The Latest Health Alarmist Buzzwords

(Central Florida Bob ) #1

Happy New Year to my fellow ketonians - and among the most erudite people on the planet!

To start this off, this is going to be about two buzzwords I keep seeing and I have no idea how important they are in terms of health. They’re clearly important to get people talking and selling newspapers, online reading or something, but what little “science” I can find is even lower quality than usual for this sort of the stuff.

The buzzwords are “microplastics” and “forever chemicals”.

When I first heard of microplastics it sounded like a good thing. Everyone was worrying about plastics in the ocean and talking about the great Pacific Garbage patch when all of a sudden (I think it was 2016 or '17) it turned out that the plastics were being partially dissolved or even digested by some sort of bacteria or critter. That meant the big pieces of plastic were becoming small pieces of plastic, and if it’s a surface area phenomenon, smaller pieces have a higher surface area to mass ratio (very little mass) so they disappear faster.

In the last year or two, it has turned into we have microplastics everywhere, and it’s getting talked about as something to be alarmed about.

The second term about “forever chemicals” seems almost self-contradictory. I’ll borrow a quote from
a news article that came out this weekend here

PFAS are aptly named “forever chemicals” because of their nearly indestructible chemical structure, which prevents them from breaking down in the environment. These chemicals build up in soil, water, and even the human body over time.

Exposure to PFAS has been linked to various health issues, including cancer, hormonal disruptions, developmental delays in children, and weakened immune systems.

My issues here are both different than usual and the same as usual. The different thing is that a “nearly indestructible chemical structure, which prevents them from breaking down in the environment” means the chemicals don’t react with other chemicals (and everything, everything, is a chemical). Which says to me that if they don’t react with other chemicals, they’re not any more likely to react with the ones in our body.

If they’re not likely to react, how are they " linked to various health issues, including cancer, hormonal disruptions, developmental delays in children, and weakened immune systems?"

It has to be that “correlation isn’t causation” trap that so many of these studies fall into. It sorta works like this: find something else that’s increasing and if the two things are increasing they’re correlated. The closer they are to the same rate of increase, the higher the correlation, but it’s still true that even if the rates are different, they’re correlated over time.

So what do you think? Have you changed anything in your life over this?

(Robin) #2

Good reasoning to me.
I don’t take much of the constant alarmist issues seriously.
Even if they are true… what can I do about it? Nada.
Just carry on and mind my own business and body.

(Doug) #3

Bob, good post. I haven’t changed anything. Been living the same way for a long time, haven’t experienced anything bad (that I know of) and am not going to change now - clawing my way into the late 60s.

I worked with PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) for 35 years. They too are very stable, don’t break down fast in the environment, tend to bioaccumulate, etc. Lots of hype about them in the 1970s and 1980s, much of my job was getting rid of them. But the bottom-line toxicity isn’t much, in my opinion.

Plastics - my wife said we’re going to get rid of all our black plastic food utensils - supposedly the black ones ‘shed’ more. We haven’t done it yet.

I thought of the “inert” thing, too, but apparently there really are chemical changes in the brain, liver, and colon, due to plastics, at least in mice.

Changes in the metabolism of proteins, fats, nitrogen, and hormonal changes were observed.

(Bean) #4

Fabulous turn of phrase.

I have a nanoengineering/ physics expert home from college at the moment, so I asked her.

Here are her comments:
"So, the thing with any kind of harmful chemical/nanoparticle/radiation is that anything can kill you in excess, and the most dangerous things tend to stick around in the body longer than others. We honestly don’t know the long-term effects of nanoparticles/microplastics. We know inhaling them is bad due to the structure of our lungs, but ingesting them is a different story. Plastics are polymers, and a good chunk of the natural compounds we ingest from food are also polymers (cellulose and proteins are technically polymers). We just don’t know how well our bodies can break down synthetic polymers in microplastics the way it does natural ones.

We do know that pervasive chemicals like those used in Teflon are harmful, but usually only cause notable health problems for folks who worked in manufacturing with those chemicals and had extremely high exposure to them. Why is this if they are non-reactive? Just because something is inert does not mean your body can handle it. I work with Argon gas quite a bit which is definitely inert, but I don’t go and breathe it in if I can help it because I know it’s non-reactiveness keeps my lungs from removing it, and may cause me to die of oxygen depletion (since my lungs would be full of argon molecules staying stubbornly inert rather than nitrogen and oxygen).

I don’t know the exact chemistry when it comes to PFAS (physics and engineering major, not chemistry) but I do know in order for you body to remove something, it has to be somewhat reactive chemically to be processed. Stuff doesn’t just pass on through once it has diffused outside of your main digestive track. If you have a buildup of something the body can’t remove, like PFAS, it may take up channels and limit some other necessary molecule from being effectively transported, like how fluorine can replace calcium in our bones. It has a cascade effect that worsens with increased exposure.

To be perfectly honest though? The anxiety of trying to keep track of all of the PFAS and unwanted nanoparticles in our life would probably kill you faster than the actual amounts you are exposed to. If you keep your health up in other ways and don’t work in heavy manufacturing, you’ll be okay. Most of my ethical problems with PFAS and microplastics have more to do with their regulation (which tends to create unintended consequences). I’d recommend the VICE documentary “The Hidden Chemicals Destroying American Farms”. It covers those consequences pretty well.

TLDR: ingesting PFAS and microplastics are like pouring grease down a drain. There is nothing overtly dangerous about the grease, and a little grease getting down the drain is fine, but the drain isn’t equipped to handle a lot, and it may cause a flood in extreme cases."

(Doug) #5

Right on - good post here too. Just theorizing - the physical presence of things can make a meaningful difference, even if they are not technically very chemically reactive, as (presumably) with the (supposedly harmful) buildup of amyloid plaques, tau proteins, etc, within the brain, i.e. one potential big cause of cognitve decline/dementia/Alzheimers, etc.

While correlation obviously does not constitute causation, on its own, it also is no way necessarily ruled out.

(KM) #6

Erring on the side of caution, I try to limit my exposure to both plastics and man made chemicals and fibers, but I admittedly make a ton of exceptions. Just keeping processed carbs, seed oils, preservatives and sweetners out of my diet takes up most of my alarmist bandwidth.

Dark Waters was an interesting and depressing documentary about Dupont and Teflon. The people involved did have very high exposure, though.

(KCKO, KCFO 🥥) #7

This along with using glass storage containers is what we do at our home.

(Central Florida Bob ) #8

Sorry for disappearing. Ended up being rather busy around here. Or maybe it just seemed like it to an old, retired dude. :wink:

The conclusion I get from @beannoise’s “nanoengineering/ physics expert home for college” and especially things like the references to argon is that the overall view is sorta like, “sand is pretty much nontoxic, but you can still get killed by it.” The First Law of Toxicology is “the does makes the poison,” after all, but even that doesn’t apply here. The argon itself isn’t hurting you, anything blocking getting oxygen into your lungs can do that.

The TLDR version is an example of it.

FWIW, I don’t pay a nanosecond’s worth of attention to the PFAS or microplastics. If it wasn’t clear from my original rambling post, I think it’s strictly like the old observation that fear sells. A dramatic headline is likely to get people paying attention. People are doing this to make headlines.

RFK Jr’s Make America Healthy Again seems to have struck a resonant chord with a large segment of the public. I don’t know enough about the guy but stuff I’ve become aware of is really a mixed bag. I just see the emphasis on Froot Loops isn’t the insane amounts of carbs in the cereal, it’s that it has milligrams of a food coloring that isn’t allowed in other countries. I guess it’s easier to give up Red Dye number whatever than sugar.

(KM) #9

I did like something else Gary Taubes said. Paraphrasing shamelessly here, “health interventions” come in two flavors. Getting back to the original setup (ie “caveman times”), and engineering in the hope of finding something better that the original. His assertion is that the new and improved should be vetted much more stringently, it so often turns out to be a mistake.

(Edith) #10

You have to choose your battles, and baby steps can many times go further in the long run than trying sudden revolutionary change.

(Robin) #11

Glad you’re back!