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?