[BenFranklin100]

Devils advocate here: food has been packaged in plastics for decades and plastic containers have been around longer than that. If plastics were as damaging as you claim, wouldn’t we have already seen this in the epidemiology?

[butchkass]

That’a fair point and I might be overpanicking. I could argue that it might be happening and we just don’t know about it, but from what I gathered, yes strokes are on the rise, but experts seem to believe it’s related to blood pressure. Although there probably weren’t as much microplastics when the last generation was born ; it’s now ubiquitous to the point of being found in the blood of fetuses. If gen Z and Alpha don’t die from aneurysms at 45, then yeah, I guess we could assume it isn’t dangerous.

I’m just tired of this kind of things : conglomerates are putting X everywhere, and then we have to prove that X is indeed dangerous, when they should be the ones proving that it isn’t. All the while they’re lobbying billions of dollars to try and make the research as slow as possible so that they can get every last cent of profit before X gets banned.

[myrmidon]

> If gen Z and Alpha don’t die from aneurysms at 45, then yeah, I guess we could assume it isn’t dangerous.

I think this is still overly alarmist. Plastic production basically started really ramping up in the 1950s in industrialized nations-- thats 75 years ago.

Yes, you can argue that exposure might have increased significantly since (+ bioaccumulation etc.), but excess mortality should've been roughly proportional, and I'd argue that it's implausible for "plastic lethality" to stay hidden for so long (I fully agree that it's not pretty that the stuff is everywhere nowadays, but I think "next generation is all gonna die from this before they get 50" is just not reasonable to assume, and we arguably cause much bigger problems for the next generations already anyway).

> I’m just tired of this kind of things : conglomerates are putting X everywhere, and then we have to prove that X is indeed dangerous, when they should be the ones proving that it isn’t.

I think this is a luxury problem-- you might be very willing to forego all remotely risky innovations/technologies now-- but you are rich compared to a person 75 years ago (and we reaped lots of benefits from that risk already!).

De-risking everything might look attractive in hindsight, but it is unclear what you would have lost to such a policy: Possibly a big chunk of modern material science, electronics, communication technology, ...

It is easy to downplay all that today, and pretend we never really wanted smartphones anyway, but I'm skeptical that the average person a hundred years ago would have seen this in the same way.

[swatcoder]

> wouldn’t we have already seen this in the epidemiology?

What's your control group for a study that might confidently determine that one way or another? Where are food-plastics held off but everything else about modernity and its potential blights adopted?

Ultimately, there are numerous terrible trends in health and wellness that we see accumulate over the course of the 20th century, consistently echoed in developing communities as they join into modern practices. Some causes of death go way down, some experience of luxury goes way up, but misery and previously uncommon forms chronic illness seem sweep across each and every such community.

We don't have a good, scientific handle on what the specific causes are because there are so many simultaneous radical changes that are introduced into a community as it "modernizes", and while we can sort of flail about and speculate about individual mechanisms and test them individually, as in this study, it's consistently a limited and almost blind search among the innumerable unknown unknowns that we don't have the capability, finances, or will to explore at population scale or over decades-long periods of time.

We'll presumably catch up on some of our horrifically dumb mistakes, as the GP noted for things like asbestos, and plastics may or may not prove to be among them, but right now we mostly just know that we face huge new problems and most of us will probably be gone by the time society learns what it did to cause many of them.

[myrmidon]

Very simplified-- looking at incidents over time is a good sanity check.

If you expect microplastics to cause problems with blood flow in brains, you would expect stroke rates to go up with "microplastics exposure".

But they don't; so either the effect is nonexistent, small enough to be drowned by noise or completely compensated by another product of progress, and, frankly, all those scenarios sound rather unconcerning to me compared to well known environmental problems (e.g. atmospheric CO2).

You are absolutely right that there are a plethora of other negative effects to look at, but I will trust the young scientists yearning for a Nature publication to do their job, and will focus my political vote and personal efforts on know big problems until science shows this to be one as well.

[fallinditch]

Yes, I wondered this myself. I guess it's simply that it's taken a long time for the amount of micro plastics to become problematic. Some types of micro plastics come from disintegration of plastic materials, which takes time.

[trgn]

maybe it's more the accumulation. less the plastic wrap rubbing off on the fruit, but the plastic wrapper getting thrown away and ending up breaking apart in the water.