As someone who avoids cooking with plastic, I've always wondered... what makes people think it's safe? Does it not occur to most people that plastics can break down through the heat they're subjected to, or do they assume the plastics in question have been specifically designed to adequately withstand that?
My basic mental model is that my body is constantly consuming chemicals that it doesn't use, be it particulates in the air or substances in the foods I eat or drink. My body is very good at incorporating the substances that it finds useful and ignoring (or killing) the ones that it doesn't, so I don't find myself worrying too much about any particular substance it might take up.
To your point, I don't have any particular reason to think that trace quantities of plastics going through my digestive system are going to cause any harm to me. Obviously if I have specific reason for concern I'll be careful (I'm not, like, going to eat off of asbestos plates...) but otherwise I'm not going to think about it much.
Exactly. Few things can cross the intestine wall, for example we don't have a problem with the absolutely insane amount of bacteria that process food inside of us and produce, well, shit. If you were to make a small cut in the intestine somewhere, well, then chances of getting septic (i.e. the bacteria overpowering your immune system) are high.
So I'm not worried about things larger than a bacteria, unless proven otherwise.
The other issue is with quantity. We all have lead or radioactive isotopes embedded in the body. Or, we can breath in small quantities of carbon monoxide, form example from a passing by car. That doesn't immediately cause problems, the quantity matters.
> My body is very good at incorporating the substances that it finds useful and ignoring (or killing) the ones that it doesn't
What are you basing this off of? From my perspective, the body is decidedly not good at ignoring substances. There are thousands of poisonous or cancerous chemicals. Things like mercury or lead build up in the body to the point of causing severe harm. Anything that can be made small enough will enter your body, and the body was only “designed” to tolerate a narrow band of substances that are encountered in the natural world.
I just ate a dinner off of a plate that's been sitting on my shelf for a few days, using utensils that have been sitting in my drawer for a few days, accumulating whatever residual particles have been floating through the air settling on them.
Like most people I lick my fingers after eating chips and don't sterilize my hands in advance, hands covered with whatever I've recently been touching (including the plastic bag that the chips came in...).
I have an air purifier at home, but there's all sorts of detritus kicked up in the air from materials around the house that my body is constantly inhaling (not to mention the exhaust and tire particulates that I get from cars driving by me or whatever is being produced in the construction site down the street).
I absolutely agree that there are plenty of things out there that are bad for you, at least in sufficient concentration. But every breath you take and every bite you eat is consuming at least some trace amounts of particles that your body doesn't need, from all sorts of sources.
It may well be that nanoparticles of plastics are particularly bad for you (in the concentrations that are normally consumed) but my heuristic is to not worry too much about things like this unless given concrete reason to.
Yeah, I'm always wondering why are people so concerned about what they eat while they are breathing in particulate poisons that have direct access to their blood.
Most things my body consumes (even the ones it doesn't use) don't fall in to that category. And most of what you're describing our bodies are very good at ignoring. I'm bathed in radiation constantly and I'm fine (unless I stay out in the sun too long without sunscreen...). I wouldn't want to live in a house with asbestos or lead paint, but I wouldn't be too bothered visiting a friend who lived in one. And so on.
It may absolutely be that nanoparticles of plastic are so harmful that eating off of plastic plates is a really bad idea, but my heuristic would be to not worry too much about it.
If it were extremely or noticeably bad for you in the short term, it would be obvious and we would know about it.
Generally I assume that I consume microscopic inedible dirt/mineral/etc particles all the time without know it and they most likely pass through my digestive system. I know of course that digestion is complex and that many of these likely are absorbed to varying degrees. I try to not cook with plastic generally but I also do not go out of my way too much to avoid it - same as me not trying to eat vegetables with dirt on them but not being anal about making sure all vegetables I consume are dirt-free
Because life is short term. And it will end soon enough in one gruesome way or the other regardless. If you can keep yourself from falling apart too rapidly till then it's all good.
I don't think plastic is safe and avoid it whenever possible, but an argument for its safety is that it has been widely used for a hundred years and we still don't have many direct causal links between plastic and health problems.
If microplastics is a problem, I would expect studies to have shown up linking microplastics to cancer in the elderly, or to dementia, or heart disease, or any of the other very widely spread health issues that could arise after decades of exposure in a population.
I'm not an expert, but wouldn't you need just a scalpel, a microscope and lots of donated tissue samples?
The windows of opportunity would have been narrow to definitively target microplastics as the cause of many diseases where observations of the potential mechanism of action for a morbidity - in this case, probably inflammation or endocrine disruption - could also be caused by other factors which are easier to measure.
This is because plastics became common when a lot of other industrial practices and materials became common in the environment, many of which we know contribute to diseases of modernity.
Microplastic pollution is likely easily confused with other forms of pollutants that were easier to detect historically, and thus care way more about. This would include lead poisoning or carbon monoxide or other chemicals that mimic hormones in the endocrine system.
So why isn't this an argument for disregarding microplastics as being marginal? Because there are microplastics on the larger end which exhibit effects on the endocrine system more definitively than smaller plastics, and these results are easier to report because these plastics are easier to observe.
But with the presence of smaller plastics everywhere, which we would have to know because larger plastics always break down into smaller ones over time, to both understand that they are a common water pollutant yet also observe them in biological tissue requires more precise modalities than historically have been available when microplastic pollution could have started.
It's possible that it might be only "larger" microplastics that have an effect on health, and smaller ones end up being flushed out before they have an effect, or end up not mimicking any hormone and just end up being an chronic inflammatory like pollen would be to those allergic to it.
But that cutoff is quite arbitrary if we rely on just the microplastics that are easy to observe as the only ones that affect our health. A better idea would be to suspect smaller plastics and then gather evidence on their effect on tissues over other pollutants, as the ability to sample them becomes available.
Tupperware was founded in 1946, and the home microwave was invented in 1967. So it has been about 56 years of just that combo. As I said, I agree that plastics cannot be considered safe, but I was presenting a possible argument that others might use.
56 years is kind of an upper bound on microwaving plastics (for the sake of argument, let's focus on that for now), and that's when it started. It means people who were born then and are < 56 years old now might've been exposed to some fraction of (not even nearly the same amount) as much plastic as people born today would be. If we posit that the current exposure levels might cut a few years off the human live... as a layman, naively speaking, can I really expect anybody to have even noticed this in the last 56 years? And given scientific studies like this take years/decades to bear fruit, why would anyone expect this to have been an established fact if it were true?
(I get that this isn't your personal argument; I'm trying to figure out why this argument might seem plausible to other laymen.)
I disagree, if you drink water that tastes like plastic from your drink bottle, you intuition will probably tell you drinking it isn't healthy. You avoid drinking the water until you have evidence to support your intuition.
Is something wrong here? Was something bad done? I would see a problem if I blindly trusted it.
Personally, I was told for a long time to ignore my intuition and it actually got me into trouble quite a few times, I take a more balanced attitude towards it now.
The problem is we have health regulatory agencies from whose lack of statement we derive an implicit assumption of safety.
Either they need to do more testing/whitelisting rather than observing/blacklisting, or there needs to be better communication about the limits of these regulators.
What makes you think it's unsafe? The amount of people using it without obvious problems indicates it's not obviously unsafe, and presumably most people just go with the flow (as I do - I'd assume that if there were problems it would have been found over the preceding decades of use)
Unless your philosophy is "I will put anything in my mouth that isn't proven to be unsafe", I don't think that's the right way to look at it? It's not that I see it as "unsafe" (at least not obviously so), but rather that I don't see it as "safe", either. "An [obviously] unnecessary risk" is probably a better phrasing, because it seems like its safety isn't really well-understood at this time. Why take the risk when you can just spend a few seconds transferring food onto a plate or something?
"You don't know what you don't know"; additionally asking too many questions makes you a "health nut" or "health freak", as portrayed by popular media.
