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Comment by caeril | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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, 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.

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