The numerous spiders you swallow in your sleep will take care of that.
Plastic Bertrand, who eats 500 credit cards daily, is an outlier and should not have been counted
When asked why he does it Bertrand replied: Ça plane pour moi.
What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?
41–50 of 341 posts
Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Turns out masks are not made of asbestos. Unsurprisingly, masks safety and effectiveness has been studied extremely extensively.
certain groups (nurses, doctors or certain workers) have to wear a masks all of the time for years. It would have definitely been noticed if it would cause such effects...the control group exists, just compare it to the rest. It would have been obvious.
But those groups are particular ones that are also exposed to other environments that affect health so any discrepancy will be hard to attribute.
Also, doctors did not wear masks to the extend we did during Corona. They'd only wear them during some surgery, not the whole day including even outside.
Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?
#43Startup idea: flavoured credit cards!
Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?
#44This article conflates particles of any size, and often does not even mention sizes, e.g., '28 particles' in a serving of beer? That is imprecise (doesn't mention size) and wrong: probably way to little, as nano particles are used in filtering (clarifying) beer. The articles also doesn't really tell me how to avoid all that plastic. If 40 percent of human diet contains plastic, then there's hope, so which 60 percent…
Personally, I think that in answer to the question of “how to avoid all that plastic?”, the article is leaning more towards “take action to stop the plastic from being produced and added to food in the first place”.
While it makes the problem larger from an individual perspective, the alternative of simply trying to avoid it in our own foods would mean that our available foods shrink over time as plastics continue to seep in to more and more places.
Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?
#45How much glass do I consume? Or is glass, dust, whatever - any different from plastics?
Well, SiO2 is pretty different from plastic, chemically speaking. And I would expect that we inhale several grams of fine sand dust per week too. In other words, the amount of "glass" entering your body because you drank a beer is probably irrelevant compared to e.g. Sahara dust (if you're in Europe) in the air around you.
Yes and silicate is an environmental component that's well understood and our bodies have adapted to it because sand has been a thing forever. And glass is chemically inert.
Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?
#46This article conflates particles of any size, and often does not even mention sizes, e.g., '28 particles' in a serving of beer? That is imprecise (doesn't mention size) and wrong: probably way to little, as nano particles are used in filtering (clarifying) beer. The articles also doesn't really tell me how to avoid all that plastic. If 40 percent of human diet contains plastic, then there's hope, so which 60 percent…
> but what elephant do I miss?
Probably the plastic that was in those tomatoes to start with.
I doubt there's a practical way to avoid it, it's probably fairly random depending on where the food is from. Especially if I recall right it's often found in the water supply which you then drink directly or is used to water plants which you then eat.
Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fibers embedded in lung tissue is how asbestos causes lung cancer, so wouldn't surprise me. Wearing a mask for an entire work day, than inevitably some of those mask fibers will get to your lungs. Its only a question if your lung tissue is not able to clear out some of them, that will cause inflammation, that long term can lead to cancer.
Turns out masks are not made of asbestos. Unsurprisingly, masks safety and effectiveness has been studied extremely extensively.
Agreed.
However on the other side: there were some rather poor quality masks produced during the pandemic, so I would not be surprised to see future data about those being linked to health problems.
Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, SiO2 is pretty different from plastic, chemically speaking. And I would expect that we inhale several grams of fine sand dust per week too. In other words, the amount of "glass" entering your body because you drank a beer is probably irrelevant compared to e.g. Sahara dust (if you're in Europe) in the air around you.
Yes and silicate is an environmental component that's well understood and our bodies have adapted to it because sand has been a thing forever. And glass is chemically inert.
Dust or soil has thousands of components, metals, bacteria, fungi, molds, organic matter, feces etc. It can give you farmer's lung and other illnesses. Plastic is comparatively inert. Weird that there is not environmental movement to reduce soil from the environment.
Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?
#49Nah, I have Apple Card so mine is titanium.
Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a story on HN today about a plastic-eating enzyme: >Researchers at the Cockrell School of Engineering and College of Natural Sciences used a machine learning model to generate novel mutations to a natural enzyme called PETase that allows bacteria to degrade PET plastics. The model predicts which mutations in these enzymes would accomplish the goal of quickly depolymerizing post-consumer waste plastic at low…
> Maybe one of the human gut bacteria could be modified to also produce this enzyme? Fantastic, now I can not only eat the food, but also the packaging! Can we get one for cellulose too? Then we can eat pizza while it's still in the box.
You can, there are cellulase enzymes sold for human consumption. I don't know how much cellulose you'd be able to eat in one sitting, though. Cellulase is pretty slow.