Microplastics in the olfactory bulb of the human brain
jamanetwork.com
jamanetwork.com
When we are trying to predict the implications of unproven technologies on complex worldwide economies, there is talk of "obvious inevitability"
When we express concerns that chemicals humanity recently started coating the entire planet with at an alarming rate seem to get really deep into every kind of living tissue and nearly everything else we've ever seen bioaccumulate like that has caused a lot of unforeseen issues that took a long time to suss out but most turn out to be at least somewhat harmful, there's all this "well we don't have longitudinal RCTs with enormous sample sizes showing the specific harms of every specific plastic published in prestigious journals yet so who knows really"
I’ve found HN and other comment sections to lean in the direction of assuming the worst about microplastics, historically.
However, I think we’re all getting tired of the constant “sky is falling” tone around these studies that can’t demonstrate harms outside of extremely narrow and exaggerated lab circumstances.
Meanwhile, the alternative medicine gurus have adopted microplastics as their excuse for nearly everything.
These microplastics are crossing the blood-brain barrier in a significant portion of the population without most people even intentionally ingesting them. Hell, it's hard to avoid if you try. Our society slathers this stuff over everything. In my lifetime I've seen a giant swath of packaging for food go to plastic from some other material, presumably to cut costs. I recently bought a new oven and I guess they put those stupid plastic phone screen covers over the glass panes on both sides of the oven door. Do they just ship all glass with this stuff applied to it now?
The burden of proof to ensure these things are safe should be on the companies selling them. The companies that make these substances already have vast research arms for designing the polymers, and if they were held to even the FDA's standards for drug safety we would have a lot more studies about this stuff. These companies are also heavily subsidized by governments, which might even be part of why downward pressure on price seems to make everyone go to plastics. Like why exactly is it cheaper, even if you don't bake in the entire R&D budget of inventing them, to use novel polymers made as byproducts of petroleum than it is to make glass or cardboard packaging?
We should, in the same way that we do for pharmaceuticals, hold these orgs to a standard of demonstrating that this bioaccumulation doesn't cause some kind of harm, because the alternative is that some researcher needs to come up with a specific claim of harm, fund a study despite there being significant pressure from these orgs to never do such studies, and certainly never publish if the results might credibly make them look bad, and somehow translate that into making bespoke positive policy prescriptions that would likely be fought tooth and nail by same. That expectation is not a sane default
Maybe we should convince government to do less of those things somehow?
But also:
Polyester is just so cheap that any feasible oil tax wouldn't amount.
For the past several years a large fraction of people have literally been inhaling every lungful of air through a frangible polyester microfiber that they wear around their mouth & nose. We tear these fabrics to shreds and then manually extract the lint from the dryer with our bare hands so it won't start a fire. Putting the finest dispersal mechanism we have, micro-spun fibers, directly into our lungs, and not even thinking about the consequences, seems like maybe it's an orthogonal bad choice we are making which could have orthogonal solutions.
However, I am also wary of the push to view mitigations or "consumer behavior" generally as a means to actually deal with this kind of problem at scale. Like the whole carbon footprint thing BP was pushing for a while. Still in the public lexicon, doesn't do jack shit about real emissions at scale, but great for gotchas on activists. We have significant poison control and food quality control regulations because people can't really develop all the expertise necessary to vet all their own stuff, and it's a huge drain on society to make them do so rather than just solve that coordination problem centrally. Also, monopolistic consolidation has made even very organized boycotts dubiously feasible in forcing change in companies who respond more to their investors than their customers.
To me, governments exist to solve exactly this kind of problem, even though there are many other areas in which I would like them to mind their own business. In this case a lot of why petrochemicals are so cheap is because the cost of doing business for oil companies is heavily subsidized, so removing those subsidies wouldn't even require a new tax, and that money could be productively spent on lots of stuff, like maybe medical research even
Boycotts are a luxury that only the middle class can afford to participate in, and they don't really have the potential to participate in more than one or two at a time.
That is not a restriction that an effective boycott of an entire industrial method can labor under. The "personal responsibility" crowd have it dead wrong - we are trapped in this system and have very limited choices about what we consume, far too limited to allow us to collectively throw out an industrial technique that is anything less than lethal to us.
Ultimately, the only thing powerful enough to take on a cartel is a government. A lot of people have negative feelings about the abstract concept of government, and certainly the government sucks sometimes. Nearly any way that an individual can come up against power has the potential to suck a lot
However, democratic governments for all their failings are far more responsive than consolidated industries to pressure from people who want change. Our "brand of capitalism" - by which I mean the particular economic and regulatory policies of the US government at this moment in time - is doing significant harm to the majority of people, in a way that it just wasn't in my parents' generation, and it doesn't have to stay this way. The options are not accept how things are or tilt at windmills by doing a master's thesis worth of research for every item we buy at the grocery store. The political will for better safety nets, better research and regulation, economic policy that helps the majority of people instead of a tiny sliver of the most deep-pocketed, and siccing the government on the cartels that increasingly dominate every industry is pervasive. The bet cartels are making is that they can create apathy and confusion to forestall this until they can burn down the institution of democracy itself
Used to be, you could ignore the alt types because you had to buy their magazines to know what they were thinking. Now apparently everyone needs to be aware of what they are thinking and make sure they have the exact opposite opinions of the alt types so they seem sane or whatever. You can just ignore the them you know, they are not in the room with you.
They are absolutely in the room with us, and they're getting people killed.
Critical thinking includes knowing that such people exist and aren't that rare.
I mean, this was once essentially the case for "cigarettes are bad for you".
We don't need RCTs, nor do we rely on them to make causal inferences about long term exposures, nor would an RCT be possible with microplastics.
But we need some converging lines of evidence before we go chicken little. What's the alternative?
The revelation that you are likely to have microplastics suffused throughout your body seems far more meaningful than "not much".
The effects of this are unknown, but it seems reasonable to be concerned about potential harm until it's effects are studied in vivo and it's statistically not more harmful than the utility we get out of it. That alone seems like decades of research. You don't need to throw up your hands and act like you can't hypothesize even if the answers are out of your reach.
What kind of strong effect are you looking for, immediate death?
That fact isn't reassuring to me at all. There's a wide variety of increasingly common health conditions that have an unknown etiology -- ADHD, autism, CFS, IBS, mental illness, obesity, etc.
The fact there isn't an immediately obvious health outcome is worrying because it just as likely has a wide reaching effect on a great many bodily systems, making it difficult or impossible to isolate exact consequences from varying exposure.
And the number of people named Killian corresponds well with the rise in incidents related to airbags:
https://tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/2599_popularity-...
You don't just get to pull random things that are going up (assuming that they're going up, which you haven't actually shown) and blame them on something else that is ostensibly going up. That doesn't suggest anything. Ever. [1]
That is pretty sus, after all. Oh look, I just made MSCI's stock go up:
https://tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/1639_google-sear...
[1] But hey, waitaminute...violent crime is down since the 1970! Did microplastics do that, or does it only work for bad stuff?
We also have a long history of introducing new compounds into the environment and then many decades later saying oops, turns out those are toxic. BPA and PFAs recently, to name a few.
Where does that leave us? Who knows. I'm not saying microplastics are responsible for any of those diseases. I'm saying we don't really know what the hell is going on, so some alarm and caution seems appropriate. And, call me crazy, I'd say accidentally coating the planet with a new substance isn't a good thing. There is nothing reassuring about this situation.
Maybe we can cure your asthma? Nope. We can't cure your diabetes either, sorry. Type 1? We don't know how you got that.
Better hope you never have any auto-immune disorder or mental illness. Doctors won't be able to explain it or cure it. And hopefully you never got long Covid. Cross your fingers on cancer, alzheimers, and parkinsons.
I could go on but I wonder, isn't our lack of understanding an obvious truth?
I can't say this means much to me when exposure to plastic has been accelerating that entire time.
Still, I do sincerely appreciate skepticism as a useful part of any dialogue about hypothesized health impacts.
Personally, I don't see an issue with avoiding consumer-grade plastic except when necessary.
Like we study mechanisms for a reason. "Little things get into all your cells" isn't a specific causal argument for specific health outcomes, but it's reasonable to assume it might do something undesirable based on what we know about how cells work and other cases like it. Also, the intervention space is pretty large and some scaling back on plastic usage from the current levels would not be some crazy obvious harm either
Also, "we haven't found effects yet" is especially troublesome in a case where the contaminant in question is a cash cow for an industry that has continuously spent more money than I can even meaningfully reason about suppressing science and muddying discourse about products they sell. Sowing doubt has been an explicit strategy of the petroleum industry for greenhouse effects and it took a long time for us to even definitively know that, so now that we do, why should I assume the same companies aren't taking the same approach for this problem? Again, it feels like isolated demands for rigor
I see no benefit in hand waving away a potentially serious public health problem just because you aren't seeing any anecdotal evidence of harm.
That's only because we have no way to gather evidence, because almost everybody alive has microplastic exposure, so we don't have a control group.
It's just the nature of poorly understood psychology and the long human lifespan that most scientific research wouldn't be able to establish causality on a whole host of negative things (e.g. look how long it took to even get agreement that football concussions were detrimental in the long-term).
This is a contradiction.
A while back I tried to look for those, and it was nontrivial to find papers that would conclusively show that they are harmful, and the mechanisms of this harmfulness.
There's a ton of press about where they are (everywhere) but (as a layman) you could argue it's because they're not very reactive, and this lack of reactivity could mean they're not actually that harmful, and are just there.
Take TFA as an example. Based on the abstract it shows that microplastics are there, but concludes with "highlighting the need for further research on their neurotoxic effects and implications for human health".
Now of course doing good studies about this is extremely hard, as it's hard to find subjects untouched by microplastics for control groups, but I hope someone here can provide me with some good sources on this.
To be clear, I'm not trying to deny the harmfulness here, I'm just looking for good related content.
Microplastics and nanoplastics in atheromas and cardiovascular events. N Engl J Med. 390(10):900-910, 2024.
Summary: People with artherial plaque that contains micro- and nano-plastics have a higher risk of death during the followup period. It's an observational study, sample size is not too big, but some findings look quite mechanistic suggesting causality, e.g. "electron microscopy revealed visible, jagged-edged foreign particles among plaque macrophages and scattered in the external debris". The effect size induced by microplastics on death risk also looks substantial.
Personally, I think microplastics are a very important pollutant, and evidence of this will unfold during the next years. Sadly, it is extraordinarily hard to remove them from our environment. They are everywhere. For example, car tires shed lots of microplastics that end up in eggs or inside vegetables and plants, which absorb them from soil. Most liquids are packaged inside plastic, which is continuously leaking into the content. We should at least be measuring their levels and setting up maximum concentration thresholds in our food chain. We should go back to glass bottles, whenever possible. Suspended microplastics in the air are also a major concern. Plastics are great for certain applications, but we use them in places where they don't belong.
Last year I moved to a house with a greenhouse and started gardening, and was surprised not only by the amount of plastics used, but by the amount of UV unstable plastics used.
- Previous owner used polyester string to tie up plants, which now just disintegrates whenever I touch it. I had to go out of my way to find jute twine.
- I bought agricultural fabric to cover plants during spring. I left it at the top of the greenhouse over the summer to provide shade. By autumn it was disintegrating as it was not UV stable. Again I had to go out of my way to buy a UV stable polyester sheet that I will use now.
There are very good, very practical reasons we moved from glass (and metal and other materials) containers to plastic. Unless those factors are sufficiently addressed, plastic is here to stay.
For those who haven't been keeping track or are just too damn young to know history, those factors include:
* Weight. Glass and metal, and also other materials like ceramic and wooden containers, are heavy compared to plastic. This additional weight means it takes more energy to transport, meaning more costs in fuel and labor.
* Fragility. This namely applies to glass; glass containers are fragile and they are very dangerous to handle if and when they break. Plastic containers are much more durable, and even if they break they are seldom as dangerous as broken glass. More broken containers also mean more goods lost to spillage, which in turn means additional cost to re-manufacture and re-ship.
* Durability. Going along with the above, plastics are equal to metal containers in keeping contents and the outside world separated. This is incredibly important for ensuring food safety.
* Contaminants. This applies primarily to metal containers, but also paper and sometimes ceramic. Metals leach into foods, this is mostly prevented with special coatings but it's not perfect and the coatings themselves are also contaminants that will eventually leach. Likewise paper containers which have coatings applied so liquids don't seep through, and sometimes ceramic containers to prevent leaching. We know these contaminants are bad, unlike microplastics where we still aren't conclusively sure.
* Cost. Plastic is cheap compared to basically every other material we can make containers out of. This is a great boon to the consumer who ultimately ends up paying the most markup.
I have seen some drinks shipped in plastic, so it is possible to do, I wonder if glass packaging is a 'premium' thing. Though, if they can do it for cheap beer, then I'm sure they can do it for non-alcoholic drinks on scale.
I can't believe costs of switching to glass or ceramic are that high. I've bought tons of inexpensive dairy and desserts that came packaged using those materials. But since most customers don't care, they tend to use plastic.
But damn did it feel cheap in a bad way. Being cheap is obviously one of the reasons we use plastic containers, but the feeling associated with plastic alcohol is just plain irrationally bad.
if plastics have impact on human health, how many $ we can save for using re-usable glass and metal?
Restaurants and bars still have the same system here for e.g. Coca-Cola drinks, which come inside a glass bottle that has been reused several times. I'm not sure plastic is more efficient than reusing a glass bottle. Lots of yogurts are packaged in glass containers, and price seems average. I have also heard that plastic is rarely recycled, so it also sounds unsustainable from that perspective.
Oh yes, I love paying a couple cents less per drink to have micro plastics in me
Meanwhile you'll walk outside sipping your glass bottle and take a deep breath of tire dust from nearby cars, which is actually the primary route of exposure for microplastics to enter the body since the lungs do exchange particles with the blood stream (notably, you will also find silicates, soot and basically every other type of thing all throughout the body via lung exchange as a mechanism).
Smelling something doesn’t automatically make something dangerous, obviously. It does mean the molecules that were previously part of your plastic soup bowl are now knocking around in the open air.
Glass doesn’t do that at common temperatures. It’s basically inert.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9885170/
Quote from the abstract: The direct consequences of MPs and NPs on the thyroid, testis, and ovaries are documented. Still, studies need to be carried out to identify the direct effects of MPs and NPs on the hypothalamus, pituitary, and adrenal glands.
I definitely feel we should be more serious about reducing use of plastics, especially for uses likely to contribute to microplastic levels, but it’s going to be hard to convincingly make that case without quantifying these risks in relation to actual human microplastics levels.
If we replace all plastic cups with glass cups, might we get micro-glass inside ourselves instead?
Glass, mostly silicon dioxide, might sound harmless, but glass can chip off in microscopic sharp fragments (think fiberglass dust - which some suggest might be as bad as asbestos). Glass also slightly dissolves in water (this is how glasses start to look frosty after enough dishwashing - they're dissolving), and slightly evaporates (everything has a vapour pressure!). And obviously the glass isn't pure - there can be all kinds of deliberate and accidental additives.
Am I worried about glass? No. But it seems naive to wholesale replace plastic with something else until there is a decent understanding of the replacement.
Also, while glass does dissolve in water, it is an extremely slow process that does not affect containers at room temperature in any significant way. As for the claim about glass evaporating due to vapor pressure, while technically true, the vapor pressure of glass at room temperature is so infinitesimally small that it's completely irrelevant for practical purposes. This process occurs at such a slow rate that it would take far longer than the age of the universe to have any measurable effect on a glass container.
How about we leave the silly accusations of malice at whatever low rent other website they were learned at. You don't know motivations.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are so stable they are called "forever chemicals", but according the NRDC, "PFAS are also toxic at extremely low levels (i.e. parts per quadrillion), posing significant risks to our health":
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/forever-chemicals-called-pfas-s...
And the answer is, broadly, they mimic hormones. Compounds in plastics can activate endocrine receptors because they are similar enough to hormones which are more or less everywhere across the animal kingdom.
Sometimes it can be hard to pin down the specific negative effects in isolation, but there are some pretty clear metrics.
"A review of the endocrine disrupting effects of micro and nano plastic and their associated chemicals in mammals" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9885170/
"When comparing water of the same spring that is packed in glass or plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), estrogenic activity is three times higher in water from plastic bottles."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096007601...
If you were to get a block of lab grade PET you’d find it was inert
"Micro- and nanoplastics in the body are passed on during cell division"
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240306150719.h...
You'll be surprised what it picks up over time, and consequently what you end up not inhaling...
My understanding is that the health benefits are most pronounced from avoiding smoke and fine dust particles which don't necessarily have a lot to do with plastic, but it's a good recommendation regardless.
There is significant evidence linking PM2.5 concentrations and health (which is a common metric about fine particles in the air of a particular size, in this case 2.5 micron range)
They are so effective that they will literally filter a bad smell out of a room assuming it’s not a gas that’s making then smell.
I don't think we have that evidence for plastic (yet).
Also you totally can start buying plastic free clothes here and now. Just more expensive usually.
Not sure how socks used to be without plastic but pretty sure they'd fall apart fast.
Well, asbestos is a great insulator and lead makes beautiful bright paints, it's just that the downsides outweighed those great properties.
You don't need lightweight waterproof clothing, you just like it. Getting a little sweaty under a non-breathable fabric or getting wet but staying insulated with wool will be just fine. Umbrellas are great as well.
What beats lightweight breathable fabric is not desecrating the planet.
Or maybe (high strength successors to) Rayon, which as I understand should decompose like regular cotton.
And rayon doesn't exactly have a good history.
I'm all for looking for better things. Will be hard to replace some stuff, though.
> Water is a very inexpensive resource in most parts of the world.
I don't think you know what you're talking about, and you're (like myself) living in a privileged part of the world if water is an inexpensive resource to you. Freshwater scarcity is going to be one of the most critical issues exacerbated by the climate change, and as I said, particularly so in those parts of the world where cotton is grown such as South Asia. The most famous case of cotton production having catastrophic consequences is the Aral Sea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea).
https://h2oglobalnews.com/cotton-farming-and-water-scarcity/
https://thewotrblog.wordpress.com/2018/02/27/why-farmers-are...
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/mar/20...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...
Another problem is fast fashion. The fashion industry is a bit of a cancer on the planet, encouraging chains like H&M to sell very cheap clothes filled with plastic, that people need to replace every few years.
But sure, it's also true that you can make extremely low-durability clothing from synthetic polymers that aren't even intended to last (ultra fast fashion is incredibly destructive, yes).
The problem with farming resource calculations and fearmongering, is often they measure water usage of a particular crop without really considering where the water came from.
Wouldn't you say crops grown with just water from the rain were using water with perfect sustainability?
Also, agriculture isn't necessarily sustainable just because it doesn't require artificial irrigation. As an extreme example, just look at the Amazon. The land used to grow a water-intensive species might be better used for other purposes.
And for the rest... talking to climate doomers isn't interesting or productive. You'll only believe negative things, you demonstrably here don't know what you're talking about and just make things up to fit the narrative you have in your head. You clearly knew nothing about cotton production but made up facts without bothering to look for information at all. You make up your climate facts as well, do you know anything about the climate models for what will happen in the cotton growing regions of the US? Or have you heard vague things about droughts and decided to parrot those and assume they apply here because they supported your doom thoughts?
Fungal attack on woody biomass involves chemicals you do not want in your body. The attack involves extremely reactive hydroxyl radicals, for example.
Being accustomed to something doesn't mean the thing doesn't hurt us.
Mostly outside the body, before ingestion occurs.
> Being accustomed to something doesn't mean the thing doesn't hurt us.
I disagree. Evolution had the last ~360 million years (that's about how old cellulose is I believe) to evolve mechanisms to protect our body from cellulose particles.
> Mostly onside the body, before ingestion occurs.
This is an obviously silly statement. Of course cellulose can be ingested in various ways, including extremely small particles.
I dunno, half of my wardrobe is natural and the stuff that isn't is specific outdoor gear that would just be marginally worse at its' job (heavier, a bit less waterproof).
I feel as if people get a bit stuck on things being optimal or whatever. If my boxer shorts and socks are a bit less elastic, ok, cool, whatever, who cares? If this stuff actually is dangerous it doesn't matter how much better it is.
Serious mountaineering is still done with merino wool.
Let's also not forget while down is natural, the material encapsulating it is usually not!
"the only real upside of wool is it is very warm and comfortable to sleep in"
Because that is a big upside to me.
So thanks for confirming my point and congratulations on defeating your strawmen.
Googling "100% cotton" _clothing item_, "100% linen", "100% leather", "100% wool". It's not hard.
I personally use a clothing rack to hang all my plastic (polyester, spandex, etc) clothes, and i only put cotton items in the dryer. Including towels of course.
For that matter, I wonder if they ever made asbestos clothing for routine wear? Looks like aprons, oven mitts, and ironing board covers.
While we know plastic is getting to places it should not be, we have not fully figured out all the negative impacts. Those impacts will drive where/when to use it.
Edit: Again, I am not trying to downplay potential harm. It might be a serious issue that is driving poor outcomes but I don't believe we have research of that as of yet.
No doubt these are almost entirely due to synthetic fibres in clothing and other textiles, which have been around for more than half a century now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olefin_fiber
Note that natural fibres aren't great either if you inhale enough of them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byssinosis
The amount of pseudoscience and illogicity around microplastics is staggering. Consider those advocating for banning traditional blown-film plastic bags and replacing them with ones which are woven or non-woven fibre... the majority of which will also be made from plastic, but will emit loose fibres far more easily. Go after the textile industry if you really want to reduce microplastics, as that's where the majority of them come from. Of course this is assuming there is any clear evidence of harm, which is far from conclusive.
It’s a more interesting result if plastics are unique in ending up here.
When consumers are in debt and deprived of surplus income, they are forced to ignore their ethical concerns and go for the cheapest of the cheap, which is usually bad for the environment.
Had we had a more decentralized system, with less severe inequality, I tend to think that we would be using a far more heterogeneous set of materials in manufacturing. There would be less focus on minimizing costs, leaving more room for ethics and thus we wouldn't end up with massive global problems like this.
It's weird how plastic in its current form has been around and sold in such massive qualities for such a long time. It makes it look as though there is absolutely no room for innovation. But history tells us there is always room for innovation. Capitalism has been good at finding creative paths (plural). The tech monoculture we have today seems unnatural. Likely propped up by our debt-based monetary system which allows infinite compounding of wealth which leads to unsurmountable artificial centralization. It manufactures inequality, homogeneity and groupthink.
Capitalism should be a hydra, but the monetary system has turned it into a one-headed dragon with a single mighty but aging head.
PS: originally this said boomers, but I meant Doomers, as I. People who run around screaming the world is doomed
Who is paying these damages in trillions? Even if you were to pin it on specific companies, they would go bancrupt.