Microplastics have always fascinated me, because I keep seeing article after article about how much microplastic exists around us, but far less strong evidence about its actual effects. That is not to say there are no effects, of course. Maybe we just have not found them yet.
A friend of mine worked on her bachelor’s thesis about the effects of microplastics on the immune system, specifically T cells. Her result was that the microplastic particles she studied were too large to interact with T cells.
She probably will not publish this result because she thinks it is not interesting enough. Classic file-drawer problem in academic science.
While I encourage her to do it anyways as a negative results is also interesting but she wanted results that are worthing of headlines in magazines.
> She probably will not publish this result because she thinks it is not interesting enough. Classic file-drawer problem in academic science.
It's truly insane that everyone in the academic class understands the fundamental problems of herding and sampling bias and yet every incentive is in place to do this.
Having lived this reality, people respond to incentives. Your have to very fundamentally re-architect the incentives and career progression in academia to make publication of null results more common. The other side of this is reducing the time and hassle of publication. Right now I’m unlikely to battle for 1.5-3 years to get something through peer review for a result that nobody will find interesting.
I think this is exactly what the person you are replying to is saying; everyone knows it, but the people in charge of setting up the incentives still don’t seem interested in changing the incentives.
It wouldn't take much time for her to publish it then move on to something that looks good on a resumé, but it could actively work against her if she published something that doesn't substantiate the status quo. If you get labeled a science denier, because you published a negative result for a politically-charged subject, even when you agree with the overall cause, it'll be nearly impossible to get a job in the field, even with a flawless resumé.
> but far less strong evidence about its actual effects.
Yeah, but we shouldn't take absence of evidence as evidence of absence. The fact is that it's just really really hard to establish a causal relationship, even if it's there, because of all the cofounders. Heck even if you constructed a study with a known poison, like lead, and you might not see the results in a single study. You could give 50 participants water with flint levels of lead in it for a month, and you might not get scientifically significant result just due to the wide variance in a population.
Or another example is just thinking how hard it would be construct a study with a control, when every single construction material has plastics in it and they are floating in the air around us all the time (as mentioned in the article). Could it affect mental or reproductive wellbeing? Certainly. Can we construct a study to establish either way? Not easily.
And one of the plasticizers they talk about, pthalates, are known to be endocrine disruptors (i.e. mess with hormones).
Evidence can be strong or weak. Every positive study result is evidence of presence, usually strong evidence. Every negative study result is evidence of absence, usually very weak evidence.
p<=0.05 is so easy to achieve for actual positive results (just increase sample size) that I don't think it's productive to treat any result with p>0.05 as positive evidence for any purpose other than deciding to rerun the study with a bigger sample size.
And yet, people can be extremely vigilant about a positive correlation when it doesn’t fit their personal agenda, going as far as questioning methodology in even the least pragmatic ways possible; or, become accepting of the absence of evidence as evidence of absence when weak/no correlation is convenient to their own biases.
I'd say it's very sensible to assume absence up front before there's convincing evidence of presence. Sure, personal biases influence our evidence thresholds a lot, and often people demand unfair rigor that cannot be practically met. But the opposite is also true - sometimes people will believe in presence with zero evidence if they like it enough. The latter is far, far more dangerous than the former.
It’s one thing to believe in presence with zero evidence, and another to _withhold_ judgment when there’s zero evidence. I think you may be conflating the two.
Then again, perhaps we are simply two different types of people. I don’t believe that a complex system can be expected to stay the same when you introduce a new factor into it, while you prefer to adjust much later when effects appear or when evidence achieves total infallibility up to the academic level. I am risk-averse, you like taking it; I’d rather prevent, you’d rather cure. Stating that the former is “far, far more dangerous” is just begging the question though.
Note that we didn't call it junk DNA until we learned a whole lot about how DNA works and formulated a theory in which junk DNA doesn't do anything for good reasons. In a way, lack of understanding prevented us from calling it junk DNA earlier.
Of course it's still possible for the theory to be wrong and the so-called junk DNA being actually important. It's only junk according to our classical, non-quantum and non-relativistic theory of junkiness.
> Note that we didn't call it junk DNA until we learned a whole lot about how DNA works and formulated a theory in which junk DNA doesn't do anything for good reasons. In a way, lack of understanding prevented us from calling it junk DNA earlier.
So upon further consideration, since I don't really know anything about the research of the impact of microplastics, I'll apologize for speaking of scientific hybris so flimsily, that was really the hybris of the layman (me).
I'm still skeptical, not of science but of the harmlessness of microplastics. Not because of any evidence I have, but because it's just so us... this cycle of putting something everywhere before we even know it exists, finding out it exists, going "nahhh it's probably fine" for years, decades or centuries, and then "oh shit". Which I'll admit is not scientific and not really a useful contribution to this conversation, either :P
It's not really analogous. One of the hypothesized ways that microplastics are harmful is that they disrupt the immune system; there has been evidence found of this in bivalves. Another is that they cause inflammation, which is also mediated by T-cells. A null result on the impact of microplastics on human T-cells is directly relevant to these hypotheses.
The mechanism of harm for asbestos is known to be that the fibers enter the lungs and can't be expelled, eventually leading to cancer. Its interaction with T-cells is quite irrelevant there.
>>> Also, unfortunately, a result that industry and the anti-regulation crowd will use to say microplastics are harmless.
>> also, asbestos is too small to interact with T-cells, so it must be safe.
> It's not really analogous.
Ironically, this is missing the point. They were commenting on flawed reasoning. This shouldn't need to be spelled out, as it's part of the conversation context.
Sometimes "dunking" comments are a variation on https://www.instagram.com/p/DY2DRKDhqaa - where everyone is arguing about who is wrong, because they aren't treating it like a conversation.
Once microplastics fall apart futher, to nano-plastic, it will start to get absorbed by T cells because they want to destroy any invaders. Once absorbed, T-Cell start to produce H2O2 to destroy anything they absorbed. Unfortunately, plastics are mostly chemically neutral and so, it cannot be destroyed like that.
T-Cells produce more H2O2, eventually it leaks outside and start inflamation of surrunding tissue. There is research about it.
AKA nanoplastic-induced oxidative stress, but it's actually macrophages (and neutrophils), not T-cells.
The reason this is problem is because cells can never destroy nano-plastic so they keep self destroying forever (chronic inflammation).
I still have my doubts about actual scale of this, especially how we still haven't solved pm2.5 pollution or even asbestos and heavy metals. And then there's PFAS, VOCs, Phthalates and Bisphenols. There's insane amounts of benzene in gas stations and traffic jam, yet no one really gives a fuck (until there's like a ppm in a sunscreen lol).
You are most likely to inhale it due to plastic abundance in environment, just like thousands of other things. It doesn't even have ICD yet. Ingested microplastic unlikely to breakdown while it travels thru your body.
p.s. my partner de-plastified a lot of my life (thru a lot of opposition of me) to the point where a lot of plastic objects feel gross now.
Right, and when it comes to "what happens when the macrophage can't destroy what it engulfed", we can probably learn a lot from parallel work studying tattoos, where the ink-particles are similarly "attacked".
Plus it's a lot easier to create studies or even just observe the cells in question.
Unknown to me, but something useful to know is that there is something smaller than microplastics called nanoplastics. The distinguishing factor is that nanoplastics are particles smaller than 1 micron, while microplastics are particles between 1 micron and around 5 millimeters. As your other respondent notes, at some point you're talking about single molecules. As plastics is an entire category and not a single thing, there's no one size where that happens, but some polymers have chains that are as little as 0.01 (1/100th of a) micron in size.
As far as I am aware, we have yet to have effective, replicable research on what if any biointeractions exist with nanoplastic particles, including single polymer chains.
One thing I learned from this article is that even though the plastic particles themselves are poorly studied the chemical additives, such as phthalates and bisphenols, are very well studied and are known toxins. So even if the tiniest plastic particles (smaller than the ones your friend studied, that can cross from your gut into your bloodstream), don't affect your health at all, you still don't want to ingest these things because of the other chemicals in them.
I expect many researchers are using fresh lab-made microplastics, which are indeed mostly harmless. However part of the problem is that real-world plastics are chemical sponges that absorb toxins (heavy metals, PCBs, etc) from the environment and deliver them in a concentrated dose into the body.
>However part of the problem is that real-world plastics are chemical sponges that absorb toxins (heavy metals, PCBs, etc) from the environment and deliver them in a concentrated dose into the body.
> Her result was that the microplastic particles she studied were too large to interact with T cells.
Her "result" of what? Was there an actual experiment and what was its scope or was this by surveying literature?
Microplastics are of a pretty large range of size, and then there are nanoplastics below that.
I'm also not an expert, but a quick search shows a number of results of microplastics affecting T cells, some directly and some in terms of immune signaling, so this negative result doesn't seem that definitive.
(as usual, the difficulty is in teasing out in vivo effects)
> I'm not an expert but I'm going to condescend about an expert's "results" anyway.
I mean it's a detail free second hand anecdote about someone's informal discussion of their bachelor's thesis. Which part of that is the basis of a good scientific conversation?
> We assessed how reliable current measures are for trying to find microplastics in blood. And what we found is that lipids and fats will give you a false positive for polyethylene.
> We worked with an architect, and we built the lab pretty much from scratch. [...] So we ended up going with stainless steel. It was the only way to not have any plastics.
> I don’t think we’ve got really good evidence at all for what effects [microplastics particles on their own] might be having on human bodies. If we’re eating plastics, what size and what type of plastic can actually get into the bloodstream?
This is a great interview, though I'd caution against reading it like a literature review. It's just the views and opinions of a single (relevant and qualified) expert
We don’t fully understand even some of the most obvious pathologies. If a disease isn’t glaringly obvious and coupled with profit incentive, God help you. The question of what microplastics do to us is simply beyond the capabilities of both modern medicine and academic research institutions.
When there's such a large and obvious profit disincentive, we should probably question whether its a capabilities problem or a willful ignorance problem.
Microplastics are even suspected for the low sperm count and power of men after the 70's. We can attribute to them any effect we observe today. It's insane. Let's accept that we cannot causaly link MPs with anything because we do not control the exposure and cannot perform a randomised trial. That is more scientific and sincere.
So the article seems to pose more questions than it answers. I was expecting some observations from the plastic-free lab they built, and at least some evidence of the comparative impact vs. other labs that use plastic to study blood and other fluids (besides the 100-times-plastic/phthalates concentration in the air).
What exactly are they studying in the lab? The biggest takeaway from all this is that "we [still] don’t have enough information yet".
The latest studies I read suggested that while microplastics are found in our bodies, there's still no clear evidence of how harmful they are. So I don't think it's as scary as it's often portrayed.
fwiw kimchi-derived probiotic bacterium (Leuconostoc mesenteroides CBA3656) was shown to bind nanoplastics and help mice excrete more of them. But it’s not yet proven that eating kimchi removes microplastics from humans
Very nice to see someone actually looking at the issue objectively instead of the unholy blend of clickbait, shoddy "science" and either fear mongering or blind denialism we usually see.
Getting to the point where we're actually able to measure something real is good progress.
" We tested about 30 different construction materials trying to find some that didn’t contain plastics, but also didn’t contain plastic [additives] such as phthalates, but we couldn’t find any. Everything had either plastics or phthalates in them."
did read,
>e360: Do we really eat a credit card’s worth of plastic each week?
>Rauert: That has absolutely been debunked
and
>...we found is that lipids and fats will give you a false positive for polyethylene. Lipids are made up of the same building blocks as polyethylene, so when we analyze them, they look identical in our analysis instrument.
>I know it is easy to say we don’t have enough information yet, but we do know about [the health risks from] these chemicals that are in all the plastics that your food is wrapped in.
Not just because we can't measure it but because its hard to say what's due to the plastic and what's due to additives in the plastics
> And while we know a lot about the impact of chemicals added to plastic — such as phthalates, which have been shown to impact fertility, or bisphenols, which have been linked to Type 2 diabetes — we know very little about what effect the plastic particles themselves might be having.
>Even when you put a glass panel in the window, you have silicon holding the glass in. We tested all these different brands of silicon to try to find ones that had low levels of phthalates. It was a crazy amount of detail that we went to, but it was really worth it.
Silicone holds the glass panel. Silicon is the glass itself. Yale editors, do your job. She worked "a crazy amount of details", and so can you!
I think hate of plastics is an emergent form of elitism.
Upwardly mobile middle/upper class people who've sort of "maxed out" the amount of personal identity they can buy with regular plastic things can unlock a new level of identity by deciding that plastics are bad for them and eliminating plastics from their life, a process which conveniently requires buying a whole new set of things that distinguish them from their peers.
This is the only way I can explain how irrational and inconsistent plastic-haters behavior is. There is so much invisible plastic in their life that they don't seem to care about.
> requires buying a whole new set of things that distinguish them from their peers
No, it requires buying a whole new set of things to fit in with and be accepted by their peers, to distinguish themselves from the outgroup, the plastic users.
I don’t necessarily believe this is some emergent elitism; I see it more as a modern religion with many many rules about eating and consumption (using plastic is now a sin).
Like any religion, sinners (for example plastic users) are mostly pitied because they are ignorant, but those who know and choose to use plastic anyway, well, it’s OK to hate them.
I don't get this whole attitude. Moving away from plastics in our kitchen was basically zero extra cost. Something busted, and we replaced it with non-plastic. Even bamboo scrubbers don't cost more than plastic (maybe even a little less) and I can't see any particular longevity difference.
I think the fact that I volunteer to clean up trash on public lands and know that weathered plastic is the period worst period to remove makes me move away from plastic in general.
Plus, a solid $3 wooden spoon is just a joy to cook with. They outlast the plastic ones, too.
Microplastic ingestion? Well, I'm not sure the effects or the relative quantity compared to tire shed and other industrial factors. But if I were forced by some diety to bet my life on if plastics in the kitchen or on clothing had a negative health effect, I'd make that bet.
But the main thing I don't get about the attitude stems from the fact that I don't really care what other people use in their kitchens. I recommend it.
Things like glass food storage containers are really expensive compared to plastic. And they still have plastic lids; like, I don't know what you'd even do without at least the seal-part being some kind of plastic, I guess you'd need to use natural-sourced wax to make it seal, or something?
And on the topic of cost, I'm certain my kids have broken between 50 and 100 glass and ceramic drinking cups, storage containers, plates, and bowls in a little over a decade. They destroy plastic items at a way, way lower rate. Consider the use case of packing a kid's lunchbox. Plastic is... very tempting, for practical reasons. And cheaper.
Last I checked, plastic vs. wood on an otherwise identical stamped metal Victoronix knife costs you an extra $15-$20, which is a notable percentage of the total cost of the item. I sprung for the wood on my latest replacement just for the aesthetics, but it cost enough more that I did give it a good think first.
> Even bamboo scrubbers don't cost more than plastic (maybe even a little less) and I can't see any particular longevity difference.
Are those actually just bamboo? Maybe they are, I dunno, I can't recall seeing one. Lots of the "bamboo" materials I've encountered have turned out to contain (at least some) plastic.
> Plus, a solid $3 wooden spoon is just a joy to cook with. They outlast the plastic ones, too.
That's just true. Plastic spoons for cooking suck, wood and (where it makes sense and won't damage other things) metal are way better. Wooden ones aren't even expensive. The popularity of plastic ones is baffling.
One thing that's surprised me is the cost and/or total lack of availability of glass blender jars, even on fairly high-end brands (both the fake-high-end ones that are just expensive, and the actually-good ones). I remember my parents' assuredly cheapest-thing-in-the-store blender that they probably bought in the 70s or 80s had a glass jar, because that was just... standard. Meanwhile my as-awesome-as-I'd-hoped-thank-god expensive-ass Vitamix came with a plastic jar, and they do not make glass replacements. (I'm just checking and it looks like they might finally make one in stainless, though? Still, I'd prefer glass because being able to see what's going on in there is very nice, but I'm gonna have to look into that...)
I don't have a good answer for kids breaking stuff.
And I do wonder what glues are used in the bamboo scrubbers, but I have no way of finding out. The scrapers are at least a solid single piece. They're either definitely bamboo or some very skillfully-engineered plastic to look exactly like it. ;)
There are a lot of cheap glass blenders on [ONLINE STORE]. But yeah, the high end ones--maybe they're trying to avoid that 50s look.
We just run with the plastic lids with glass tupperware. The only other sensible replacement we've found is reused jars and Ball jars, but all those lids have plastic liners, too. We don't cook the lids and food contact is limited. Would be nice to have something else. Silicone lids? We have some of those we picked up for Ball jars at some point. But this seems like a lower potential issue than cooking with plastic materials.
For really inexpensive stuff like blenders and glass containers is the second-hand store.
Around the time that I became a parent, I remember a friend’s wife emphatically telling me why one should never ever give fruit juice to a child. Later in the evening, she recounted an anecdote where a bout of constipation was cured with prune juice. I could not help myself from commenting “but isn’t that fruit?”
somehow this thread reminds me of that conversation.
> That's just true. Plastic spoons for cooking suck, wood and (where it makes sense and won't damage other things) metal are way better.
If you have ever used nice commercial high-temp silicone spatula, it's an incredibly versatile and easy to clean spoon for cooking. A bit expensive at like $20 though. Pair with nice nonstick pan and polycarbonate cutting board (dishwashable) for the easiest and most out of fashion cooking and cleaning experience.
> One thing that's surprised me is the cost and/or total lack of availability of glass blender jars
My cheapest in the store oyster blender is glass, I think they mostly still are.
> If you have ever used nice commercial high-temp silicone spatula, it's an incredibly versatile and easy to clean spoon for cooking. A bit expensive at like $20 though. Pair with nice nonstick pan and polycarbonate cutting board (dishwashable) for the easiest and most out of fashion cooking and cleaning experience.
Those, I do use! My wife insists on keeping one non-stick pan, mostly for eggs (I just cook them in stainless, whatever) so we've got a couple around for that specific use case, but I grab them sometimes for other things, too. They're great for scraping little bits of sauce out of the edge of a pan, things like that.
> My cheapest in the store oyster blender is glass, I think they mostly still are.
Ha! Really? I killed one blender before upgrading (the old "buy a cheap one, and if you wear out out, buy the expensive one" approach) and that was also plastic, but it probably wasn't Oyster. Hm.
All of those were glass when I was a kid, it seems really weird to me that the pricey ones are usually plastic now. I'm not even (that) worried about the health effects of it, I mostly just like the way the contents move & pour in glass better, the plastic's too "sticky" (though I do cringe a little when we blend a near-boiling sauce in the plastic jar)
Sorry if I offended you; fwiw I was describing a phenomenon that I observe. My own attitude about this whole situation was left unspecified, so I’ll add a few notes here: I do actively pick up litter (sometimes bigtime: I cleared a derelict boat from a lake today!) and I try to not litter. I try to respect the planet. I do use a lot of plastic.
I've addressed this idea in a sibling comment. I think at least some superstition is inevitable in any subculture. Consider how many tech 'holy wars' might involve baseless beliefs about how a text editor or programming language or whatever being not only superior because of personal preference but because it's inherently more optimized. Treating anti-micro-plastics as a "religion" rather than a subculture based on a meme deserves a bit more nuance.
1. Is it based on inherently irrational, unfactual beliefs, e.g. anti-vaccination or anti-5G myths?
2. If we consider religion as a way to explain complex phenomena using just-so stories (the pop anthropology / layman idea of primitive man inventing Zeus to explain lightning), then what intellectual or emotional need does anti-microplastics belief validate?
> Treating anti-micro-plastics as a "religion" rather than a subculture based on a meme deserves a bit more nuance.
Agreed, and I think we satisfy your two conditions and many more.
If I read you right, question 1 pertains to irrationality, and question 2 pertains to powerful storytelling.
OK here’s one example that shows you are on the right track, but there is still more.
My ex-wife is gluten free. This single choice never comes alone. in my ex-wife’s case, she also believes in the healing power of crystals and essential oils. (Irrationality checkbox); I cannot describe her vision of cosmic creation but I guarantee it involves witchcraft/folk
magic and differs from
traditional dogma (Storytelling checkbox).
BUT THERE IS AT LEAST ONE MORE VERY IMPORTANT CHECKBOX! A good religion also prescribes a proper way to behave and act in the world for maximum benefit in the afterlife. In these newer religions, the afterlife is “the health of the planet”, so one must do everything in this life to ensure you do not hurt that future.
To be fair, that wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list of criteria for what constitutes a religion, nor is the second one really a criterion for inclusion, just a couple of points I was thinking of. For the first, I would hesitate to label microplastics skepticism as baseless as the other two examples I listed, as there seems to be some studies that suggest they're not great for the human body? But sure, forming an entire belief system about how they're the anti-panacea for all of modern ills is certainly unfounded.
The second is more prescriptive-suggesting than descriptive. What motivates the desire to create single scapegoats for all of modern ills? Maybe a breakdown in public trust in science, lack of comprehensive medical education, spread of misinformation, political polarization (lots of these health fads end up embroiled in culture wars), etc. So that's a host of issues to work on. And at the same time, the anxieties they are preoccupied with- widespread changes to people's bodies, for one - do need explanations for, otherwise people will flock to just-so stories.
Your introduction of a third point about how a modern pseudo-religion provides a call to action to achieve a desirable afterlife that actually exists in this life (e.g. some unspecified healthy future) is rather inspired. Reminds me of the phenomenon of how secular cults of political personality now appear to be moving in on traditional spirituality. Superstition, it would seem, can exist even without belief in the overtly supernatural.
All culture is shared ignorance. These comparisons to religion are inverted. Religion was born out of cultures needing to herd their people.
You're right that the debate about plastics is mostly meaningless noise by people who don't really care. Taking advantage of uncertainty while it still exists is a lucrative game.
None of this is comparable to software. Writing software is a choice and the users don't have to care beyond the UI. It's apathy, not ignorance, that holds software back. Text editors and programming languages are not usually the highest priority choice to make. The majority of software tends to be specialized one-off solutions. We don't exactly have chemists cooking up their own kitchenware materials on the weekend.
Software development creates subcultures, just like any other occupation, craft, human activity. Tech holy wars is a thing, and I'm sure a lot of it dealt with articles of faith just like any other source of controversy.
I brought them up to illustrate that any endeavor will end up pockets of irrationality as part of the general culture. Doubtless in academia, scientific research, other forms of engineering, etc. there are little superstitions as part of the subculture.
That said, sure; the movement against microplastics is a pop health fad, which is different because it's a consumer-oriented activity whose actual effects are probably impossible to quantify. (As pointed out in a different comment in this discussion thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48836691) Building software produces tangible, measurable outcomes. Though likely far less measurable compared to other forms of engineering!
> It's apathy, not ignorance, that holds software back.
That's somewhat debatable, in that compared to the physical sciences, it sure seems like software engineering involves a fair amount of following traditions of preexisting practices and there's a lot of cargo culting that ends up happening. More of a craft than a science. But that's tangential to this discussion.
> is different because it's a consumer-oriented activity whose actual effects are probably impossible to quantify
Your perspective on software is that of a consumer, so you're not necessarily wrong. You're in the majority of people using software along with all those people having their "holy wars".
I'm just saying it's not intrinsic to software. The majority of people who write software for a living are silent about this because it's completely irrelevant to their lives.
It's like this with all other creative work too. As they say "a poor craftsman blames his tools", but more generally improvisation is expected when you're supposed to know what you're doing. Professionals can't afford to be helpless. In fact, that's why we have so many competing standards in technology to begin with. Constant reinvention is the most boneheaded way to progress, but my point is that this is in direct opposition to everything you're saying.
You seem to be insisting that there's ignorance where there is just apathy. For every one person whining, the internet has a chorus of hundreds. On the other side of the fence, there are dozens of people who could fix it in their sleep just ignoring it because it doesn't bother them that bad. That's what makes software so different from manufacturing plastic doodads at scale. You at least don't need a factory, but there are probably countless other reasons.
> Was this LLM-generated? Because the intent is garbled, each sentence going in a different direction from the previous. (So perhaps not LLM after all.)
Quoting the entirety of your comment verbatim in case you edit it. It's poor form to overplay your hand and troll instead of discuss.
I flagged your reply, and I suggest anyone reading these should do the same. HN is really going off the rails allowing this, but I know it's hard to rein it all in. At the risk of becoming even more of a hive mind, I think we need users to pitch in some more.
> Your perspective on software is that of a consumer, so you're not necessarily wrong. You're in the majority of people using software along with all those people having their "holy wars".
What do either of those statements mean? You neither say what I am not necessarily wrong about, and the second sentence means that - everyone is using software? The majority and the minority are both doing something?
> The majority of people who write software for a living are silent about this because it's completely irrelevant to their lives.
I’m not sure if this is accurate. Programmers have opinion, taste-based arguments all the time, sometimes based on dubious assertions. People pay attention to the proclamations of Linus Torvalds or John Carmack even when sometimes they’re not necessarily based on evidence, and parrot it as prophecy. Though sure, they are also not the norm, and becoming a public figure changes one’s behavior. (Uncle Bob Martin appears to have turned into a Twitter crank in recent years, for example.)
> It's like this with all other creative work too. As they say "a poor craftsman blames his tools", but more generally improvisation is expected when you're supposed to know what you're doing.
Like what? What are you referring to? What does improvisation have to do with what you were just writing about?
> Professionals can't afford to be helpless.
What is making them helpless? What are they doing or not doing?
> In fact, that's why we have so many competing standards in technology to begin with.
Okay this might be relevant. So you’re saying what I was talking about- tech holy wars based on opinions and superstition- causes competing standards?
> Constant reinvention is the most boneheaded way to progress, but my point is that this is in direct opposition to everything you're saying.
What does constant reinvention have to do with anything? What is an example of reinvention?
> You seem to be insisting that there's ignorance where there is just apathy.
I am not saying that all of engineering is ignorant, I am simply making the banal and obvious observation that any field of human activity will contain pockets of emotion-based conclusions that might not reflect reality.
The original point is that even the most seemingly empirical, scientific, whatever, domain might still involve facets that aren’t so scientific.
What does apathy have to do with it? If you were to rebut my point, you can simply say, “no there is no ignorance.” Why are you contrasting it with apathy?
> For every one person whining, the internet has a chorus of hundreds.
What does this sentence mean? A chorus of hundreds not what, not whining? The internet is full of whining choruses.
> On the other side of the fence, there are dozens of people who could fix it in their sleep just ignoring it because it doesn't bother them that bad.
Fix what? Ignoring what? What are you referring to?
> That's what makes software so different from manufacturing plastic doodads at scale. You at least don't need a factory, but there are probably countless other reasons.
??? Countless other reasons for what? Why are you contrasting software with physical engineering in a way completely irrelevant to my prior comparison?
Finally, I haven’t even touched upon your original response, which starts with “All culture is shared ignorance.” Which, while sounding both profound and impressive at first, is meaningless. All culture is shared knowledge as well. All culture is share norms, mores, values. What does it all mean?
> HN is really going off the rails allowing this, but I know it's hard to rein it all in.
Allowing what? Allowing people to write things? Last I checked people flag plenty of posts, including trolling. Rein what all in? Trolling?
First of all, yes, performatively following health fads has always been a thing for people with money.
But do you honestly believe this is what's going on at a large scale? What an absurd reaction to other people doing something that you don't like or don't understand. Nobody who isn't a paid influencer is sneering at you for using the wrong materials in your kitchen.
If you feel sneered that, that's your problem and not anyone else's. Are you going to start plasticmaxing, like rolling coal but for food containers?
I think you're doing the thing that you are accusing other people of doing. Creating an artificial distinction between "us" and "them", so that you can feel like you are part of the "us". It's just that in this case you want to feel like some kind of rational rebel, one of the final chosen few with common sense, in an increasingly irrational world.
You could just liken it to any pop health, dietary, or environmental fad instead of trying to portray a banal "people turn consumer choices into personal identity/lifestyle" trend as a whole new class of phenomenon. Crunchy hippies shop organic and audiophiles buy gold-plated premium wires; every subculture has at least a little bit of superstition.
Health in general has always worked like this, from supplements, to organic food, to avoiding ultra-processed foods, to gluten-free diets, pretty much every popular health fad has no provable causative effect on health.
Most of human behavior is irrational. If we were all perfectly rational, we would have healthy diet and exercise habits from the get go, and we'd have plenty of time to prepare food and exercise, because we wouldn't waste any time on entertainment.
>pretty much every popular health fad has no provable causative effect on health.
Isn't this almost true by definition? If it actually works, it's not a "fad", just "science" or whatever. Advice like "eat more vegetables" and "don't drink alcohol" probably do work, but they're ingrained enough that nobody thinks they're "fads".
The late 1800's health craze centered around Battle Creek, Michigan has had long lasting cultural and dietary impact, but I think most people would still call it a fad, because the core tenants were only popular for a short time.
Besides, the breakfast cereal movement it created quickly devolved from the Kellogg's and Post's original healthy cereals, Corn Flakes and Grape Nuts respectively, into the sugar-laden craze of 1950's cereals. Even Graham crackers were healthy and bland at the time, but we now associate them with cinnamon and sugar.
If someone comes out with a study that shows, all other things being equal, decreasing or increasing the amount of ultra-processed foods causes a respective increase or decrease in health, then I will rethink my stance.
Until then, I'll keep eating foods consisting of proven healthy ingredients, even if they are classified as Nova 4 ultra-processed, such as lasagna made using my great grandmother's recipe or ancient Mayan dishes like pavo con achiote and also cochinita pibil, while avoiding foods that are proven unhealthy despite the not-ultra-processed Nova 3 and lower status, like Cronuts, potato chips, and bacon cheeseburgers.
I don't know why their ingredients are classified as Nova 4, or why the processing level is defined by ingredients, in the first place. Lasagna contains ricotta which is made from whey, and whey automatically makes something Nova 4. Many ancient Mayan dishes contain achiote seeds, also known as annatto, which also automatically makes something Nova 4.
Achiote seeds add a bright red to yellow color, depending on the concentration, and add a mild earthy flavor. This puts it in the Nova 4 ultra-processed foods category, ostensibly because the color can make food more attractive. This is as opposed saffron stigmas, used in some traditional European dishes, which add a bright red to yellow color, depending on the concentration, and add a mild earthy flavor. Why adding achiote makes something ultraprocessed and adding saffron doesn't isn't explained, but I wonder if there's a predilection toward traditional European foods.
The Nova classification only counts fresh fruits and vegetables as unprocessed, which is Nova 1, so almost all foods are processed foods, Nova 3, or processed ingredients, Nova 2.
I eat healthy food and avoid unhealthy food, but the Nova classification system is so poorly done that it is meaningless. Even going off of actual levels of processing, instead of the ingredients, doesn't help much. One of the earliest processed foods, hominy, is much healthier than the unprocessed counterpart, and when Italians relied on polenta made from unprocessed corn, they became malnourished and suffered from pellagra, while those in America relying on the otherwise identical grits, made from hominy, weren't malnourished.
That's why I go off of actual research proving which ingredients are healthy based on the effects of adding them to or removing them from a diet that otherwise stays consistent in volume and calories, instead of the vibes-based categories the Nova classifications use, and the vague research showing that rich healthy people who exercise eat some things and poor unhealthy people who don't exercise eat other things, but never showing that eating some things actually makes you more healthy and eating other things actually makes you less healthy.
If similar levels of research into ultra-processed foods were applied to other statistics, they'd find that ice cream sales lead to drowning and owning a Ferrari makes you rich.
Even more so: plastics are not a specific chemical and they are not a specific material. Plastic is a category of materials that is very broad and very wide. You can make plastics out of almost anything. Therefore, to hate on plastics is to basically hate on an entire category of engineering and material design but not to actually know what a plastic is... sheer ignorance.
Yes, it's a category of materials that is overwhelmingly populated by a much more specific, ultra-cheap and therefore ultra-pervasive, set of chemicals which are shown in study after study to have worrying characteristics.
Anything that shows evidence of omnipresence, endocrine disruption, bioaccumulation, and inter-generational transmission should be extremely, extremely closely scrutinized.
To think otherwise is absolute braindead contrarianism, full-stop.
Personally, I think that the Microplastics Moral Panic is a textbook study of F.U.D.
There is practically nothing that ordinary people can do for prevention, mitigation, diagnosis or treatment of microplastics in our bodies, so I therefore conclude that it is futile and wasteful to worry or argue about it, unless you have abundant free time and resources to get paranoid strangers all in a frenzy, for no good reason.
I half-assed try to avoid plastic in contact with (especially very) hot food or drink, and avoid it in long-term food containers, in no small part because I've seen things like plastic cooking spoons losing non-microscopic parts of themselves in food, and I find the stains plastic storage containers acquire after a little use kinda worrisome (I'd rather my reusable storage containers not be that permeable, thank you very much), but otherwise agree that any real amount of effort to avoid microplastics would probably do more good if it took the form of a 20-minute jog per week, i.e. "don't even consider worrying about it unless you've really, really got all your other health stuff sorted out"
Like I'm pretty sure the bigger health risk with a plastic soda straw is the soda, not the straw, you know?
This is a fine argument against banning plastics. This is unrelated to "Microplastics Moral Panic is a textbook study of F.U.D." though.
If microplastics are a case of FUD, then there's nothing to look into. How and why would anyone discover anything surrounding a case of moral panic/FUD? By definition, there's nothing to discover.
I've picked up enough plastics off the beaches of the world already. Plastic ruins ecosystems and is a scourge on this planet. It's too late to fix, it's everywhere. 8 million tonnes of plastics enter the oceans every year, and it just keeps accumulating. We're ruining marine ecosystems.
Why was that we used to be able to ban environmental toxins such as leaded gasoline without this weird psycho-social-political analysis that has become the fashion in some circles?
Are you sure it's all irrational? I, for one, prefer other materials for many things because they are more durable, hygenic or simply feels nicer. Seems perfectly rational to me. An irrational choice would be something like carrying a heavy canvas tent with wooden poles just because you hate plastic. Do you know anyone who does that?
Interesting theory but doesn't really coincide with on the ground facts. We know there has been an increase in hormonal issues. We can barely even get anyone to stop heating up and microwaving plastic to be ingested, which we know causes issues. The European Food Safety Authority completed a re-evaluation into the risks of BPA in 2023, concluding that its tolerable daily intake should be greatly reduced. BPA was everywhere, every can and receipt. Just because people can't identify all the ways plastic is ubiquitously ingested in their life, it means they're hypocritical and don't care about the unknowns?
Microplastics have always fascinated me, because I keep seeing article after article about how much microplastic exists around us, but far less strong evidence about its actual effects. That is not to say there are no effects, of course. Maybe we just have not found them yet.
A friend of mine worked on her bachelor’s thesis about the effects of microplastics on the immune system, specifically T cells. Her result was that the microplastic particles she studied were too large to interact with T cells.
She probably will not publish this result because she thinks it is not interesting enough. Classic file-drawer problem in academic science.
While I encourage her to do it anyways as a negative results is also interesting but she wanted results that are worthing of headlines in magazines.
> She probably will not publish this result because she thinks it is not interesting enough. Classic file-drawer problem in academic science.
It's truly insane that everyone in the academic class understands the fundamental problems of herding and sampling bias and yet every incentive is in place to do this.
Having lived this reality, people respond to incentives. Your have to very fundamentally re-architect the incentives and career progression in academia to make publication of null results more common. The other side of this is reducing the time and hassle of publication. Right now I’m unlikely to battle for 1.5-3 years to get something through peer review for a result that nobody will find interesting.
I think this is exactly what the person you are replying to is saying; everyone knows it, but the people in charge of setting up the incentives still don’t seem interested in changing the incentives.
Yes, this has been my experience in the Australian academic system as well: everything is broken and nobody with the power to change it, cares.
China seems to make some strides for their own academics, thinking loudly about moving away from glam publications as career incentives: https://www.ft.com/content/64a811f1-b132-4211-8a8c-2252cf964...
It's supposedly about the worry of leaking state secrets, but it will have positive outcomes apart from that.
More devastating, the null results we would be really valuable with machines that can think. (Not humans that don't give a shit).
>people respond to incentives
Careful, you're starting to sound dangerously close to an Austrian economist!
[ ;) ]
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." -- Charlie Munger
It's worse than that.
It wouldn't take much time for her to publish it then move on to something that looks good on a resumé, but it could actively work against her if she published something that doesn't substantiate the status quo. If you get labeled a science denier, because you published a negative result for a politically-charged subject, even when you agree with the overall cause, it'll be nearly impossible to get a job in the field, even with a flawless resumé.
I’m not sure who the academic class is (are grad students, postdocs, and tenured professors really in the same class?).
Anyway, the people setting the incentives are the ones handing out the grants.
> but far less strong evidence about its actual effects.
Yeah, but we shouldn't take absence of evidence as evidence of absence. The fact is that it's just really really hard to establish a causal relationship, even if it's there, because of all the cofounders. Heck even if you constructed a study with a known poison, like lead, and you might not see the results in a single study. You could give 50 participants water with flint levels of lead in it for a month, and you might not get scientifically significant result just due to the wide variance in a population.
Or another example is just thinking how hard it would be construct a study with a control, when every single construction material has plastics in it and they are floating in the air around us all the time (as mentioned in the article). Could it affect mental or reproductive wellbeing? Certainly. Can we construct a study to establish either way? Not easily.
And one of the plasticizers they talk about, pthalates, are known to be endocrine disruptors (i.e. mess with hormones).
> Yeah, but we shouldn't take absence of evidence as evidence of absence.
That's wrong. Yes, we should.
Each and every study that doesn't find evidence for what they are looking for is evidence for its absence.
That’s wrong. Only if the studies are powerful enough and are looking at the right stuff can you make any reasonable conclusions.
If the studies are powerful enough then that absolutely isn’t evidence of absence at all.
Evidence can be strong or weak. Every positive study result is evidence of presence, usually strong evidence. Every negative study result is evidence of absence, usually very weak evidence.
That's not right, a negative study often still can give evidence that something is true, but it just didn't meet the p=.05 threshold.
p<=0.05 is so easy to achieve for actual positive results (just increase sample size) that I don't think it's productive to treat any result with p>0.05 as positive evidence for any purpose other than deciding to rerun the study with a bigger sample size.
And yet, people can be extremely vigilant about a positive correlation when it doesn’t fit their personal agenda, going as far as questioning methodology in even the least pragmatic ways possible; or, become accepting of the absence of evidence as evidence of absence when weak/no correlation is convenient to their own biases.
I'd say it's very sensible to assume absence up front before there's convincing evidence of presence. Sure, personal biases influence our evidence thresholds a lot, and often people demand unfair rigor that cannot be practically met. But the opposite is also true - sometimes people will believe in presence with zero evidence if they like it enough. The latter is far, far more dangerous than the former.
It’s one thing to believe in presence with zero evidence, and another to _withhold_ judgment when there’s zero evidence. I think you may be conflating the two.
Then again, perhaps we are simply two different types of people. I don’t believe that a complex system can be expected to stay the same when you introduce a new factor into it, while you prefer to adjust much later when effects appear or when evidence achieves total infallibility up to the academic level. I am risk-averse, you like taking it; I’d rather prevent, you’d rather cure. Stating that the former is “far, far more dangerous” is just begging the question though.
Absence in the results of whatever we measured for. Just take the sheer hybris of "junk DNA": We don't understand this, so it's probably junk.
Note that we didn't call it junk DNA until we learned a whole lot about how DNA works and formulated a theory in which junk DNA doesn't do anything for good reasons. In a way, lack of understanding prevented us from calling it junk DNA earlier.
Of course it's still possible for the theory to be wrong and the so-called junk DNA being actually important. It's only junk according to our classical, non-quantum and non-relativistic theory of junkiness.
> Note that we didn't call it junk DNA until we learned a whole lot about how DNA works and formulated a theory in which junk DNA doesn't do anything for good reasons. In a way, lack of understanding prevented us from calling it junk DNA earlier.
Thanks for noting that, you totally caught me since I actually don't even really remember the stuff I read about that, which was probably false to begin with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_DNA#Junk_DNA_and_non-codi...
So upon further consideration, since I don't really know anything about the research of the impact of microplastics, I'll apologize for speaking of scientific hybris so flimsily, that was really the hybris of the layman (me).
I'm still skeptical, not of science but of the harmlessness of microplastics. Not because of any evidence I have, but because it's just so us... this cycle of putting something everywhere before we even know it exists, finding out it exists, going "nahhh it's probably fine" for years, decades or centuries, and then "oh shit". Which I'll admit is not scientific and not really a useful contribution to this conversation, either :P
I participated in research from 2017-2022 that found similar results regarding bio-interactions, generally.
Learned a lot about making microfludic flow cells at least
> ... too large to interact with T cells.
Also, unfortunately, a result that industry and the anti-regulation crowd will use to say microplastics are harmless.
also, asbestos is too small to interact with T-cells, so it must be safe.
It's not really analogous. One of the hypothesized ways that microplastics are harmful is that they disrupt the immune system; there has been evidence found of this in bivalves. Another is that they cause inflammation, which is also mediated by T-cells. A null result on the impact of microplastics on human T-cells is directly relevant to these hypotheses.
The mechanism of harm for asbestos is known to be that the fibers enter the lungs and can't be expelled, eventually leading to cancer. Its interaction with T-cells is quite irrelevant there.
I understand asbestos fibers literally get tangled with DNA, and that this can be demonstrated in vitro.
>>>> ... too large to interact with T cells.
>>> Also, unfortunately, a result that industry and the anti-regulation crowd will use to say microplastics are harmless.
>> also, asbestos is too small to interact with T-cells, so it must be safe.
> It's not really analogous.
Ironically, this is missing the point. They were commenting on flawed reasoning. This shouldn't need to be spelled out, as it's part of the conversation context.
Sometimes "dunking" comments are a variation on https://www.instagram.com/p/DY2DRKDhqaa - where everyone is arguing about who is wrong, because they aren't treating it like a conversation.
Can microplastics never get small enough to interact with T cells?
Once microplastics fall apart futher, to nano-plastic, it will start to get absorbed by T cells because they want to destroy any invaders. Once absorbed, T-Cell start to produce H2O2 to destroy anything they absorbed. Unfortunately, plastics are mostly chemically neutral and so, it cannot be destroyed like that. T-Cells produce more H2O2, eventually it leaks outside and start inflamation of surrunding tissue. There is research about it.
Link to that research, please. It would add meaningfully to this discussion.
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AKA nanoplastic-induced oxidative stress, but it's actually macrophages (and neutrophils), not T-cells.
The reason this is problem is because cells can never destroy nano-plastic so they keep self destroying forever (chronic inflammation).
I still have my doubts about actual scale of this, especially how we still haven't solved pm2.5 pollution or even asbestos and heavy metals. And then there's PFAS, VOCs, Phthalates and Bisphenols. There's insane amounts of benzene in gas stations and traffic jam, yet no one really gives a fuck (until there's like a ppm in a sunscreen lol).
You are most likely to inhale it due to plastic abundance in environment, just like thousands of other things. It doesn't even have ICD yet. Ingested microplastic unlikely to breakdown while it travels thru your body.
p.s. my partner de-plastified a lot of my life (thru a lot of opposition of me) to the point where a lot of plastic objects feel gross now.
> macrophages
Right, and when it comes to "what happens when the macrophage can't destroy what it engulfed", we can probably learn a lot from parallel work studying tattoos, where the ink-particles are similarly "attacked".
Plus it's a lot easier to create studies or even just observe the cells in question.
So microplastics are indeed harmless!
(/s)
Too bad common discourse is too distracted to consider nanoplastics…
By the time the public tires of microplastics debates, they’ll be in no mood to relitigate nanoplastics
There’s a transition point where things stop being micro plastics, then nano plastics, and become specific chemicals.
Those molecules may be toxic but the interactions are distinct from microplastics or nano plastics.
Unknown to me, but something useful to know is that there is something smaller than microplastics called nanoplastics. The distinguishing factor is that nanoplastics are particles smaller than 1 micron, while microplastics are particles between 1 micron and around 5 millimeters. As your other respondent notes, at some point you're talking about single molecules. As plastics is an entire category and not a single thing, there's no one size where that happens, but some polymers have chains that are as little as 0.01 (1/100th of a) micron in size.
As far as I am aware, we have yet to have effective, replicable research on what if any biointeractions exist with nanoplastic particles, including single polymer chains.
> 5 millimeters
TIL thermoplastic pellets are “microplastics” :)
I don't make the definition
She should at least put it on https://www.biorxiv.org/ !
One thing I learned from this article is that even though the plastic particles themselves are poorly studied the chemical additives, such as phthalates and bisphenols, are very well studied and are known toxins. So even if the tiniest plastic particles (smaller than the ones your friend studied, that can cross from your gut into your bloodstream), don't affect your health at all, you still don't want to ingest these things because of the other chemicals in them.
I expect many researchers are using fresh lab-made microplastics, which are indeed mostly harmless. However part of the problem is that real-world plastics are chemical sponges that absorb toxins (heavy metals, PCBs, etc) from the environment and deliver them in a concentrated dose into the body.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/923529
>However part of the problem is that real-world plastics are chemical sponges that absorb toxins (heavy metals, PCBs, etc) from the environment and deliver them in a concentrated dose into the body.
>https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/923529
But your linked study only talks about biofilms and E.coli?
> Her result was that the microplastic particles she studied were too large to interact with T cells.
Her "result" of what? Was there an actual experiment and what was its scope or was this by surveying literature?
Microplastics are of a pretty large range of size, and then there are nanoplastics below that.
I'm also not an expert, but a quick search shows a number of results of microplastics affecting T cells, some directly and some in terms of immune signaling, so this negative result doesn't seem that definitive.
(as usual, the difficulty is in teasing out in vivo effects)
I'm not an expert but I'm going to condescend about an expert's "results" anyway.
Very informative, thank you for your comment. You have truly contributed to the conversation. Good job.
> I'm not an expert but I'm going to condescend about an expert's "results" anyway.
I mean it's a detail free second hand anecdote about someone's informal discussion of their bachelor's thesis. Which part of that is the basis of a good scientific conversation?
Some stand out takeaways:
> We assessed how reliable current measures are for trying to find microplastics in blood. And what we found is that lipids and fats will give you a false positive for polyethylene.
> We worked with an architect, and we built the lab pretty much from scratch. [...] So we ended up going with stainless steel. It was the only way to not have any plastics.
> I don’t think we’ve got really good evidence at all for what effects [microplastics particles on their own] might be having on human bodies. If we’re eating plastics, what size and what type of plastic can actually get into the bloodstream?
This is a great interview, though I'd caution against reading it like a literature review. It's just the views and opinions of a single (relevant and qualified) expert
We don’t fully understand even some of the most obvious pathologies. If a disease isn’t glaringly obvious and coupled with profit incentive, God help you. The question of what microplastics do to us is simply beyond the capabilities of both modern medicine and academic research institutions.
When there's such a large and obvious profit disincentive, we should probably question whether its a capabilities problem or a willful ignorance problem.
Would have loved to see the effects broken down by plastic, as the term "plastics" is as non-specific as "metals" and "organic"
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I have lurked HN for about a year now, and just created an account to respond to this and say: ???
Well, at least the parent comment had one positive effect. Welcome!
Microplastics are even suspected for the low sperm count and power of men after the 70's. We can attribute to them any effect we observe today. It's insane. Let's accept that we cannot causaly link MPs with anything because we do not control the exposure and cannot perform a randomised trial. That is more scientific and sincere.
So the article seems to pose more questions than it answers. I was expecting some observations from the plastic-free lab they built, and at least some evidence of the comparative impact vs. other labs that use plastic to study blood and other fluids (besides the 100-times-plastic/phthalates concentration in the air).
What exactly are they studying in the lab? The biggest takeaway from all this is that "we [still] don’t have enough information yet".
I have grown to accept it. It is part of me now
The latest studies I read suggested that while microplastics are found in our bodies, there's still no clear evidence of how harmful they are. So I don't think it's as scary as it's often portrayed.
fwiw kimchi-derived probiotic bacterium (Leuconostoc mesenteroides CBA3656) was shown to bind nanoplastics and help mice excrete more of them. But it’s not yet proven that eating kimchi removes microplastics from humans
It is proven that it tastes hella good though
Did she debunk that article that was around microplastics in human testicles?
Wait, there's more to this than a meme?
one word: microplastics
here’s to you mrs robinson
deep cut
Very nice to see someone actually looking at the issue objectively instead of the unholy blend of clickbait, shoddy "science" and either fear mongering or blind denialism we usually see.
Getting to the point where we're actually able to measure something real is good progress.
" We tested about 30 different construction materials trying to find some that didn’t contain plastics, but also didn’t contain plastic [additives] such as phthalates, but we couldn’t find any. Everything had either plastics or phthalates in them."
We’re going to find out at an autopsy.
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tldr, not much because we can't measure it to begin with
did read, >e360: Do we really eat a credit card’s worth of plastic each week? >Rauert: That has absolutely been debunked
and >...we found is that lipids and fats will give you a false positive for polyethylene. Lipids are made up of the same building blocks as polyethylene, so when we analyze them, they look identical in our analysis instrument. >I know it is easy to say we don’t have enough information yet, but we do know about [the health risks from] these chemicals that are in all the plastics that your food is wrapped in.
Not just because we can't measure it but because its hard to say what's due to the plastic and what's due to additives in the plastics
> And while we know a lot about the impact of chemicals added to plastic — such as phthalates, which have been shown to impact fertility, or bisphenols, which have been linked to Type 2 diabetes — we know very little about what effect the plastic particles themselves might be having.
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yes
Please show us on the doll where the microplastics hurt you, for the jury please.
The doll is missing that part!
>Even when you put a glass panel in the window, you have silicon holding the glass in. We tested all these different brands of silicon to try to find ones that had low levels of phthalates. It was a crazy amount of detail that we went to, but it was really worth it.
Silicone holds the glass panel. Silicon is the glass itself. Yale editors, do your job. She worked "a crazy amount of details", and so can you!
we have recently transitioned to only using glass bottles in our family.
I think hate of plastics is an emergent form of elitism.
Upwardly mobile middle/upper class people who've sort of "maxed out" the amount of personal identity they can buy with regular plastic things can unlock a new level of identity by deciding that plastics are bad for them and eliminating plastics from their life, a process which conveniently requires buying a whole new set of things that distinguish them from their peers.
This is the only way I can explain how irrational and inconsistent plastic-haters behavior is. There is so much invisible plastic in their life that they don't seem to care about.
> requires buying a whole new set of things that distinguish them from their peers
No, it requires buying a whole new set of things to fit in with and be accepted by their peers, to distinguish themselves from the outgroup, the plastic users.
I don’t necessarily believe this is some emergent elitism; I see it more as a modern religion with many many rules about eating and consumption (using plastic is now a sin).
Like any religion, sinners (for example plastic users) are mostly pitied because they are ignorant, but those who know and choose to use plastic anyway, well, it’s OK to hate them.
I don't get this whole attitude. Moving away from plastics in our kitchen was basically zero extra cost. Something busted, and we replaced it with non-plastic. Even bamboo scrubbers don't cost more than plastic (maybe even a little less) and I can't see any particular longevity difference.
I think the fact that I volunteer to clean up trash on public lands and know that weathered plastic is the period worst period to remove makes me move away from plastic in general.
Plus, a solid $3 wooden spoon is just a joy to cook with. They outlast the plastic ones, too.
Microplastic ingestion? Well, I'm not sure the effects or the relative quantity compared to tire shed and other industrial factors. But if I were forced by some diety to bet my life on if plastics in the kitchen or on clothing had a negative health effect, I'd make that bet.
But the main thing I don't get about the attitude stems from the fact that I don't really care what other people use in their kitchens. I recommend it.
Just please don't litter. :)
Things like glass food storage containers are really expensive compared to plastic. And they still have plastic lids; like, I don't know what you'd even do without at least the seal-part being some kind of plastic, I guess you'd need to use natural-sourced wax to make it seal, or something?
And on the topic of cost, I'm certain my kids have broken between 50 and 100 glass and ceramic drinking cups, storage containers, plates, and bowls in a little over a decade. They destroy plastic items at a way, way lower rate. Consider the use case of packing a kid's lunchbox. Plastic is... very tempting, for practical reasons. And cheaper.
Last I checked, plastic vs. wood on an otherwise identical stamped metal Victoronix knife costs you an extra $15-$20, which is a notable percentage of the total cost of the item. I sprung for the wood on my latest replacement just for the aesthetics, but it cost enough more that I did give it a good think first.
> Even bamboo scrubbers don't cost more than plastic (maybe even a little less) and I can't see any particular longevity difference.
Are those actually just bamboo? Maybe they are, I dunno, I can't recall seeing one. Lots of the "bamboo" materials I've encountered have turned out to contain (at least some) plastic.
> Plus, a solid $3 wooden spoon is just a joy to cook with. They outlast the plastic ones, too.
That's just true. Plastic spoons for cooking suck, wood and (where it makes sense and won't damage other things) metal are way better. Wooden ones aren't even expensive. The popularity of plastic ones is baffling.
One thing that's surprised me is the cost and/or total lack of availability of glass blender jars, even on fairly high-end brands (both the fake-high-end ones that are just expensive, and the actually-good ones). I remember my parents' assuredly cheapest-thing-in-the-store blender that they probably bought in the 70s or 80s had a glass jar, because that was just... standard. Meanwhile my as-awesome-as-I'd-hoped-thank-god expensive-ass Vitamix came with a plastic jar, and they do not make glass replacements. (I'm just checking and it looks like they might finally make one in stainless, though? Still, I'd prefer glass because being able to see what's going on in there is very nice, but I'm gonna have to look into that...)
I don't have a good answer for kids breaking stuff.
And I do wonder what glues are used in the bamboo scrubbers, but I have no way of finding out. The scrapers are at least a solid single piece. They're either definitely bamboo or some very skillfully-engineered plastic to look exactly like it. ;)
There are a lot of cheap glass blenders on [ONLINE STORE]. But yeah, the high end ones--maybe they're trying to avoid that 50s look.
We just run with the plastic lids with glass tupperware. The only other sensible replacement we've found is reused jars and Ball jars, but all those lids have plastic liners, too. We don't cook the lids and food contact is limited. Would be nice to have something else. Silicone lids? We have some of those we picked up for Ball jars at some point. But this seems like a lower potential issue than cooking with plastic materials.
For really inexpensive stuff like blenders and glass containers is the second-hand store.
Around the time that I became a parent, I remember a friend’s wife emphatically telling me why one should never ever give fruit juice to a child. Later in the evening, she recounted an anecdote where a bout of constipation was cured with prune juice. I could not help myself from commenting “but isn’t that fruit?”
somehow this thread reminds me of that conversation.
Just chiming in because you might be interested -
> That's just true. Plastic spoons for cooking suck, wood and (where it makes sense and won't damage other things) metal are way better.
If you have ever used nice commercial high-temp silicone spatula, it's an incredibly versatile and easy to clean spoon for cooking. A bit expensive at like $20 though. Pair with nice nonstick pan and polycarbonate cutting board (dishwashable) for the easiest and most out of fashion cooking and cleaning experience.
> One thing that's surprised me is the cost and/or total lack of availability of glass blender jars
My cheapest in the store oyster blender is glass, I think they mostly still are.
> If you have ever used nice commercial high-temp silicone spatula, it's an incredibly versatile and easy to clean spoon for cooking. A bit expensive at like $20 though. Pair with nice nonstick pan and polycarbonate cutting board (dishwashable) for the easiest and most out of fashion cooking and cleaning experience.
Those, I do use! My wife insists on keeping one non-stick pan, mostly for eggs (I just cook them in stainless, whatever) so we've got a couple around for that specific use case, but I grab them sometimes for other things, too. They're great for scraping little bits of sauce out of the edge of a pan, things like that.
> My cheapest in the store oyster blender is glass, I think they mostly still are.
Ha! Really? I killed one blender before upgrading (the old "buy a cheap one, and if you wear out out, buy the expensive one" approach) and that was also plastic, but it probably wasn't Oyster. Hm.
All of those were glass when I was a kid, it seems really weird to me that the pricey ones are usually plastic now. I'm not even (that) worried about the health effects of it, I mostly just like the way the contents move & pour in glass better, the plastic's too "sticky" (though I do cringe a little when we blend a near-boiling sauce in the plastic jar)
> I don't get this whole attitude.
Sorry if I offended you; fwiw I was describing a phenomenon that I observe. My own attitude about this whole situation was left unspecified, so I’ll add a few notes here: I do actively pick up litter (sometimes bigtime: I cleared a derelict boat from a lake today!) and I try to not litter. I try to respect the planet. I do use a lot of plastic.
GP is looking for culture war in a ball pit.
I've addressed this idea in a sibling comment. I think at least some superstition is inevitable in any subculture. Consider how many tech 'holy wars' might involve baseless beliefs about how a text editor or programming language or whatever being not only superior because of personal preference but because it's inherently more optimized. Treating anti-micro-plastics as a "religion" rather than a subculture based on a meme deserves a bit more nuance.
1. Is it based on inherently irrational, unfactual beliefs, e.g. anti-vaccination or anti-5G myths?
2. If we consider religion as a way to explain complex phenomena using just-so stories (the pop anthropology / layman idea of primitive man inventing Zeus to explain lightning), then what intellectual or emotional need does anti-microplastics belief validate?
> Treating anti-micro-plastics as a "religion" rather than a subculture based on a meme deserves a bit more nuance.
Agreed, and I think we satisfy your two conditions and many more.
If I read you right, question 1 pertains to irrationality, and question 2 pertains to powerful storytelling.
OK here’s one example that shows you are on the right track, but there is still more.
My ex-wife is gluten free. This single choice never comes alone. in my ex-wife’s case, she also believes in the healing power of crystals and essential oils. (Irrationality checkbox); I cannot describe her vision of cosmic creation but I guarantee it involves witchcraft/folk magic and differs from traditional dogma (Storytelling checkbox).
BUT THERE IS AT LEAST ONE MORE VERY IMPORTANT CHECKBOX! A good religion also prescribes a proper way to behave and act in the world for maximum benefit in the afterlife. In these newer religions, the afterlife is “the health of the planet”, so one must do everything in this life to ensure you do not hurt that future.
To be fair, that wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list of criteria for what constitutes a religion, nor is the second one really a criterion for inclusion, just a couple of points I was thinking of. For the first, I would hesitate to label microplastics skepticism as baseless as the other two examples I listed, as there seems to be some studies that suggest they're not great for the human body? But sure, forming an entire belief system about how they're the anti-panacea for all of modern ills is certainly unfounded.
The second is more prescriptive-suggesting than descriptive. What motivates the desire to create single scapegoats for all of modern ills? Maybe a breakdown in public trust in science, lack of comprehensive medical education, spread of misinformation, political polarization (lots of these health fads end up embroiled in culture wars), etc. So that's a host of issues to work on. And at the same time, the anxieties they are preoccupied with- widespread changes to people's bodies, for one - do need explanations for, otherwise people will flock to just-so stories.
Your introduction of a third point about how a modern pseudo-religion provides a call to action to achieve a desirable afterlife that actually exists in this life (e.g. some unspecified healthy future) is rather inspired. Reminds me of the phenomenon of how secular cults of political personality now appear to be moving in on traditional spirituality. Superstition, it would seem, can exist even without belief in the overtly supernatural.
All culture is shared ignorance. These comparisons to religion are inverted. Religion was born out of cultures needing to herd their people.
You're right that the debate about plastics is mostly meaningless noise by people who don't really care. Taking advantage of uncertainty while it still exists is a lucrative game.
None of this is comparable to software. Writing software is a choice and the users don't have to care beyond the UI. It's apathy, not ignorance, that holds software back. Text editors and programming languages are not usually the highest priority choice to make. The majority of software tends to be specialized one-off solutions. We don't exactly have chemists cooking up their own kitchenware materials on the weekend.
Software development creates subcultures, just like any other occupation, craft, human activity. Tech holy wars is a thing, and I'm sure a lot of it dealt with articles of faith just like any other source of controversy.
https://gwern.net/holy-war
https://wiki.c2.com/?HolyWar
I brought them up to illustrate that any endeavor will end up pockets of irrationality as part of the general culture. Doubtless in academia, scientific research, other forms of engineering, etc. there are little superstitions as part of the subculture.
That said, sure; the movement against microplastics is a pop health fad, which is different because it's a consumer-oriented activity whose actual effects are probably impossible to quantify. (As pointed out in a different comment in this discussion thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48836691) Building software produces tangible, measurable outcomes. Though likely far less measurable compared to other forms of engineering!
> It's apathy, not ignorance, that holds software back.
That's somewhat debatable, in that compared to the physical sciences, it sure seems like software engineering involves a fair amount of following traditions of preexisting practices and there's a lot of cargo culting that ends up happening. More of a craft than a science. But that's tangential to this discussion.
> is different because it's a consumer-oriented activity whose actual effects are probably impossible to quantify
Your perspective on software is that of a consumer, so you're not necessarily wrong. You're in the majority of people using software along with all those people having their "holy wars".
I'm just saying it's not intrinsic to software. The majority of people who write software for a living are silent about this because it's completely irrelevant to their lives.
It's like this with all other creative work too. As they say "a poor craftsman blames his tools", but more generally improvisation is expected when you're supposed to know what you're doing. Professionals can't afford to be helpless. In fact, that's why we have so many competing standards in technology to begin with. Constant reinvention is the most boneheaded way to progress, but my point is that this is in direct opposition to everything you're saying.
You seem to be insisting that there's ignorance where there is just apathy. For every one person whining, the internet has a chorus of hundreds. On the other side of the fence, there are dozens of people who could fix it in their sleep just ignoring it because it doesn't bother them that bad. That's what makes software so different from manufacturing plastic doodads at scale. You at least don't need a factory, but there are probably countless other reasons.
Was this LLM-generated? Because the intent is garbled, each sentence going in a different direction from the previous. (So perhaps not LLM after all.)
> Was this LLM-generated? Because the intent is garbled, each sentence going in a different direction from the previous. (So perhaps not LLM after all.)
Quoting the entirety of your comment verbatim in case you edit it. It's poor form to overplay your hand and troll instead of discuss.
I flagged your reply, and I suggest anyone reading these should do the same. HN is really going off the rails allowing this, but I know it's hard to rein it all in. At the risk of becoming even more of a hive mind, I think we need users to pitch in some more.
> Your perspective on software is that of a consumer, so you're not necessarily wrong. You're in the majority of people using software along with all those people having their "holy wars".
What do either of those statements mean? You neither say what I am not necessarily wrong about, and the second sentence means that - everyone is using software? The majority and the minority are both doing something?
> The majority of people who write software for a living are silent about this because it's completely irrelevant to their lives.
I’m not sure if this is accurate. Programmers have opinion, taste-based arguments all the time, sometimes based on dubious assertions. People pay attention to the proclamations of Linus Torvalds or John Carmack even when sometimes they’re not necessarily based on evidence, and parrot it as prophecy. Though sure, they are also not the norm, and becoming a public figure changes one’s behavior. (Uncle Bob Martin appears to have turned into a Twitter crank in recent years, for example.)
> It's like this with all other creative work too. As they say "a poor craftsman blames his tools", but more generally improvisation is expected when you're supposed to know what you're doing.
Like what? What are you referring to? What does improvisation have to do with what you were just writing about?
> Professionals can't afford to be helpless.
What is making them helpless? What are they doing or not doing?
> In fact, that's why we have so many competing standards in technology to begin with.
Okay this might be relevant. So you’re saying what I was talking about- tech holy wars based on opinions and superstition- causes competing standards?
> Constant reinvention is the most boneheaded way to progress, but my point is that this is in direct opposition to everything you're saying.
What does constant reinvention have to do with anything? What is an example of reinvention?
> You seem to be insisting that there's ignorance where there is just apathy.
I am not saying that all of engineering is ignorant, I am simply making the banal and obvious observation that any field of human activity will contain pockets of emotion-based conclusions that might not reflect reality.
The original point is that even the most seemingly empirical, scientific, whatever, domain might still involve facets that aren’t so scientific.
What does apathy have to do with it? If you were to rebut my point, you can simply say, “no there is no ignorance.” Why are you contrasting it with apathy?
> For every one person whining, the internet has a chorus of hundreds.
What does this sentence mean? A chorus of hundreds not what, not whining? The internet is full of whining choruses.
> On the other side of the fence, there are dozens of people who could fix it in their sleep just ignoring it because it doesn't bother them that bad.
Fix what? Ignoring what? What are you referring to?
> That's what makes software so different from manufacturing plastic doodads at scale. You at least don't need a factory, but there are probably countless other reasons.
??? Countless other reasons for what? Why are you contrasting software with physical engineering in a way completely irrelevant to my prior comparison?
Finally, I haven’t even touched upon your original response, which starts with “All culture is shared ignorance.” Which, while sounding both profound and impressive at first, is meaningless. All culture is shared knowledge as well. All culture is share norms, mores, values. What does it all mean?
> HN is really going off the rails allowing this, but I know it's hard to rein it all in.
Allowing what? Allowing people to write things? Last I checked people flag plenty of posts, including trolling. Rein what all in? Trolling?
Oh give it a rest.
First of all, yes, performatively following health fads has always been a thing for people with money.
But do you honestly believe this is what's going on at a large scale? What an absurd reaction to other people doing something that you don't like or don't understand. Nobody who isn't a paid influencer is sneering at you for using the wrong materials in your kitchen.
If you feel sneered that, that's your problem and not anyone else's. Are you going to start plasticmaxing, like rolling coal but for food containers?
I think you're doing the thing that you are accusing other people of doing. Creating an artificial distinction between "us" and "them", so that you can feel like you are part of the "us". It's just that in this case you want to feel like some kind of rational rebel, one of the final chosen few with common sense, in an increasingly irrational world.
You could just liken it to any pop health, dietary, or environmental fad instead of trying to portray a banal "people turn consumer choices into personal identity/lifestyle" trend as a whole new class of phenomenon. Crunchy hippies shop organic and audiophiles buy gold-plated premium wires; every subculture has at least a little bit of superstition.
Health in general has always worked like this, from supplements, to organic food, to avoiding ultra-processed foods, to gluten-free diets, pretty much every popular health fad has no provable causative effect on health.
Most of human behavior is irrational. If we were all perfectly rational, we would have healthy diet and exercise habits from the get go, and we'd have plenty of time to prepare food and exercise, because we wouldn't waste any time on entertainment.
>pretty much every popular health fad has no provable causative effect on health.
Isn't this almost true by definition? If it actually works, it's not a "fad", just "science" or whatever. Advice like "eat more vegetables" and "don't drink alcohol" probably do work, but they're ingrained enough that nobody thinks they're "fads".
The late 1800's health craze centered around Battle Creek, Michigan has had long lasting cultural and dietary impact, but I think most people would still call it a fad, because the core tenants were only popular for a short time.
Besides, the breakfast cereal movement it created quickly devolved from the Kellogg's and Post's original healthy cereals, Corn Flakes and Grape Nuts respectively, into the sugar-laden craze of 1950's cereals. Even Graham crackers were healthy and bland at the time, but we now associate them with cinnamon and sugar.
You might want to rethink your position on avoiding ultra processed foods not having any positive health effects...
If someone comes out with a study that shows, all other things being equal, decreasing or increasing the amount of ultra-processed foods causes a respective increase or decrease in health, then I will rethink my stance.
Until then, I'll keep eating foods consisting of proven healthy ingredients, even if they are classified as Nova 4 ultra-processed, such as lasagna made using my great grandmother's recipe or ancient Mayan dishes like pavo con achiote and also cochinita pibil, while avoiding foods that are proven unhealthy despite the not-ultra-processed Nova 3 and lower status, like Cronuts, potato chips, and bacon cheeseburgers.
Why would those be nova 4? And it sounds like you're already avoiding some processed foods. Did you mean avoiding ALL processed foods?
I don't know why their ingredients are classified as Nova 4, or why the processing level is defined by ingredients, in the first place. Lasagna contains ricotta which is made from whey, and whey automatically makes something Nova 4. Many ancient Mayan dishes contain achiote seeds, also known as annatto, which also automatically makes something Nova 4.
Achiote seeds add a bright red to yellow color, depending on the concentration, and add a mild earthy flavor. This puts it in the Nova 4 ultra-processed foods category, ostensibly because the color can make food more attractive. This is as opposed saffron stigmas, used in some traditional European dishes, which add a bright red to yellow color, depending on the concentration, and add a mild earthy flavor. Why adding achiote makes something ultraprocessed and adding saffron doesn't isn't explained, but I wonder if there's a predilection toward traditional European foods.
The Nova classification only counts fresh fruits and vegetables as unprocessed, which is Nova 1, so almost all foods are processed foods, Nova 3, or processed ingredients, Nova 2.
I eat healthy food and avoid unhealthy food, but the Nova classification system is so poorly done that it is meaningless. Even going off of actual levels of processing, instead of the ingredients, doesn't help much. One of the earliest processed foods, hominy, is much healthier than the unprocessed counterpart, and when Italians relied on polenta made from unprocessed corn, they became malnourished and suffered from pellagra, while those in America relying on the otherwise identical grits, made from hominy, weren't malnourished.
That's why I go off of actual research proving which ingredients are healthy based on the effects of adding them to or removing them from a diet that otherwise stays consistent in volume and calories, instead of the vibes-based categories the Nova classifications use, and the vague research showing that rich healthy people who exercise eat some things and poor unhealthy people who don't exercise eat other things, but never showing that eating some things actually makes you more healthy and eating other things actually makes you less healthy.
If similar levels of research into ultra-processed foods were applied to other statistics, they'd find that ice cream sales lead to drowning and owning a Ferrari makes you rich.
Even more so: plastics are not a specific chemical and they are not a specific material. Plastic is a category of materials that is very broad and very wide. You can make plastics out of almost anything. Therefore, to hate on plastics is to basically hate on an entire category of engineering and material design but not to actually know what a plastic is... sheer ignorance.
Yes, it's a category of materials that is overwhelmingly populated by a much more specific, ultra-cheap and therefore ultra-pervasive, set of chemicals which are shown in study after study to have worrying characteristics.
Anything that shows evidence of omnipresence, endocrine disruption, bioaccumulation, and inter-generational transmission should be extremely, extremely closely scrutinized.
To think otherwise is absolute braindead contrarianism, full-stop.
Personally, I think that the Microplastics Moral Panic is a textbook study of F.U.D.
There is practically nothing that ordinary people can do for prevention, mitigation, diagnosis or treatment of microplastics in our bodies, so I therefore conclude that it is futile and wasteful to worry or argue about it, unless you have abundant free time and resources to get paranoid strangers all in a frenzy, for no good reason.
I half-assed try to avoid plastic in contact with (especially very) hot food or drink, and avoid it in long-term food containers, in no small part because I've seen things like plastic cooking spoons losing non-microscopic parts of themselves in food, and I find the stains plastic storage containers acquire after a little use kinda worrisome (I'd rather my reusable storage containers not be that permeable, thank you very much), but otherwise agree that any real amount of effort to avoid microplastics would probably do more good if it took the form of a 20-minute jog per week, i.e. "don't even consider worrying about it unless you've really, really got all your other health stuff sorted out"
Like I'm pretty sure the bigger health risk with a plastic soda straw is the soda, not the straw, you know?
Did this apply to people freaking out about lead a couple decades ago?
What about those advocating for smoking bans in shared spaces?
Cholera outbreaks near the city water wells?
Or are microplastics special in some way?
We didn't ban water or metals because of the things in your examples.
Discover what plastic is harmful and we can't start to talk.
This is a fine argument against banning plastics. This is unrelated to "Microplastics Moral Panic is a textbook study of F.U.D." though.
If microplastics are a case of FUD, then there's nothing to look into. How and why would anyone discover anything surrounding a case of moral panic/FUD? By definition, there's nothing to discover.
I've picked up enough plastics off the beaches of the world already. Plastic ruins ecosystems and is a scourge on this planet. It's too late to fix, it's everywhere. 8 million tonnes of plastics enter the oceans every year, and it just keeps accumulating. We're ruining marine ecosystems.
Why was that we used to be able to ban environmental toxins such as leaded gasoline without this weird psycho-social-political analysis that has become the fashion in some circles?
Every plastic object replaced with a metal, or similarly strong/more solid material is an upgrade.
Are you sure it's all irrational? I, for one, prefer other materials for many things because they are more durable, hygenic or simply feels nicer. Seems perfectly rational to me. An irrational choice would be something like carrying a heavy canvas tent with wooden poles just because you hate plastic. Do you know anyone who does that?
Interesting theory but doesn't really coincide with on the ground facts. We know there has been an increase in hormonal issues. We can barely even get anyone to stop heating up and microwaving plastic to be ingested, which we know causes issues. The European Food Safety Authority completed a re-evaluation into the risks of BPA in 2023, concluding that its tolerable daily intake should be greatly reduced. BPA was everywhere, every can and receipt. Just because people can't identify all the ways plastic is ubiquitously ingested in their life, it means they're hypocritical and don't care about the unknowns?
> There is so much invisible plastic in their life that they don't seem to care about.
Huh? You think it's hypocritical for people not to "seem to care about" things that, by your own definition, they are ignorant of?