AFAIK, still no conclusive studies that show microplastics having an overly adverse affect on the human body. I’ve seen one linking it to lower sperm counts, but that’s not particularly bad to me. We don’t need more people.
The big scare with microplastics is that they are everywhere and that certainly isn’t good; and I think we’re all just waiting for the shoe to drop and some study to come out that shows something majorly negative with them. But for now, there’s nothing obvious sticking out that shows an immediate concern. Which makes sense. We use plastic for so much because it tends not to react to stuff.
Because they are so ubiquitous that it is impossible to find a control group. Quite literally every single person on the planet has micro plastics in them.
AFAIK, still no conclusive studies that show microplastics having an overly adverse affect on the human body
The problem is that we’ll never know because there’s no control group. Everybody has them, even fetuses still in the womb. You would have to build bunkers with perfect air filtering, and then go through, like, four generations of humans to breed microplastics-free specimen, which you could then use a the control group for the rest… Only them never leaving the bunker would already invalidate the tests… So, yeah…
Though even that is complicated by 50 or so years of nuclear weapons testing, which likely also increased cancer rates. Not to mention all that lead everywhere. Produce gradually losing nutrients because farming mostly just focuses on the big three with fertilizer and the others are being mined out of the ground and sent to landfills, septic tanks, waste processing facilities, cemetaries, and crematoriums also doesn’t help (though I’m not sure waste processing and crematoriums remove those nutrients from the cycle like the others, since the one could produce fertilizer and the other might be sending it out into the atmosphere where it could eventually end up back in the soil).
There’s so much chaos that it’s hard to isolate causes, which then makes all the causes kinda “hide in plain sight” because they can perpetually blame the others and shit only gets worse over time.
AFAIK, still no conclusive studies that show microplastics having an overly adverse affect on the human body. I’ve seen one linking it to lower sperm counts, but that’s not particularly bad to me. We don’t need more people.
The big scare with microplastics is that they are everywhere and that certainly isn’t good; and I think we’re all just waiting for the shoe to drop and some study to come out that shows something majorly negative with them. But for now, there’s nothing obvious sticking out that shows an immediate concern. Which makes sense. We use plastic for so much because it tends not to react to stuff.
Because they are so ubiquitous that it is impossible to find a control group. Quite literally every single person on the planet has micro plastics in them.
The problem is that we’ll never know because there’s no control group. Everybody has them, even fetuses still in the womb. You would have to build bunkers with perfect air filtering, and then go through, like, four generations of humans to breed microplastics-free specimen, which you could then use a the control group for the rest… Only them never leaving the bunker would already invalidate the tests… So, yeah…
If micro plastics were a problem then we should expect to see rapid increases in cancers in younger adults.
Handed a note
Huh. No shit.
Though even that is complicated by 50 or so years of nuclear weapons testing, which likely also increased cancer rates. Not to mention all that lead everywhere. Produce gradually losing nutrients because farming mostly just focuses on the big three with fertilizer and the others are being mined out of the ground and sent to landfills, septic tanks, waste processing facilities, cemetaries, and crematoriums also doesn’t help (though I’m not sure waste processing and crematoriums remove those nutrients from the cycle like the others, since the one could produce fertilizer and the other might be sending it out into the atmosphere where it could eventually end up back in the soil).
There’s so much chaos that it’s hard to isolate causes, which then makes all the causes kinda “hide in plain sight” because they can perpetually blame the others and shit only gets worse over time.
We haven’t noticed much in the way of short term effects, but there’s no way to know what long term effects there will be except to wait.
In the meantime, since the effects are… unlikely to be beneficial, the best thing to do is reduce exposure as much as possible.