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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.



That was a really long response, but I think you missed this:

> and the body was only “designed” to tolerate a narrow band of substances that are encountered in the natural world.




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