Why aren't we losing our minds over the plastic in our brains? | Hacker News Reader

Why aren't we losing our minds over the plastic in our brains?

scientificamerican.com

95 pointsmikhael175 comments

Is there some sort of Pareto principle that could be applied to reducing plastic intake? Can someone suggest a few easy steps that would cause >50% reduction in plastic intake, for those who don't have time to dig through the research, and can't make drastic life changes?

I'll offer "don't microwave in plastic containers" as a starter for ten.

Second might be "get a metal water bottle".

This is a really good question, and I'd love to know the answers here too

wood cutting board

Another bonus: at least for bamboo, it has antimicrobial properties compared to plastic, which tends to have all sorts of difficult-to-clean grooves for bacteria to hide in.

The bamboo will be glued together with something like polyurethane though. That makes up a smaller percentage of the board of course.

So I just need to find larger round block cut from single tree...

Or then just give up and live with my plastic cutting boards...

That's not how bamboo works though. It is hollow and needs to be processed into larger blocks

Presumably you don’t mean a large bamboo tree?

There are so many neat cutting boards available, with suitably eye watering prices. I made I nice Rimu one (though admittedly it was glued) out of old house framing that was otherwise going to be binned. Chopping down these ancient hardwood trees for house framing is depressing to think about. https://gatherandyou.co.nz/products/handmade-rimu-chopping-b...

There are types of wood that have antibacterial properties which make them more rot resistant.

New Zealand has Totara trees which are truly beautiful. Over 100 year old Totara fence posts are still on various farms and some research group was buying them and extracting something out of it as a trial acne treatment.

Plenty of other woods have rot resistant properties too. Puriri comes to mind, it used to be a common house pile, but wow is it horrible to cut.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podocarpus_totara https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitex_lucens

Important to note that bamboo boards will dull your knives significantly faster than other woods. Other kinds of wood are still better than plastics at being bacteria-resistant (but still need disinfecting after cutting meat etc.—and so does bamboo)

Titanium is also great

Eating mostly plants, get everyone doesn’t want to go full veg, would probably help.

Given that it bio accumulates trying to get closer to the bottom of the food chain should reduce intake.

Partial, but an easy one: Don't combine all three of these: Heat, food/drink, plastic.

Sad Aeropress noises... I really hope someone builds a metal or glass Aeropress, because I love everything about it but the fact I'm boiling plastic every morning...

Isn’t the aeropress premium aluminum?

Aluminium and glass. But wow is it expensive.

They have made a glass aeropress.

Indeed they have. Last timeI checked it was still only an announcement. Time to order this bad boy, shame it's almost 10x the price but I think it's worth it not having that much plastic involved anymore.

Presumably demand could drive down that price.

I bought a silly machine, a Faema Jubilee, and the only other I seriously considered was a Linear Mini.

Since then I talked with a repair tech and have seen inside both.

The Linear is an amazing machine but the combo of having lots of plastic parts and lots of computerisation makes me wonder about longevity. High heat and plastic is rarely a great combo. The tech hated working on the Linea, and I can’t get past its fake brew paddle. No regrets on the Faema, it’s a beautiful machine and all the faults in its coffee are due to me, not the machine.

Another easy thing to do is to prefer clothes with natural fiber types (cotton, wool, etc). A lot of the particulates in one's home are generated from just the abrasion of your clothing as you move around. When those are natural particulates instead of synthetic, you'll end up inhaling a lot less.

Related is improving airflow and vacuuming regularly so that these particles don't accumulate as much.

Funny enough, banning cotton is being considered in europe at the moment.

wait why?

True in the most trivial sense, but no, not really.

Eating cotton for breakfast is being considered on HN at the moment.

Src please

This is incorrect: https://www.nzz.ch/international/baumwoll-verbot-eu-dementie...

There are lots of indoor air filters that would likely also help. They also help with things like indoor pollution generally.

Also they increase plastic production to manufacturing them.

Note that there are other environmental trade-offs to be made. Cotton is know for requiring tons of pesticides. Wool production also often involves pesticides and neuro-toxic dyes. In Let My People Go Surfing Yvon Chouinard claims using “every acre of land from Maine to the Mississippi” for sheep would be required to replace one synthetic wool yarn mill (pg102, 2016 ed). I’d be interested in finding corroboration of this, but regardless it’s made me rethink trying to go mostly natural textiles. Not to mention, for outdoor activewear, synthetics are almost always superior.

I think the real solution is to try to buy less clothing, reuse old clothing, use clothing longer, and reduce consumption from the worst offenders: fast fashion. Yes, you are still exposing yourself to plastics in your own home, but my impression is industrial production is by far the largest producer of microplastics.

There's an article that says that 78% of microplastics in the ocean are from tire dust alone.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/tire-pollution-toxic-chemical...

So what is the alternative for tires that does not use plastics? Or only use some natural compounds that do not act like microplastics.

Less cars? More regulation on tire composition?

What alternate composition? I mean what is the no plastic alternative option?

Is there even a way to get same characteristic with say fully natural rubber. And would such rubber also be free of any risks?

Less cars. Obviously they will continue to exist, but reducing car miles by: prioritizing mass transit, walking, and biking. Encouraging large companies and businesses to locate with density near stations and urban centers rather in suburbia. Increasing housing stock and density close to stations and urban centers to improve transit effectiveness and reduce commuting miles.

Yes, also lighter cars.

Natural rubber? Definitely used to be a thing and (I think) some higher-grade tires for lorries still have a natural rubber component because it can have better wear properties.

It seems natural rubber is not help. It can as well involve in microplastics. It still ends up acting like polymers and additives can still be harmful. Just because something is natural does not mean it is safe or is not made to be harmful when processed.

That's nonsense because much of the damage from tire dust is from a specific synthetic chemical called 6PPD.

Lighters cars, electric bikes, more trains on steel tracks...

Trains.

Bikes produce far less tire and brake wear due to weight etc.

My suggestions:

  * switch from microfiber to e.g bamboo sheets
  * donate blood periodically to reduce your body’s load https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2790905
  * add a filter to your washing machine to divert microplastics from the wastewater e.g. https://planetcare.org/

This could really motivate people to donate blood

Bloodletting making a comeback?

I don’t qualify for blood donation, so at this point it really is my only option…

There is a real FDA approved therapy called "Total Plasma Exchange" that removes and replaces nearly all of a patient's plasma. It is used to treat autoimmune disorders, certain cancers, and other conditions. Off label, it is gaining popularity in "executive health" and longevity circles as it seems to improve age-related biomarkers and may help slow cognitive decline.

The explanation is that you're throwing away all the hormones, inflammatory factors, toxins, etc floating in the blood and giving you body a chance to "reset" with what it actually wants/needs.

What is it replaced with?

Mostly saline with a bit of donor albumin.

I would rather use my own albumin than donor albumin, or just leave it unremoved.

Vampirism as a service?

Maybe investment is required in FANG industries (apologies to Charles Stross)

planetcare.org - what a shitty website. Immediately a full screen popup came up to claim a 10% discount or "Nah, rather pay full price" and while I was looking for a closing "x" the next popup asked me to "Wait! ... blah ...". Luckily I found the x for my tab faster and left to never come back.

Be aware, aluminum bottles (and cans, although they have recycle-ability benefits over plastic) usually have plastic liners. Glass (with its weight and durability problems), stainless, and titanium are good.

Titanium can with a premium beverage inside.

There is a hint of Juicero to the concept.

The truth is we're probably still unaware of the worst offenders but here how I go to reduce my exposure, in no particular order:

Food:

  - avoid all that came into contact with plastics, use glass containers
  - sea salt has microplastics in it, rock salt can be a better alternative
  - don't use plastic utensils or equipment, like plastic grinders
  - overall, avoir processed and packaged food, buying locally helps
  - eat smaller animals: bioaccumulation is worse in larger animals
  - I almost completely eliminated all seafood from my diet, if you want to eat fish, prefer the smaller ones

Water:

  - use glass water bottles or reverse osmosis system that can filter smaller particles for drinking water
  - if you enjoy soda, you should know most of them are contaminated, that is because carbonation increases internal pressure and mechanical stress on the bottle walls, which can accelerate the degradation of the plastic and release of particles. And it gets worse: every time you open the bottle, the pressure release causes even more degradation
  - therefore for soda: use glass bottles too, cans are coated with plastic but not as bad as the bottles (they use epoxy resin which is more stable and the stress on cans is less than plastic bottles), but here glass is still king.
  - I use a service in my city that delivers boxes of glass water and soda, it probably exists in your city too and is more affordable than you might imagine

Air:

  - there is not much you can do to avoid microplastics outside, car tires supposedly account for 28% of all microplastics entering the environement, avoid living close to busy street? Truth is we don't have enough studies and data to truly know about that
  - use an air purifying system for your home, the commercial ones are mostly bs, make yourself one with at high MERV rating (MERV 13 or above), there is a whole community of DIY builders, look it up
  - use a vacuum cleaner that uses bags and possibly has an HEPA filtering, this will prevent you from blowing all the microplastics that may have shed on your floor into the air, make sure to keep in properly maintained

The typical advice also makes sense: avoid plastics in your clothes and in cosmetics, but I found these not always easy to apply and not as significant as the rest (water, food, air). So here's my bigger point: don't stress over removing all plastics from your life, it'll only make you miserable, pick your battles and make the changes where you can tolerate them, you'll probably be better off than most people.

Switch to loose tea (if you drink tea), with porcelain tea kettles to brew, and metal strainers into porcelain mugs. The tea bags are made with plastics.

While you're switching back to porcelain, glass, and metal, avoid things made in China if you can. Their porcelain and glass is high in lead (often poisonously so).

Eliminate any black or charcoal colored plastics that you can. When you get to-go containers for food, transfer it to a dish (porcelain) or bowl (porcelain or glass) immediately when you get home before putting it in the refrigerator.

Never microwave with plastic wrap (a.k.a. cling film). We use paper towels if it must be covered, or another plate if it's liquid.

No plastic utensils, no "paper" plates (paper plates are mixed with plastic to make them hold up better) and have their own forever chemicals in them.

Get a pour-over kit (ceramic or porcelain, glass, and metal). We still use paper filters, but make sure they're actually paper.

No polyester clothing, or at least more than 65% or 70% cotton.

Those are my top two. I'm also avoiding the grocery store bagged chicken sitting under a heat lamp, hot coffee in god-knows-what lined "paper" cups, and fatty or acidic items in plastic containers. No plastic cutting boards. No polypropelyne shirts or sheets. I'm just guessing at where the plastic comes from but it makes me feel better.

But ultimately, look around the grocery store or just life - everything's got plastic in it. If there are drastic negative health consequences to plastics (and it's looking really likely that there are), what the hell do we do about it? We've almost certainly committed too far to plastics to fix it on any meaningful scale.

Because otherwise plastic is miracle material.

Alternatives are lot less practical or do not offer same advantages. Glass is heavier, less sturdy, possible produces shards that cause immediate damage such as cuts. Most metals need the plastic coating to be non-reactive.

And then products packed in plastic stored in inert gas last amazingly long time. Which is very big selling point for many customers.

> a group of Italian researchers followed 257 people who had plaque in their carotid arteries. They found that 20 percent of the people in their study who had microplastic-laden plaque had had a heart attack, stroke or had died after almost three years, compared to 7.5 percent of the people who didn’t.

Microplastics could be a proxy for diet. Which is why we need more studies!

> Scientists still don’t know what this plastic is doing to us.

I think it's because of this and how expensive, inconvenient, and possibly dangerous the alternative is. There's a lot of risk of illness in food handling, and things like one-time use containers and disposable gloves have done a lot to help.

"Microplastics found in X" has become a pretty weird sport.

The phenomenon is worth studying, but it's not hugely surprising given how ubiquitous they are (another thing you find in every human, probably in higher quantities, is sand). But despite tons of scrutiny, there are no studies showing that it's actually hurting us.

We've done some really sketchy things in the early days of industry (leaded gasoline, etc), and have gotten into this overdrive where we're jumping the gun on a lot of substances that are probably not bad. Every year, you have several headlines in the mold of "X is everywhere and might be killing us"... but never really followed by that "oh yeah, it was really killing us" part.

Immediate consequences versus long-term consequences. Leaded gasoline is still being studied on how impactful it was.

https://dupri.duke.edu/news-events/news/20th-century-lead-ex...

Lead is highly toxic. Plastic is not necessarily toxic at all.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/indiana-plastics-fire-s...

>> A plastics fire in Indiana spewed various toxic chemicals into the air, including hydrogen cyanide and benzene, according to test results from the Environmental Protection Agency.

>> Officials said Friday that air monitors detected hydrogen cyanide, benzene, chlorine, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds in the ground-level smoke.

Don't set fire to your brain then, problem solved.

Or leave a PET water bottle in the car.

Because that's exactly like setting it on fire.

People don't typically set plastic on fire to inhale the smoke. But leaving a water bottle in a car, where there are often significant thermal changes, results in a leaching of some of those chemicals into the water.

Because it's often clear, folks often think that plastic is inert like glass. It is far from it.

The (sub)topic is lead, though. If lead is still being used in plastic water bottles, then I'm with you, that's just nuts.

Obviously water bottles should be made from plastics that don't leach anything harmful into the water when left in a hot car. To the extent they do, it should be easy to come up with specific arguments to prohibit specific substances. Just blaming "plastics" in general is a category error, since not all plastics are proven to be harmful in this regard.

Burning things can change their toxicity.

Or more specifically, not all plastics are the same. So are they all safe?

https://www.bennettplastics.com/is-it-safe-to-microwave-my-f...

Do we except polystyrene as carcinogenic, if consumed? So don't eat it. Yet we've banned lead paint, because paint chips flake off. So eating paint chips or inhaling paint dust causes lead toxicity. Admittedly we don't think plastic is nearly as toxic, but some scientists argue it's understudied.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsomega.2c03453

>> These adverse effects of PS-MPs [polystyrene] on human kidney and liver cells suggest that ingesting microplastics may lead to toxicological problems on cell metabolism and cell–cell interactions. Because exposing human kidney and liver cells to microplastics results in morphological, metabolic, proliferative changes and cellular stress, these results indicate the potential undesirable effects of microplastics on human health.

Lead has been around for a long time, and well studied. The cumulative "we" are just now coming to terms with microplastics. I think the concern is valid for what these microplastics might be doing to our cells.

https://sustainability.yale.edu/explainers/yale-experts-expl...

>> Anastas goes on to explain that our bodies are accustomed to breaking down, processing, and disposing of natural polymers every day, but newer man-made polymers come with many unknowns. “We just don’t know to what degree these human-made polymers are different and affect our bodies differently,” Anastas explains. “Our bodies evolved to process all of these other natural polymers over countless years, but our bodies and the environment have not been given the chance to evolve to process these man-made polymers.”

lead was the additive of choice to reduce plastics flamability in household items like venitian blinds and other stuff, when it degrades it drops a whitish dust, that is largely lead, also certain plastics react with food and other common things in a home, and react, producing byproducts that are bad for us, and of course, plastic itself is never totaly benign my preference is to have as little of the stuff around as possible, but that is harder and harder to do

We already know cancer rates are going up for young people. What's changed, apart from all the extra chemicals floating in our blood?

An enormous number of things, impacting almost every aspect of human lifestyle.

Obesity.

It is infuriating how many times this needs to be said. Too many people pretend this is not a problem.

> Too many people pretend this is not a problem.

Fatpositivity is a hell of a mental state. they are trying to frame it as not only not a problem but as a good thing. they are just playing into agrocorporations that want to continue pumping sugar into everything we eat.

For the most part, no. They just don’t want to be treated like some sort of lesser human being.

It’s a difficult problem. People get sick of being told 300x “why don’t you just do x”

its not difficult.

1. stop drinking soda and juice. 2. eat only unprocessed food 3. go for a 30 min walk every day.

its really hard to go over 300 lbs if you cook your own meals, don't load up on 300 calorie sugar bombs and take basic responsibility for your own health. and I say this as someone who used to be very fat.

Can we blame phones instead so we can keep selling our McBurgers?

This.

Most cancers happen from DNA mutations, and most DNA mutations happen during cell division, and cells divide well... when there is ample nutrients. The world we live in today, is very different than our distant ancestors. Calories are absurdly abundant compared to our evolutionary past, or even 100 years ago.

In my country they tested adolescent children that were brought up by eating "bio" food vs people that ate regular food.

Kids that has been eating the 'healthy' "bio" food had, on average, unhealthy amounts of lead, heavy metals and other chemicals in their blood. The kids that didn't eat "bio" food didn't.

So I ask you, where should the average EU person go to?

Interesting! Do you have a reference for this?

Was there any explanation given? Could be that besides the bio/normal food, also the diet composition is completely different?

https://www.belganewsagency.eu/study-finds-that-young-people...

A man who smoked two packs of cigarettes per day for years, used to comment on "people who went to Health Food Stores" .. Look, he would say, see those people? they are not very healthy.. (often people with health problems would seek a better diet).. That man smoked for 40 years, no problem! he said.. his skin suffered, he lost his sense of taste for foods.. One year he was diagnosed with Lung Cancer and died after a slow, lingering and painful illness, in his early 60s.

I don't really see what that has to do with what I posted, as it completely misses the point.

This is not about eating fast food vs eating healthy. This is about groups of people eating the same food, only that one is labeled 'bio/organic' and the other isn't.

When these people were subjected to tests, and the foods themselves were tested, it was quantifiably proven to be less healthy.

Depression and massive vaccination with experimental mRNA vaccines.

Use of mRNA vaccines is fairly recent, can you show even a correlation between them and cancer rates?

How is depression causing childhood cancers?

First, we should have randomized independend studies about side effects of new vaccines, which takes about 3 years to make.

Did we have something like that during 2021 few months after developing new vaccine when milion of doses was distributed?

Look at graphs in 15-44y catgeory. Still increasing mortality since 2020. Why? https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

No one thinks that the best drug launch method is do it untested.

Isn’t that curve you show trending down?

Frightened mind is easily manipulated.

In 15-44y category its going up with excessive deaths.

> Every year, you have several headlines in the mold of "X is everywhere and might be killing us"... but never really followed by that "oh yeah, it was really killing us" part.

Asbestos? Cigarette smoke? BRUH lol.

Pretty sure they mean since leaded gas was banned. Asbestos was around the same time, and cigarette awareness started decades prior.

The "getting bonked on the head a lot might be killing us" narrative has progressed rapidly in the past 20 years, fwiw, and you'd think we would have noticed it earlier given it is visually evident postmortem and doesn't depend on technology

I refer you to BMJ 2018;363:k5094, "Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial"

Conclusion: "Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention."

It's hard to scientifically prove some things!

Spoiler: the aircraft never took off.

I’m not sure that they are as clever as they think they are. Maybe I’m not academic enough for the joke.

https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094

The whole point of the study is to show the limitations of a Randomized Controlled trial.

This study shows the difficulty in studying the effectiveness of entrenched practices, especially when there is good reason to suspect that not using the practice will result in extremely significant harm at high probability. Here we have a study with enormous self-selection bias.

They did ask candidates mid-flight in commercial aircraft if they would be willing to participate at their current altitude and speed, and obviously all declined. On the other hand a number of candidates found on private planes that were not moving were willing to participate.

This study also shows how statistical techniques can be misused, as here in a study where the adverse results in question occurred in literally zero participants of the control group is obviously worthless, but one can still run the stats to conclude no statistically significant difference was detected.

Lastly it brings up questions about best available evidence. Many researchers tend to automatically assume that an RCT is better than other evidence. Now if they read the study closely and notice flaws they often change their mind, but if they just skim the abstract they can miss this. This is an example of a case where the only available RCT is total garbage, and we have far better evidence in the form of accident statistics from skydivers. Accidents where no chute was packed, or the chute (and any backups) completely fail to deploy are a very good proxy in practice for jumping without one at all.

Agreed. I think its something to look into but surely the boomers who went through the plastic industry in the 60s had it way worse when we had way less stringent standards and were getting exposed to and even eating now banned substances. If they survived it..and by survive I mean lived to a healthy 80-100 year life for the most part then we probably will be fine.

> Everything that goes into our bodies gets filtered through our livers and kidneys, so maybe it’s not a big surprise that bits of plastic find their way into those organs. Same with our hearts; microplastics end up in our blood and can get stuck in our clogged arteries.

> But our brains are designed to keep things out ... researchers behind the brain plastics study think the tiny shards of plastic hitch a ride on fat molecules to get [past the blood-brain barrier] inside brain cells ... The researchers estimated that the average brain studied had about seven grams of microplastics in it.

Having 7g of _anything_ foreign inside my brain seems like cause for concern to me.

There is no sound evidence of having so much microplastics in the brain. The studies that show it are very broad, incomplete and did not check for false positives.

"The main analytical method used in this study was pyrolysis gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. This method can give false results when used to measure plastics because fats (which the brain is mainly made of) give the same pyrolysis products as polyethylene (the main plastic reported)"

And then you have something like this: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32882126

"Why Aren't We Losing Our Minds over the Plastic in Our Brains?"

Because people value convenience and low costs over most risks. It's actually amazing that Organic food has found as much traction as it has with the increased cost and less convenient shopping.

More of it is because most people don’t know about it and out of the ones who know, most don’t believe it’s a problem.

We have scientific studies that also state that having plastic in your blood steam and organs, is okay. So unless we focus research on how plastics are affecting us, just studies saying we found plastic in xyz aren’t going to get us anywhere beyond “we should probably do more research on this”.

There is lot of other perceived value in organic. It is seen as more healthy so it works as placebo. And then some can't ever put enough value on being able to feel smug and superior towards poorer people and less well educated.

> some can't ever put enough value on being able to feel smug and superior towards poorer people and less well educated

this feels like a disingenuous categorization to me. there are sustainability, ethical, supply chain, and other environmental considerations that impact why one might choose organic food. i don’t always, but am lucky to have the budgeting flexibility to choose fancy single-origin coffee or other things with “perceived value”

it feels that comments like this betray a desire to look down on others more transparently than choosing to shop at Whole Foods does

> It's actually amazing that Organic food has found as much traction as it has with the increased cost and less convenient shopping.

I'm not surprised about this one. Store tomatoes look really nice, but have no flavour, and it's noticeable with other fruits and veggies too.

I will second this. I notice a major difference in the taste of fruits (primarily blueberries and grapes) when the organic option is not in stock at our grocery store.

People like to make fun of me for buying organic (yes, I know it's not quite what the marketing leads you to believe -- especially depending on its origin) but I do believe it's worthwhile for the environment, me and especially for my kids.

>> "Why Aren't We Losing Our Minds over the Plastic in Our Brains?"

> Because people value convenience and low costs over most risks

Enough plastic in your brain has to make you value convenience as your brain dies, but I don't want to know the amount.

I dont think this is true. We're not given the choice for alternatives. Corporations value profit over good stewardship.

I disagree, many people love weird inconvenient things. Most of the west can live comfortably but most decide to overwork themselves for status. Even the billionaires need even more.

OTOH, people have a hard time thinking abstractly, so new phenomenons like that take time to grow. But look at nuclear, once loved then hated… Group thoughts & culture evolve with time so we never know.

If our society had half a brain we would be banning as much single use plastic as possible, replacing it with whatever is appropriate.

"But it's expensive!" Yes. Properly disposing of waste costs money.

The dirty secret is that a LOT of it is tire dust.

We're addicted to our cars. It isn't going to get better.

Just enjoy the ride while you can. There is no hope to fix anything.

When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.

There is _so_ much money to be made moving our farms into artificial climate controlled environments.

A thousand years from now, the Earth will look like Mars, and humans will live in a ring of satellites around the sun.

In a thousand years I think what we consider human will be a distant memory. Gene editing will transform our society. I call it the Michael Jordan Einstein theory

Convenience, and the absolute iron grip the chemical, petroleum, and retail industries have on politicians. Dare I say the only way to fix the problem with plastics is for a global leader to unilaterally lay tariffs on a wide range of plastic products and packaging, while eliminating them on alternatives to force the industry to move away from plastic.

Donating plasma may filter micro-plastics from blood. A study showed it to be effective for removing PFAS:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8994130/

AFAIK there hasn't been a study focused on plastics, but it seems plausible.

I guess the recipient of this plasma gets the gift of the micro-plastics.

You might want to read about the process of plasma harvesting and how plasma gets used before commenting.

People don’t want to be inconvenienced so they’d rather have plastic in their brains. So many people can’t cook their own food, fix their own stuff, read an instruction manual, read a book, distinguish fact from fiction, remember what they had for breakfast, remember their best friends birthday.

Even if you do all that stuff, you’re still going to have microplastics in your brain.

https://archive.is/72BDy

Plastic is a petroleum product and the petroleum industry controls nearly every news station (Fox + Murdoch is the big one) have trillions in lobbying dollars and has complete capture of the most powerful governments on Earth. What you think and the science about plastic and climate change that we've known for decades doesn't matter.

[flagged]

"Asking for help from the universe's Creator" is the popular tactic from the world's most regressive, Christian science-deniers and the greatest fools of our day.

With all due respect, no one is more diligently ignorant of expertise than the god-botherers. Is this not patently obvious?

I'm a scientist and engineer and dedicated to love for ALL human beings, unlike the hyprocrites who only love their own ethnicity or religiosity or country or whatever.

Always love. Teach to always love. Never hate. Teach to never hate.

Once one always loves, one only seeks to reduce misery and increase happiness.

If you're talking about America's GOP, they are inveterate liars who cause untold misery the world over. The New Testament warned us about them in 2 Timothy 3, among other places. The same goes for the most popular forms of the other religions -- corruption is rife not only in politics but religion, too.

This world is a better place when we treat each other as beloved friends, regardless of their form of religion (including none at all), ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual preference.

You should not confuse the teachings with the hypocrisy of the liars.

And RATM's debut album is the most important album of the 20th Century.

Appreciate the thoughtful and heartfelt response.

> If you're talking about America's GOP, they are inveterate liars who cause untold misery the world over.

Well, yeah. I mean, all you're preaching sounds lovely, but eg Pete Hegseth's "Western Christian Paideia" is a fascist call to arms: he literally titled his book "American Crusade," so how can I not find it impossible to trust anyone sporting a crucifix?

First, my friend, I don't support the crucifix at all. I support the teachings of love by Jesus and his ilk.

Second, fascists can NOT be of God, simply because God commands us to love one another, not harm or persecute them. I don't give a rat's ass about what a person says they believe, it's how they treat people that matters to God and to their karmic happiness.

There is no compulsion in religion. If there is compulsion, there is only evil. The only thing we are permitted (and commanded even) is to protect the innocent from persecution in any form. Religion must be every person's free choice. If a person is oppressing another person, irrespective of what reason that person gives, they are doing evil.

We can only impinge on another's free actions in order to protect others from physical harm.

So, in summary, fuck all fascists no matter their ideology or book or whatever. What a person says doesn't mean a damn thing -- it's what a person does, how they treat others, that matters. That is all that matters.

We are to be honest, kind, generous, caring, and compassionate to everyone we can. Once we embrace that ethos, we can then rain holy hell down on the hateful bastards that use their power to cause so much misery.

Gird yourself, my friend. Go within yourself and connect with God and ask it to make you a servant of love. I am at your service. Get ready, because those Goddamned motherfuckers are on some real evil shit and you better know good and well which side of the struggle you stand on.

And please don't blame the teachings of Christ for the hateful, manipulative, lying hyprcrites' evildoings. The enemy of man works against us by convincing fools to betray religion's love teachings. And they are all liars who think it's all going their way. They are wrong, but shit sure looks bleak at the moment.

Peace be with you, my friend. "The Way goes in." --Rumi

Could you please stop taking HN threads on these offtopic tangents? Once in a while is ok, but when it's your primary use of the site, that's not ok, especially when it's this repetitive.

I answered the question in the post's title, so my response is, by definition, on-topic.

There are a lot of things going on in the US currently where I could ask "Why aren't We Losing Our Minds over ....?" The answer is money. Moving away from plastic is expensive and consumers aren't demanding it so business as usual.

Losing my mind over the plastic in my brain wouldn’t do any good either, it’s already there.

Maybe the plastic is telling us to not worry about the plastic?

It's interesting to wonder that if something in the environment did cause widespread cognitive impairment, how long would it take for us to realize it was happening?

BahahahahahhahahhahHAhaa

We wouldn't. Not as a society at least. It would be "fringe conspiracy theories" to say such things to protect big plastic or something.

Potentially.

Good question.

I wonder if the Romans knew they were getting dumber from sweetening their food with lead.

Not just the Romans, but anyone over 50, particularly in urban areas, got dosed with plenty of lead as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead

Has anyone plotted the amount of lead in the electorate over time?

It'll be interesting to see as the baby boomers pass away [0] if the political pendulum swings from "rah rah fu got mine, cruelty is the point, suck it libt*rds" conservatism, back to liberalism. It'd give me hope that Tr_mp winning again was just "one last hurrah" of those right-of-center (or by international standards, far-right) in the US.

[0] https://incendar.com/baby_boomer_deathclock.php

If one had to pick a single demo that propelled Trump in ‘24, it was young men [1].

[1] https://apnews.com/article/election-harris-trump-women-latin...

Lead does not readily degrade, either. It is still in the soil, the dust, our building, our foods, et cetera. People seem to be generally less exposed in each successive generation, however.

https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/1570

The best example of this in recent history is probably lead. This sort of thing is likely to be multigenerational.

If you ask the average person today why we stopped putting lead in gasoline (or why we started, but I digress) I doubt you'll get a consistent or correct answer. I've no doubt the same could be said with respect to these plastics in fifty years.

Why we stopped, health. Why we started, can’t be anything other than profit.

Don't forget the part where we tried really hard to stop but denial and corruption meant we kept at it for decades too long.

Why we started, can’t be anything other than profit.

It was a technical issue. The lead prevented valve seat wear. IIRC, Honda was the first manufacturer to use hardened valve seats that didn't need lead.

So, ultimately, you can say that it was profit, but then every human activity can be reduced to profit and it no longer means anything.

> It was a technical issue. The lead prevented valve seat wear.

no, that has been debunked.

see https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/secret-history-lea...

How does that article debunk anything?

Yes, lead has anti-knock properties. There are other ways around knock, including chemicals that are described in your link. There was no way around accelerated valve seat wear until hardened valve seats became universal, which finally happened because lead was being banned.

did you read the article?

Plastic waves its hands: “this is not the plastic you’re looking for”

That only works on the weak minded...

My wife considers microplastic ingestion unavoidable and refuses to make any effort to mitigate it. So I think a certain "health-fatigue" spread around the world.

I cannot comprehend it but I can certainly observe it.

Because we'll get used to it. Or rather, those capable of handling it better will have a slight advantage and guide the hand of civilization.

Why lose your mind over something you cannot change?

It's because of all the plastic in there.

Because FOX and Newsmax is not covering it. No one cares about real science and facts in the US these days.

I care. But I do blame parents and schools for reducing the number of people interested in science.

On the plus side, there are amazing videos of all types of science freely available on YouTube. I think the basis is critical thinking and curiosity, and we need to continue to encourage this in schools.

I think the younger generations do have more critical thinking at their age than previous cohorts, simply because there is so much nonsense flying around and people are more sceptical/cynical than, say, 50 years ago. The trouble is how to produce content / character that rises above the slop and get their attention as an actually credible source of information.

I still expect that women will wake up to and react against the plastic in semen.

> So, yes, while correlation does not equal causation, these are fairly alarming signs. Yet we live in a country that believes wholeheartedly that we just keep doing what we are doing while we figure it all out.

Yes, I believe this wholeheartedly. I agree it's an important area to research, and I support regulations to try and minimize the amount of stuff that ends up in the environment and our bodies. It's pretty likely our great-grandchildren will learn about the bad old days when consumer goods were just shedding microplastics everywhere.

But I don't think it's worth giving up the benefits of widespread plastic usage while we figure out better alternatives, and I've never seen an argument that it is beyond the kind of vague gestures towards the naturalistic fallacy the source article presents. "Imagine 2.5 teaspoons of sugar. Now sub in plastic. Gross." - neither of these seem particularly gross to me.

Maybe because plastics isn't conductive?

Neuroplasticity

Maybe if it does have a negative effect it's just balancing out roughly what we got rid of with respect to e.g. leaded fuels.

As with most things, the answer is capitalism

Very insightful

Elaborate, please?

It's cheaper and more profitable to make thing out of plastic rather than something more durable/sustainable, and companies lobby against strong environmental regulations so they don't need to care about improving.

Not sure why this was downvoted, it’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. Even ideas as abstract as private property comes into play here, private owners are incentivised to make the most of their investments, and when one of the many main vehicles for wealth is land ownership, one is driven to find ways to maximise the use of that investment which in this case would be drilling oil which in turn gets further refined into plastics (among gasoline, etc.).

If we weren’t forced to live under a system that prioritises private ownership and the maximisation of profits, can we honestly say that we would independently come to the conclusion that our continued use of fossil fuels and their derivatives is okay and should continue?

Exactly! The only solution is bringing back serfdom and hoping the party appointed manor lord does a better job than what us greedy peons could ever hope to accomplish on our own.

Nobody here brought up serfdom except you and your snarky comment doesn’t provide anything of value or broaden the analysis here. The absence of capitalism doesn’t beget serfdom, it doesn’t even beget socialism or communism, it begets the absence of capitalism. Think bigger, friend.

Oh so what do you consider to be present in the absense of capitalism if not what came before it?

This is an impossible question to answer, nobody can predict the future. It’s not always a given that we would simply regress to what came before it, that’s the point. You don’t have the ability to predict the future either.

Unless you are suggesting total anarchy, usually criticism of one system would imply you desire some kind of alternative to replace it, or perhaps even some kind of amendment to the current system. It sounds like you don't have one?

But in that case, what now confuses me is your critique on private ownership. State ownership would be the alternative in this case, no?

But under the old systems, the ones that naturally manifested across the world for millennia, the natural flow is that elites in control of the state kick down the ladder and form tiered societies that limit social mobility. Through this they secure their position for generations. To do away with private ownership is to remove the checks that have been put into place to limit the power of elites who would otherwise have exclusive control.

While there have been many historical attempts to prevent this from happening, only the more recent political philosophies prescribed by liberal democracies in the past ~200 years have been effective in, even if only partially, mitigating this core issue of resource consolidation by elites. By focusing on meritocracy to the extreme (relative to before), liberal democracy and "capitalism" make power more fluid, it makes the ladder kicking more challenging (but not impossible). Yet these checks alone have given way to the explosive increase in innovation and quality of life we all now benefit from today.

Can we do better? Absolutely, especially as innovation opens doors to new ideas and capabilities.

But don't get confused by the semantics and abstractions masking the core of it all: Power. If your solution is to just re-centralize power to the group of elites in charge, even if they are elected, then regression is destiny.

Yes? A world with no private ownership and no maximization of profits is still going to find that the functional properties of plastics make one of them the best material for a wide variety of use cases. If you need something lightweight, sturdy, and either transparent or easily moldable, there's really no other option.

You're missing the point - it's not whether plastic is the best material for a use case, it's about the cost/benefit analysis of using it. Think asbestos - really good at not catching fire, with the slight side effect of royally messing up your lungs.

Plastic is great for all the reasons you describe, but it's really hell on the environment. The thing that offsets that side effect is its cheapness, and that's majorly a function of capitalism/private land ownership/the general way the world is organized right now.

I don't think it's true that plastic is cheap as a function of capitalism, private land ownership, or the general way the world is organized right now. It's cheap because it can be produced quickly and at scale from widely available raw materials. Abolishing capitalism wouldn't change the physics and engineering of natural gas wells, nor of the lumber mills and mining required to make paper and wood.

You mention asbestos, but I'm pretty confident we would not have banned asbestos if we didn't have other comparably effective building insulation materials. (Indeed, it's still used in many poorer countries where people are unable to afford the alternatives.)

> Abolishing capitalism wouldn't change the physics and engineering of natural gas wells, nor of the lumber mills and mining required to make paper and wood.

Of course it wouldn’t, I don’t think anybody would believe this. Abolishing capitalism would change the incentive for collecting and utilising those natural resources, though. It’s a lot easier to justify the made up idea of private property when you’re sitting on a pile of rocks that you believe will make you a lot of money than it is to justify sitting on a pile of rocks that a few people decided might be processed into something that’s a net positive to all of society. I have to wonder if plastics would be as ubiquitous as they are today if we didn’t have a very strong social and economic incentive to drill for its raw materials.

I don't see why abolishing capitalism would weaken the social and economic incentives to drill for natural gas either. Would a post-capitalist society no longer require electricity or heating?

Yes they would require those things, but there would no longer be an incentive to use energy sources that have the marginal benefit of making a few people very rich with the incredible downside of killing our planet.

Except the decades of materials science research demonstrates that even independently of those economic incentives, scientists understand that although plastics are incredibly valuable in a variety of applications, they’re not perfect (and at worst, actively harmful). This research is being done not because scientists would be sad to think of a world without plastics that provide land owning oil barons their precious return on investment, they’re researching it because science and human progress are what drive us forward. Thus, even in our hypothetical, it’s unclear that plastics (and their ubiquity even in applications where it doesn’t make sense) would win out.

It's currently more difficult and more expensive to find pure-cotton products... currently due to demand and scales of industry (cost). So if it becomes mroe of a deterrent that nylon friction in clothes is creating microplastics in our blood and respiratory system, then theoretically consumers devalue nylon-made products and increase value to pure cotton, demand goes up, costs go up, attracts more manufacturers and sellers for the value, then we'll see the shift back to pure cotton (or more likely a blend of organics).

Imagine if after all the panic over climate change, nuclear warfare etc, the thing that collapses our civilization is little bits of Tupperware in our brains? lol

I'm more scared of macroplastics, a 2 ton hunk of plastic falling on you will kill you way faster.

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