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Comment by adriand | Hacker News Reader

Terrifying study: “total plastics mass concentration in brains increased over 50% in the past 8 years”. Their 2024 brain matter samples are on average 0.48% plastic by weight, if I am reading this correctly: “The brain samples, all derived from the frontal cortex, revealed substantially higher concentrations than liver or kidney, at 3,057 μg/g in 2016 samples and 4,806 μg/g (0.48%, by weight) in 2024 samples, ranging as high as 8,861 μg/g.”

The only good news is that apparently the brain can clear these particles; the problem is that there is a steadily increasing amount of exposure which means that rather than clearance, there is accumulation.

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> Terrifying study

Easy on the hyperbole. Let's assume that this study is correct, and everyone at median age of 50 is walking around with this level of microplastics in the stated organs. Are we all dead? Disabled? Dying? No. Our lifespans are amongst the longest in human history. I'm doing OK. How about you?

Far bigger practical concerns are that we're fat and lethargic and suffering from metabolic disease, heart disease, cancer and diabetes en masse because we eat too much. About the only thing you can do with this finding is wave your hands around and make hypothetical links to this and that (as they do in the paper), or try to claim that this is really, secretly the underlying cause of the stuff that is actually, observably killing us.

I'm not saying there's no concern here, but I am not "terrified" of this. I am actually scared of getting fat, or falling down when I get old from being weak. These are things that happen to nearly all of us.

Anyway, first rule of science: when we look for things, we find things. If you are "terrified" by everything new you find, you are applying an emotional judgment to what you see, and not being objective enough.

> you are applying an emotional judgment to what you see, and not being objective enough.

The notion that scientists can or should be emotionless, and that this somehow produces 'objectivity', should really be consigned to the history books. Expectation and promotion of emotional detachment leads to burn out, anxiety, unrealistic expectations, unsupportive working environments, poor judgement, dehumanising of experimental subjects, etc etc etc. See the majority medical and psychiatric science history.

I'd far prefer different terminology. Maybe 'calm' or similar. Expecting and encouraging scientists to be calm is more realistic and achievable, and doesn't deny the fundamental reality that much of human existence has an emotional component.

Panicking over microplastics in human brains is surely an entirely understandable reaction. Rather than criticising it, we can learn from it. I want my healthcare researchers to be calm but strongly motivated.

> Are we all dead? Disabled? Dying

The problem with poisons is that we view them in a binary way. They're either bad, or they're not. They either hurt you, or they don't.

But in reality it doesn't always work this way. There's infinite levels of bad.

Eating off a lead plate, as the greeks did, is poisonous but certainty not deadly. Nobody was disabled.

Instead, the rich just slowly went insane over the course of their lives. Across decades, their mental state deteriorated as they grew mad. For their society, impossible to perceive. Too slow, too widespread.

Obviously we don't know the extent or even if there is anything bad about microplastics. But if there were, would we even be able to tell by the time we get there? Or would that just become life?

Could lead plates be found in the arctic, or in clouds ?

Personally I feel like the environmental contamination is the problem. Let's say we do workout this is causing some type of health issue, that's it , there is no way to fix this. We've contaminated everything with microplastics and there's little doubt , if we keep doing it, it WILL cause major issues, at least for the ecosystem, which we do rely on and that will have negative effects for us.

Yeah, I know. The dose makes the poison. Water is toxic if you drink enough of it.

The point is: without evidence that "the poison" is actually toxic, and certainly without evidence that it's more toxic than anything else you're regularly doing, then you're effectively just fretting. In the case of microplastics, we basically have neither. We have some weak lines of evidence of minor harm in other animals, and lots and lots of theories about what might happen.

Note that I didn't say "don't worry about it". I just said "don't be terrified".

At least mice are having memory issues: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030438942...

I've read a few years ago (pre-Covid) on nanoplastics about fertility, late miscarriages and premature birth, they found a lot of correlations and wrote that further research is needed to find if it's more than that.

I don't really care about plastics, fertility or fœtus so I won't pretend I do, but if you do, maybe look into it?

>I am actually scared of getting fat

Not getting fat is easy, avoiding microplastics is not. One problem affects people with a certain lifestyle, the other affects everyone (it's an environmental issue).

Also, as the article points out, the amount of microplastics accumulated in living organisms is still rising. It's something that needs more attention.

I would argue obesity is also an environmental issue and is not necessarily an issue of lifestyle. Sort of akin to smoking 40 years ago. Yes that's a lifestyle but also not really.

I have to agree. Making a big deal about microplastics when we’re overweight, sedentary, and atherosclerotic seems like stepping over dollars to look for pennies.

Anecdote. I'm not overweight. I took control of that part of my health. With microplastics, I have very little or no agency over.

How so?

Personal choices go a long way, here. Exclusively use glass and metal cookware, utensils, food containers, and straws. Don't paint your fingernails, or if you do, don't chew your nails. Don't eat fast food, takeout, or DoorDash, be selective about your restaurants (tour the kitchen if you can). Wash your vegetables. Buy from butchers that wrap in non-plasticized paper. Don't live in cities with poor air quality. Replace StainMaster carpets with ceramic tile. Don't eat large predatory fish like tuna, (avoid large predatory animals in general, as they are metals and plastics concentration machines). Buy bottled water in glass only, or filter your own.

Can you reduce your intake to zero? No, but you can get pretty close.

This accounts for an extremely small part of your microplastic intake. The vast majority comes from air particles from tires, and then the rest from water due to washing synthetic fabrics.

Until you can figure out how to stop breathing and drinking, you have microplastics in your body. In fact there's no organisms left on Earth without microplastics in their body. Which is why everyone is making a fuss. If this does turn out to be a problem, we're kind of fucked.

Well, that's a great point: let's concede that you have no control over this. What, exactly, would you have the rest of us do, other than panic?

This kind of "terror" is usually little more than a backdoor way for someone to advance their low-evidence "science" agenda:

"I'm scared of X, therefore all of you must worry about it too, and that means stop doing/using X, and/or do exactly what I say to minimize the impact of X."

I don't understand why talking about it is treated as panic. I'm certainly not panicing, but it seems to me you're freaking out a bit about this.

I'm not saying you have to do anything. I'm saying that microplastics are prolific, and we don't understand the effects. That's just reality.

Personally, I believe on a political scale we should be reducing our plastic consumption. Because it creates far too much waste.

The entire thread is in response to someone calling this study "terrifying". That was the entire point of my comment, and what I am talking about.

You'll note that I never said that we shouldn't do more research. You'll also note that sibling comment (agreeing with you) is calling for regulation and government action. So maybe you are just calling for research, but...

> Push for better understanding and maybe regulations to help reduce the impact. Again, with getting fat I have agency over. It's on me to do it. With microplastics, government action is needed, so we need to be better informed and press government to act on our interest.

> What, exactly, would you have the rest of us do, other than panic?

Advocate for a reduction in plastic manufacturing, consumption and waste. It's pretty straightforward. We did it with lead. I acknowledge that there are certain things that we make with plastic that modern society requires to function. For the rest, if we cannot manage to figure out how to keep this stuff out of our bodies and brains, then we should be replacing it with alternatives.

The part about this study that I personally find terrifying is the trajectory. A 50% increase in 8 years is astonishing. Without more data points we don't know what curve we are on right now (logarithmic? exponential?) but is this an experiment we really want to be running on our brains? I can tell you that this experiment participant wants to opt out immediately.

We are talking about bioaccumulation of an environmental pollutant in critical human organs here. The precautionary principle would seem to apply.

> Advocate for a reduction in plastic manufacturing, consumption and waste. It's pretty straightforward.

Well, thanks for being explicit about it, I guess.

> We did it with lead.

Yeah, you skipped a step: we know that lead is toxic. It's not an unproven hypothesis.

> The part about this study that I personally find terrifying is the trajectory. A 50% increase in 8 years is astonishing.

I mean...maybe? The methodology is pretty uncalibrated, the demographics of the groups is completely unknown, and the ug/g estimates they're making don't pass a common sense test. Far more likely that you can't read anything into the time-series comparisons.

Still not terrified.

I agree my sibling comment by consteval . I am also not panicking.

> What, exactly, would you have the rest of us do, other than panic?

Push for better understanding and maybe regulations to help reduce the impact. Again, with getting fat I have agency over. It's on me to do it. With microplastics, government action is needed, so we need to be better informed and press government to act on our interest.

What if plastics make people fat

Yeah, you're doing what I just said: waving your hands and speculating that this finding is the secret reason for the other problems.

I didn't see any hand-waving? It was a legitimate question and one which you offered no evidence for/against. Certainly, we know little to nothing about the total range of side-effects from accumulated plastic. Could be negligible, could cause major issues that we just don't understand yet.

It's not my job to offer evidence against every hypothetical claim of harm. There are infinite of those, and one of me.

It is my job (all scientists' jobs) to call out panic based on "science". More generally, the people who want you to believe that X hurts you (for whatever value of X) need to bring solid evidence, not just unproven hypotheses.

If we don’t talk about the problem, maybe it will just go away.

>Terrifying study: “total plastics mass concentration in brains increased over 50% in the past 8 years

If as you claim the brain can clear out these particles, why is it terrifying? I have been asking for why microplastics are harmful and gotten a lot of great ideas but almost no studies or evidence. I guess we need to start researching the causal effects of MPs and not just how much MPs there are everywhere.

Elon Musk seems to think the whole microplastics worry is BS. What a joke he has become in just a few short years.

You mean the smartest guy ever ?

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