[HardwareLust]

If this were true, would we not see a corresponding drop in life expectancy?

[Cthulhu_]

My armchair scientific answer to that is: eventually, maybe. The problem we / science / medical / life expectancy has right now is that so much has and is changing as we speak. PFAS and microplastics only really became a thing after WW2, so while on the one side we banned asbestos, leaded fuel, smoking (and more recently drinking) got out of fashion, on the other there's microplastics everywhere, PFAS, vaping, various radiations, and by the looks of it the effects of a lot of these things will only slowly become apparent and statistically significant / measurable and discernable from other possible causes over a long period (30-50 years I'd guess, maybe longer), by which time there will be other factors at play too.

[Retric]

Dead people are easy to see, the issue is trying to differentiate one cause from everything else.

Smoking for example wasn’t believed to be particularly deadly for a surprisingly long time.