Eating From Plastic Takeout Containers Can Increase Heart Failure Risk, Study Finds (theguardian.com) 62
A new study suggests that frequent consumption of food from plastic takeout containers significantly increases the risk of congestive heart failure due to gut biome changes that trigger inflammation and circulatory damage. The Guardian reports: The authors used a two-part approach, first looking into the frequency with which over 3,000 people in China ate from plastic takeout containers, and whether they had heart disease. They then exposed rats to plastic chemicals in water that was boiled and poured in carryout containers to extract chemicals. "The data revealed that high-frequency exposure to plastics is significantly associated with an increased risk of congestive heart failure," the authors wrote. [...] They put boiling water in the containers for one, five or 15 minutes because plastic chemicals leach at much higher rates when hot contents are placed in containers -- the study cited previous research that found as many as 4.2m microplastic particles per sq cm can leach from plastic containers that are microwaved.
The authors then gave rats the water contaminated with leachate to drink for several months, then analyzed the gut biome and metabolites in the feces. It found notable changes. "It indicated that ingestion of these leachates altered the intestinal microenvironment, affected gut microbiota composition, and modified gut microbiota metabolites, particularly those linked to inflammation and oxidative stress," the authors wrote. They then checked the rats' heart muscle tissue and found it had been damaged. The study did not find a statistical difference in the changes and damage among rats that were exposed to water that had been in contact with plastic for one minute versus five or fifteen. The study has been published in the journal Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety.
The authors then gave rats the water contaminated with leachate to drink for several months, then analyzed the gut biome and metabolites in the feces. It found notable changes. "It indicated that ingestion of these leachates altered the intestinal microenvironment, affected gut microbiota composition, and modified gut microbiota metabolites, particularly those linked to inflammation and oxidative stress," the authors wrote. They then checked the rats' heart muscle tissue and found it had been damaged. The study did not find a statistical difference in the changes and damage among rats that were exposed to water that had been in contact with plastic for one minute versus five or fifteen. The study has been published in the journal Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety.
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That sounds unreasonably petty, but nothing would surprise me any more.
Is this a conscious tactic? To give out stupid petty after stupid petty order until we're completely numb ... so that we'll not notice when he gives an order that matters.
Re: In related news.. (Score:2)
What is woke anyways? What exactly is being rolled back here?
Woke means anti-discrimination (Score:3)
Based on 47's recent expansion of anti-DEI rhetoric to include accessibility, as well as the lawsuit Texas v. Becerra in which 17 US states' attorneys general seek to overturn disabled students' entitlement to accommodation pursuant to section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act:
"Woke" means statutes and regulations that protect human beings from discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, or disability.
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No, the conscious tactic is to blatantly lie about what Trump does. He didn't ban paper takeout containers. He banned paper straws, which are normally used with cold liquids, not hot ones. (The sticks that go in hot beverages are stirrers, not straws.)
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He banned them as a reaction to stare and local governments banning plastic straws.
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You can keep repeating yourself (and downmodding) but until you address the issue of plastic straw bans, you won't understand the paper straw ban at all.
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No, the conscious tactic is to blatantly lie about what trump does.
trump is known for being honest, that's why they call him "Honest donald". No, wait that was Honest Abe.
A friend of mine was so thrilled when trump got elected, he's a fact checker at a successful print business and he said he gets 4x the work when donald is in the news. He says he needs a helper.
It turns out that lying orange sack of shit does create jobs.
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I understand that the use of paper straws is an extremely important issue, but when are groceries gonna be affordable again?
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I understand that the use of paper straws is an extremely important issue, but when are groceries gonna be affordable again?
Not anytime soon but as long as it can be blamed on DEI, Sleepy Joe & illegals, it's all good
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No the idea is to lie and lie and lie about things Trump isn't doing. Paper straws were the issue here. Not paper containers. And yeah, paper straws suck (pardon the pun). Same with incandescent light bulbs. My daughter loves her old bulb lamp as it is just the best, most mood relaxing light in the house. She was worried once that bulb died that'd be it. Not anymore, and now she has a little thing to be grateful to Trump for too. Back to the issue though... The lying from the media is as obvious as my
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The Associated Press is banned from the Whitehouse and Air Force One because they refused to use the silly unofficial Gulf Of America name. Yeah the orange one is that petty. https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/14... [cnn.com]
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I think a lot of people need to stop and look at what they cook with before they point fingers at the convenience foods.
Do you use plastic anywhere in your cooking process? Chopping board? vegetable cutters? Measuring cups? Food Processor/mixer? Then you're doing exactly the same thing.
The easiest way to avoid microplastic ingestion is to buy frozen foods that are not pre-cooked. (eg a pizza, or a lasagna) and then remove it from the container before putting it in the microwave so it doesn't leech any furth
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Whoa, really? I think you're nuts. I eat local food mostly (I know the guy who butchers my meat.)
Hearing someone recommend processed meals is just bizarre to me.
And yes I have plastic measuring cups, which I'm making my own bread with lol.
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Do you use plastic anywhere in your cooking process? Chopping board? vegetable cutters? Measuring cups? Food Processor/mixer? Then you're doing exactly the same thing.
No, you're doing something specifically similar. Water is a powerful solvent, but more important is the temperature. The usual rule of thumb is that a 10 degree (Celsius) increase in temperature will roughly double the speed of chemical reactions. Going from room temperature (25 C) to boiling (100 C) means a difference of 100 to 200 in the reaction rates.
If your question was whether someone cooked their food sous vide, you would have a point, especially for vegetables. There are other hazards of underco
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The survey was done in China - I don't think Trump's executive orders have validity there.
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Won't help. A lot of the paper containers are coated with a thin layer of plastic for moisture resistance. The "waxed" cardboard often used for liquids is actually plastic.
Once you start looking plastic is all over your food.
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Paper takeout containers are generally lined with plastic.
There may be truth in it... (Score:5, Informative)
... but their methodology sounds awful. There are so many confounders to whether a person is likely to buy takeout that it's pointless to even try such an analysis without doing a RCT (and on the confounders that they did consider, there were sizable group differences). Heart disease was self-report. No samples were taken. Unless you're talking soup, people almost never put "boiling water" into takeout containers and boil the containers for one minute, let alone 15. The lack of boiling time correlation is suspicious. Sample sizes were tiny (8 rats per group) (seriously, how low was the budget on this study?). Did not actually measure content or distribution of microplastics in the rats. Did not analyze the contents of their leachate.
I am concerned about microplastics and am increasingly taking steps to try to lower my exposure. But... I'm not impressed with this study.
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There's real math behind this determination not just a rule of thumb.
Yes but you clearly don't know it. You need enough samples to overcome the noise.
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Exactly.
Also, see below, comment "This 'research' is laughable" by Tony Isaac - same gist.
Funny thing is, their conclusions could be correct. Just because the methods are all eff'ed doesn't mean the results are wrong, but no one can properly assess their results.
Things that I find "amusing" are:
1 - The "clinical" part of the study was recruited from "The sample data is from the 2023 Ningxia Older Mental Health Cohort".
They do not explain what that is. Maybe if you live in China you would know, but for pub
Forgetting something (Score:2)
To go and buy takeout, you have to walk there, which greatly lowers the chance.
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UberEats enters the chat.
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And by walking you mean from your home to your car, driving to the restaurant, walking the fifty feet or so to the restaurant, picking up your order, then reversing the process. If you're lucky you might walk two hundred feet in total.
I'm sure those calories are just burning off picking up your high fat, high cholesterol, high salt takeout food.
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To go and buy takeout, you have to walk there, which greatly lowers the chance.
You don't seem to be aware of the existence of delivery or drive-through options. This is not only performatively weird, but it's disqualifying.
So no dose effect? (Score:2)
The study did not find a statistical difference in the changes and damage among rats that were exposed to water that had been in contact with plastic for one minute versus five or fifteen.
To me this suggests that the toxins are released into the water within 1 minute, and very limited amounts leech out afterwards. Would this not suggest that a proper pretreatment would address the toxicity? Also, it would indicate that re-using these containers is fairly safe
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As long as the plastics are flexible they contain plasticizers. Somewhere between most and all of those are toxic. You'll know they're safe to use when they are no longer flexible and break apart in your hands, at which point they'll be unsafe because they're releasing microplastics.
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As long as the plastics are flexible they contain plasticizers.
Isn't the point of plastics that they are plastic?
I'm pretty sure, for example, LDPE is flexible without plasticizers. And to some extent, HDPE and PP are as well. I'm not sure about PET. While plasticizers are a valid concern, do you have any data on plasticizers in food grade plastics?
(The local government site I just found says polyolefins and PET are flexible and do not require plasticizers.)
Re:So no dose effect? (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. If you were ever a child and liked to play outside, do you remember what the garden hose tastes like if you don't run it for two minutes first? What if you took soda or milk gallon containers outside to use with water, and the sun warmed them.
Those always have this distinct, disgusting, taste that you can't even wash out after it happens.
What is happening at a lower-level with the microwave. The plastic is breaking down from the thermal exposure, but hasn't lost enough to make the container melt or disintegrate. IT just collects more plastic in the water the longer it sits warm. The study likely would have had to keep the water warm for a solid day to notice such a difference, and we know that won't happen with a microwave, the water will be gone long before it gets that far.
The ideal way to reduce the microplastic exposure/shedding from plastic containers is to follow the advice we've been told since the 80's when microwaves became an everyday thing people had. "Do not put plastic in microwave. Do not put plastic in the dishwasher". Especially galling is when people leave the overwrap/styrofoam their meat cuts come on, when they put it in the microwave, be it to defrost/thaw it, or cook it itself. Plastic film wrap has got to be the worst shedder because of how the damn stuff is made. If's find if you want to cover something hard like a vegetable platter, but please don't use film wrap to cover anything with an oil in it (Eg meat) because that will absolutely absorb the plastic.
So, Keurig pods? (Score:2)
Not a problem (Score:3)
Just drink some of those plastic-eating enzymes [slashdot.org] and everything will even out.
Bullshit! (Score:3)
Polystyrene foam, which McDonalds used to sell hamburgers in, however, dissolves in lots of solvents. But not water. Actually, I'm not sure dissolve is the right word. It just loses it's structural integrity. But Chinese food comes in polypropylene.
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Thank you, very interesting. Not a chemist, but I believe PEX is polypropylene that is even more chemically and thermally stable.
Q: are all the food containers polypropylene? Again, not a chemist, but to my layman's senses, they're made of many types of plastics. I have a pretty good sense of smell, and many new food containers, including plastic bags like "ziplock", have a pretty strong and not good chemical smell.
Oh- add to that chemical smell list: "bottled" (in plastic) water.
I understand and respect yo
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What does your experience testing them with water have to do with anything? These are used specifically for hot, greasy foods, which are the perfect case for absorbing additives out of the plastic. For instance Wendy's puts "baconator" fries into them, which have hot cheese and bacon on/around/under them.
IME chinese food mostly still comes in waxed paper containers of various types, some of them like an ice cream carton and some of them (for takeaway) being the classic types. They are cheap and iconic.
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IME chinese food mostly still comes in waxed paper containers of various types, some of them like an ice cream carton and some of them (for takeaway) being the classic types. They are cheap and iconic.
I guess this must be a regional difference. Where I am in Canada, various shapes of either black or white plastic containers with clear lids are very common for both Chinese and other kinds of takeout, with Styrofoam probably a close second. We occasionally have paper containers, and I'm seeing them more frequently of late; but mostly it's still either polypropylene or polystyrene.
I prefer the paper ones - many of them are compostable, I don't have to wash them before discarding them, and I don't feel guilt
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The people who still use polystyrene in my area (far Northern California) are the "taco" trucks. I've gotten them from Mexican, Hawaiian, and Japanese trucks so far. I usually get a burrito, which typically comes wrapped in foil and provided with a small plastic bag, they are still allowed to use them. And my favorite truck also provides chips in a little paper bag, and a clear solo condiment cup of salsa. So even in the best case, there is waste. I only do this once a week since I work from home 4 days. Wh
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just don't believe that you can leach out enough of anything from polypropylene with water
Raw polypropylene and polyethylene, especially high-density ones? Sure. They're probably safe. However, flexible plastic containers are _not_ made of just raw PET or PEX, they have plasticizers that make them more, well, plasticy. These plasticizers themselves can leach (see: BPA), and they make plastics less mechanically stable.
This "research" is laughable (Score:4, Insightful)
There are so many problems with this study.
- In the studied population, was the heart failure related to takeout *containers* or to the type of *food* that is typically put into takeout containers? If you're trying to eat healthy, it's tough to do that with takeout meals.
- Who boils water in takeout containers for 5, 10, or 15 minutes? Nobody does that. Even if they do microwave the food in the takeout container (which is not recommended), they heat it just enough so it's warm enough to eat. They don't boil it to death.
- Who exclusively drinks water boiled in takeout containers?
The Guardian is slipping. This should not be reported as serious science.
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Tightly controlled studies involving humans are *very* expensive and *very* difficult to control the logistics of. The purpose of the study is to examine if there is a reasonable possibility of a link - and if so it would justify more detailed, controlled studies. That's how actual science works, you build up the research and multiple groups look at it from multiple angles, you
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Yes, good science does tend to be expensive. But that doesn't mean you can take shortcuts and assume that the results are still valid. It doesn't work that way. Bad science for the sake of saving research dollars, is still bad science.
We have WAY too many nutritional studies, and microplastics studies, that take WAY too many liberties with facts and way too many shortcuts.
No, restaurants do not put boiling liquids in takeout containers. Hot, yes, but not boiling. And if there is some edge case where it is a
Long been suspected (Score:2)
Plenty of admittedly-unqualified commentators have said not to microwave food in a plastic takeout container. And it makes sense, especially when the container can sometimes deform during the reheating process.
So what is my turkey broiler bag doing for me? (Score:2)
It would be nice if RFK would pay attention to microplastics rather than demonizing inoculations and suppressing H5N1 bird flu research.
Here's a taste test you can do (Score:2)
More important Question (Score:2)
How do we differentiate between the high fat content the foods people put inside the containers causing heart disease from the heart disease coming from the microplastics of the container when microwaved?
Also how do they differentiate between the microplastics in the air we breath, and the food we eat, and how can we be certain which of these individual sources of microplastic is the original cause of the disease ?
maybe (Score:2)
My guess is that the study is highly flawed and had an agenda.
But, don't eat from plastic, regardless. It's sort of disgusting.
But does it matter yet? (Score:2)
Until we figure out how to mitigate the decline in quality of life from natural aging, dying a few years early may not be so bad.
Did anyone investigate microwaving said containers (Score:2)
You can see if you microwave food in containers the edges melt, this is true in Styrofoam or other regular containers. I will only use glass, it doesn't melt.
"Whatever" (Score:2)
"I grew up playing in the mud, drinking from water hoses, riding bikes without a helmet, attending family gatherings where every adult smoked, and somehow, I've survived this far in good health, so...whatever."
- Gen X