PlasticList – Plastic Levels in Foods
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I'd long since noted that as the jar emptied the grinders were increasingly ineffective. Thinking on why that might be ... I realised that this was because as you grind the pepper, you're also grinding plastic directly into your food.
There's surprisingly little discussion about this that I can find, though this 5 y.o. Stackexchange question addresses the concern:
<https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/103003/microplas...>
Seems to me that plastic grinders, whether disposable or sold as (apparently) durable products, are a class of products which simply shouldn't exist.
Searching, e.g., Walmart for "plastic grinders" turns up five listings presently, though it's not clear whether it's the body or the grinder itself which is plastic. In several cases it seems to be the latter.
<https://www.walmart.com/c/kp/plastic-grinders>
(Archive of current state: <https://archive.is/yIIX4>
Krell or otherwise.
While not food, another not so frequently talked about plastic exposure could be clothing dryer vents pushing materials from synthetic clothing into the air. It’s likely less of a problem than the rubber tires on our cars making their way into the air. But it was something that occurred to me while cleaning out the dryer vent this past weekend.
However, I wonder how bad eating bits of the plastic burr grinder actually is. Presumably, they mostly pass through. Stomach acid probably leaches a bunch of stuff, but is it worse than (say) canned tomatoes that were sitting in a plastic liner for a year? I’d wager the grinder bits have a lot of surface area from scarring. That’d increase leaching.
Anyway, I strongly recommend small turkish-style grinders:
https://bazaaranatolia.com/products/turkish-grinder-pepper-m...
(No idea if this brand is decent; the form factor is great, especially for $14)
It has roughly a single-recipe capacity, so I stick crushed red pepper flakes, cumin seed, celery seed, black pepper kernels, etc in it per the recipe, then grind until it is empty. The burr on the one I linked is metal.
I’d probably prefer stainless body + whatever is commonly used for espresso grinders, assuming such a gadget exists.
> These grinders are made of Zamak (brass and zinc)
If it's real brand-name ZAMAK, then it should at least be low in lead :)
Personally I would prioritize water filtering for PFAS over microplastics worries if you have limited budget to start changing consumption patterns.
3M and Dupont deserve the death penalty for it and should've been dissolved completely for crimes against humanity.
I've lived in communism and it was exactly the same. Pollution beyond any reasonable levels, testing chemistry on products and people, rules and regulations coming from government and faceless bureaucrats... The result was the same, but instead of corporate greed the reason was lack of any interest and foresight.
Well regulated capitalism is probably best equipped to deal with such. Whether ours is well equipped to deal with this is another question.
But the thing is capitalism is a tremendously powerful machine, so it's really more dangerous than an unmotivated Polish bureaucrat. The Soviets may have drained the Aral sea but capitalism has poisoned the entire planet (with TEL even before PFAS).
I had the same thought about demineralised water, you can get more expensive models which remineralise the water after, but it looks like it's not actually that important health wise because you get the absolute vast majority of your minerals through food, not water. And remineralisation is mostly for taste rather than health. Though I don't find the demineralised water tastes bad, but if you're used to drinking hard water it might be different.
https://learn.pfasfreelife.com/research/distillers-remove-pf...
Now have fun connecting it with steel tubing
I switched to bamboo toothbrushes from plastic a while ago, before de-plasticizing was really a thing. Now I'm glad I did, because plastic bristles grinding against my teeth seems like an easy way for plastic to get inside my body. The bamboo toothbrushes are pretty nice too, the bristles are soft but firm, and the handle is made of bamboo too.
The idea of brushing my teeth with plastic has lost its appeal for me and will never be recovered.
The simple wooden ones last a decade or longer and cost about 35 $/€/£
We are doing it on purpose, eating plastic that is, the only question is why!
And to be fair, it's still fairly uncertain. We demonstrated endocrine problems with BPA, but aside from that microplastic consequences on health still seems uncertain. At best we're mostly doing the correlation/causation thing that leads people down a confusing path of cure-alls and snake oil.
If there was a smoking gun for the consequences of this in our day to day living, surely it would be regulated out of existence[1], but thus far that evidence doesn't exist.
[1] - ha ha, who am I kidding. In reality industry groups would muddy the waters, try to pretend it's "political", finance astroturfing groups, and soon enough a certain segment of society will be proudly clutching onto their microplastics, demanding higher dose services, and ascribing it with magical cure-all powers.
surely, it's not so sure, especially with the current administration reversing so many existing policies. for example, reversing the restriction of asbestos is currently in the works. so adding new regulations on plastics use seems like something that the current policy makers will absolutely not be considering. at this point, I would not be shocked if they said they were reversing the bans on lead in gasoline or paints
I really, really hoped you weren't being serious...
But https://web.archive.org/web/20250624143349/https://www.nytim...
> After reading about micro plastics in the disposable salt and pepper grinders from the big box, stores broke down and bought these very nice all metal mechanism grinders.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/comments/1liyril/after...
I buy both coarse and fine grain salt. It's extremely cheap. You don't need to grind salt.
If the plastic particles are large enough, I assume we pass them.
The follow-up question you might want to ask though is: How often do you want to ask that question?
Yes, every tiny little bit is insignificant. That is true for most things, including actual direct poisons.
A better way to look at such discussions is not to assume that this very specific thing you are currently looking at is the one, only complete problem. Remember instead, in these posts we are looking at lots and lots and lots of tiny details, only a tiny part of the whole problem space.
Do you repeat that relevancy question for every single part? The answer, when you split the problem enough, is always "relevance is near zero".
That is the problem of our tiny brains not being able to comprehend the whole, requiring us to look at tiny parts one at a time. When you create the sum, or the integral, of a huge number of rounded-down zeroes you get zero, and now you have the wrong answer for the whole of the problem.
Even big problems consist of a huge number of tiny parts. Asking the summary question on each tiny part is not a good method.
Every tiny bit of plastic we find is exactly just that - one tiny piece of the big picture. By itself and alone it would be inconsequential. If it was just that one single source of plastic particles, we would not have this discussion. We are here, performing such research, having such discussions, because we have a very large number of such tiny pieces. The question of relevancy is for the whole. Whether this one particular piece of microplastic you ate today, which came from your plastic pepper mill, is the tipping point is not a useful or answerable question, it's all of them combined over time.
Asking the summary question IS important. If we all switch to reusable straws, will that save more or fewer whales than shutting down one coal plant?
If my tap water is injecting 99% of the microplastics in my bloodstream, IDGAF about pepper grinders.
And I eat pepper like it's "the black vegetable".
i like that too.
metal ones are also available in india, made of stainless steel and maybe other metals instead.
traditionally, people in india used a thick flat wide stone and a thick cylindrical stone grinder applied back and forth on top of the lower stone, to grind spices, onion, ginger, chilllies, turmeric, etc., into a paste or masala, which was then used in making curries, sambar, and other dishes.
https://www.natureloc.com/products/ammikallu-grinding-stone
also called aattukallu in tamil and iman dasta (iirc) in hindi or urdu, but searching for the latter only gave results for mortars and pestles, which are not the same thing as the one above, the ammikallu.
> "A. When soft stone like sandstone was used for milling grain, as the ancient Egyptians often did, residue from millstones could cause a serious problem over a lifetime, said Dr. Robert K. Ritner, associate professor of Egyptology at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Egyptian teeth have been well studied in mummies, and only the rare mummy had good teeth, said Dr. Ritner, who lectures on Egyptian medicine. ''They usually had heavy abrasion, and were sometimes so worn down at the crown that the pulp or even the root was exposed, which must have been horribly painful,'' he said. The Egyptians were obsessive about cleanliness, using a natural soda compound called natron for cleaning the mouth and sometimes a chewing reed to massage the teeth. They had few cavities, and the damage seen in studies pioneered by the English researcher F. Filce Leek almost certainly resulted from the residue of disintegrating millstones."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/06/science/q-a-teeth-and-mil...
[2] https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-whole-grains-damage-you...
thanks. i can imagine, now that you say it. wonder if there were / are other bad effects too, like on other parts of the body.
It also has the added advantage that I can go completely overboard on black pepper and I love it!
That linked StackExchange thread perfectly portrays why the site went down the drain.
>Maybe you'll ingest more microplastic on fish or proteins in higher food chain than grinders.
>If you drink tea you've got a lot more to worry about in terms of ingestion.
OK ... ?
>Your concern, although logically valid, is nearly impossible to regulate or even measure.
And yet, PlasticList is a thing.
>We're talking about amount that is, literally, microscopic.
Yeah Einstein, that's why they're called microplastics.
I am SO glad that place is extinct now.
https://us.peugeot-saveurs.com/en_us/inspiration/history/
The car business sold to Stellantis, but the lineage’s kaleidoscope of other enterprises apparently continues.
A good pepper grinder (and the Peugeot’s are top notch) is such an obviously valuable purchase. Lasts a decade and fresh pepper from a good grinder is much tastier. One of the best $35 to spend imo
Specifically: the grinder top is not mated with reverse threads. This means the act of grinding loosens the top. I have to stop and re-tighten quite frequently.
I suppose the design is perfect if you are left-handed ...
Your palm is meant to hold the nut in place. On the old ones the tightness of the nut was the control for fineness so it was necessary to hold it as you turned anyway. They moved that control to its own thing on the bottom a few decades ago (iirc) but kept the rest of it the same.
Personally I just dump kosher salt into a salt cellar and call it a day but I am sure there are plastic-free salt mills out there somewhere.
Get some large sea-salt flakes if you want to be fancy with salt.
Sometimes conveyor belts would be left running for days or even weeks in the test area. After a while, you would start to see very fine dust on and around the conveyor belts. This was finely ground POM plastic. On some occasions, there were actually heaps of that stuff forming beneath the conveyor belts.
In the factories, everything gets washed down with pressure washers at least once per day, so very little of this stuff goes into the food, but it definitely gets washed away out to sea.
I think that there is probably a wide-spread misunderstanding on how the micro-plastics enter the food. It does not seem very likely that it would come from the packaging or your tupperware (unless your tupperware is so old that it has actually started to disintegrate). It seems much likelier that the plastics were in the food before it was packaged.
Meanwhile, biology has no idea what plastic is and it seems like our bodies have a hard time filtering it out.
Sorry if you were joking and I missed it.
So am I reading this right you're probably an order of magnitude below the 'safe' limit even if you subsist solely off of RXBars and Sweetgreen? Which is not so far from me at one point in my 30s...
I didn't expect to open this chart and feel _better_ about my plastic consumption, maybe I'm just misunderstanding the chart. It seems even if the limits are 10x too high, you're still probably fine.
But yes, eating even a pound of the 100th percentile food daily seems to have well below the recommended amounts. So - update the recommendations?
3M began producing PFOA (the most infamous "forever chemical") in 1947. It has been widely used in industry, and many millions of pounds of the stuff have been dumped into waterways since then. PFOA manufacturers were aware of some of the negative health effects of the substance in lab animals in the 1960s. Researchers outside of corporate America began studying PFOA in the 1980s. In the early 2000s, PFOA exposure via drinking water began to get public attention due to a lawsuit against DuPont.
As far as I know, the US government had no recommended limit on PFOA exposure in drinking water between 1947 and 2009.
Since 2009, limits have become progressively stricter. (For the timeline below, I'm quoting https://www.nrdc.org/press-releases/epa-restricts-toxic-pfas... )
In 2009, EPA established provisional health advisories for PFOA at 400 ppt and for PFOS at 200 ppt.
In 2016, EPA set a lifetime health advisory of 70 ppt for PFOA and PFOS combined.
In 2022, EPA published interim lifetime health advisories of 0.004 ppt for PFOA and 0.02 ppt for PFOS.
In 2023, EPA proposed health-based maximum contaminant level goals (MCLGs) for PFOA and PFOS of 0 ppt.
A lot of these chemicals are newer and less well-studied than PFOA, and we may still be in the period where federal limits are hundreds or thousands of times higher than the true safe level.
It's very hard to maintain a mental ranked list of health things to be worried about when hypothetical concerns get more attention/coverage the confirmed ones.
Microplastics do nebulous harm, and it's difficult or impossible to control intake.
Obviously, varies dramatically from person to person.
(Not saying it’s a good trade off or that it’s the only or best way to achieve these things obviously)
How can ingesting plastics get me high?
Not saying that's a good thing. But giving up plastics (not just in our personal life, but across the entire supply chain we rely on) would probably be harder for the average American than giving up alcohol for a drunk.
...
The European Environment Agency’s two Late Lessons from Early Warnings reports (European Environment Agency, 2013, European Environment Agency, 1896-2000) highlighted the danger. The reports analyze the impact of past inaction (or action) on environmental damage caused by, for example, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and public health issues generated by exposure to asbestos or diethylstilbestrol (DES). Each case is deconstructed to identify patterns leading to delays in appropriate decision making. The insights led to recommendations regarding how to respond to new warnings with the precautionary principle, i.e. to act to reduce potential harm as the preliminary signs of harm are still arising. It is interesting to note that the EEA had difficulty in identifying any cases of overregulation of a pollutant that had turned out to be benign when all the science was in. Most early warnings turn out to be legitimate. The costs of inaction are often drastically underestimated (European Environment Agency, 2013).
"Where is the evidence that human exposure to microplastics is safe?", HA Leslie, MH Depledge, Environ Int. 2020 Jun 26;142:105807.
<https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7319653/>
We are aware of harms from materials leaching from plastics, as well as direct harms from PFAS (<https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-human-hea...>) and BPA (<https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25813067/>), to name only two of the myriad compounds and constituents of plastics.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
For example: DEHP - Endocrine disruption, disruptor of thyroid function, Ingestion of 0.01% caused damage to the blood-testis barrier... etc
source:
> findings in models show inflammation, cell death, lung and liver effects, changes in the gut microbiome, and altered lipid and hormone metabolism.
Microplastics aren't anywhere near as well understood as sugar or alcohol. There's a growing body of research associating them with negative health outcones, inluding observing them causing harm on a cell level (i.e. not just correlational studies).
It's definitely not true that there isn't evidence of harm. There's a lot. It's more that this is a new field of research and not yet fully understood.
https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/microplastics-ever...
My only question is was the cow milked by hand or by machine? The tubing in a milking machine almost certainly contains plastic.
I'd expect that it can pull all kinds of chemicals from the milking equipment.
It is in a glass bottle, so maybe not the greatest example: https://www.sciencealert.com/glass-bottles-actually-contain-...
Straight from the cow would be far more interesting with respect to what you are bringing up, albeit beyond the scope of the broader discussion.
For example, the cocoa powder from the 1920s https://www.plasticlist.org/product/990
Can anyone comment on the methods used here? Seems they don't have the same issues.
They used several various reactions (w acetonitrile, PSA, MgSO4, C18) to selectively dissolve / isolate the plastic compounds. This is also assisted by certain techniques (sonication, GC-MS/MS). They also added isotopically-labeled control plastic samples. That should enable them measure matrix affects and adjust for them in the non-control sample.
It is the isotopic labels that give me the most assurance.
While the ziploc bags had pthalates, I agree that it is probably not enough to impact the results, especially considering the lab used acetonitrile on the bags to test them. There's also the hand soap. These would probably cause a difference of + 80 at most.
Overall, I'd say the tests were the best we can get with current techniques / technology.
To fully assess the health impact of ingested plastics, we have to establish the underlying mechanism (e.g. bioaccumulation + endocrine activity) as well as the pattern of health consequences in real-world data.
The first part is easier and I believe has been demonstrated (especially regarding endocrine activity) fairly well.
The latter is notoriously difficult; it is probably better approached with animal studies as human association studies are too unreliable and would take too long to tease out effects.
Dosage is also an important factor and often makes poison-in-principle not poison-in-practice, though low-dosages over a long period of time may still have an effect that is not immediately noticeable. Bioaccumulation is also related to this.
As for the "plastic spoon" claim, it originated from this study -- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12003191 -- in Nature.
The study you list is specific to analysis of human blood, whereas the original was done on human brain tissue. The original study cites other papers that have demonstrated the accumulation of plastics in other organ tissues using different techniques so I wouldn't discount plastics research because of the potential flaws of one method. Plus the fact that in the original study, the level of plastics increased by 50% between those who died in 2016 vs 2024 and increased further in those with dementia suggests that there is a real relationship here and something to be concerned about.
There are many other studies that establish a negative health relationship here. I don't think we should discount them.
https://www.plasticlist.org/product/65
What are they grazing on, plastic lawn turf?
And you're right, there's also: plastic from water sources, plastic in the field that gets taken up by the gras, supplements given to the cow, plastic in the cutting board the meat was cut in, plastic the meat was wrapped in . . . it's hard to get plastic out of your supply chain.
https://www.primalmeats.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/gra...
But nobody said it was coming straight off the ground!
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/cows-eating-trough-made-blue...
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2CFFY4J/hay-bales-wrapped-in-heavy...
Think of it as democratizing PlasticList's methodology: you choose what gets tested, we handle the logistics of sample collection + lab work, and results are published openly to pressure companies toward cleaner supply chains.
Also, if it's crowdfunded, why am I unable to see any finished results without giving you my email?
It should clearly state the container (when multiple are possible) as that's likely the origin of 99.9% of the microplastics, as well as temperature. Prime example: "Starbucks Matcha Latte". I bet there are orders of magnitude difference in microplastic content between getting a hot one in a plastic (coated, if not fully) takeaway cup vs an iced one in a mug.
In general, containers and the way they're used generally make the difference, but all the focus here is only on the food item.
Don't research the poison of the plastics that wash out of those volatile fibers whiilst in the laundry machines. Oh, did you think that the only source of the micro-plastics in the water supply was water bottles?
I was originally inspired by PlasticList, and actually made a quiz on my website based off their data for people to assess their plastics exposure (quiz.neutraoat.com)
That would be amazing... if backed by science, and not just of the "herbal cleansing" ilk of products.
What's the science behind your claims?
> If you chop something on a plastic cutting board (because wood cutting boards are outlawed in commercial kitchens, apparently), test before and after chopping.
Who banned wood cutting boards from kitchens and for what purpose? I did some digging and some sources cite that neither FDA nor USDA strictly ban wood cutting boards, but individual state health departments are often strict on commercial kitchens that use wood instruments. I get concerns of wood being porous and all, but with the alternative being I have to ingest shavings from the plastic cutting board with every meal... Maybe it's time for a paradigm shift.
Wood is very hard to clean.
> COLLECTION LOCATION:
> eBay, sold by littlebitoeverythingjoe
> SHIPPED IN:
> Original packaging inside Ziploc bag
>
> SHIPPING METHOD:
> UPS Overnight
Independent efforts like PlasticList are probably going to be more and more important as research funding gets slashed and health-related data is suppressed or manipulated.
Also the negligible levels of plastic detected in plastic water bottles is surprising. I was under the impression, based on other reports, that water in plastic bottles is something we should avoid.
[0]: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/plastic...
- Korean War-era sugar ration
Vs.
- store-bought sugar
Your most dangerous plastic or microplastic is the PFAS. And the biggest source of PFAS is the water you drink. Does it run through plastic tubing? A pfas filter at any point? Sit in a plastic jug?
The most effective way to deal with this is to distill your water. Distilled water is nearly pfas free, and also removes bpas, lead, mercury, and any bacteria.[1]
https://learn.pfasfreelife.com/research/distillers-remove-pf...
Any web dev type can tell me what framework, if any, is that done with?
Other that that just styled HTML based on a quick look at the debugger window if there was another framework used its not obvious...
I mean I already have exposure to lead and asbestos, and the random particulates I breathe in aren’t going away. I feel like this is getting attention because it’s a new issue, not that all other concerns pale in comparison.
But by this same measure (intention of consumer vs. exposure) we find a deeper irony:
If you sort the entire dataset by "nanograms per gram", 3 of the top 5 items are prenatal vitamins:
However, for a single-serving meal, winning on per-gram isnt really helpful since we wouldnt eat a gram of a 1-serving salad.
Its sort of like how McMansions are actually inexpensive on a per-sqft basis, but how that isnt helpful since you have to purchase all 5000 sqft of the McMansion
Separately, I always knew there was a reason those RXBars taste like plastic. /s
A fairly responsible caveat.
I've avoided Shakeshack ever since.
There is a story in Hindu mythology about churning of the milk ocean, by gods and demons in cooperation, using a mountain as the churning rod, with an objective of extracting the nectar of immortality. After a great amount of churning, a great poison comes out which must be consumed, otherwise it ends the universe. Lord Shiva consumes it, but keeps it in his throat, to save himself and the universe. When the Nectar finally comes out, somehow gods trick the demons, to keep the nectar to themselves.
Sometimes it occurs to me that this story foretold the extraction of oil from ocean deeps, giving the luxuries to the developed world and pollution to the third world.