| Past fifty years, maybe. I don’t think current food “safe” plastics are the same as those a century ago. > If they were more than trivially harmful, we would know by now. “The Increasing Prevalence in Intersex Variation from Toxicological Dysregulation in Fetal Reproductive Tissue Differentiation and Development by Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5017538/ Sperm counts are dropping globally. Hormone disruption can help explain it. Wild life that live near human populations (and pets, and lab animals on controlled diets) are unexpected getting fatter. Hormone disruption can help explain it. Amphibians are having weird developmental problems caused by, you guessed it, hormonal dysfunction. Variation in human physiology and psychology scales on a gradient; from subtle differences in brain structure, which might not even be noticeable to others, to macro differences visible to the eye. A chemical that can cause extreme variation of the external genitalia surely also can cause changes in glands and brains. IMO we see signals of the effects of hormonal dysregulation in our society with increasing prevalence. I think plastics have been quite a bit more than trivially harmful. |
But no matter what effect they have, if you can't conclusively prove it after decades and millions of people, it's by definition pretty minor.