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What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

nautil.us

181–190 of 341 posts

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#183
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nice. >In these scenarios (0.15g and 0.3g) about 90% they estimate comes from salt. for a few years now we have switched to rock salt completely at home. it's like 20-40% more expensive and we have to use a hammer/grinder every month or so but we are doing that. by reducing say 90% of the microplastics, is that.. good?

I also switched to "Himalaya" (Pakistani) salt, hoping that is low in microplastics.

A thing to note there is that there are plenty of other contaminants possible (and found in studies) in brands of pink salt (basically all pink salt is branded Himalayan salt), at much higher concentrations than sea salt, including lead. It also has no added iodine, which depending on your diet and region and such may be a concern.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s worrying about this is that we’re about 50 years into an unexplained epidemic of obesity and metabolic disease that nobody has a clear explanation for, and is also affecting lab animals fed controlled diets. It would be fascinating if this was all correlated with a common environmental contaminant, and the increasing use of various plastics could line up well.

Highly unlikely. The obesity epidemic is very well explained by diet and lifestyle choices, and regional variations in average body mass correlate with these explanatory variable pretty well.

So people just started making different choices the last fifty years?

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, whats a highly rated budget air purifier that handles VOCs too ?

I haven't done a ton of research into VOCs, but my understanding is that most purifiers targeting them use activated charcoal filters? Those filters are pretty cheap, you can tape them to a Corsi-Rosenthal Box without adding much cost at all. If there's something more complicated going on then maybe that wouldn't be effective, but in general air filtration is just a combination of how much air your filter is moving a…

My gist was buying off the shelf equipment for people who don't have time to build something.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consensus is not a necessary condition for truth. An idea can have no one believing it and be correct, and another idea can have everyone believing it and be wrong.

Absolutely. That said, it does beg the question: why, 12 years after that video was published, has the field not come to an agreement, if it is “pretty clearly” the truth? One could come up with various explanations, including lobbying by big sugar, but it falls flat when you consider that the sugar industry is only a small fraction of the industrialized food industry, there’s plenty of lobbying and influence to go a…

The first person to suggest fossil fuels would leaf to global warming was in 1896. How long until the field came to an agreement?

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Highly unlikely. The obesity epidemic is very well explained by diet and lifestyle choices, and regional variations in average body mass correlate with these explanatory variable pretty well.

So people just started making different choices the last fifty years?

Yes! People eat differently now than in the 70s!

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Highly unlikely. The obesity epidemic is very well explained by diet and lifestyle choices, and regional variations in average body mass correlate with these explanatory variable pretty well.

So people just started making different choices the last fifty years?

Yes. People and jobs are more sedentary. Kids sit in front of screens instead of riding bikes to the park and playing ball or just running around. Fat in prepared foods has been reduced, replaced with corn syrup. Portion sizes for food and drink at restaurants have probably close to doubled since the 1970s.

We are less active and we're eating more. Thus we got fat.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#189
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep. the exact same thing. i get to buy them in huge 5 Kg rocks because its just a few hundred km away but that is the reason.

Honestly that's kinda cool. And I refuse to imagine anything but a melon sized hunk 'o salt on the dinner table, with a small hammer and chisel for those who want to salt their meal.

nah. we arent those kinds of brutes. we simply buy a big hunk, every other month on a sunday spend time with a hammer and break it down to small pieces. then use a food processor to powder it

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. That said, it does beg the question: why, 12 years after that video was published, has the field not come to an agreement, if it is “pretty clearly” the truth? One could come up with various explanations, including lobbying by big sugar, but it falls flat when you consider that the sugar industry is only a small fraction of the industrialized food industry, there’s plenty of lobbying and influence to go a…

The first person to suggest fossil fuels would leaf to global warming was in 1896. How long until the field came to an agreement?

I don’t think I ever disputed that it can take a long time to reach consensus.

It’s quite clear that there isn’t a consensus on what the truth is, ergo the truth is out there on what causes obesity and it isn’t to be found within the current consensus.

However, do we take that to mean that sugar is the cause of obesity? I don’t see overwhelming evidence to that fact, so I personally don’t.

What we can take is that whatever the truth is, it is not “clear” nor obvious at this point.

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