Microplastics make their way from the gut to other organs, researchers find

[effluvium]

I should buy some real cups and quit drinking out of solocups, but then I remember the water mains are plastic and so are pipes in the house.

Then I remember I smoke cigarettes and drink too much and I will likely expire before I'm 70 anyways.

Don't know why I'm putting money into retirement, but then again God is cruel and I'll end up being be old, weak, dumb, and defenseless at 90. With no children to be my advocate, I'd likely end up being a victim of elder abuse. Hope my gluttonous and slothful life helps me avoid the nightmarish nursing homes.

[elric]

Cross-linked polyethylene (the stuff in?water pipes) seems pretty safe. A lot more so than, say, lead pipes. That doesn't seem like the kind of plastic we should worry about, water pipes tend not to end up in oceans.

[bamboozled]

Then I remember I smoke cigarettes and drink too much and I will likely expire before I'm 70 anyways.

With all due respect, you might be a little depressed ?

[i5heu]

I think you are on something [0], but then again, more poison is more bad.

[0] https://www.cuspuk.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Plastic-Pi...

[naruhodo]

Think on the bright side. Maybe they will drop the bomb and you'll get enough radiation to evolve some super powers.

[hgyjnbdet]

This made my chuckle.

[kazinator]

I'm going to be counting on this to keep up my neuroplasticity.

[batch12]

I finally get to say "in mice" though I think it'd be silly not to consider whether it translates to humans...

https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP13435

[aydyn]

Instead of playing that gotcha game, can you hypothesize what differences in human anatomy would cause this to happen in mice but not humans?

There's a reason researchers use mice, and that's because physiologically, they are tiny humans.

[odyssey7]

Can Starbucks please stop packaging their tea in the plastic nets?

[bamboozled]

Hot tip, don't buy Starbucks ?

[knodi123]

Is there any high quality research into the health effects? I keep hearing about how microplastics spread, but not whether that's demonstrably bad.

I found this (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10151227/) , but it's a wildly broad overview, and includes claims both dubious and entirely believable, buried in tons of uninteresting stuff about how plastic can spread and how common it is.

[brnt]

I hear you, but with things we stand a chance of ingesting I really like to flip the onus. I think we can do better than we did with asbestos.

[stevebmark]

No RCTs that I’m aware of. Microplastics may contribute to heart disease. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2309822

[Eisenstein]

Don't many things make their way from the gut to other organs? What does that mean? I'm all for reducing plastics, but what happens when we scaremonger and then end up with nothing is that people stop listening to warnings, even when they are true. Let's focus on real harm plastics cause that we are aware of and good solutions to disposable plastics until we have studies that definitively show harm from microplastics in humans.

[therealcamino]

You're asking for studies that show the effects of microplastics in humans. How do you think that gets established? Not all at once. This isn't scaremongering, it is how science happens, part of the pathway to establishing what those effects are. Knowing where microplastics can migrate through mammalian tissues is clearly relevant to your own stated end goal.