There are two macro population health trends that suggest we are somehow poisoning ourselves at a large scale. Most people do not relate the two, but I personally wouldn't be surprised if they have related causes.
The first is the Flynn effect, which was rising IQ levels decade over decade, which halted and then reserved for most Western nations around 1990s/2000s and is now declining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Also the metabolic syndrome/obesity epidemic. 40% of US adults have obesity. By 2030 about half of US adults will, and in 29 states more than half of adults will be obese.
We see obesity becoming increasingly normalized. People feel powerless to stop it and that we should just accept it.
It feels to me like there is something besides diet changes happening to us. That's part of it, but I wonder if microplastics or some kind of gut biome disruption is playing a role as well.
These so called "obesogens" just increase the propensity towards obesity and depending on exposure and your sensitivity to then, you can overcome them or not via exercise and dieting and other means.
>These so called "obesogens" just increase the propensity towards obesity and depending on exposure and your sensitivity to then, you can overcome them or not via exercise and dieting and other means.
The prevalence of sugar in so many foods can't help.
Personally I avoid "sugary" food and drinks like the plague. I also don't snack and do regular exercise and sometimes don't eat dinner. I'm at a healthy weight in my 40s.
How many adults that are obese have a healthy relationship with food and do regular exercise / fast? Obese children I have sympathy for, I'm uncertain how I feel about obese adults. I don't know if their metabolism is ultra slow, or they are just not taking care of themselves. Its complicated...
What about obese adults that used to be obese children?
Regardless of the cause of the obesity epidemic, it should be addressed compassionately and efficaciously. What makes that difficult (at least in the US) is that the most efficacious treatments aren't aligned with how the healthcare system works. Maybe you won't blame being fat on diet and exercise, but there's almost certainly a diet and excercise plan that will make you lose weight.
First-line treatment should be,
- Walk/jog 30 min, 3x per week. Pace for a mildly elevated heart rate.
- Eliminate super sweet foods from regular diet. No more than 3x per week. This could be VERY hard for sugar-addicted folks, so start small and work up.
- Fast occasionally. Intermittent is great, but longer is even better.
- Take a multivitamin.
The end goal is to replace your sweet craving with a fat craving and be ok feeling hungry for periods of time.
Obesity is caused by eating too much. If you don’t eat then you won’t gain weight, there is no subverting the laws of thermodynamics.
It sounds callous but if you go to Africa or visit a prisoner of war camp you won’t find many fat people and so blaming chemicals in America for so many fat people doesn’t make much sense to me.
The tunnel-vision on this subject is truly astounding. I can't think of any subject that is treated in the same way.
Say that someone was failing at university because they have no motivation. And they have no motivation because they have depression. Then a vocal minority would always butt in with the following truism:
- Failing university courses is caused by not studying enough. There is no subverting the fact that you need to study the material in order to not fail the course.
This is of course a completely useless advice/truism.
Now say that someone overeats because they have depression. Or because of some pathology caused by microplastics. Or let's just say that there is a possibility that a different environment (no microplastics) would lead to them not overeating. Do you still want to derail this conversation with irrelevant “thermodynamics” truisms?
'The mistake here lies in the assumption that it is possible to describe an object completely (we won't go so far as to say "explain") without making any reference to its relation to its environment (whether this relation be one of indifference, selective relevance and capacity for stimulation, of disconnection, or of closure). In order to avoid these problems, which arise from the point of departure taken, both subjectivist and objectivist theories of knowledge have to be replaced by the system/environment distinction, which then makes the distinction subject/object irrelevant.'
― Luhmann, Niklas (1990), The Cognitive Program of Constructivism and a Reality that Remains Unknown. In: Krohn W., Küppers G. & Nowotny H. (eds.) Selforganization. Portrait of a scientific revolution. Kluwer, Dordrecht: pp. 64–85, p. 66
I'd say more, but frankly, I'm only on hackernews rn because I can't bloody sleep and doing more than copy pasting would wake me up too much
It’s not looking for a reason besides the objective one, it’s trying to find the reasons behind the objective one.
Many commenters like to slight of hand their possibly objective comments about calories as making their comments about moral or will-power failings just as objective, when it’s not a transitive property.
Your argument is that forcing people to go without food causes them to lose weight, which is impossible to deny. You argument says nothing about what causes people to gain weight, however.
Just look up 'hormonal weight gain' to see that it isn't just about eating less. Then look at research into the influence of chemicals/micro plastics on those hormones.
Yes, all calories have to go in through the mouth. How those calories are processed, however, is influenced by a great many factors.
I visited the US a few years ago and I was shocked how much calories were packed in random foods. Some desserts/cakes alone were above 1000kcal. Basically in the US I had to be very careful and calorie counting and I got the impression if you eat randomly you'll end up with a very high calorie intake (typically above 3000 per day), whereas this is usually less true in Europe (but it's getting less true every year) and you might end up just a bit overweight instead of obese by eating randomly.
>How those calories are processed, however, is influenced by a great many factors.
I feel compelled to assume that we can't possibly be extracting every calorie from certain types of food. Caloriometers work differently from human digestive systems.
That's correct, but we're pretty efficient - from 75 to 99%. This is typically around 90% except for fiber, which is marked down in calorie labels already. It also depends on what exactly you're doing with the energy, if you're in a calorie surplus then protein to tryglyceride metabolism is less efficient than, say, dietary fat to tryglyceride, but this can just be neglected.
But yeah, human digestion is pretty efficient. Muscles are far less efficient though, around 30%, which is a neat fact.
The comment started with "Obesity is caused by eating too much." At the core, this is very much the objective truth. If it so happens that someone processes cake or calories differently than others, they need to eat less cake and take in less calories.
The pervasive obsession with avoiding this truth is concerning and has had a detrimental effect on society. How many of us know someone who passed away from COVID due to this kind of unhealthiness? Primary Care Physicians and health professionals out there need to step it up and be truthful with people.
I can acknowledge the extreme cases where this may not be possible, but 9/10 times we can take ownership of our lives whatever the situation, clean our diets and get out there and exercise.
In an environment awash with cheap calories, some people get obese and some don't. That's something worth investigating. (I personally think it's more about natural mental variation than subtle chemical poisoning, but that's probably just my bias talking).
Also the big elephant in the room is most people are hardly active. Your body is designed to forage for miles a day. Who even bothers simulating that? We walk to the fridge and from grocery store to parked car at most. Its so much easier to maintain good health if you are active.
It doesnt matter how we developed. My city developed for walking first. I can and do walk to places like 10 mins to the grocery store. The problem is for most people, if they have an easier choice than physically moving they take it. So they would rather drive two minutes than walk 10. Its also evident whenever I see an escalator. The escalator will be full of able bodied people while the stairs along side it that take as long to get up as standing still on the escalator are empty, because people chose the option that involves the least effort every chance they get. Never mind getting a little bit of leg exercise on the stairs. At work I routinely see healthy people take the elevator 1 floor instead of the stairwell right next to the elevator.
We have to be taught the value of exercise and being physically active because most people don’t default to that.
True in the technical sense, but it doesn’t address the mystery that in the 40s, 50s, 60s people in rich countries had access to plenty of food, ate lots of calories, and yet obesity was very rare.
That’s no mystery. The amount of calories the average person expends has decreased as we’ve become more sedentary.
In the 40s, 50s, and 60s most people did manual labor and even office jobs were not as sedentary since you couldn’t just sit at a computer.
Here’s another simple overlooked example, grocery shopping, before the rise of superstores you’d go into town and visit 4 different stores. The butcher, the hardware store, the grocer, the pharmacist etc. now it’s all in one big store all next to each other.
Here’s another example lawn mowing. Back then most people had manual lawnmowers.
Here’s another example the moving of goods. Go look up a picture of the manual labor involved in being a stevedore back then versus now and that’ll give you an idea of how much less physical exertion is needed these days even in jobs that are still considered manual labor.
Overall I think solely blaming plastic for obesity is an oversimplification and assuredly wrong, although it could have some affect there are a lot of other things going on.
Declines in fertility and IQ are most likely due to obesity so it’s a big issue.
To add onto this it seems there’s a causation of low iq with obesity but not vice versa.
I also just had this thought about declining levels of fertility in humans. If it’s being caused by external factors like plastic or any pollution we’d expect to see similar effects in all other mammals especially ones close to human populations.
I wasn’t able to find any studies backing this up with just a cursory search, but it is likely the easiest way to add or detract from the plastic hypothesis.
I do know that not all but most studies comparing fertility between decades found that when controlling for obesity the differences were not statistically significant between time periods.
Trite, but accurate. I gained 50 lbs within 6 months after I quit smoking, when I had been skinny for decades prior. There is no doubt in my mind that the (justifiable) demonization of smoking in recent decades contributed to the obesity crisis.
But not eating slows down your metabolism, and then you will eventually find yourself at a point where you are tired all the time because you are not consuming enough calories to have a high enough metabolism and energy level, and yet you are still slowly gaining weight because you are too tired to do anything to burn it off.
Starvation mode is a myth. Well, kinda. You do enter "starvation mode" where your metabolism significantly slows down, but only if you're actually starving. Simply eating in a caloric deficit will not do anything to your metabolism.
The beginning of this article talks about that in great detail:
I thought there have been studies finding that simply eating less doesn't necessarily work for some people because of metabolism. Maybe they have a thyroid issue too.
And that the amount you would have to limit yourself to with a completely sedentary life (like many people have) and still be in a caloric deficit is just not sustainable for people and would make you feel absolutely miserable and also unlikely to get enough vitamins and minerals and cause other health problems.
because let's be honest, telling people to eat less is not going to stop them from eating junk, just less junk.
"Just eating less" I don't think is really enough for most cases. You need to also be active and exercise along with, and even better, be eating the right balance of macros.
I would say you need to do maybe 2 of the 3 to lose or maintain weight, and doing all 3 will certainly allow you to lose weight. But doing just 1 is unlikely to see results.
> "Just eating less" I don't think is really enough for most cases. You need to also be active and exercise along with, and even better, be eating the right balance of macros.
To lose weight, you need to eat in a caloric deficit, that's it. Excercising just burns extra calories which allows you to eat more while staying in a deficit.
And macros / less junk food are, of course, important for health, but if we're speaking strictly about weight loss, no, it doesn't matter. FWIW, you can eat only a Big Mac and 3 Snickers bars every day, and you'll still lose weight, because that's about ~1800 kcal, which is a deficit for most people.
> the amount you would have to limit yourself to with a completely sedentary life (like many people have) and still be in a caloric deficit is just not sustainable for people and would make you feel absolutely miserable and also unlikely to get enough vitamins and minerals and cause other health problems.
That depends on what you eat really, there are a lot of foods that don't have a lot of calories while still being very nourishing, and many of them are just normal foods, not some special "fitness stuff"
---
The article I linked in my above comment is actually a great explanation of why "just eating less" is enough for most people, I highly recommend you read it if you haven't already.
Obesity is caused by eating too much of the wrong thing.
Which happens to be the cheap thing in industrialized mass produced Western food chains. Cheap in terms of dollars and personal time.
So obesity is really an economic problem.
We should come down like a ton of bricks on fast food and require they offer healthier options at low prices, subsidized by taxes on their unhealthier options.
Or more simply, you could not subsidize the cheap unhealthy options at source (eg corn subsidies).
But until very recently, I would absolutely have still chosen the unhealthy option. I'm not sure how much impact 20% on a bag of Doritos is really going to have.
Not sure you're going to shift US corn subsidies without changing the electoral system. ;)
To me, substitutability is key.
If you tax unhealthy food, but unhealthy food is the only option (from physical, financial, and time perspectives), people just pay more to eat unhealthy food.
If you tax unhealthy food, but also require healthier and low-cost options at the same establishment, then people begin to have options. I.e. do I want a $10 Big Mac or a $3 grilled chicken sandwich?
Even getting the Big Mac less often would be a net win.
And I call bullshit if McDonald's tries the "But it's impossible to run healthy food through our supply chain..." argument.
I'm saying I would have picked the unhealthy option. I know this, because I spent decades doing it when I certainly wasn't hurting for money. Maybe on a population level it would work, and I'm just atypical. Can we look at sin taxes on cigarettes and draw any conclusions?
Apparently the relationship between income and obesity is complex enough to vary by race and gender. Which is to say, not tightly coupled. (CDC studies)
Cigarettes are a great example of missing substitutability.
If you smoke, and the price of cigarettes increases, what options do you have?
My version of an anti-smoking campaign would have drastically boosted the price of cigarettes and used to tax to decrease the price of nicotine patches or gum.
If there aren't alternatives at the point of sale, there aren't alternatives.
> If there aren't alternatives at the point of sale, there aren't alternatives.
I agree. But most of my bad food choices are made in supermarkets. Next time you're at a checkout, look for the healthy trolleys and the unhealthy trolleys. Honestly, the difference is stark. (When I go on a health kick, I find it amazing how many aisles I just don't need to walk down. So much processed food).
On the tax point I'm going to try to argue you away from the concept of hypothecated tax, because I think it's almost always a bad idea. Money is fungible, and taxation all goes into a single pot. Tying tax and spending together is a rhetorical trick, meant to manipulate public opinion - whenever you see a politician doing that, there's a good chance they're trying to con you.
If we're going to put a sin tax on something, we should do it because it's the right thing to do. If we're going to fund a health programme, we should do it because it's the right thing to do. But these decisions are orthagonal. Tying them just unnecessarily binds government's hands wrt future policy changes. Worst-case, you end up funding obsolete health programmes, "because that's what the tax is for".
How many people are going to go to McDonald and order to tofu instead of the burger exactly? What's more the problem isn't the mere choice of the burger its the choice of the double burger with bacon, super sizing it, adding fries and lets top it off which a chocolate shake.
For practical purposes you either need to eat modestly at McDonalds or more realistically not eat at McDonalds very much.
You can replace McDonalds with "eating out" because you don't need to go crazy with supersizing and milkshakes to eat past your calorie budget in a single meal.
When we eat out, we easily eat 1000+ calories. That's over half the daily calorie budget of a 5'5 woman. Yet it's just one of the meals people eat in a day.
People like to come up with a bunch of reasons for why we eat too much or why the food we eat is somehow making us fatter than it might otherwise but we gloss over how trivial it is to overeat caloric dense foods even if "obesogens" and microplastics never existed.
Which is why we can't fix or even effect in any meaningful way by making McD offer lighter fare. What ends up happening is we end up paying a bunch of assholes with masters degrees to administer the program. McDonald's pays a bunch of assholes with bachelors degrees to figure out how to maximize their gain. Before long they are touting their healthful options which take up about 6sq inches on their board on commercials so that people don't feel bad or unhealthy when they roll up to the drive through window even though they actually ordered the double quarter pounder and the ass expander 2000 shake.
Fast forward a little bit and their lobbyists have convinced government to further incentivize healthy options by paying Restaurants that implement absolutely meaningless standards that do nothing for anything and we are actually subsidizing giant asses whose milkshake brings all the obesity adjacent diseases to the yard.
If you actually want to disincentivize negative things you have to either actually forbid them or just make it more expensive. Incentives will always be gamed and end up as free giveways. See bullshit carbon credits.
Want people to eat fewer big macs? Tax them at 100% and watch most of the cheap fast food implode and cease to exist. Want those people not to starve watch in amazement at a virtue of UBI you can tax things out of existence that destroy people's health without starving people.
God bless you sir/madam, but I’m not wrong. There may be some people with “glandular” issues causing them somehow to eat too much but I don’t think I’m saying something controversial when stating that americas obesity crisis is mostly just to do with lazy sedentary people who like eating and watching tv more than eating healthily and doing exercise. Blaming micro plastics, hormonal imbalances blah blah etc is a waste of time, and won’t result in any benefit to anyone.
Most people just need to hear the hard and brutal truth, you’re going to die young because you’re fat and you’re fat because you’re lazy and can’t handle some small amount of effort to abstain or go for a walk.
> It feels to me like there is something besides diet changes happening to us. That's part of it, but I wonder if microplastics or some kind of gut biome disruption is playing a role as well.
Based on what many people have in their shopping carts and the sugar water many people are constantly chugging, I see no reason to think anything other than excess calories is the cause. And lack of exercise as an exacerbating factor.
Excess calories are the proximate causes. The factor that causes excess calories are likely multifactorial such as car dependency, toxic advertising, and environmental toxins such as obesogens, and more, including unidentified factors.
Maybe fat as well ? Not the one in walnuts and linen seeds but the pork, diaries and coconut. Not an expert at all, just wondering in what extend we should avoid them comparing to sugar.
I was in the metabolic syndrome and obese group, and I have some thyroid problems (likely due to growing up near a uranium enrichment facility). I could diet and exercise and still gain weight that was largely visceral fat, and especially fat in my liver. I was in the beginning stages of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
Under my doctor's supervision, I went on the keto diet. I eat high fat foods and meats, and I lost about 50 lbs in 2 months. My weight stabilized over the following months within a healthy range. Additionally, chronic pain, concentration, and energy levels all improved. Most of this is due to the weight loss, but not all of it. Sugar can cause inflammation in high quantities, and it can also cause an increase in blood pressure. Sugars are also metabolized by cancer cells while ketones are not, which would explain the rise in cancer rates as sugar consumption has increased across the planet. My liver function improved, cholesterol levels improved, blood sugar stabilized, and insulin resistance went down.
I personally believe that there is some kind of difference among humans in how we digest things that goes beyond the microbiome. Some people can eat high amounts of carbohydrates and sugars without negative consequences beyond tooth decay. Other people cannot eat any sugar without incurring weight gain and cognitive problems.
Fat by itself is very satiating, you'd struggle to rack up the calories eating purely fat unless you were really trying. However too much sugar without fibre will spike your blood sugar levels which triggers an insulin response, causing your body to effectively store any glucose in your bloodstream into muscle and fat cells[0]. The end result is you're hungry again and able to eat more calories. Combine that with a high fat diet and you have a recipe for obesity.
When I used to weight train, during my cuts (weight loss phases), I had much more success with a high fat/low carb diet than I ever did calorie counting (which naturally makes you avoid fat since they have a higher calorie density).
[0] Not an expert but this is my layman's understanding after reading lots of books on the subject.
here is a study on the negative effects on aquatic life:
"In aquatic invertebrates, microplastics cause a decline in feeding behavior and fertility, slow down larval growth and development, increase oxygen consumption, and stimulate the production of reactive oxygen species. In fish, the microplastics may cause structural damage to the intestine, liver, gills, and brain, while affecting metabolic balance, behavior, and fertility; the degree of these harmful effects depends on the particle sizes and doses, as well as the exposure parameters"
> It feels to me like there is something besides diet changes happening to us.
Well sure, obesity is a result of a lot of factors, some genetic, but a lot of it is the food environment surrounding people. The lack of easy access to healthy foods or education on how to buy and prepare them, plus economic pressures all play into this.
> a lot of it is the food environment surrounding people
Yup. It is hard to pull all the factors apart because they contribute to each other. If you are obese, I understand it screws up your hormones which makes it easier to stay obese. Also if you have exposure to chemicals which cause you to have a tendency towards being obese you are more likely to seek out a bad food environment - e.g. crave McDonald's fries, etc.
So you sort of just need to work on each factor and over time, it will change. For many, we already have significantly accumulations of forever chemicals or microplastics so it may take a generation to truly fix.
This the one area the administration should go after instead of alcohol or whatever else they think they’re doing. By addressing obesity, making it uncool, taxing the living daylights out of sugary additives, etc they would save more lives than the lives combined in all their other feel-good, virtue signaling efforts[1]they sound nice and all but in thd end this effort would actually save a many more lives.
[1]gas stoves and ranges, overhead fans, etc. and of course when they released a trial balloon they accused people of conspiracy theory thinking -but here we are. Meanwhile sweeteners and fillers are everywhere.
Do you see an administration going after obesity the way they did tobacco? (negative ads, advertising bans, etc)
Unlike smoking, half the class is already fat. NGOs and media would frame it as a psychological harm to those children, fat-shaming, or who knows what else. It would be a political landmine.
Unfortunately, I don't. They seem to baby obesity, including the media where obese people like Lizzo and others are celebrated for being unapologetically fat. I understand bulimia is an issue too and we don't want kids especially to think they need to be waifs, but now this sentiment pendulum has swung way too far to the other side and they accommodate obesity in every which way. The only fat people the media seem okay to chastise are Trump and I think maybe Chris Christie & very few others?
No, this should be confronted as _the_ health threat of the next 20 - 30 years. It's more consequential than anything else, Health-wise, productivity-wise, medical costs, quality of life --All these shoppers in their electric 4-wheeled scooters. It's insane that this is not a declared crisis.
They may only eat 2 meals a day but they likely snack too. If you only eat 2 meals a day and do not eat between meals you are most likely going to be a normal weight.
I'm gonna need some more hard evidence before I believe that microplastics in the human body play a strong causative role in both infertility and changing IQ scores (and first you have to convince me of the import of IQ scores).
It's a classic "jacking off butterflies" response. That's a reference to the TV show Childrens Hospital, in which one of the doctors finds a cure for cancer and it's butterfly semen. One of the other characters says something along the lines of "We both know cancer is an amalgam of unique conditions, it should be impossible to find a single cure" but they brush it off and starting jacking off butterflies. That's how I feel whenever people try to reduce complex social phenomena to a single simplistic cause. "We both know it can't be just this one thing, but let's pretend it is because that's easier to solve."
I don't deny that there is more and more research every day about the negative impacts of microplastics on the human body. From my place of relative ignorance, it still seems that more sweeping claims like "Microplastics are responsible for the Flynn Effect and the male infertility crisis" are awfully bold. You throw obesity in there too, and doesn't it seem like folks are trying to pin all of society's ills on a single issue? It's like when people try to pathologize black people by arguing that all their social ills are actually just due to lead exposure. That has proven to be a very shaky argument, and one that has to plow through a lot of nuance and complex social phenomena to land on a materialist claim so simplistic that it's kind of infantilizing.
Plus, the obsessive focus on IQ reeks of bad social science.
> it still seems that more sweeping claims like "Microplastics are responsible for the Flynn Effect and the male infertility crisis" are awfully bold
You are making my original statements into a straw man argument. I didn't say they are fully responsible, but rather I think they are contributors.
I even asked in my original post what else could be contributing:
> I think microplastics along with forever chemicals/PFAS are two of the likely culprits and are probably fairly easy to deal with.
>
> I wonder what else could be contributing?
Lead does reduce IQ and increase crime. Here is a meta-analysis that tries to tease out how much lead was responsible for crime and homicide:
Banning lead gasoline was the right thing regardless. It was causing harm. It is hard at the time to know exactly how much.
You then wrote:
> You throw obesity in there too, and doesn't it seem like folks are trying to pin all of society's ills on a single issue?
I do think we are poisoning ourselves in probably a few different ways -- we have made so many novel chemicals without significant safety testing that a good chunk of them are probably harmful and can also likely build up over time. If we can continue to deal with these harmful chemicals that have clear links to negative health outcomes, we will be better off as a society.
The trick is to keep studying them and then act on those studies to mitigate the harms of those chemicals.
The world is complex and there is usually not a singular cause of everything. But that doesn't mean we should just throw our arms up and say, oh no, I can not do anything it is all just too complex or overwhelming. No, instead you just have to do, as Anna says in Frozen II, "the next right thing:"
I think we agree more than we disagree. I believe we need to seriously study the effect of microplastics on the human body. I believe the federal government should follow California's example (at a minimum) and take a heavier hand in regulating PFAs and testing water for microplastics. Microplastics are causing a number of negative health effects, some of which are known, many of which are unknown. I don't think we should throw our hands up and give up, not at all.
And yet the study you shared about lead actually proves my point. The meta-analysis showed that the impact of lead on crime is overstated in the literature. And I know a number of sociologists/criminologists, and (though this is anecdotal) they take the lead hypothesis far less seriously than this meta-analysis does. Partially that's due to the fact that this was written by economists, the natural enemy of sociologists. But I digress.
My argument is that simple "scientific" answers to complex social problems get overstated, while the messy stuff gets overlooked. It's a cognitive bias that especially affects the kinds of people on this website, because it substitutes complex social scientific problems with "simple" chemical cause and effects. It doesn't means we we shouldn't address the very real public health crisis. But remember, Rome wasn't built in a day, and it wasn't destroyed by lead pipes. That's a myth.
Your default position should actually be caution considering how the introduction of foreign elements to the human body, especially one that enters the bloodstream, generally causes some kind of illness. See steroids, chemotherapy, heck even the antibiotics that we are prescribed to take sometimes. Why should microplastics get a pass by default in your worldview?
And don’t you think there’s disproportion in your asking for a total and convincing argument to believe otherwise, while also claiming that the basis of your doubt is some scene from a TV series that performs bathroom humor?
> The first is the Flynn effect, which was rising IQ levels decade over decade, which halted and then reserved for most Western nations around 1990s/2000s and then started to reverse a bit:
Same point in time where people started to get cell phones and be always connected to the internet.
Underrated comment. When I was growing up I would often read books and do math problems for fun because there was not much else to do. Now I am constantly on the internet watching things and using my brain very little.
I'd like to offer a single datapoint(mine) on this too, I'm going to university soon and in the last few years, the fact that the internet exists has allowed me to solve interesting math problems that I would've never learnt in school
Ban plastic food containers for any type of long-term storage or anything that gets heated up (and different plastics have different microplastic shedding profiles, so ban the worst first) and also ban PFAS in anything that gets close to food. It will increase costs, but the alternative is we poison ourselves, so it is sort of needed. Phase it in so that industries have time to adapt.
Plastic food containers aren't even close to being the largest source of microplastics.
Synthetic fibres in clothing (like that cotton-poly blend shirt you're most likely wearing) and motor vehicle tyres are some of the bigger sources. These both also release particles directly into the atmosphere allowing them to get absolutely everywhere, unlike plastic in landfills that probably has a harder time escaping into the wider environment.
> Plastic food containers aren't even close to being the largest source of microplastics.
Can you give me some citations? I know that microwaving plastic containers is about the worst thing you can do with regards to microplastics, because it releases tons of them right into your food:
Both that headline and article are cringeworthy. You can’t extrapolate a bunch of flawed experiments like that to anything real.
This is a hot area of research but that means it’s a hotbed of flawed and sensationalist research.
Dunking embryonic cells in a bath of ridiculous concentrations of nanoplastic chemicals and watching them die is cute and a tired, stupid trick. If you put any of your cells in your favorite drinking water they’re going to lyse. It doesn’t prove shit.
i would love a citation related to the polyblend tshirt. I absolutely love them but if its poisoning me more significantly than microwaving food in plastic containers, i will gladly return to hemp
It's almost as if it was the adoption of the microwave oven that signaled the roller coaster was beginning to race downhill.
God, I wish I could go back to non-plastic packaging. Natural peanut butter I can still find in glass, as I can for my jelly. But mayonnaise, ketchup and countless other items are in plastic-only containers.
Things like the microwave lowered the friction point for making food and snacks so I'm sure it is part of it. I honestly think people forget how much more friction was involved to have a bite to eat even just 20 years ago, and even more so 40 years ago.
Plastic food packaging is crazy to me, but also lowers the cost of food because of transportation. I would love to see a situation where you buy food in glass bottles and take thise cleaned glass bottles back to the store for resuse, for example. On plastic, on strategy for healthy eating is to be as strict as you can about buying food packaged in plastic. This is getting harder, but it forces you to get the majority of your food from the produce and butcher. Of course, one lived in places (like DC) where such a strategy might seem less possible.
You might not but more microwave meals come in plastic trays, as do most other microwave foods. I use mine mainly to reheat leftovers, which are in glass of ceramic but that doesn't appear to be the majority use case judging from what I see at the houses of friends and family. Plastic and the microwave seem to be madly in love with each other.
This is probably mostly the right answer to the obesity problem. Most condiments and packaged "food" is garbage food. If argue that a majority of products in a typical grocery store don't need to be there.
That’s hardly the only source. And the plastics are already in the ecosystem and circulating for a very long time even if we banned all plastics today - which we won’t and instead every year we produce and use more
Sure, everything is multi factor. Saying things are complex is a way to ensure there is no action taken ever.
> And the plastics are already in the ecosystem and circulating for a very long time even if we banned all plastics today - which we won’t and instead every year we produce and use more
Sure, but the sooner we act, once we know for sure this is a significant contributor, the sooner we stop making the problem worse.
I want my children to be able to have children, don't you?
I think that with the advances in refrigeration, materials, logistics, we can safely go back to having bulk food for a lot of our needs. Also reusable glass containers instead of plastic bottles (e.g. for milk, oil, etc.)
> It will increase costs, but the alternative is we poison ourselves, so it is sort of needed
I hate to be that guy, but it's easy to say costs increase is a lesser problem when you are not in the lower end of the economic spectrum. What would happen to people who barely survive today? Corporations won't decrease their profit, gained by using cheap plastic, for the greater good.
Considering the alternatives are metal and glass, I'd assume that the cost difference would be exponential, especially if the most common alternative is banned and transport will be much heavier.
IIRC, cost-benefit analysis (even in terms of health and other human indicators) suggests we probably should have kept at least some uses of DDT, as a lot of people have died of malaria because we didn't.
I wonder if that factors in the health and ecological effects of atrazine, neonicotinoids, glyphosate, and other substances. Many of their effects are the same as the effects of the other substances being discussed ITT.
Well then there are two straightforward questions:
- are the overall costs of plastics (namely pollution and its environmental and health effects) higher than the costs of banning plastics? Seems like a clear yes.
- what are the redistributive effects? Seems like: consumers are net winners (lower health effects, some or all financial costs of switching away from plastics are passed down to consumers through higher prices); some firms are losers (mainly those who produced plastics or used a lot of them) and some are winners (newcomers, producers of no plastics solutions, transporters).
Glass isn't really that expensive. It was cheap enough to be commonly used 100 years and it is only cheaper and easier to produce and transport today than it was then.
If the Flynn Effect is caused by more complex environments, it's possible we've just maxed out the improvements to be had from turning up the gain on that. Maybe this is just as smart as we get because of hard biological limits.
Is there no existing population that has been minimally affected by these 2 factors ?
A controlled study is impossible to do, but the correlations and trend lines should show up when comparing across different population wide exposures to PFAs and microplastics.
That's another reason I think it is important to keep granular data of localized IQ, fertility, and trends in reproductive choice. People are worried about what it will reveal. We should instead be worried about what we're missing.
Sure, there are plenty of such populations. The first one that comes to mind is the Kogi, who live in a sky island 4000 meters above northern Colombia:
But none of those populations can actually be used for testing, because you would need to collect relevant data on them starting 50 years ago, and we don't have any time machines.
I used to think this, that the obesity thing was just a function of an increase in calorie consumption and a drop off in physical activity. I just can't take this view seriously anymore. When you look around today, there are body types that never existed prior to the 1970s - at least at any kind of scale. Comparing pictures of family gatherings from the 1950s through the 1970s, and then to the 1990s and beyond and there's such a stark, shocking difference. Two of my cousins had gastric bypass surgery (before they passed away), and there was never a real change in their diet or exercise (one was a cop, so it's not like he didn't get exercise). Something is poisoning us in America, and if there was one issue presidential candidates should be talking about that should be an easy bipartisan win it's health and fitness.
Whenever I tried "eating healthy" without calorie counting, I didn't lose weight. 6 weeks on keto to lose 200g was demoralizing.
Then I did calorie counting with MyFitnessPal and ate at a 500 cal deficit, and I lost weight. It works. But I pretty much had to stop eating out because I couldn't know the numbers on restaurant meals. I was basically eating raw food half the time, just to make it easier to calculate.
I'm surprised there's no government initiative to help people do calorie counting. Open up-to-date database, force restaurants to feed it nutritional info, etc.
It is the calories. We are simply eating many more calories than in the 1970s. Cheap, high calorie, highly processed food were not ubiquitous like they are today.
Being a cop is a very sedentary position in most of America. Unless you are a city cop out walking around you are probably in your car most of the day.
I'm not being clear, because there's some confusion in the replies to my comment here and elsewhere in the larger thread. I'm not denying that calorie counting helps most people lose weight. I did it to cut after a gain phase when I was training for certain events. Of course it works (for most people), and I agree with you that I wish more people did it.
What I am saying is that, for many and an increasing number of people, something is wrong - calorie surplus or not - with that they're ingesting. Even the physiology of being "fat" in the 1950s looked absolutely nothing like obesity does today. The "processed" part is the difference, though, so we certainly agree on that point.
I wonder if the Flynn effect could be more about our cultural environment then our chemical environment.
In 1900 lots of people lived with low access to information or highly sensory stimulating environments. By 1950 there was a lot more stimulus and info. TV, comic books, color movies, rock & roll, fear of nuclear armageddon. By 2000 we're overloaded. Cable TV, computers, cheap and rapid long distance communication, fear of climate armageddon. Maybe the cognitive load has just become too much. Two beers might make you better at darts, but 20 won't.
The Wikipedia article on the Flynn effect mentions air pollution. Though this is a little surprising because in some parts of the West, air pollution has decreased since the introduction of acid rain controls in the 1980s, while the decline shows up generally after the 90s.
Solvent-extracted hydrogenated seed oils for one thing.
Canola is an industry term, not Latin plant name, but why would culture repressed by toxic ersatz foodstuffs and microplastics care to know about brassica seeds?
I was pretty disappointed to learn that hexane is still commonly used for solvent extraction of vegetable oil. Residual levels are generally < 50 ppb, but hexane metabolites can covalently bond to biomolecules [1] and take years to be removed [2]. There are tons of safer solvents to choose from.
Out of sight out of mind.
humans rarely react to anything unless they see it. If microplastics caused us to bleed out our eyeballs, things would change quick.
...we should be just fine in the (English-speaking) west then: to a first approximation, no-one can afford the US health services outside dire emergencies, while over in the UK they're busy "starving the beast" so they can privatise huge swathes of it.
i don’t think evolution works that fast; the only thing that fast would be something like selective breeding for dogs, but thats intentional; the type of evolution you’re talking about is more on the order of 10^6 years
Everyone always says this but I’ve never heard it from an actual evolutionary biologist. Some genes evolve faster than others; in fact, some genes have themselves evolved to be able to evolve faster.
Evolution is working every single generation. Dogs no more or less than humans or anything else.
Dogs were selected, but everything responds to environmental pressures. All the time. Natural ones no different than human-provided ones, right?
And humans have changed more in the last 50K years than in the 1M before that. Because of civilization I have to think. Anyway, off by 2 orders of magnitude there, for really significant changes.
i’m not saying the effect is zero; im saying the effect is clearly too small; there are obviously degrees to this. halving of overall hormone levels are surely not explained by a measly three generations of improved health care removing the selective pressure in favor of the survival of high-hormone humans
> Improvement of health services reduces selection pressure on reproductive fitness of population
Yes this is true. With all the C-section babies we have now, if we ever loss access to low cost surgical delivery care, we are going to have a spike in childbirth related deaths. But the male infertility crisis is rising faster than evolution can adapt here. There is something external involved.
The average human reproductive fitness level is not anywhere near bad enough for just a couple of generations to have such a profound effect on reproductive health.
I tried to find a citation and it was sort of mixed in terms of results -- it doesn't seem like it is the primary cause of it dropping across the board:
I'm pretty sure he is going to either say either immigrants or something related to Chad vs Incel.
But more concretely, there is evidence that conservatives out reproduce liberals in the US and in part it is related to the urban - country divide and that could also be related to both pollution, but also likely cost of living: https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-conservative-fertility-advant...
Something else it could be is that the internet is a great tool for learning and connecting, but it's also a great tool for turning your brain off and being passively entertained for hours on end. Even worse than that would be the concept of algorithmic thinking patterns being trained into people as they allow a social media site to "tell" them what to think about.
An example would be people who go onto Twixxer to find out what they are supposed to be mad about today. I understand that there are legitimate issues which need a spotlight put on them and social media can be a great tool for that. But it also thrives on that level of anger and energy, so there is a decent amount of less-than-dire issues being flogged just for engagement.
If enough people are just entertaining their brain away/being directed by an algorithm more often than not, I can see this moving the needle on general intelligence since "the brain is a muscle" and not using it means you can lose it over time.
I'm still shocked that there hasn't been more of a regulatory push to eliminate single-use plastics. In the US the closest we've gotten is banning plastic straws and charging for plastic carry bags.
Everything I've read about plastic recycling points to it being ineffective and requiring massive amounts of fossil fuel to move the waste around the globe, often with much of it just getting burned or dumped into the environment anyway. Despite that, the aisles of grocery stores are still packed full of single-use plastic bottles, containers, wrappers, etc.
Are any countries making a legitimate effort to drastically reduce the use of plastics? It seems like we had a pretty good system years ago in requiring people to leave a deposit for bottles when purchasing beer or pop to incentivize return + reuse.
The problem is plastic particles getting into food. And that comes from things like heating up in plastic, storing things in plastic. Non single use plastics are a major problem.
That's the thing. Plastic is modern lead. It's easily moldable, but causes subtle health problems.
I don't understand this perspective, the need to wait for mountains of published evidence that something is "bad", or "bad enough" to do something about it. Plastic is toxic, we all know this. It's everywhere, it's in the food and in the water. In reality it's the "Citation needed" reflex that's the reddit-tier reaction to stuff like this, because it pretends that humans can't or shouldn't make decisions unless we all sit around in a peer-review committee to review the "data". Perhaps in some contexts that perspective makes sense, but again, in this one, we all know plastic is bad (for us and the environment).
I don't understand the perspective of criticizing a request for a citation? This is exactly how misinformation spreads.
The parent hand-waved away the substantial differences between various plastics and made bold blanket statements on plastics as a whole that may or may not be true.
There's plenty of material out there to cite with and providing a cite that supported your understanding would help the discussion. Here's a random one:
There are thousands of plastics, and a blanket statement like this is simply false. We should be working to figure out which plastics are toxic, and why. You're essentially looking at lead and coming to the conclusion that "Metal is toxic, we all know this."
If it was comparable to lead in terms of identifying toxicity, we wouldn’t be having this debate.
So actually plastic is worse than lead in that it’s more insidious, some want to slowly kill things but it’s nearly impossible to tell which. If only it were like lead and upfront about it.
So no, they are not saying “metal is toxic”. That is extending the analogy to another topic: identification
And they're everywhere. I bought a sweater a couple of years ago. It's made from recycled PET bottles. It felt like a nice thing a couple of years ago. Now I realize that every time I wash it I'm releasing micro plastics into the sewer that might not get filtered out.
Kyrgyzstan passed a law banning many single-use plastics from January 1st, 2027. I hope the ban sticks. It will be challenging to make the economics work.
> It seems like we had a pretty good system years ago in requiring people to leave a deposit for bottles when purchasing beer or pop to incentivize return + reuse.
On the other hand, this system incentivised using plastic bottles instead of glass, because of less hassle with returning.
> Everything I've read about plastic recycling points to it being ineffective...
There is one effective way to recycle plastic into energy called "waste incineration".
Japan incinerates trash for energy, and yet they typically require residents to separate plastics from "burnables". Maybe it'd be better (and easier) for everyone if we just started putting everything into the burnable pile.
Another reason for the sorting at least here is that the companies using plastic packaging are the ones responsible for and paying the disposal system. I think the theory is that this will cause them to reduce plastics use and develop improved re-use.
No you don't. A ban forces industries to create alternatives. Otherwise they won't bother. You just schedule a phased elimination over time so those alternatives can get developed. That's precisely how the Montreal Protocol banned CFCs and protected the ozone layer:
If it was that easy to get an alternative introduced it would have been suggested already and all of these radical "green" governments would have hopped on the train immediately. This idea that we're just killing people with microplastics because we like it is insane.
CFC's coming out of your hairspray is WAY different than removing the plastic keeping your food fresh.
Stop with the black and white thinking. There is NO alternative that is free of some negative consequence. You're already seeing this with EV's. Every single "green" replacement introduces new problems that are often worse than what they've replaced.
Well, plastics that end up in the environment will degrade by the elements into microplastics, and rainwater will carry them to the oceans (or salt lakes, but I know none in Germany).
There are differences in statistics between EU countries, they might tell something interesting.
EDIT: "considered to be at risk of missing one or more material-specific targets, with plastic being the most critical material:
They have for the PET bottles, yes, but there are still thousands of other packaging types which just get dumped in garbage with unknown destinations. I cannot really imagine a deposit on those (do you want stinky meat packages returned to the shop?) but still we need to find a solution.
The salad head comes in a plastic bag. The pork chop is sealed in plastic. Sausages are coming with plastic labels, single use bags are still everywhere, and let's not forget the hard wrappings of tools or toys. Can we put all all those in waxed paper? And what exactly will that "wax" be?
Don't cans have a plastic lining on the inside so that the liquid doesn't touch the metal? Same goes for paper from what another commenter said about paper straws.
Heck I wouldn't trust paper food packaging because I'm not sure they would use a wax liner instead of some fancy PFAS forever chemical.
> I'm still shocked that there hasn't been more of a regulatory push to eliminate single-use plastics. In the US the closest we've gotten is banning plastic straws and charging for plastic carry bags.
I think it's because those two things can be used to scold consumers and thus inculcate the belief that the final link in the production-consumption chain bears all the blame.
I mean I have seen signs encouraging people to use reusable bags at the checkout line. But is it a problem that literally everything in the store (except mushrooms I guess) is wrapped in plastic? Apparently it is not.
It's exactly the same as fossil fuels and climate change, plastic is far too convenient for any government to even consider doing anything extremely significant regarding it
It’s all about depending the scale you look at. One might expect that where governing is concerned, anticipation of long term down side will be given some weight in the balance.
I agree there’s far too much single use plastic. For example, it baffles me why non perishable products are still sold in transparent plastic bags. If they go to the store they generally get taken out of the plastic bag and put on display. If they’re sold online I have to waste time opening and discarding of a random plastic bag. Why? What purpose does it serve? If you’re that desperate to wrap it in something why not branded paper or even one of the decomposable clear bags that look like plastic but aren’t. Why is the cable in the box also in a small plastic bag? It’s ridiculous.
> Why is the cable in the box also in a small plastic bag?
The charger I bought this weekend was in a cardboard box. Inside that cardboard box was a plastic shimmy bracket, keeping things in place. The charger had a plastic film adhered to it, but not the whole thing, just like the on the sides kind of. The cable was tied together with a velcro band (plastic from the futor!). On the plugs of the cable were little plastic protector caps. The box itself was wrapped in plastic of course. There was a booklet, not plastic.
The material world we've surrounded ourselves with really is made of plastic, disposable trash.
I believe you. Or, plastic is essentially worthless, so it just gets applied willy-nilly. As if, plastic, _because_ it is cheap and easy to produce, therefore it must be everywhere. Go shopping, here's your free plastic bag, well, hell no, double bagged, because plastic is flimsy and crap quality (you didn't even ask, but force of habit, shrug). Package a thing, wrap it in plastic on the outside and the inside! And maybe, if you put in in a box, put more plastic inside that box. so the thingie is snugly ensconced in russian dolls of plastic. Plastic straws, free, a bunch of them, of course in a little plastic sleeve.
This proliferation of plastic is not rational, certainly not wholesome. It is purely the downstream effect of plastic being cheap to produce, it is primarily a technological phenomenon.
If you were just talking about plastic packaging you have a point. By weight that is a small percentage of plastics though, which is incidentally why it is so cheap.
For other applications plastics are an outright miracle material though. Imagine if all drinks came in glass bottles; all cases and other structural parts were made of metal or wood; all elastic members were made of rubber or treated wood. The added need for shipping alone would probably outweigh the CO2 impact from current plastics production. As it is you get plastics almost for free while refining oil. Not to mention the insane demand there would be for metals, wood and rubber.
I can totally imagine. Glass bottles with deposit. Return them when empty, reclaim deposit. Most plastic bottles are also, I don't know, for crap products (?). Sodas, energy drinks. We could just drink more water.
> plastics are an outright miracle material though
Absolutely. There's certainly "good" applications of plastic. I don't dispute that.
The problem of replacing plastic in food is the cost. If you use glass or steel or aluminum, you need new logistics to reuse them.
Also, glass is heavier, and requires a lot of energy to be made, so it would require a production chain that ships back empty containers.
The best silver bullet solution would be to have local canteen, a bit like in the army or at school, where you just get a subscription with a calendar (not on demand, you plan the meals you'll get), so it reduces waste and costs.
We should just stop eating at home, with individual fridges, ovens, kitchens etc, this is highly inefficient.
Yes, this is collectivization, but it's the best solution for an economy of scale. Individualism was never a good solution, individualism is often very wasteful.
Call me a communist or a socialist, I don't really care.
So you want people to eat only when and where and what the state says you can eat???
The vast majority of people don’t want to choose your wet dream when they have the choice between their own private house versus a local canteen on a schedule. Nobody likes other people so much that they’d choose to be stuck in a school cafeteria environment for their food or their children’s food forever. Life is not perpetual kindergarten where everyone’s together all the time. Life is competition and mutually-beneficial cooperation in some things, and friends are made on the basis of mutual desire. Not forced socialization and collectives. What you are proposing results in mass starvation when the systems of incentives and motivations collapse.
More local farms and more vertical farms and more greenhouses and more victory gardens are the best path. I leave it to families and individuals to choose what options they want and to buy food whenever they want. With more production, all the options will get cheaper as we flood the world with more fresh produce from better and more localized supply chains owing to incoming innovations in vertical and greenhouse farming. Not interested in going back to top-down control structures from the 1900s.
What’s next? Restricting the caloric intake of political pariahs? Restricting the options available at the local canteen to give the best options to the friends of the party and everyone in charge? Lol
Because the united states valued individualism for a very long time, before and during the cold war, and even now. It's a cultural aspect.
Blame people like Reagan and Milton Friedman for this. It's a highly political problem.
Inequality is already somewhat caused by individualism, but climate change is also caused by climate change. For example, if China wants to reduce its co2 emissions, you only have to convince Chinese leaders, and it's done just by snapping fingers.
In the US, you have to make it profitable, which is doable, but it's more complicated and lobbyists will also be a big barrier to change.
I loathe the chinese leadership, but being a democratic modern industrialized nation doesn't mean you will see decisions that make sense.
Communist China is responsible for nearly 2/3rds of CO2 emissions since 2000. In the US it's been going down for the past decade.
You also have to keep in mind the American entrepreneurial culture or DNA which has born fruit unlike any other system, and is even responsible for the very platform we're using right now. That's all about this idea that any individual can change the world.
It’s just a weasel wording to say “lots.” How many and where did you get your number from? How many of those are using a designated sitting area to eat food they brought from home?
And if you think something is a good change, make it for yourself and don’t impose it on someone else. Vast majority of people given the choice will pick independence and purchasing/making their own food whenever they want, not being dependent on their work or state cafeteria.
I pulled “lots” out of my ass, based on having been to a couple different campuses. The fuzziness of “lots” accurately represents the level of certainty (low) which is appropriate for chit-chat about the existence of cafeterias. Chill out, nobody is actually going to ban cooking at home.
Just fyi in Germany we aren't forced to eat at the work cafeteria if we don't want to. I'm not sure where you got the idea of forcing people to eat communally from
Source that this is the norm in Germany? How many Germans do you know who do this and how did you conclude that the sample is indicative of the broader population? How expensive is food in Germany that people have no independence to buy and prepare food?
Parent is getting downvoted because the vast majority of people won’t agree with that nonsense. Leave it in the 1900s.
I work at a major research institution with a canteen and literally all of the Germans in my research group eat at the canteen. When I walk past it is very full.
Germans have a meal called Abendbrot which means "evening bread".
A research university is a pretty select group though. What about the average working family with children? Or retired age adults? Do Germans not have a "slow food" movement where they are encouraged to garden, cook, and compost at home?
Without resorting to abolishing the family kitchen altogether (many years of church morning teas give me the heebie jeebies about foodborne illnesses around community food prep) - there are ways to avoid some plastic packaging. Depending where you are, wholefoods places probably exist and will happily sell you a scoop (metal) of the ingredient you need in a pickle jar (glass). Also a good way to avoid storing bulk amounts of rarely-used ingredients, saves some waste.
This was an idea of the infamous Romanian communist dictator Ceausescu: he wanted to feed the whole of Bucharest in a single giant canteen. Unfortunately he was toppled and killed in 1989 before this idea could come to fruition.
It’s unfortunate that a communist dictator was toppled and killed? Did you ever bother to look into why that happened and all the evils he did?
We shouldn’t be borrowing from a dead communist dictator’s playbook. Clearly it didn’t work out for him and the vast majority of people didn’t want that.
I didn't think I needed to elaborate that any idea coming from communist dictators (let alone the self-styled Genius of The Carpathians) should not be the basis of our policies.
Collectivism need not invoke communism and socialism. I've long lamented how we've lost the local community at the village or even family level.
I.e. we can still follow your idea but at a village or family level. So why buy butter in a plastic tub when your neighbour next door has a cow and butter churning machine? Heck have a big enough multi-generational household compound and you can keep it all in-family!
Doing it at the family level or between neighbors who like each other and agree to share from victory gardens and greenhouses and personal farms is much different than what the parent proposed. Multi-generational family compounds are an awesome idea. This also solves retirement issues for the elderly.
A good canteen can combine more ingredients in a more sophisticated way than I have time for at home. I'm not making Beef Bourguignon at home, but it's easy for them to make up a big batch. Economies of scale!
Personally, while being exceedingly libertarian leaning, I would advocate a gradual ban of plastics generally. All plastics are ephemeral and they're not easily recyclable. Humans used glass, wax, paper, wood, and other products before plastics were widely available and our materials sciences have improved dramatically over time. To me, the main problem here is that plastics are just so cheap due to having been in production for so long. With a strong tax incentive, it should be possible to promote other materials. The biggest hurdle in my mind would be an unbelievable increase in the cost of wood...
> I'm still shocked that there hasn't been more of a regulatory push to eliminate single-use plastics.
I'm not- show me the direct harm it is causing on an individual level. We can all agree they are a nuisance but it is hard to show how they are outright harming people. Studies like this are a step towards that proof.
Ideally, governments armed with scientists are capable of making key judgments like this one without “my child’s arm fell off” levels of apparent, individual harm.
This is an absolutely horrible heuristic. Let’s put radioactive toys, toys painted with lead, leaded gasoline, DDT, and thalidomide back on the market. None of these were “obvious to the layman.”
Individual scientists are wrong a lot. Science as a process continues to be the (imperfect) reigning world champ of truth discovery, no matter what contrarianism du jour memes are spreading over the internet.
Uhh no. Lead, mercury, radioactivity, thalidomide, and asbestos poisoning are not detectable as “my child put a toy in their mouth and their tongue fell off.”
These were uncovered over the course of years by statistical analysis, prompted by suspicions created by (noisy, often non-human) information about the mechanisms.
Similarly, we have tons of data supporting a bunch of theories of micro plastic harm in the lab. The waiting revelation isn’t going to be “omg all these people are sick and we didn’t know it,” it’s going to be “all these people have been sick and we didn’t know why.”
Which is exactly the form of the sperm quality/fertility theory as well as obesity. We know these compounds cause fertility and metabolism issues in cell cultures and in animal models. We know we are facing civilization-scale problems with obesity and fertility. Drawing the connection between these types of observations is always extremely noisy because there are obviously trillions of variables affecting “does a specific individual become infertile or obese,” or “does a person have an elevated risk of birth defects.”
I’m not necessarily on the side of an immediate and total ban, but this “we’ll see the problems if they exist” attitude is profoundly ignorant and arrogant. The historical examples appear obvious to you because you saw the results of extremely deep study prompted from initially low-quality suspicions.
> The harm should be obvious to the layman IMHO in order to be legislated away. Otherwise, it should be left up to personal choice.
I'm not sure if this is sarcasm but if it's not, this is really the peak of anti-intellectualism ideology, i.e., that if a thing is not immediately obvious without studying then we should remain ignorant of it. I don't think that kind of opinion is a good fit for this forum to be honest, which has learning and information sharing as an important goal, so I will have to flag your message, which is an extremely rare thing for me to do (actually this may be my first time ever)
No you didn't, you said that if a layman cannot understand it immediately, then we should never use the information in the context of law, i.e. we should just ignore the information, i.e. remain ignorant
> The mice in the study began to move peculiarly, and to exhibit behaviours reminiscent of dementia in humans
I know this is only _in mice_ but the policy we have of "let industry do what they want and if we find out it's harming humans in 30 years we'll do something about it" has not proven to work out so well in the past (lead, DDT, CFCs, cigarettes).
This is the third time this week I've seen a study related to microplastics.
Should I be alarmed? If so, what can I even do? If I'm understanding these studies correctly, these microplastics are everywhere. In our bodies, in our water supplies, in our food. And we can't even get rid of them.
A) The research is still very much in its infancy. We don't know how big of a deal microplastics are to human health yet. In a couple years we'll have a better idea.
B) There's not much you can do about them. This is compounded by A). Maybe certain types, sizes, forms of exposure etc. are more significant? We don't know any of this yet.
C) You have a limited capacity for anxiety without going crazy, allocate it wisely. If we want to be anxious about our health, for most people being anxious about diet and exercise habits will yield better returns than just about anything else...!
I’m personally exhausted from hearing about all the terrible stuff that’s happening that I have very little to no control over. I have seen countless articles about micro plastics, forever chemicals, fresh water supplies decreasing at alarming levels, Gulf Stream collapse, etc.
It’s enough to make you feel nihilistic. A big part of me feels like these are government problems, as the average person is preoccupied with paying the bills, feeding their kids, and all the other trivialities that we deal with on a daily basis.
That said, most governments are mired in bureaucracy at best, or downright dysfunctional (or anti environmental) at the worst.
So… what’s a guy to do besides “chop wood, carry water” while trying to enjoy life as best I can?
There is a spectrum in between chop wood, carry water that looks like:
- use natural cleaning products
- use reusable bags
- volunteer in green space preservation
- vote in local elections
etc. Establish your principles and live as closely to that as you can, and tune out what is outside of your control. Seriously. Block it. No one needs to see this shit every day.
>A big part of me feels like these are government problems, as the average person is preoccupied with paying the bills, feeding their kids, and all the other trivialities that we deal with on a daily basis.
And what about when those people vote for their immediate rather than their long term needs? The man who just wants to pay his bills and feed his kids wants cheap food and cheap gas, and for prices not to go up. His politicians can't affect the sort of change you're suggesting because their opponents who promise more cheap garbage win too many votes.
It's also somewhat of a boogeyman. I mean they are real problems, widespread even, but the "everywhere-ness" of them is the boogeyman. You dont necessarily have to be as afraid of it as it may seem.
Sure its a real problem and we shouldn't be complacent. But is your faucet suddenly killing you or not? Maybe it's actually not. And maybe you should confirm that it is before being afraid of it after reading articles online.
Keep in mind that there are dozens if not hundreds of different problems, each being presented as catastrophic. If it was all true to the degree claimed, we'd be in far worse shape. It's logically impossible for everything to be as bad as claimed.
In truth, we're doing pretty ok. There's just still lots of room for improvement.
No need for question marks. I think we really need to square off with the idea that, while we will personally not cause or contribute highly to major shifts in how the world operates, there are ways to contribute - even a simple e-mail to your representatives - that should be undertaken in earnest by each and every one of us, even if we don't feel that they will make an impact. Most people don't - and that's why the impact is negligible. We really should assertively encourage each other to participate, even to the smallest degree.
I think I and a lot of people around me got used to the relative comfort in life. To the sceptics this may sounds like just more scaremongering, but let's face it, it _has_ been getting worse in many more ways than we wanted or expected over the last decade. The least we can do to try to revert this trend is to attend a march, send an e-mail or try to spare some time to vote. Nobody can ignore the fact, that it will not reverse itself on its own.
You can't do anything about it. Personally, I think it's probably being a bit overblown. It's definitely not good but some of these articles make it sound like you'll drop dead in a few days.
Plastics have enabled us to keep food fresh and have done a lot of things to keep humans living longer and healthier than they ever could in the past. Our modern food preservation couldn't exist without them.
So, yeah we need to be better but I think people should be looking at the overall picture. I don't see an alternative for plastic right now.
These are great questions. I think it's impossible to say for sure. It is at once a real problem (because they exist and cause problems) and a boogeyman because you never really know where they are and how much is going to be a problem for you. So be completely apathetic. Or always be afraid of everything and perform some purity rituals that give you some peace of mind despite not really knowing anything. Like drinking bottled water only despite that maybe having more, or installing expensive filtration systems without testing before or after for the existence of microplastics or effectiveness of the filter. Or telling your kid not to drink certain water because its not safe, despite having no actual knowledge of any risk.
Obviously we should continue to gather more information and remediate what we can but I think there is also a problem with fear-based behavior that just spreads anxiety baselessly.
I agree with the perspective that it's impossible to tell exactly, with confidence, how harmful they are and what each of us should do. The topic may not be fresh, but the awareness of the dangers is. If you aren't willing to go with the intuition that having non-degradable artificial compounds in your body sounds 'bad', then I'd personally go for what seems to be a reasonable middle ground, likely what most of us are already doing, which is - stay on the look out. Assimilate trustworthy data (on the question of what constitutes trustworthy data - that which comes from sources striving for integrity and rigor and not from anecdotes), be ready to adjust, steel yourself for possibly drastic changes in the future.
Personally, I find the argument that the data we currently have is not enough to force us to make such changes absolutely understandable - but at the same time, I find this kind of inertia unwarranted in the age where the world looked almost unrecognisable just a decade ago.
I mean, some things will reduce your plastic exposure without requiring measurements. Glass containers, metal bowls, no non-stick pans. That still leaves open if that results in different health outcomes, but it’s still something you can do without having high-tech measurement devices.
Well I'm talking about water specifically. In theory I agree that we can avoid things we know are harming us. But there is a balance to be struck between avoiding things out of an abundance of precaution and paranoia. Let's not forget that mental health issues including anxiety have skyrocketed the past few decades. At some point it has to be measured or else we wouldn't know its harmful. With microplastics and water, you need to know what comes out of your faucet (or whatever you are drinking). You can't just rely on some study analogous to those finding issues with eating teflon or using it on very high heat. And not drinking out of plastic cups seems firmly in baseless anxiety territory.
I'm not sure that helps. I suspect -- but I would really like to know -- that the sources of microplastics are non-obvious. I've heard of cosmetics, textiles, tea bags, foams as the most likely culprits, rather than plastic containers at room temperature, which I think are pretty stable.
Part of the issue, though. They often take food that’s above room temperature, bowls might get scratched by utensils, containers might be used in the microwave.
> This is the third time this week I've seen a study related to microplastics
Most of Science is utter junk, driven by the willingness or desperate effort to publish anything to make a career in academia or funded by special interests.
What matters is what can be consistently replicated, observed and explained.
what special interest benefits from showing negative impacts to mps? you've got to think who has the most to lose our gain. This is a more trustworthy study because usually showing negatives about huge entrenched products is fought by the special interests like plastic/oil companies, or DuPont in the case of Teflon aka forever chemicals.
Though I think worrying about it is fruitless as we're more likely to solve global warming than get all the Chemicals and plastic out of our blood globally, and that's worth the worry because there are at least things we can do to mitigate things(assuming political will ever signs)
Presumably, alive and full of microplastics is still better than just being dead, which is usually what happens when you don't get blood transfusions when you need them.
I've started donating blood and eating cabbage regularly on the story that those things are good at getting crap out of the system and good for me otherwise anyway.
> In summary, semen quality in men has declined significantly over the last 80 years, with sperm concentration dropping to approximately one seventh of its original value. This timing coincides with the development of plastics.
To be fair, “the last 80 years” coincides with a lot of stuff. The world has changed a lot since the 1940s. Isolating plastics as a cause and accounting for all other variables is next to impossible.
And correlated with decreased sperm quality and count. Considering the sheer amount of bad health outcomes that are also associated with obesity in general, it's not surprising that it also affects fertility.
Question then becomes, if you adjust for obesity, how much has male fertility changed since 80 years ago?
We have lab data showing that microplastics also disrupt metabolisms. So this is not quite the escape hatch we might wish it was: we have good reason to suspect that microplastics are also contributing to obesity.
(Of course this doesn't fully remove our extremely sedentary lifestyle and highly unnatural food supply either)
Woah. At that rate, how long until everyone is literally infertile? 15 more years? (Yeah, I know, it might not be a linear decline. It's still shocking.)
There's no mention of reproductive health at all. It's a neurological study with some extra data attached. "Thus, we proposed to investigate the effect that exposure to MPs has on young and old C57BL/6J mice, focusing on neurobehavioral effects, inflammatory response, as well as translocation and accumulation of MPs in tissues, including the brain".
I looked for microplastic test services and it seems like they're all $500+. Wish it was something you could do at home. The local results are all that really matters. Would be interesting to compare bottled water vs. tap water/well water. I've heard bottled water tends to contain more.
Most modern buildings use PEX (cross-Linked Polyethylene) tubing for water in homes no more copper pipes like years ago. Basically plastic so it may not be very good.
Microplastic detection is a large focus in sensing right now. Its expensive and hard for the very same reason microplastics are so difficult to stop: they're chemically inert and small. Most detection methods rely purification and microscopy, which is for now mostly manual labor.
I'm not sure but maybe to some degree? I have seen that recommended but I find it hard to believe the contamination source is the bottle itself. I figured it was from water source that was more concentrated with microplastic pollution. Which I assume happens more from plastics degrading in the environment over a long time, not simply water touching it in a controlled environment for a few months.
I would be interested in this too. Also from my laymen understanding it should be not that hard to develop filters for at least larger particles. Or is that too simple thought out?
Well this is something you don't really need a high tech test kit for. Take a sample of any fluid you can find anywhere, are microplastics in it? The answer is yes.
This is untrue, do the math on tap water compared to food. It's such a small contribution.
>Using an average calcium concentration in public water supplies of 26 mg/liter and a maximum of 145 mg/liter (Durfor and Becker, 1964) and assuming that the average adult drinks 2 liters of this water daily, then the drinking water could contribute an average of 52 mg/day and a maximum of 290 mg/day. On an average basis this would represent 5% to 10% of the usual daily intake or approximately 6.5% of the adult RDA.
>Therefore, typical drinking water in the United States, Canada, or Europe provides approximately 3% to 7% of the RDA for magnesium intake by a healthy human.
I actually had a Vevor water distiller (still have it, actually) and drank almost exclusively distilled water for ~10months, ending June 2023.
I feel better going back on tap water, fewer stomach issues. I don't have a proper theory that can explain why this is the case, but it's certainly the case.
Your body is not an abstraction. There will be parts of your body that will come in contact with acidic distilled water before it diffuses. But even in aggregate there were some studies showing increase in muscle cramps and heart disease in people drinking distilled water.
But how do I know I need one if I dont test? Do I even have a microplastics problem? The best case scenario is I test and see there is none and I don't have to worry about it.
But if there is a concerning amount and I took steps to remediate I would want to test afterwards to ensure its working. I'm not just looking for peace of mind, I want to know if I have microplastics and how much.
Microplastics are, quite literally, everywhere.
Are you on Earth? Congrats, you are eating, breathing, and drinking microplastics.
They've been leeching into the environment for so long that you are no longer just concerned about primary sources contaminating your air, food, and water.
It's homogenized, from the deepest parts of the ocean to the tops of the highest mountains, there are microplastics. It's completely penetrated the food cycle.
If you want to avoid drinking microplastics, you'll have to explicitly remove it from your water.
If you want to avoid eating microplastics... I guess grow your own food in a hermetically sealed bubble and water it with your filtered water.
From the actual paper: "With this in mind, an in vivo study was designed to determine the effects of these MPs [microplastics] in a rodent model (Figure 2A). Following a 3-week exposure to PS-MPs, C57BL/6J mice were tested in a series of behavioral assays including the open-field and light–dark preference tests. Both assays showed significant changes in parameters such as distance traveled, rearing activity, and duration in the center between the control and the exposed groups for both old and young mice (Figure 3 and Figure 4). Overall, these changes seemed to be more pronounced in older animals, which may be due to age-related dysfunction exasperating the effects of the PS-MPs on behavioral performance (Figure 3D,H,L and Figure 4D,F). The behavioral changes exhibited by the young mice, however, suggest that even without increased age as a co-variable, PS-MPs can induce altered behavior in rodents after just 3 weeks of exposure (Figure 3B,F,J and Figure 4C,E)."
Rather scary if you ask me...slight behaviour changes in a massive global population such as humans can cause us to make societal level mistakes that could be fatal.
Microplastics is the lead paint exposure of the current and past 2 generations.
This article cites synthetic rubber from tires as a potential source of micro plastics. Are there any studies that show how much people are exposed to?
Comparisons between rubber from bikes, motorcycles, and different classes of motor vehicles (sedans/cars, trucks, heavy duty trucks or machinery, and even the subclass of EVs).
Even more of a reason to get away from car centric transportation if the levels are several orders of magnitude difference.
I think that the main source is motor vehicles, both cars, trucks and heavy duty trucks and maybe motorcycles if you have enough of them (which we do not in North America.)
One of the biggest reason plastics are used is because they're inert.
in this case, fluorescent polystyrene particles
Did they neglect any effects of the fluorescent dye instead?
The fact that plastics are everywhere, and we have been exposed to them for several generations, should be seen as evidence of their harmlessness; we would've seen many obvious effects if they weren't. I see this as very similar to the sometimes argued link between cellphone radiation (or RF in general) and cancer.
This is simply more fearmongering from those who stand the most to profit from it...
Sure, but what about the more slight effects? A 2-point general decline in IQ is a huge problem, but not obvious. I am wary of any “bogeyman” that we are told to be worried about, in this case, the pervasiveness of plastic does actually worry me. Hopefully i’m wrong
Correlation does not equate causation. Maybe IQ has gone down because a lot of people literally do not give themselves time to think at all. Every free moment the phone is open dumping junk food tier information into their head. The mind didn’t evolve to be inundated by tick tocks while you pee. Its supposed to wander and be bored.
> ‘water, seafood, consumer products (clothes, toothpaste, salt, sugar, honey, beer, anything stored in plastic bottles, plastic wrap, or cans/cartons lined with plastic), and via inhalation from textiles, synthetic rubber tires, and plastic covers’
How true is this? How do microplastics end up in honey, for example? And I thought plastic bottles/wrap etc were stable in the lifespan that they're used for food storage (BPA aside) - is this really claiming that plastic starts to fall apart from the get-go?
> is this really claiming that plastic starts to fall apart from the get-go
Yes.
Microplastics are everywhere. Everywhere on the planet we look, we find microplastics. Just ... everywhere.
Beekeepers are using plastic worker brood foundations, for example. Honey is often stored in plastic buckets and bottles, somewhere in the production process/transport.
> Microplastics are everywhere. Everywhere on the planet we look, we find microplastics. Just ... everywhere.
I appreciate the links, but that's not what I asked. I know microplastics are everywhere. Do you have studies showing that plastic begins to distintegrate immediately? What's the working lifetime for a plastic container before it begins to distintegrate and leach microplastics into what's stored in it?
Assessing the Release of Microplastics and Nanoplastics from Plastic Containers and Reusable Food Pouches: Implications for Human Health
... microwave heating caused the highest release of microplastics and nanoplastics into food compared to other usage scenarios such as refrigeration or room-temperature storage. Some containers could release as many as 4.22 million microplastic and 2.11 billion nanoplastic particles from only one square centimeter of plastic area within 3 min of microwave heating.
The microplastics in a product don’t have to originate in a product’s final packaging. Things like airborne particles on the production line, filaments from filters and cleaning equipment, manufacturing swarf, and cleaning processes that are oriented to killing small things with heat / UV / chemistry rather than filtering tbem out is probably more of the answer than leaching and degradation.
I live in a country where, despite 70% water (I know, seawater) and lots of rainforests, most urban people drink bottled water (single-use and refills). Talk about selling ice to Eskimos. Probably because the ice outside is polluted, and it's easier to buy instead of fixing the root cause.
Anyway, ignoring the effect on nature since we clearly don't care about it, how damaging would the effect be to people who consume water that way, daily?
I can't help but feel that a website named sustainable plastics might have an ulterior motive for criticizing current plastic usage. This isn't to say that current plastics are somehow good, but rather that, perhaps the people talking about the best ways to fight fires ought not be the fellows with a vested interest in fire extinguisher sales.
I bought a tub of BCAA powder from Ghost and was horrified after finding a large spidery plastic blob buried in there. I went to Burger King and looked inside the burger randomly which I never do and found plastic. Theres a microplastic issue but theres also a large plastic issue in food. Often times you do even notice when you eat it.
Very sure. I took my sweet time inspecting it and then just about puked before tossing that trash. Never ate there again. The burger was disgusting aside from the plastic as well which was the only reason I even inspected it in the first place.
I’ve been saying it for a while now and am unfortunately feeling more confident.
Microplastics are the next lead emissions style issue that’ll end up being linked to widespread socio-behavioral decline and health issues.
Except it’ll be worse due to the far more prevalent and widespread use of plastics. It’ll be as if we used lead to make _everything_ and then found out lead is bad.
where is the chorus of people saying “…in mice?” it goes to show that this comment is used to beat down ideas that they decided they dont like long before reading anything. but for microplastics, which is exactly the kind of politically charged junk food they love, there is no chorus of “in mice.”
anyway, how is it crossing the blood brain barrier? dubious.
lots of things can cause change in behaviour through inflammation. cows milk for example. the solution to this and microplastics and a huge number of diseases will be gaining control of inflammation and metabolism. at the moment we dont even understand how they work.
Why do you think necessarily that this is junk food? Fair that there is no chorus, but what is the problem using mice in an experiment? I mean, it’s done for a reason, right?
Get reusable silicone bags. Most sources say they don't release microplastics. I'm not sure how well studied that is but my hunch is they probably aren't as bad as using a ziplock bag.
There are several options for consumer priced steam injection ovens, I have one from Anova but there are other options too, and they can do sous vide to a degree without using a plastic bag.
And Long COVID is shaping up to be our generation’s HIV/AIDS.
History rhymes because people don’t ever learn. We deal with one problem or crisis at a time, instead of generalizing what was learned in order to help future generations avoid the same mistakes.
Why do you think I said Long COVID is shaping up to be like HIV/AIDS?
The parallels between the two are stark: How the CDC and NIH bungled public health advice and research funding, how clinicians are ill-equipped to treat it, how the public is clueless about the long-term harms of post-viral immune dysregulation [0].
Both AIDS and Long COVID are post-viral, multi-organ, chronic conditions that dysregulate the immune system, through many of the same mechanisms [0].
They are also conditions that severely affects the quality of life of those who are afflicted, increasing the risk of severe life-threatening illnesses [1].
Similar to the early years of the AIDS pandemic (which, I might add, is still ongoing), the harms of Long COVID are not widely understood or acknowledged in clinical practice or among the general population.
At this point citizens owe the government nothing for allowing this to happen. Not even taxes! Every social problem from mass shootings to homelessness might as well be attributed to Microplastics or some form of other pollutant.
how do you determine the difference between a "narrative" that is a true reflection of reality and a "narrative" that is to "milk money from middle class Americans"?
The first is the Flynn effect, which was rising IQ levels decade over decade, which halted and then reserved for most Western nations around 1990s/2000s and is now declining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
The second is the dropping fertility/sperm counts/hormone issues/etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_infertility_crisis
I think microplastics along with forever chemicals/PFAS are two of the likely culprits and are probably fairly easy to deal with.
I wonder what else could be contributing?