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The amount of exposure has also changed. Some bakelite knobs on your armoir aren't a big deal. Sleeping with a 'fleece' blanket and inhaling polypropylene all night every night may not be fine.
Personally, I don't have confidence in being able to be an informed consumer of plastics, and it's easier to just minimize platic use in general without trying to decide what's dangerous and what's ok.
To wit, life expectancies in North America have been declining the last few years.
Also, plastics have been around for 100+ years. That would be one heck of a lag.
*EDIT* They're not back to pre-COVID levels yet, but getting closer.
I'm sure that has nothing to do with predatory health insurance companies.
To suggest otherwise is clueless and asinine.
Actually, it's not even that as most of the modern increase in life expectancy / fall in mortality occurred before the invention of plastics.
The former largely concluded by the 1920s. Plastics were largely invented during the 1930s, and were introduced as products over subsequent decades, at an ever-increasing rate.
Which is to say: whatever lead to the increase in life expectancy was largely not plastics. Rather it was increased general hygiene, sanitation, food quality, refrigeration, waste removal, and sewerage systems.
I'd mentioned this only a few months back, note especially my follow-up comment which similarly points out another frequently-touted factor which also fails the temporal sequencing test:
[†]: Works as well for high fructose corn syrup or Fentanyl.
Remember the black spatulas a while back, and how it turned out to be a math error?
Seems like a pretty minor change to me. I’m already going out of my way to not put metal in there anyway…
Overcome the effect of antibiotics and vaccines that's just what it shows, and that's really not surprising
> Remember the black spatulas a while back, and how it turned out to be a math error?
The math spatula being an ill-founded crusade from a line researcher doesn't mean you can make nonsensical argument to say it's not harmful…
Humans existed. They had an average life expectency of 'x'. Then we introduced plastic. The life expectency became x+y.
We cannot say that plastic caused the increase, but it is clear that any decrease was small enough to be hidden by other factors.
Am I saying that it's harmless? No. Am I saying that your effort and attention are better spent checking your fire extinguishers arent expired or that your brake pads don't need changed? Yes. Those things have significant and obvious impacts on your survival odds. This does not.
Yes, but those "other factors" being antibiotics and vaccine, it turns out that even the deadliest pollutants we know were hidden by other factors, so it really gives us no idea about how harmful it is, as it could go from "harmless" to "cause millions of death every year" that's why I say the argument makes no sense.
> Am I saying that your effort and attention are better spent checking your fire extinguishers arent expired or that your brake pads don't need changed? Those things have significant and obvious impacts on your survival odds. This does not.
That's the problem, you cannot make this conclusion at all, it could be much worse than those two while still being hidden in longevity statistics, just because antibiotics and vaccine has so strong of an effect on life expectancy! Having no fire extinguisher at home has pretty much no impact on your life expectancy, but at the time plastics were introduced a significant fraction of the newborn didn't reach 10yo because they died of an infection of some sort.
I see what you mean, and I think we're basically coming at the same point from different angles. If you are a medical researcher or involved in crafting legislation this is probably important. You could help save millions of lives in aggregate. However, I'm suggesting that individual people should think of the opportunity cost before they panic. After all, a person can only worry about so many things and almost everyone is at or past their capacity.
To use another half baked example, if plastics take away a year, and antibiotics give you 5 extra you still win. However, if smoking cigarettes, obesity, or driving too fast risk taking away 10 years, start with one of those first.
Optimizing the bits of life that are too small to reliably measure is just not a great way to live, unless you've already handled all of the low hanging fruit in your life. Anxiety kills people too.