Nanoplastic Ingestion Causes Neurological Deficits

It's fun to think about what society would be like if all those "kids these days" denigrations, which are thousands of years old, were objectively true. The ancient greeks must have had secret fusion reactors and AGI that our blithering idiot archaeologists have yet to uncover. Our hypersonic aircraft are no comparison to the sumerians' near-lightspeed craft. Humanity has been on a downhill trajectory since the phoenicians figured out gravity field manipulation. Secrets lost to time along with our IQ points.

Lacquer is resin from trees, not plastic.

I don't know if it's better for you than plastic or really anything about its chemical composition, but it's not plastic.

Edit: After reading more, there is an acrylic lacquer that was developed in the 1950s that contains plastics, but outside of that, normal or traditional lacquers are typically biological in origin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacquer

I personally try to avoid canned drinks and foods to avoid metal poisoning. I typically buy two liter sodas in plastic bottles and avoid softer plastics. Styrofoam cups and other styrofoam food containers are awful. If you get hot food in a styrofoam go box, the box is often visibly marked by contact with hot food and you can smell it and taste it.

It's also potentially a reason to switch to an electric vehicle -- to avoid exposure to gas fumes while refueling your vehicle. (Or you can be "an extremist nutter" like me and give up your car entirely.)

Eating food out of a plastic container isn't going to increase your microplastics intake (by enough to matter). Those kinds of plastics are too stable to be a problem in that regards. Even if you left your food in them in the fridge for days.

The microplastics problem is a pollution problem. When you're done with any given plastic thing you throw it out. Some tiny percentage gets recycled, sure but for the most part nearly all plastics get trashed.

The trashed plastic breaks down into microplastics slowly over time and those microplastics are very mobile and easily wash or blow away if they're exposed to sun. This means they end up in rivers, lakes, streams, and large bodies of water (e.g. the ocean). From there they diffuse and get inadvertently eaten by sea creatures which are then eaten by larger sea creatures and ultimately end up concentrating inside the larger species that we eat.

It's not just the fish though; it ends up in our water supplies which are used to wash our other foods and ourselves. Basically, microplastics are currently so pervasive in our water supplies that every product made for human consumption that exists has microplastics in it.

The solution isn't to do away with plastics entirely it's to use different kinds of plastics that don't become long-lived microplastics. For example, polylactic acid (PLA). It's not suitable for all purposes but it's perfectly fine for something like a frozen food container or even the thin plastic film that seals it up.

The only reason we're not using such plastics (in the places where they can be used) is they're not as cheap as the bad stuff. We need regulations that require single-use products use plastics that don't break down into long-lived microplastics.

I remember being really scared about it and then I vaguely remember some doctor saying most stuff will go through stomach just fine, and that included glass.

Memory is fuzzy and I'm definitely not a doctor, so please double check.

I'm assuming if you are eating glass, it's a small enough piece that you won't notice, it can be big, you'll notice in your mouth.