Microplastics Found In Human Stools For the First Time (nytimes.com) 307
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: In a pilot study with a small sample size, researchers looked for microplastics in stool samples of eight people from Finland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom and Austria. To their surprise, every single sample tested positive for the presence of a variety of microplastics (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). In a pilot study with a small sample size, researchers looked for microplastics in stool samples of eight people from Finland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom and Austria. To their surprise, every single sample tested positive for the presence of a variety of microplastics.
The new paper, which was presented Monday at a gastroenterology conference in Vienna, could provide support for marine biologists who have long warned of the dangers posed by microplastics in our oceans. But the paper suggests that microplastics are entering our bodies through other means, as well. To conduct the study, they selected volunteers from each country who kept food diaries for a week and provided stool samples. Dr. Philipp Schwabl, a researcher at the Medical University of Vienna who led the study, and his colleagues analyzed the samples with a spectrometer. Up to nine different kinds of plastics were detected, ranging in size from .002 to .02 inches. The most common plastics detected were polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate -- both major components of plastic bottles and caps.
The new paper, which was presented Monday at a gastroenterology conference in Vienna, could provide support for marine biologists who have long warned of the dangers posed by microplastics in our oceans. But the paper suggests that microplastics are entering our bodies through other means, as well. To conduct the study, they selected volunteers from each country who kept food diaries for a week and provided stool samples. Dr. Philipp Schwabl, a researcher at the Medical University of Vienna who led the study, and his colleagues analyzed the samples with a spectrometer. Up to nine different kinds of plastics were detected, ranging in size from .002 to .02 inches. The most common plastics detected were polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate -- both major components of plastic bottles and caps.
Coca Cola in plastic vs glass (Score:5, Interesting)
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The plastic taste I find annoying has to be coming from something.
Your imagination.
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Which is what any high-end chef or experimental psychologist will tell you: a lot of taste comes from imagination -- or at least expectations. That's why fine cuisine restaurants put so much effort into arranging food on the plate; if they slapped it on any old way it would taste different.
Human sense perception has Bayesian inference baked in at the neurological level. The colors you see, for example, are the product of both the light impinging on the retina and also the brain's prior knowledge of the s [wikipedia.org]
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I have no doubt that the steps you recommend will improve your chances, but that's dependent on the experience and expertise of the cop. You can get yourself shot for trying to comply with officer commands. For example the officer tells you to raise your hands, and then thinks your cell phone is a gun.
Following orders can also get you shot if you misunderstand police commands. There was a black guy recently who got tasered by a cop apparently for that reason. The cop told him to sit on the curb. Then
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I have met a few police officers (some in good situations, some in not-good ones) and in every situation, the officers were calm, collected, mostly professional, and didn't shoot me. Do you know where I have met most of the police officers? In areas with low violence rates. They aren't mentally conditioned to see guns, because for the most part they d
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I think it's about the carbon-dioxide. Coke from PET just tastes flat.
But it is interesting... for me the hierarchy is:
1 - 250ml glass bottle
2 - 330ml Aluminium can
3 - 330ml glass bottle
4 - A whole lot of nothing
5 - More of the same as in 4
6 - PET if I have a belly ache
7 - from tap only if I really crave the sugar...
For water I go with tap as that is still the cleanest and best tasting water around in Switzerland. For beer I don't care much whether it's glass bottle or can.
What remains? milk and juice from
Re:Coca Cola in plastic vs glass (Score:5, Informative)
Most probably it has to do with the different source of sugar. Coca Cola tastes different in every country regardless of which bottle you get it in. As for beer it could very likely be the case that the beer in the can is fresher. Glass bottles are not ideal for beer in the way they are stored and exposed to light. Beer is sensitive to light which is why many beers use as dark of a glass as possible. In cans beer is kept fully airtight, light tight, and nitrogen blanketed. I always ask this question during brewery tours and the answer is always the same: cans are better for the beer, but our customers think it's cheap which is why we ship it in bottles instead.
Now just remember this tibbit next time you're drinking a Corona. Maybe it's not a bad beer that is only remotely palatable when combined with lemon, but rather it just went off on account of ignoring hundreds of years of experience of exposing beer to light in clear glass bottles :-)
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I've never had Corona with lemon. Just lime. Is lemon better?
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I always preferred the Mexican imported Coca Cola in glass bottles. I suspect the taste improvement was not from cane sugar vs fructose syrup but rather due to glass bottle vs plastic.
I don't like the Mexican versions of Coke/Sprite, but you can get the American formulas in glass bottles as well and I've always thought that the Sprite taste so much better in a glass bottle vs plastic.
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I think the taste difference is primarily the amount of Cane Sugar vs Corn Syrup. However other factors is the degree of carbonation. Plastic bottles (and cans) hold a very high degree of carbonation. While for glass bottles with metal caps, there is a degree of a slow leak espectially when the pressure is very high, then it stabilizes to a lower carbonation level. A lower level of carbonation makes the drink taste more sweet.
If you are drinking it out of the bottle, we get other factors which may facto
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Glass bottles?
Examine the bottle cap more closely.
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Yeah a small surface area that makes minor contact versus the entire container?
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BPA we pretty much know how to deal with. Dont store the cans in hot places like a closed car, and dont cook your food in the can. Personally id rather a BPA lined can, at least i know what i am dealing with than some mystery "BPA free" lining. Guess what when they take the BPA out of the plastic they replace it with some other chemical, likely not as well studied as BPA is. They dont just say oh we're just going to keep making the plastic exactly the same as before and just not put the BPA in the mix. The
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You have no idea how canning plants work ingredients go into the cans are sealed and then cooked.
Re: Coca Cola in plastic vs glass (Score:5, Insightful)
Except it is highly recyclable. Glass just happens to be more expensive than plastic.
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Except it is highly recyclable. Glass just happens to be more expensive than plastic.
Glass bottles are more expensive to ship: they are heavier, need more protective padding, and they also take up a bit more space. Also, broken glass on the streets. So while glass has certain upsides when it comes to beverages, there's the whole chain of logistics to worry about.
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Initial cost, yes. But if we did it like Canada where bottles are returned to the bottler to be refilled instead of crushed and reprocessed, it eventually pays for itself after 10 or so refills. Of course this would have to be coupled with an appropriate bottle deposit to encourage returning (or at least high enough to allow the manufacturer to recoup costs if someone discards the bottle after it's only been refilled once or twice).
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Am I the only one old enough to remember that we did exactly that in the US until the mid-70s? Every soda bottle had a hefty deposit (usually half the cost of the soda itself) which made it routine to return bottles to get your deposit back (or, more typically, to get the next 8-pack of bottles). The bottles were returned to the bottler, washed, sterilized and reused. Chipped or damaged bottles were recycled or trashed. There was an entire system built around this - bottlers, drivers, supermarkets all coord
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but glass is bad for the environment
No it isn’t. Broken glass looks ugly until it erodes into pebbles, but it’s inert silica that has no effect on adjacent biology.
Re:Coca Cola in plastic vs glass (Score:5, Informative)
I work in the industry. All aluminum and steel cans have an internal coating. Some types are more visible but they all have it.
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And if they didn't, the contents might react with the metal.
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Olympics of poop (Score:5, Funny)
I hope they looked for more than just plastics. The international scope of this study could finally allow us to complete a poop olympics of sorts. Whose poop had the highest amount of micro gold? What about the highest amount of bitcoin (is that in poop?) Which country had the runniest poop? The highest tensile strength? And finally, are the Russians doping their poop?
Grandprize goes to the guy who thought of this (Score:2)
He's obviously full of poop
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So What (Score:4, Insightful)
Plastics go in, plastics go out? Whats the problem?
Do they get into the blood stream? Do they degrade in the body and produce toxins?
So What-do the locomotion. (Score:2)
I think the point is that plastics aren't suppose to be there in the first place.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Oh god, don't say that!
It will start the next Soy Boy panic, Paul Joseph Watson will have to defend selling Brain Force Plus in plastic bottles, Reddit will be full of endless threads about the plastic content of anything you might conceivably ever put in your mouth.
Re:So What (Score:5, Insightful)
Plastics go in, plastics go out? Whats the problem?
Do they get into the blood stream? Do they degrade in the body and produce toxins?
Some go out, we don't really know if they all go out. And even if they all go out we don't really know everything they do along the way. Do they produce toxins, produce bio-active molecules, or even have a physical effect on biological processes?
My understanding is that most researchers think they're benign... but there's a lot of weird byproducts of our modern economy making it into our bodies, it's hard to imagine there are no negative consequences.
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Hopefully benign. Someone needs to study if those micro plastics encourage bad gut bacteria when the plastics are passing through or getting stuck on the gut lining. How about the news about the parasitic worm that helps improve good gut bacteria?
https://www.the-scientist.com/... [the-scientist.com]
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... [sciencedaily.com]
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Plastics go in, plastics go out? Whats the problem? Do they get into the blood stream? Do they degrade in the body and produce toxins?
Seems science does not know yet. The above study can't tell whether all of it comes out again... just that something comes out that thus must have entered.
It seems the concern is that >b>microplastics are of a size that would allow them to pass through cell membranes or perhaps even be incorporated in cell structures. Does some break down and release active compounds? Does it cause mechanical damage or weakness? More study needed.
It is High Fructose Corn Syrup (Score:5, Informative)
It is caused by High Fructose Corn Syrup consumption and obeisity does correlate directly to that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup
See the graph showing the sharp rise in total corn based sugars in the 1980's and 1990s, in the *USA*.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup#/media/File:US_Sweetener_consumption,_1966_to_2013.svg
Your idea of "unsupported by evidence" is laughable.
HFCS is pure calories in carbohydrate form. The exact thing needed to get fat.
HFCS's consumption rise corresponding to people getting super fat.
Whereever HFCS consumption increase, so the people became fat.
Re: It is High Fructose Corn Syrup (Score:2, Insightful)
HCFS certainly plays its part, but not because it's any worse for you than sugar, because it's cheaper. Companies started putting it in everything, so our consumption skyrocketed.
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HCFS certainly plays its part, but not because it's any worse for you than sugar, because it's cheaper.
It is only cheaper in America, where corn is subsidized and cane sugar tariffs are sky high. In the rest of the world, cane sugar is cheaper.
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Lots of HFCS here in Canada, yea free trade.
Re:It is High Fructose Corn Syrup (Score:5, Informative)
It is caused by High Fructose Corn Syrup consumption and obeisity does correlate directly to that
Correlation is not causation. HFCS consumption went up in America along with obesity. But many other countries also became obese, some worse than America, and they did NOT consume much HFCS, because they have no corn lobby pushing it.
Dietary surveys of Americans show a weak correlation between HFCS and obesity. Many people that avoid it got fat. Many people drinking several sodas per day stayed skinny. Some sodas are made with cane sugar, and people that drink those get fat at the same rate as people that drink HFCS soda.
There is plenty of evidence that all types of sugar are bad for you in excess. There is not much evidence that HFCS is worse than other sugars.
Animal studies are inconclusive. Some show a correlation of HFCS with weight gain, but most do not.
NIH: Lack of evidence that HFCS causes obesity [nih.gov]
List of countries by BMI [wikipedia.org]. America is 17th.
Re:It is High Fructose Corn Syrup (Score:4, Interesting)
About that. Other countries use the same shit, just not necessarily made from maize. Here in Germany, for example, it is called "glucose-fructose syrup" and is usually made from potato starch, but the difference between that and HFCS is miniscule. From my personal experience American food is way sweeter compared to the more or less similar stuff in Germany, though, that might be key difference.
Re: It is High Fructose Corn Syrup (Score:4, Insightful)
Fast wasnâ(TM)t a common meal until the 80s.
Yes it was. Fast food took off in the 1950s, and spread in the 1960s and 1970s. The result was almost NO increase in obesity. Then in the 1980s, with no significant change in fast food availability, obesity rates dramatically increased.
People werenâ(TM)t slurping frappucinos all day.
Frappuccinos were not a fad until well into the 1990s, a decade into the obesity epidemic.
People worked active jobs not sitting in offices.
Jobs were becoming less "active" for decades, with no increase in obesity. There was no significant change in the early 1980s.
Itâ(TM)s calories.
Of course, but saying "people got fat because they ate more" does nothing to explain WHY obesity suddenly skyrocketed with no significant change in availability or affordability of food, no significant change in opportunities for exercise, etc. Why did a hundred million people suddenly start eating more?
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Of course, but saying "people got fat because they ate more" does nothing to explain WHY obesity suddenly skyrocketed with no significant change in availability or affordability of food, no significant change in opportunities for exercise, etc.
But there *was* a significant change in opportunities for exercise - computer/network usage became much more widespread during that time. All of a sudden, files were available without leaving one's desk to go find it in a file cabinet, and files could be easily sent
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A good way to support or refute this theory would be to look at obesity numbers among public transit users versus drivers. Overwhelmingly, public transit use requires more walking (and in the case of Subways/Els/Metros, also involves stairs). Anecdotally, I see less overweight people in Northeast US cities where traffic / parking constraints make driving impractical.
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computer/network usage became much more widespread during that time.
Nope. Desktop computers were very rare in the early 1980s. They didn't really take off until the late 80s and early 90s. Obesity rates rose fastest among the poor, the people least likely to use a computer.
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Fast food took off in the 1950s, and spread in the 1960s and 1970s. The result was almost NO increase in obesity. Then in the 1980s, with no significant change in fast food availability, obesity rates dramatically increased.
In the early days, McDonalds had one size of burger (what is now their smallest burger) and one size of fries (which is now their smallest size.) And they didn't offer 32 oz sodas, either.
Why did a hundred million people suddenly start eating more?
Stress.
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It probably had nothing to do with HFCS since the sugars in it are not all that different from cane sugar. More likely is that American manufacturers decide to put sugars into every damn type of processed food. HFCS were simply cheaper. Foreign manufacturers selling to the American public got in on the act to compete and then decided to pump up the sugar content for their domestic consumption.
Large amount of sugar is simply bad for you no matter where it comes from.
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HFCS is pure calories in carbohydrate form. The exact thing needed to get fat.
HFCS's consumption rise corresponding to people getting super fat.
Yes, but it's not because "HFCS is pure calories in carbohydrate form", it's because HFCS was used to replace not just sugar but vegetable oil. HFCS is barely different from table sugar, the difference is literally not meaningful. But it is very different from vegetable oil. Oil goes rancid but sugar is more or less eternal until metabolized, it will keep for ever and ever. And when you put it into a recipe it affects the texture. When you combine it with citric acid, it does this without making the product
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Obesity in American shows no signs of slowing, and the reasons why it’s so widespread can be traced to an increasingly sedentary lifestyle that keeps people inactive, and eating, for more hours of the day.
The problem is especially concerning among children and teens, according to the latest study published in Preventive Medicine. The study analyzed data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination survey from 2003-2004 and 2005-2006. More than 12,500 people ages 6 to 84 years wore activity trackers to log how many of their waking hours they spent active and how many they spent sitting
http://time.com/4821963/teens-... [time.com]
Seems some people have a pretty good idea
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Seems some people have a pretty good idea
No they don't. Your citation basically says that "people got fat because they got fat". It identifies no underlying cause.
Following WWII, food became much cheaper in America. Working hours became shorter. Jobs involved much less physical labor. People zoned out in front of the TV. All of these things happened DECADES before obesity rates started to rise.
Then in the 1980s, with no significant change in any of the above trends, obesity rates started to SOAR. Climbing, not 5%, not 10%, not even 100%, but
Re:So What (Score:4, Insightful)
No they don't. Your citation basically says that "people got fat because they got fat". It identifies no underlying cause.
People got fat because they weren't going out and exercising as much.
Well lets see what you had happening around 1980
You had video games becoming a big thing.
You had more television via cable in 1980, back when All In The Family was the best show on television and the original Battlestar Galactica was the best science fiction, there really wasn't much pull from the idiot box All of a sudden you had HBO playing things you actually wanted to see and without commercials then Skinemax came along and started piping just short of hardcore porn into the home yeah that changed the dynamic.
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Video games didn't become a thing for everyone and their grandmother until well into the 90s. In the days of the Amiga, the NES, Genesis etc., computers and gaming were the territory of the geeks and nerds. Who ironically were stereotyped as skinny little twigs compared to the football team's quarterback.
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They were already getting big by the end of the 70s
You had the NES out by 83 it sold I want to say 50 million plus units ? have fun look it up and correct me.
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This is a DESCRIPTION of the problem, not an EXPLANATION. It doesn't explain why obesity rates TRIPLED. What CAUSED a hundred million people to stop exercising and start eating more? Why didn't they stop in the 1970s or the 1960s instead? There was a massive change in metabolisms for no apparent reason.
Jeebus no, a Description of the problem is saying Obesity increased X percent. Saying it happened because people weren't getting as much exercise is an explanation.
These two statements are mutually exclusive
Video games actually became big in the 1990s, and mostly they displaced TV watching.
Median and average TV hours did not change much from a decade earlier
The first one is also likely false.
Also, the early 1980s were part of the disco years, and long distance running was a fad.
Have you ever been to disco ? Alcohol isn't exactly low cal, but admittedly the coke might offset he calories, the rest of the experience is hardly a workout.
The number of long distance runners is miniscule if the videogamers could actually move fast enough to catch the
Re:So What (Score:5, Insightful)
Plastics don't make people fat. People get fat because they eat too much. In theory it is possible that certain chemicals in the plastic cause people to eat more, but it is much more likely that hyper-palatable processed foods can do this job on their own, without need for plastics. The food industry employs very smart people who's job it is to get you hooked on their products.
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Plastics don't make people fat.
False. Some plastics, including BPA and DEHP have been shown cause obesity. The effect is strongest when exposure is prenatal or in early childhood.
People get fat because they eat too much.
Thanks for stating the obvious. Now explain why a hundred million people suddenly starting eating more in the early 1980s. Food didn't get cheaper. Jobs didn't get easier. TV shows didn't get better. So what was the cause?
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Some plastics, including BPA and DEHP have been shown cause obesity.
You're reading too quickly. My first sentence meant that plastic on its own doesn't cause obesity. I explain that in the next two sentences.
Now explain why a hundred million people suddenly starting eating more in the early 1980s. Food didn't get cheaper.
I already explained. Food became much more palatable. We got a lot more quick snack type foods, plus snack foods that are masquerading as regular food, like muffins and donuts for breakfast, and pizza/french fries for dinner. More fast food instead of home cooked meals.
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Food became much more palatable. We got a lot more quick snack type foods
No we didn't. I grew up in the 1960s. We had Twinkies, DingDongs, HoHos, all sort of chips and dips, and Velveeta "cheese". Pringles were available in 1968. McDonalds was everywhere.
All these piles of junk food caused almost no change in obesity rates compared to the 1940s and 1950s. Then the 1970s came. No increase in obesity.
Then the 1980s came. There was no significant change in availability of junk food, processed food, or fast food. But there was a sudden and dramatic change in metabolisms.
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McDonalds was everywhere.
If you're trying to say that home cooking and eating out did not change between 1960 and 2000, you're simply wrong.
https://america-loan-service.s... [amazonaws.com]
also, ingredients in food changed dramatically, based on attempts to make food both cheaper and more addictive:
https://www.slickwellness.com/... [slickwellness.com]
More cheeses eaten (just an example, you can try finding graphs for all kinds of high calorie junk food)
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdo... [usda.gov]
Was there a dramatic increase in plastics in the 80s ? Does increase in plastic cau
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Economic downturn
There was an economic dip in 1982, then the economy boomed for a decade. So why didn't people get skinnier?
Video games and home entertainment arrived in the 80s
Only for a tiny fringe. They became mainstream in the 1990s.
Cheese and milk products added to everything
Nope. That happened decades earlier. Also there is no evidence that milk causes obesity.
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Aspartame became available in the early 80s, all major diet sodas had switched to it by 1985. It was used internationally as well.
A more likely cause is the sudden generational rise in Gen X women going into the workforce instead of cooking meals at home all day like the prior generations'. Obesity is inversely correlated with time spent cooking at home.
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Other explanations are either restatements of the problem ("people suddenly began eating more", "people suddenly became more sedentary") or are unsupported by evidence, such as blaming it on HFCS, which is an "American thing" yet the obesity epidemic is a worldwide phenomena.
People began eating more and were more sedentary are not restatements of the problem. They are direct causes. You then would need to figure out why people are eating more or are more sedentary. Also, though it's a worldwide problem, the rate varies greatly from country to country, and even within areas of each country.
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It's called, Kids dont go out to play any longer
Helicopter parenting became common more than a decade after the obesity epidemic started. Also, in the beginning of the epidemic, obesity rates rose faster in adults than in kids.
Lets see TV with 24/7 cable channels.
Median and average hours of TV watching did not significantly increase in the early 1980s.
Computers, the internet, iphones and ipads.
Those came a decade (computers) or more than two decades (iphones and ipads) after the obesity epidemic started.
Now a days you just see kids sitting around with their face buried in some I device
That is a consequence, not a cause.
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As far as "hating vegetables" goes, most people I know that hate them only know vegetables as this thing that comes in a can or a freezer bag and mom boiled the fuck out of. I loved my mom's cooking, but when it came to having 2 working parents, there was no time to cook fresh meals.
Fresh vegetables and direct, high, heat is your friend here. Grill if you can go outside, wok or broiler if its cold out. Don't use too much oil, get just a little char on it, and you are good to go.
But we don't know (Score:5, Funny)
how much plastic there was in people's stool before the industrial revolution!
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The majority of stool samples collected from archeological sites have been found to be contaminated with microgutta-percha and microshellac.
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Careful! You're going to be labelled a plastic poop denier!
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how much plastic there was in people's stool before the industrial revolution!
You jest, but some very interesting stuff has been added to food over the centuries (sometimes by the eaters themselves). Not very clean sawdust in flour, for example.
Terminology (Score:3)
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Microplastics seems to span the range from 5mm down to 10nm but this seems too broad to me if you are talking safety. 5mm is roughly 20 thousandths of an inch and that's fairly macroscopic with a very small surface area to volume.
I really hope you meant 5nm, because five millimeters is roughly one fifth of an inch, but if that was the case, it implies the previous sentence would have been "from 5nm down to 10nm", which doesn't make much sense.
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More likely 5 micron. The other thing I would take issue with there is the "surface area to volume" being relevant. Surface area and volume have different units, and are thus not directly comparable. If we're talking spherical particles, they all have the same proportions.
This demonstrates an understanding below the 8th grade level. For any fixed shape, the volume scales as the diameter (or any fixed point to point in the shape) to the third power while the surface area scales to the second power. For example on a sphere the volume is 4/3 pi r^3 while the surface area is 4 pi r^2. Therefore the ratio is proportional to the size, tiny particles have massive surface area to volume while large ones do not. This is a fundamental property of mathematics and physics and affect
Little thought experiment here (Score:5, Interesting)
Take a look at what the food you eat comes packaged in.
I'll take mine as an example
Breakfast: Oatmeal, bacon and eggs. Oatmeal packeaged in a plastic container, bacon in a plastic pouch, eggs in in plastic foam carton
Lunch: Salami onion and cheese on rye (good jewish rye not that supermarket crap): Salami plastic pouch again, cheese plastic pouch, rye bread paper bag
Dinner: Stir fried vegetables (from my garden)
Of that only the food I grew myself, and the Rye I got from a kosher baker didn't have plastic involved, and I am not all that sure about the Rye. Is it any wonder there's plastic in poop ?
The question is what effect does it have ? Probably none as food grade plastics are indigestible and aren't going to be spending that much time in your digestive tract. Kids after all have been eating the damndest things since time immemorial
Re:Little thought experiment here (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you make a habit of eating the eggshells, that's not going to be an issue.
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No but I do crack the eggs and egg shell often gets in the pan with the egg.
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Unless you make a habit of eating the eggshells, that's not going to be an issue.
Would that be true if small plastic particles worked their way into the bloodstream of the hen?
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Why are your eggs in a plastic carton? Ours are in cardboard.
Why is your salami in a plastic pouch? Ours just hang on string in supermarkets inside natural skins often coated in a layer of Penicillium.
Why is your cheese in a plastic pouch? Ours is sliced off a wheel that is encased in wax.
Note I'm legitimately asking. Is it a choice or are products not available in a more natural packaging to you?
On the flip side I'm getting off my high horse to say that same place I buy the above from has decided to indivi
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You're kidding, I hope
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To my knowledge, "food grade" means that, when used appropriately, the plastic does not leach chemicals into the food.
This
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"With proper recycling, lightweight plastic is actually easier/better to recycle than paper."
Our pressed-paper egg cartons go into the compost. They soak up water and degrade quickly.
New kind of dupe? (Score:2)
Is this a new kind of "in-line" dupe? Wasn't the old kind good enough????
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Is this a new kind of "in-line" dupe? Wasn't the old kind good enough????
This is better. You can enjoy the same article longer, all at once.
Small problem now, but (Score:2)
microplastics grow up to be room-sized Barney action figures. [trbimg.com]
Plastic in stools? It's been in chairs forever! (Score:2)
How the hell did this story make it onto /.?
Has no one there ever been to Ikea?
"found for the first time" (Score:2)
(...) found for the first time (...)
That's a bit of an odd way to state this; my guess it that they just didn't bother to look any ealier. I'm pretty sure that just about anybody looking at their shit through a microscope in the 1990s would have been able to find plastic in there as well. Probably people professionally looking at shit have encountered endless heaps of plastic in shit already. No surprises here whatsoever.
And? (Score:2)
And? Is there some provable harm from them?
Probably trace amounts of lots of interesting stuff in our waste ...
Water bottles (Score:2)
Give that we recently learned that merely opening a water bottle was sufficient to impart microplastic particles into the water, these results should be no surprise.
Jumping from microplastics in stool to microplastics being ingested from oceanic sources, well, that doesn't pass the simplicity test when there's a far more germane answer, like they drank bottled water as many Europeans do.
OLD: Nobody was making a deal of it. (Score:2)
All but mined SALT has plastic in it. Probably for decades now if we had been tracking it. What can one expect from SEA SALT! Never understood why people thought it was better or more natural than land or chemical salt.
Microplastics MOSTLY come from clothing and other TINY FIBER sources because it takes a long time to break the plastics into microplastics. Already small plastics are most the way there. Every time you wash clothes you're releasing some... don't know why that wasn't news... maybe it was long
Do editors edit? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Which suggests that either the editors are idiots, or that they don't bother to read what they type....
Why can't it be both?
What's the big deal? (Score:2)
I bought a couple plastic stools at Ikea last week. My cats occasionally sit on them, but I bought them mostly for humans.
Advantage (Score:2)
Let's use this to our advantage. Find a way to make vitamins and vaccines long lived and embed them into plastics. Then make all the plastic producers mix them into everything. We can finally eradicate Measles and there is nothing the encephaletic anti-vaxers can do about it!
Well no shxt! (Score:3)
Nearly 100% of our food and drink comes in plastic containers, or metal containers with an internal plastic coating, or wrapped in plastic. Even fruit & vegetables all have those little annoying plastic code stickers.
Then everything we don't eat but use on a daily basis is made of plastic or comes in plastic containers-keyboards, mouse, pens, pencils, phone/tablet protectors, computer accessories, power tools, yoga pants, stretchy athletic clothing, shoes, socks, gloves, toothbrush, brushes, dental floss, body wash, shampoo, to name just a few.
On top of that everything we buy is comes in plastic shrink molding or wrapped in layers of plastic.
Is it really surprising that some of this stuff wears off and gets into our bodies?
Re: (Score:2)
I heard that too. I'll quote it here so you know what "that" is that I am referring to:
"In a pilot study with a small sample size, researchers looked for microplastics in stool samples of eight people from Finland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom and Austria. To their surprise, every single sample tested positive for the presence of a variety of microplastics."
Re: (Score:2)
Microplastics are found extensively in water. Most animals drink water. Including vegans.