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

nautil.us

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

#191

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

PeterisP wrote: post #130
azinman2 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that’ll reduce it?

Sea salt made from current seawater would include microplastics from that water, but rock salt would not as it was formed before these plastics existed. On the other hand, various mines of rock salt may have all kinds of other mineral additions that may be harmful for human consumption, so most rock salt is used for e.g. deicing roads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h23rF0xrhTE

historically this mine for example has been used to extract salt for generations........

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

#192

Post by glenneroo »

throw8383833jj wrote: post #176

>> When it comes to eating microplastics, scientists have documented plastic particles in about 40 percent of the human diet, including beer, honey, salt, and seafood I was surprised about the honey. Geezz. Anyways, i've got about 35 fruit trees, and 90 berry bushes in the backyard and I plan to eat primarily from that as soon as they generate enough food..

AFAIK that probably won't help you much as rain also contains plastic particles, which is also why all bodies of water tested (so far), even underground, contain plastic.

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

#194

Post by danShumway »

sydthrowaway wrote: post #185
danShumway wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, I think that's totally reasonable.

I will make one last pitch though that if you don't want to spend the hour putting together a full box or researching it, the most primitive filter you can build that will (as far as I can tell, again take my opinions on VOCs with a grain of salt) be decently competitive with commercial filters and will require less time to find the parts for and put together than you'll spend researching commercial purifiers is:

- 1 20 inch box fan (any brand) from any store

- A 20x20 MERV13 filter or equivalent (FPR 10 if you're buying from Home Depot), these will all be located right next to the commercial filters/purifiers in any store that sells them.

- An activated charcoal filter (optional if you care about odor or VOCs, aprox 20x20 but it's likely okay if you go a bit smaller). Will likely also be next to the purifiers/filters in any store.

- Duck tape or string in a pinch if you don't have tape.

Tape them all together (make sure that arrows on the side of the filter point in the same direction as the fan is blowing) and run the fan at speed 2 or 3; don't worry about building a fan shroud or perfectly aligning things.

----

That comes at the cost of:

- Extra noise

- General ugliness

But it will still perform pretty decently well and takes less time to set up than it will take to read the instruction manual for a commercial purifier. The noise from running the fan at full speed is a downside though, so I'm not knocking anyone who wants to go commercial for an out-of-the-box solution -- just saying that if what's putting you off is the time/building requirements, you can do a hacky version of this in 3-5 minutes that will get the job done for an average small apartment, and there's basically no way to mess it up as long as you don't tape the filter on backwards.

Again though, nothing against people who want to just order something, that's a totally reasonable ask. I just don't want people to get scared away thinking this has to be a full-fledged project, it's DIY but it doesn't have to involve any measurements or tools or any particular effort beyond slapping some duck tape around a single fan.

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

#195

Post by eslaught »

wbsss4412 wrote: post #165
ellopoppit wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty clear the epidemic of obesity and metabolic disease is largely caused by sugar https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM

It’s not at all clear that the current epidemic is caused by sugar. Lustig is a great speaker, and I’ll admit that when I first watched that I was quite convinced. His position, however, is still not representative of a consensus within the field, and for good reason. While sugar consumption is likely detrimental to one’s overall health. Simply cutting out sugar is not necessarily going to lead to better weight manag…

I really, really recommend watching this lecture:

The Human Microbiome: A New Frontier in Health by Susan Lynch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCaTQzjX2rQ

What food you eat certainly influences conditions in your gut, which influences your gut microbiome. On the other hand, your gut microbiome is highly persistent and even efforts to diet may not have the direct impact you'd think it would. Also, other factors (like conditions at birth) have strong effects that are highly persistent.

If you're not familiar with this research you really owe it to yourself to learn about it.

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

#196

Post by higgsbozo »

throwawayboise wrote: post #188
mitchdoogle wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. Fats were deemed the enemy #1 and the problem with corn syrup has relatively only recently been brought to public's attention. A friend of mine from Europe spent the summer in Florida riding bike all day long under a swelling sun, selling encyclopedias. He should have lost weight, but he came back with puffy cheeks and belly. I blame corn syrup for that :)

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

#197

Post by ephbit »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #82
moffkalast wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you don't spill any and wake up tomorrow with all the plastic in your house eaten.

Interestingly a friend of mine was discussing this with me yesterday and proposed that such a bacteria, if prolific, would be one of the more appealing causes of the end of modern civilization.

Not gonna happen. Why? Because AFAIK all life on earth uses water as a solvent. Unless your plastic is constantly/regularly exposed to water, bacteria will have almost no chance of catabolizing it.

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

#198

Post by hex4def6 »

slim wrote: post #109
palijer wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems a rather arbitrary trait to dismiss a researcher for. It is possible to be correct with flawed design choices.

that pie chart to the left is not poor design choice. it demonstrates actual incompetency.

Oh man. I was annoyed by the breakout of the second pie chart which seemed needlessly confusing. But the left one is worse for double counting everything.

And it has a typo! ("Analys"[sic]). That doesn't really bode well for how much rigor the rest of paper had, either in its creation or review(s).

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

#199

Post by hombre_fatal »

amelius wrote: post #120
Calavar wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pie chart on the left double counts everything. The total is represented as a slice in the pie chart.

Probably a case of automatically converting an Excel column into a pie chart.

That's what came to mind. And they simply selected a pie chart instead of a bar chart, and it wasn't super wrong because they were trying to show subcomponents of a larger value.

Meh. Not worth the HN thread. It's like picking apart why someone wrote code in a suboptimal/messy way when in reality they just wanted to get something done under a constraint, and the author would totally agree if they were here to defend themselves.

Yet here are people saying the author can never be taken seriously because of it.

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

#200

Post by mr-wendel »

snowwrestler wrote: post #84
mr-wendel wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My concern is with all the infants. Being able to gawk out and stare at all the many faces you see, and how they respond to you has got to be foundational to your discovery of the world. If had to place a bet on a major "net negative" I'm going all in on this. I have one friend who absolutely swears that "covid babies" are a thing, and that you can spot them from across the room. I haven't yet figured out what that m…

Infants basically ignore strangers or have mild interest in them. Infant eyesight is not good for distance; their perception is also in its infancy (their eyes detect photons but their brains are still learning to interpret the signals); their attention is correlated more strongly to sound than vision because sound is what they get in the womb. I mention strangers because the immediate caregivers of infants were gene…

Cheers, thanks for the extra points to consider. It's not an idea I'm committed to -- just concerned about it, so that helps!
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