get stuck in places like tiny blood vessels or tiny pockets in your intestine. not inert. not safe. not toxic, but not good
Then there's additives. Last I read, some ~10k different ones. A good % of those known to be harmful. Or lacking data on their safety. I suspect some of those additives are way more harmful than the polymer itself (or its feedstock).
Never mind that we're ingesting a whole cocktail of these things. Interactions a go-go!
But I've got another one: use rock salt instead of sea salt. This might not be feasible; most or all salt I see in sea salt, but it seems fairly obvious to me that rock salt is unlikely to contain any plastic, whereas sea salt is likely to contain plastic.
Can't live without spring water and only a specific brand at that. I tried tap water and even filtered water but it tastes so horrible that I am barely able to drink 2-3 cups a day.
> 7. Use wood or bamboo cutting boards
I use the quartz (previously marble) countertops for cutting. My spouse hates me for it. Easier to maintain than wood boards (I obviously don't mind the scratches, it wasn't that shiny to begin with). Not sure about safety.
It also has the upside of not absolutely destroying your knives like using knives on a quartz countertop will do. You’ll save more time not sharpening knives than you would maintaining a wooden cutting board.