Microplastics detected in human blood in new study

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/microplastics-detected-in-human-blood-180979826/

by serverlessmom • 4 years ago

137 129 4 years ago

Semaphor• 4 years ago

179 comments 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30810626

Here are the other articles, but only that one had a discussion: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru...

elevaet6• 4 years ago

Hypothesis: hormone-mimicking plastics in the human body are causing endocrine disruption and are part of the cause of obesity epidemic.

helpfulmandrill• 4 years ago

Wouldn't surprise me. The problem is how would we ever establish this, given the difficulty now of finding people without microplastic contamination?

IshKebab• 4 years ago

Doubtful. There are much much more obvious causes of the obesity epidemic, and obesity isn't uniformly distributed like plastic is.

DrBazza2• 4 years ago

Obesity is due to the introduction of high fructose corn syrup and decades of the sugar industry making out that "low fat" foods in the shops are better for you, whilst lacing them with sugar to make them taste better.

cameronh902• 4 years ago

HFCS isn't used much in Europe, but obesity rates are still following the US curve here (albeit a decade or three behind, depending on country).

Processed or sugar laden foods may be the culprit but the science isn't at all settled.

dagurp• 4 years ago

Obesity is a problem in lots of places where the use of HFCS is uncommon. I would say the main issue is sedentary lifestyles and the high availability of cheap and unhealthy fast foods (in crazy portions).

graeme• 4 years ago

Monocausal thinking doesn’t suit a complex system.

HFCS increases obesity. But you have increasing obesity in regions without it, and have people who eat it who aren’t obese. It’s neither necessary nor sufficient and your comment contributes nothing to evaluating the role of microplastics.

frontman1988• 4 years ago

Plastics definitely are lowering testosterone levels worldwide.

elevaet6• 4 years ago

Can you cite any evidence of this?

sva_• 4 years ago

Yes: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c06316

Another hypothesis: Endocrine disruptors in pregnancy lead to damages in the endocrine system and development of children, and contribute to some of the issues many people are nowadays facing.

0des2• 4 years ago

I love how we will blame anything besides admitting we stuff our holes too often, know it, and still don't stop doing it. Excessive food, especially sugar, is the biggest undercurrent in harmful substances in our modern age and hardly anybody wants to do anything about it.

shiftpgdn• 4 years ago

Because that’s a lazy idea. Do you really think everyone everywhere suddenly all at once decided to eat more and walk less?

yourapostasy• 4 years ago

I love how we will blame anything besides...

When talking statistical trends, keep in mind that even animals in tightly-controlled settings are getting obese in aggregate [1]. This is scientifically curious.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/10/its-not...

yourusername• 4 years ago

The question is why we stuff our holes too often now. It is not just availability of food. Even comparing to the 1970's or 1980's when food was already widely available and cheap obesity prevalence is still increasing. The shift from manual labour to sedentary jobs doesn't explain it. Office workers in the 1980's on average were less obese than the general population now and even people with physical jobs (construction workers) are more often obese.

lalalandland2• 4 years ago

I wonder about other hormonal stress caused by plastics. A lot of plastic softeners are estrogen like

krageon• 4 years ago

[...] part of the cause of obesity epidemic.

The (US) obesity epidemic comes from a food landscape obsessed with sugar. Most things you will find in supermarkets and restaurants are just significantly more calorically dense than it needs to be. That's your cause. The epidemic comes from eating too much.

Pointing fingers at other things might be useful, after the biggest issue is tackled.

hiccuphippo• 4 years ago

Except microplastics are found all over the world and obesity epidemics only on certain countries.

SamBam• 4 years ago

Unsure if we have evidence that microplastics build up in our food supplies and bodies at the same rate across the world, especially if this is the first study to even detect microplastics in the body.

spywaregorilla7• 4 years ago

Everyone loves to flaunt this theory, as well as the sperm quality one. I think both are wrong, or at least, minor effect sizes relative to the bigger picture. The sperm quality drop is due to obesity plain and simple. It's a well studied, strong effect size.

The rise of obesity itself has many obvious causes. Sedentary work, high calorie, high sugar/sweetener diets. If it were microplastics you would expect to see this as a universal effect, but it's really not. While obesity is rising on average, it's highly concentrated. Many communities, especially affluent ones, have very low obesity rates still. Very few people in my social / work circle are obese. And like, although I've cut out soda and most of the obvious bad things, its still apparent to me that my diet is likely overloaded with sugar and sweeteners much more than past generations. Poor people have high stress, insufficient money to buy quality food, and insufficient time / hardware to invest in food preparations on a regular basis.

And we have case examples too. Remote Amazonian (brazil) populations get introduced to nestle food? Wait several years and bam, fat.

Why are pets getting fatter? Because they're eating garbage too. Why are wild animals getting fatter? Because they're eating garbage too. You then see follow up questions like "Why are sperm quality readings dropping in dogs?" It's because they're fucking fatter. "Why are sperm quality readings dropping in people that aren't obese?" Because the whole population is shifting right and is fatter within their BMI bin.

Antibiotics are a real studied cause as well of causing fattening.

Frankly it would be extremely surprising to me if we didn't see the outcomes in obesity that we are seeing given the dietary crises the world is facing. Microplastics need not appear in this picture.

titzer4• 4 years ago

"Why are sperm quality readings dropping in people that aren't obese?" Because the whole population is shifting right and is fatter within their BMI bin.

I can't make sense of this statistically. Bins are just arbitrary cutoffs on a distribution. It's not like people know where the lines of bins are and crowd up against the edge, throwing off the median inside. People shifting "within" a "bin" doesn't change much. Instead, people shift bins. Some bins have more people, some bins have fewer people.

I think obesity is a huge factor, maybe 80%. But I don't know why you feel so strongly that every other explanation is completely false.

collegeburner• 4 years ago

Ok then explain why the testosterone reference ranges have went from like 800-2000 in the 60s to 200-800 now. Not just obese people, a "normal" healthy young man these days has the test levels of like a 60-80 hear old then. I think it's something more than just obesity causing endocrine disruption.

dehrmann3• 4 years ago

It seems like we've discovered things that are obviously bad for us within a decade or two of use. Leaded gas, DDT, ionizing radiation, asbestos. I'm sure there are loads of things that are less than ideal, but it looks like they're all at least an order of magnitude safer than bad things that came to use in the 20th century. It's at a point where the data has problems with statistical significance and confounding variables.

hogrider• 4 years ago

Anything except people overeating, sure.

mkoryak2• 4 years ago

The question I have after reading this article is what makes

0des2• 4 years ago

That is my grandfather's name, what's wrong with it?

mkoryak2• 4 years ago

Nothing, I think it's a great name!

captainbland3• 4 years ago

Two possibilities: microplastics turn out to be bad, and we're stuck with a generation (at least) of health effects until we can get rid of them.

They turn out to be safe (enough) to eat and end up being turned into some kind of food filler in lower end products.

EGreg• 4 years ago

But what if they keep building up, like acidification of oceans?

m0llusk• 4 years ago

super powers like telekinesis and eye beams

captainbland3• 4 years ago

It's the same problem: the extraction of fossil fuels. We have plastics because they're close to free as a byproduct of that process and the ocean is acidifying mostly because of dissolved atmospheric CO2.

bamboozled2• 4 years ago

I doubt we're ever just going to "get rid of them", how would anyone supposed we do that?

Microplastics have been found in ice in Antarctica this stuff is here to stay and is accumulating in our bodies and the environment more and more each day.

captainbland3• 4 years ago

Ok, I admit that may have been a little bit of hyperbole. But I expect in such a scenario some (very expensive, wide reaching) mitigations might be put in place such as banning the relevant types of plastic and introducing some kind of specially targeted filtering/treatment in fresh water supplies in areas where that's logistically/politically possible (assuming an effective system for it can be found).

titzer4• 4 years ago

Spoiler: they are bad.

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

Everything is bad in extreme, we care about how bad. E.g. what’s the risk equivalence of X ppm micro-plastics compared to Y amount of sugar intake.

seanicus• 4 years ago

Possibilty 1a: microplastics causes reproductive issues that contribute to plummeting fertility rates, mass human extinction ensues and consequently the problem sorts itself out quite nicely.

lalalandland2• 4 years ago

Remember the melamine baby formula scandal ?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trace-melamine-found-in-us-baby...

post_break• 4 years ago

I'm not surprised. I saw a whistle blower at a pig farm showing them grinding up waste food from super markets, packaging and all feeding it to the pigs. They eat all the plastic and junk, we eat them.

jahnu• 4 years ago

And this is why industrial farmers have pursued, and sometimes succeeded, legislation making it a crime to secretly film this sort of thing :(

politician• 4 years ago

That’s disgusting. It breathes new life into the biblical rules of abstaining from pork.

hungryforcodes• 4 years ago

It surely isn't just pig farms though. Cows, chickens....

azth3• 4 years ago

It's also prohibited in Islam. One of the most important things to understand is that why something is prohibited may not be immediately (or even ever) apparent to us, The Creator knows us better than we know ourselves.

meristohm2• 4 years ago

Why did those rules come about?

serverlessmom• 4 years ago

This is horrifying but ultimately not surprisingly either. Profit over the health of the people, always.

heurisko• 4 years ago

In the UK I watched a company being filmed that openly admits that peeling all the, in this case, biscuit (cookie) packaging, off of biscuits wasn't economically viable, so they just grind it all up.

nemo44x• 4 years ago

Remember reading about ancient people foolishly consuming led or kings that went mad from consuming gold? I guess we are those people for microplastics.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 4 years ago

kings that went mad from consuming gold

I don’t think I have heard of that. Gold is pretty inert.

squishy47• 4 years ago

I think the common term for gold poisioning is greed.

dundarious• 4 years ago

Not gold, but similar: consuming silver has a long history, continuing right up to this day, in spite of the fact that it just seems to ruin your complexion. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2297471.stm

MisterTea• 4 years ago

It's quite possible the gold was alloyed with lead or other toxic/poisonous heavy metals and consumed. Though I have myself not heard of kings ingesting gold directly, though I am sure it has been done for a variety of dubious reasons.

sph• 4 years ago

I think you mean lead. It was commonly used as a sweetener in Ancient Rome and causes pretty irreversible neural damage.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate

SnowProblem2• 4 years ago

It's common in many spices we use today, unfortunately. Consumer Reports published tests on this recently, following-up on other studies, and they have a campaign to get the FDA to regulate heavy metals because so few companies test. Fortunately, you can find brands that do independently test on Amazon, and some brands seem better than others (ie. Simply Organic).

https://www.consumerreports.org/food-safety/your-herbs-and-s...

ffhhj• 4 years ago

Gold is inert, but miners used mercury to extract it.

mgdlbp• 4 years ago

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

snickerbockers• 4 years ago

This is a bit terrifying for me as one of my favorite hobbies is putting together plastic Gundam model kits, which entails grinding the plastic down to a fine dust with sandpaper and aerosolizing acryllic paints through an airbrush.

memling• 4 years ago

Do you use a NIOSH (or other regulatory) approved mask?

And, editing here, how do you clean up afterward?

throwawayboise2• 4 years ago

Microplastics as being discussed are much smaller than what you get with sandpaper in model building. If you can see the dust, it's not micro sized.

derkades• 4 years ago

Maybe they should be called macroplastics because this is not true. First sentence on Wikipedia:

Microplastics are fragments of any type of plastic less than 5 mm (0.20 in) in length,

dwighttk• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30810626

Deadsunrise• 4 years ago

Apart from using metal/glass drinking and eating utensils / plates and things, how can one avoid these the best we can?

agentultra• 4 years ago

It's probably nearly impossible at this point to avoid them entirely. They're in the air and have been detected in remote parts of the world with little human activity.

You could minimize contact more: prefer clothes without synthetic fibres. One possible vector for microplastics could come from dryer lint containing broken down bits of plastics from clothing: acrylic paints off of metal buttons, fibres, plastic buttons, etc.

If you eat fish, minimize your intake or consider avoiding them entirely. Another possible vector is accumulation through the food chain.

As always: reduce the need or dependence on plastic products in general.

Buy produce from local producers and wholesalers instead of grocery chains that wrap food in way too much plastic and packaging.

If you shave body hair consider using a straight or safety razor instead of disposable ones.

Reduce, reduce, and where you can't: reuse.

rockostrich• 4 years ago

This isn't from using plastic utensils. It's from consuming meat that comes from animals that had plastics in their food, drinking local water supplies that have been tainted with microplastics and not treated (from what I've seen I think the only "proper" treatment here is reverse osmosis/distillation), and other random things listed in the article like toothpaste, tattoo ink, and lip gloss.

Tozen• 4 years ago

Whatever happened to hemp plastics and other natural non-toxic biodegradable plastics?

It's amazing how the world is letting the oil companies (who make the plastics) poison us and destroy our environment at will. Microplastics even in the blood of babies... Yet, seems to be no sense of urgency to stop this catastrophe and insanity.

It's like driving a car, seeing you are about to go over a cliff, but the foot is still firmly planted on the accelerator.

Microplastics detected in human blood in new study

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