Consumer Reports finds 'widespread' presence of plastics in food

> It'd be nice to know, for instance, how damaging one substance is versus another so that I can prioritize my concerns better.

A list of harmful chemicals people could be exposed to in daily life shouldn't be difficult to compile if there isn't one already, but is relatively useless because as I noted exposure itself is not the problem in almost all cases.

However taking that list and trying to compare the harm on some sort quantitative level is going to be difficult.

I wouldn't worry about it -- I was speaking more about 'stay mindful of things around you that you can control, like wearing PPE when necessary or staying away from off-gassing plastics which have a characteristic smell' rather than 'make a list of everything you are exposed to and plan your life around it'.

"processed" is a term that exists on a spectrum, it's rare to find any food item outside of vegetables or nuts that is truly "unprocessed." In general, meat and dairy are not considered heavily processed. Most sources consider raw meat purchasable at grocery stores unprocessed.

> Although limestone is still considered safe and is used as e.g. filler in pills.

AFAIK this makes sense. Asbestos is really dangerous only in the lungs, so you need to inhale a "friable" form of it somehow. Putting it in your stomach won't do anything.

Nearly 500 years ago, Paracelsus wrote "All things are poisonous and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not poisonous". He was correct then and he is still correct today, but we stubbornly refuse to accept the first law of toxicology.

Broiling, frying and baking makes food more toxic. There's absolutely no getting away from that fact. As soon as you apply high heat to a food, you're performing a poorly-controlled chemical synthesis that produces all sorts of toxic stuff - acrylamide, acrolein, heterocyclic amines, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, you name it. The risk isn't particularly high, but it's real.

Most people have perfectly reasonably decided that they are willing to take that very modest risk in preference to exclusively eating raw foods. Some people aren't willing to take that risk and it is their right to do so, but anyone proposing a ban on the sale of cooked food on public health grounds would be rightly dismissed as a lunatic.

The plastics that we use (within and without the food industry) aren't significantly toxic and they're incredibly useful. Without plastics, the food available to you would be more expensive and much less varied. A lot of work has gone into minimising the harms and maximising the benefits of plastics and other synthetic chemicals and that work continues.

The villainisation of plastic is based on prejudice, not science. Some people have decided to hate or fear plastics and are trying to concoct an argument that they are devastatingly dangerous, but that effort has yielded little other than rumour and guilt-by-implication.

Yes, we produce a lot of plastic, because it's very useful. Yes, some of that plastic does get into the environment and can in some cases bioaccumulate. Yes, some species of animals have been meaningfully harmed by plastics, primarily because they are unable to distinguish macroplastics from food and actively seek out and eat pieces of plastic that they then cannot digest. No, there is no evidence that the levels of microplastics or free plasticisers in the environment are significantly harmful to human health or ecosystem health, nor any plausible mechanism by which that could be true or become true in the foreseeable future.

Plastics are not the next CO2 or the next tetraethyllead. They are far too well-studied to hold any significant surprises. Many, many researchers have spent their careers actively trying to prove that plastics are terrible (by fair means or foul), all to no avail.

Fair. There are also differences that come from length of exposure, though?

I don't want to start doomerism. I was just somewhat personally surprised at how many things have plastic linings. I do want companies testing, but I don't think it is good for mental health to get alarmed at all possibilities.