New Study Links Plastics To Heart Disease, Diabetes 266
fprintf writes "There have been a number of studies over the years, some of which have been debunked, linking plastics with human disease. Now British researchers have released a study again linking common plastics used in food/liquid storage with human disease."
Re:I haven't even rtfa, but here goes (Score:2, Insightful)
Corelation. Is. Not. Causation.
So, what, you're suggesting people who live lifestyles that cause heart disease are more likely to also use plastic containers for their food and drink? Or people with heart disease are more likely to use plastic containers? What other correllation are you proposing?
Re:I haven't even rtfa, but here goes (Score:5, Insightful)
Relative risk (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if they will compare the instances of disease to those from food poisoning from earlier methods of food storage?
Re:I haven't even rtfa, but here goes (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly right. "Correlation is not causation" has become more like a reflexive meme around here rather than a thoughtful addition to the conversation.
Re:I haven't even rtfa, but here goes (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent redundant (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA: "At least from this study, we cannot draw any conclusion that bisphenol A causes any health effect. As noted by the authors, further research will be needed to understand whether these statistical associations have any relevance at all for human health."
As noted by the authors. The authors, and the person TFA got a quote from, and TFA all make this concession, and you try to karma-whore by stating the obvious. Read. The. Fine. Article.
Re:I haven't even rtfa, but here goes (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I haven't even rtfa, but here goes (Score:3, Insightful)
I haven't even rtfa but here goes
Corelation. Is. Not. Causation.
Translation: I don't like the conclusion so I'll make a baseless assumption and attack the article without any knowledge of it. Sounds like a severe case of cognitive dissonance to me.
Re:BPA can cause more than that. (Score:2, Insightful)
Nice links. Can't imagine why Natural News would have such articles. Couldn't be anything about their bias to get people to buy "natural" products, is it?
You know, like Kevin Trudeau claiming the government is keeping cures for arthritis, cancer and other afflictions from the people and how he miraculously has all these cures, but only if you buy his book and visit his web site to buy the products.
Do you have any proof of this bias? No
Did Kevin Trudeau write any of those articles I posted? No
Do you have any links or proof that he is providing miraculous cures? No
Good job at attacking a source you don't like instead of trying to prove anything they said wrong. Very intelligent!
Re:I haven't even rtfa, but here goes (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have a genuine statistical beef with something, please actually explain it rather than smugly stating, "corelation(sic). Is. Not. Causation)
Either that or show me your PhD in statistics.
Re:Relative risk (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if they will compare the instances of disease to those from food poisoning from earlier methods of food storage?
Using glass jars sure caused a lot of food poisoning!
Or how about not using BPA in plastics used to store food? Is that so hard to ask? There are probably thousands of plastics that don't use BPA. Why even risk it?
Junk food? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Relative risk (Score:3, Insightful)
My wife is big on Tupperware and a quick check showed that some products contain BPA but not all. That's just one line of products. It's quite surprising how far spread these things are.
Anyways, it's like Transfats we should know what contains it and then work towards removing it. BPA has long been known for it's damaging effects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#Health_effects [wikipedia.org] so eliminating it altogether would be in the best interest of all. Here in Canada our Health system is stretched to the limit due to an aging population why allow something that further impacts health and strains that system? I imagine that there will be the common "Oh it's not conclusive yet!" responses. Heaven forbid if anyone needs to spend an extra penny at Walmart.
Bad Snopes, Bad (Score:5, Insightful)
"some of which have been debunked"
Snopes is good at debunking (urban) myths. They are not, however, good at evaluating science. Debunking is not even an appropriate term or activity to apply to science (as stated by the poster, and as performed by Snopes). Their FAQ lists other forms of common fiction which are not urban myth, but fail to list badly researched statements by or about science among them.
Snopes reports the "debunking" coming from the International Bottled Water Association. Nobody conversant with science would accept a statement from such as biased source as authoritative. Their major hint should have come from the statement that the master's thesis was "not peer reviewed". A thesis is conducted by a student under a committee of professionals, at least one of which (the thesis supervisor) is an expert in that field. Peer review is conducted by the committee. A thesis is intended to be material suitable for rewriting into a publishable paper. It will have the committee members' names on it, in reference if not in the by-line. As professionals they will at least see to it that the result is worthy of carrying their names.
As for the quote in Snopes supposedly from Rolf Halden of Johns Hopkins that there are no dioxins in plastic, do your own research, as Snopes should have done to follow up, and as the Johns Hopkins people should have done before making the statement. Go to: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez [nih.gov] and put in the search terms "plastic" and "dioxin".
Snopes should also have done their research on the link they provide to the Johns Hopkins PR release (not a scientific publication of any sort, and certainly not peer reviewed) making the "hoax" claim. It is not from Halden, it is from Kellog Schwab. In addition to misattribution, they fail to note that the statement is made in the context of J.H. distancing themselves from misattribution in the emails titled "John Hopkins Cancer Update" and such, not in the context of research conducted or reviewed. There is a similar J.H. missive listed among the 150 results from PubMed. It is in a J.H. publication (peer review?) and has no authors credited.
Snopes appears to have found a way to become a subject of their own scrutiny, as they have delved into science and come up as debunkable urban science myth. Stick to urban mythology, Sponesites. Science can and does take care of itself, if you dig for it in science rather than press releases. Evaluating science requires taking the specific hypothetical statements and applying scientific expertise, not merely quoting vested interests (!) who happen to disagree for reasons other than replicable evidence.
Use Glass (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a reason all chemistry beakers, bottles, and flasks are made from glass, its the only cheap inert material that doesn't on some level mix with what you are containing. Metal and plastic eventually leech out.
Rather than going overboard with the results I would follow some common sense guidelines:
1) If you are a baby or preggers then use glass containers.
2) Use glass containers for heating things in the microwave or for long term liquid storage.
Given that the vast majority of everything we drink and eat these days is either stored in plastic or touches plastic at some point I think its almost impossible to go plastic free, and I doubt it matters much.
Re:I haven't even rtfa, but here goes (Score:3, Insightful)
I wish I could mod you up a more.
I don't understand why everyone immediately fires off that stupid one liner every time someone proposes a logical conclusion. Do any of these people understand how science works? You come up with a hypothesis based on an educated guess, then you test to see if it's true. Refuting something outright, saying that there's no concrete proof is the basis of a creationist's argument. If there is evidence to support a claim then there is clearly reason to believe there is causation, *based* on the correlation.
Everything causes cancer. (Score:3, Insightful)
Everything causes cancer, and cures it [today.com].
A lot of this "new study" stuff is horrendously [badscience.net] lazy [badscience.net] journalism [badscience.net] caused by having too much space to fill [today.com].
Plastics linked to longer life (Score:2, Insightful)
To parrot an industry-trade-group TV commercial, "imagine a world without plastics." No single-use hypodermic needles and other medical devices, fewer artificial body parts and almost certainly no pacemakers, etc. etc. etc.
Yes, certain plastics are harmful to certain parts of our bodies. Any decision to take them off the market or restrict their use must be made holistically, and not based on a single narrow "save the fill-in-the-blank" criterion.
Re:Maybe you should RTFA then. (Score:4, Insightful)
But don't you know that every media outlet known to man (and a few that are unknown) will grab this headline and run with "Teh cancer causing plastic!!!!!!111!! News at 11:00."
You've got your terror-inducing tagline wrong - too informative and too specific on time. It's supposed to go:
A shocking new study has found that a chemical found in 99.8% of US househoulds may be killing your family. We'll have details on that alarming story sometime in the next 90 minutes. So stay tuned, we return you now to the live coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial.
This should be followed by 6 minutes of live coverage of a lawyer shuffling papers, a commercial break, and a return to the same teaser. Repeat ad nauseum.
Re:I haven't even rtfa, but here goes (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. People who eat more prepackaged foods are more likely to be taking in all sorts of stuff---high fructose corn syrup, higher levels of sugar, higher levels of various preservatives (some of which break down into rather nasty stuff in the presence of citric acid), etc., all of which lead to increased levels of disease, whether it's heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc. Those prepackaged foods are frequently packaged in containers made out of plastics that leach... yup, you guessed it... bisphenol A.
The correlation is interesting, but it isn't remotely close to proving causation. What would be required for that would be doing another study that compensates for dietary differences (and genetic predisposition and...).
I'm not convinced (Score:3, Insightful)
Look, if it were in response to any particular post or claim, I'd understand it. Heck, I could even swallow it as "just watch the hordes claim causation there." Then it at least also gave the question to which it answers.
But posted as a knee-jerk reaction by itself, it is just plain old dumb. And it almost invariably makes a claim about TFA, not about anyone who might misunderstand it.
I mean, picture the following conversation:
You: "But it does keep things from being subtracted by idiots who can't grasp that concept."
Me: "Then you should stop sucking cock."
You: "WTF?"
Me: "Oh, sorry, I'm just defensively answering in advance to people who think sucking cock also keeps idiots away."
If it sounds stupidly absurd, bingo, that's about how that tired meme is too. Stick to where someone actually falsely claimed causation.
Because from where I stand, the parrots reposting that meme all over the place _are_ the idiots subtracting from the conversation. That "answering" a question nobody asked is just adding useless noise to the signal.
But, just to be a lot less nice, let me tell you what it looks like to _me_ most of the time: karma whoring and ego masturbation. It allows some loser to (A) feel like a member in the big family of skeptics, and/or (B) feel already better for his lack of scientific results or education, by having something snarky to say each time any mention of science comes up. It's a one-liner ego-stroke, that's all there is to it. "Look at how much smarter I am than those 'scientists'! I know that correlation doesn't equal causation! I bet they don't!"
Bonus point if the idiot doesn't even understand what he's talking about there.
Not that I think science needs any defense from that, and far from me to keep anyone from using their own brains about any given problem or solution. By all means, please _do_ use your brains. But the whole point is that such one-liner memes _aren't_ much of a sign of brain activity, most of the time. It's just a canned slogan that most seem to wave around mechanically and unthinkingly, just because it seemed fashionable to pull it out.
Re:What TFA actually says (Score:3, Insightful)
True about HFCS being rare in Europe. Doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of prepackaged foods with truckloads of sugar, though. And we got some yogurt in Italy last summer that was chock full of HFCS, IIRC, so it's not unheard of even there.
Even among the prepackaged health food crowd (with a few possible exceptions like fresh bagged carrots), people who eat prepackaged foods are more likely to be in a hurry (or else they would buy fresh), and thus more prone to stress, and thus more prone to obesity. They are also less likely to have time to get exercise, and thus more prone to obesity. And so on.... :-)
The point wasn't to speculate about what common cause triggered both the obesity/diabetes and the Bisphenol A. The point was that it is pretty trivial to come up with plausible explanations in which a common cause could result in both increased BPA exposure (which presumably would result in increased BPA uptake) and obesity.
Your reverse causation theory is also interesting. Obesity would presumably cause additional uptake of foods, and if you are eating more foods and tend towards prepackaged stuff, that by itself would lead to greater uptake of BPA along with it.
That said, if Bisphenol A interferes with hormones, it would not be surprising if that resulted in weight gain. As such, the causation theory is also quite plausible.
Until more studies are done, it is just correlation. One would hope, however, that in light of the correlation, there will be a significant push to step up studies to determine causation or lack thereof.