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Microplastics in the olfactory bulb of the human brain
171–180 of 186 posts
Re: Microplastics in the olfactory bulb of the human brain
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am fairly convinced that this comment section is among the best demonstrations for "isolated demands for rigor" I have personally ever seen, I’ve found HN and other comment sections to lean in the direction of assuming the worst about microplastics, historically. However, I think we’re all getting tired of the constant “sky is falling” tone around these studies that can’t demonstrate harms outside of extremely na…
> Meanwhile, the alternative medicine gurus have adopted microplastics as their excuse for nearly everything. Used to be, you could ignore the alt types because you had to buy their magazines to know what they were thinking. Now apparently everyone needs to be aware of what they are thinking and make sure they have the exact opposite opinions of the alt types so they seem sane or whatever. You can just ignore the the…
5 years ago I didn't routinely have to have conversations with family members about why they should get vaccinated against deadly diseases. Now I do.
They are absolutely in the room with us, and they're getting people killed.
Re: Microplastics in the olfactory bulb of the human brain
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's a wide variety of increasingly common health conditions that have an unknown etiology -- ADHD, autism, CFS, IBS, mental illness, obesity, etc. And the number of people named Killian corresponds well with the rise in incidents related to airbags: https://tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/2599_popularity-... You don't just get to pull random things that are going up (assuming that they're going up, which yo…
Taking a step back, my point was simply that there's a large number of common ailments that we don't understand. We don't know what causes them and we don't know how to cure them. Our understanding of human biology is grossly incomplete. We are nowhere close to first principles here. We also have a long history of introducing new compounds into the environment and then many decades later saying oops, turns out those…
No no no, you don't get to point at "common ailments" and assume you've explained anything. What common ailments do you think we don't understand, don't know the causes of, or can't cure?
Re: Microplastics in the olfactory bulb of the human brain
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
>We should go back to glass bottles, whenever possible. There are very good, very practical reasons we moved from glass (and metal and other materials) containers to plastic. Unless those factors are sufficiently addressed, plastic is here to stay. For those who haven't been keeping track or are just too damn young to know history, those factors include: * Weight. Glass and metal, and also other materials like cerami…
> cost Oh yes, I love paying a couple cents less per drink to have micro plastics in me
And yet you would get, on average, 0 microplastics from drinking out of plastic bottles since those are brand new bottles which have not been subject to UV degradation of any kind. They're also entering via the GI tract, which doesn't have a particularly high rate of foreign matter exchange with the blood stream.
Meanwhile you'll walk outside sipping your glass bottle and take a deep breath of tire dust from nearby cars, which is actually the primary route of exposure for microplastics to enter the body since the lungs do exchange particles with the blood stream (notably, you will also find silicates, soot and basically every other type of thing all throughout the body via lung exchange as a mechanism).
Re: Microplastics in the olfactory bulb of the human brain
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the direct human exposure seems to come from polyester, which we have raced to make the dominant clothing and bedding fabric.
Massively subsidizing anything to do with oil has certainly caused all these byproducts to be super artificially cheap, so with the governments with globe-spanning military empires absorbing most of the cost and ensuring not even the mildest threat of accountability for "externalities" in an economy designed to reward single-minded monetary optimization, it was pretty inevitable that things made of oil would get perv…
I mean, yes.
But also:
Polyester is just so cheap that any feasible oil tax wouldn't amount.
For the past several years a large fraction of people have literally been inhaling every lungful of air through a frangible polyester microfiber that they wear around their mouth & nose. We tear these fabrics to shreds and then manually extract the lint from the dryer with our bare hands so it won't start a fire. Putting the finest dispersal mechanism we have, micro-spun fibers, directly into our lungs, and not even thinking about the consequences, seems like maybe it's an orthogonal bad choice we are making which could have orthogonal solutions.
Re: Microplastics in the olfactory bulb of the human brain
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Massively subsidizing anything to do with oil has certainly caused all these byproducts to be super artificially cheap, so with the governments with globe-spanning military empires absorbing most of the cost and ensuring not even the mildest threat of accountability for "externalities" in an economy designed to reward single-minded monetary optimization, it was pretty inevitable that things made of oil would get perv…
I mean, yes. But also: Polyester is just so cheap that any feasible oil tax wouldn't amount. For the past several years a large fraction of people have literally been inhaling every lungful of air through a frangible polyester microfiber that they wear around their mouth & nose. We tear these fabrics to shreds and then manually extract the lint from the dryer with our bare hands so it won't start a fire. Putting the…
On one hand, I strongly agree that some mitigations are personally achievable and that this is smart to do. Personally, I preferentially buy natural fibers (cheaper than you might think if you thrift 'em), and I cold wash and hang dry the polyester garments I do own
However, I am also wary of the push to view mitigations or "consumer behavior" generally as a means to actually deal with this kind of problem at scale. Like the whole carbon footprint thing BP was pushing for a while. Still in the public lexicon, doesn't do jack shit about real emissions at scale, but great for gotchas on activists. We have significant poison control and food quality control regulations because people can't really develop all the expertise necessary to vet all their own stuff, and it's a huge drain on society to make them do so rather than just solve that coordination problem centrally. Also, monopolistic consolidation has made even very organized boycotts dubiously feasible in forcing change in companies who respond more to their investors than their customers.
To me, governments exist to solve exactly this kind of problem, even though there are many other areas in which I would like them to mind their own business. In this case a lot of why petrochemicals are so cheap is because the cost of doing business for oil companies is heavily subsidized, so removing those subsidies wouldn't even require a new tax, and that money could be productively spent on lots of stuff, like maybe medical research even
Re: Microplastics in the olfactory bulb of the human brain
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, yes. But also: Polyester is just so cheap that any feasible oil tax wouldn't amount. For the past several years a large fraction of people have literally been inhaling every lungful of air through a frangible polyester microfiber that they wear around their mouth & nose. We tear these fabrics to shreds and then manually extract the lint from the dryer with our bare hands so it won't start a fire. Putting the…
On one hand, I strongly agree that some mitigations are personally achievable and that this is smart to do. Personally, I preferentially buy natural fibers (cheaper than you might think if you thrift 'em), and I cold wash and hang dry the polyester garments I do own However, I am also wary of the push to view mitigations or "consumer behavior" generally as a means to actually deal with this kind of problem at scale.…
Under our brand of capitalism, the system pressures the working class doubly hard to use the cheapest things on the market, and guilts the middle class to aspire to more expensive goods which are Ethical, or Natural, or Lite, or Healthy, or Artisan, or whatever buzzword of the day prevails.
Boycotts are a luxury that only the middle class can afford to participate in, and they don't really have the potential to participate in more than one or two at a time.
That is not a restriction that an effective boycott of an entire industrial method can labor under. The "personal responsibility" crowd have it dead wrong - we are trapped in this system and have very limited choices about what we consume, far too limited to allow us to collectively throw out an industrial technique that is anything less than lethal to us.
Re: Microplastics in the olfactory bulb of the human brain
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is probably one of the most prominent studies till date: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38446676 Microplastics and nanoplastics in atheromas and cardiovascular events. N Engl J Med. 390(10):900-910, 2024. Summary: People with artherial plaque that contains micro- and nano-plastics have a higher risk of death during the followup period. It's an observational study, sample size is not too big, but some findings l…
> For example, car tires shed lots of microplastics that end up in eggs or inside vegetables and plants, which absorb them from soil. Last year I moved to a house with a greenhouse and started gardening, and was surprised not only by the amount of plastics used, but by the amount of UV unstable plastics used. - Previous owner used polyester string to tie up plants, which now just disintegrates whenever I touch it. I…
True. The paradoxical thing is that even organic agriculture doesn't currently care much about microplastics given that they are not tested. It's a huge blind spot.
Re: Microplastics in the olfactory bulb of the human brain
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most cotton production in the US is not irrigated. The problem with farming resource calculations and fearmongering, is often they measure water usage of a particular crop without really considering where the water came from. Wouldn't you say crops grown with just water from the rain were using water with perfect sustainability?
The cotton in my clothes doesn't come from the US, and neither does that of the vast majority of world's people. Besides that, surely you're aware that the American South is going to increasingly suffer from droughts as well? It's pretty disingenuous to assume that just because historically rainwater has been sufficient, it's going to be so in the future as well. Also, agriculture isn't necessarily sustainable just b…
The US bans most of the cotton from China, the worlds largest producer, because of slavery. The US also produces a third of global cotton and is the leading exporter. You certainly have some American cotton in your closet, a huge portion of the people around the world will have American cotton in their clothes.
And for the rest... talking to climate doomers isn't interesting or productive. You'll only believe negative things, you demonstrably here don't know what you're talking about and just make things up to fit the narrative you have in your head. You clearly knew nothing about cotton production but made up facts without bothering to look for information at all. You make up your climate facts as well, do you know anything about the climate models for what will happen in the cotton growing regions of the US? Or have you heard vague things about droughts and decided to parrot those and assume they apply here because they supported your doom thoughts?
Re: Microplastics in the olfactory bulb of the human brain
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most common plastic, PET, is inert and does not mimic hormones
This is not correct. "When comparing water of the same spring that is packed in glass or plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), estrogenic activity is three times higher in water from plastic bottles." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096007601...
PET in consumer products has a lot of contaminating non-PET plastics, precursors and other chemicals co-present, which can lead to the effects you cite.
If you were to get a block of lab grade PET you’d find it was inert