I'm not surprised. I saw a whistle blower at a pig farm showing them grinding up waste food from super markets, packaging and all feeding it to the pigs. They eat all the plastic and junk, we eat them.
In the UK I watched a company being filmed that openly admits that peeling all the, in this case, biscuit (cookie) packaging, off of biscuits wasn't economically viable, so they just grind it all up.
It's mostly pigs. Remember that they're omnivores, so they eat the same things humans eat. Cattle eat grass, they're also fed grain commercially, and after the mad cow outbreaks, cattle are no longer fed meat and bone meal. Chickens mostly eat grain and worms, though I assume they're getting some meat and bone meal.
Found this on youtube. I grew up around farms, and it looks about right.
For adults, yes. I'm not yet convinced we're able to raise healthy children without a little meat, and if we collectively scaled back to eating meat once a week it wouldn't matter how many of us are vegetarian or vegan.
I see animals as individuals and as people. I grew up on and around family farms (for sustenance, not profit). I'd rather we had less of The Jungle (Upton Sinclair) and more of everyone at least witnessing the butchering of the animals they'll be eating. I wish I'd gotten on a fishing boat at some point when I was younger.
I'm trying out eating three times a week (not a magic number, just what I've settled on for now), and now that I'm used to it I want the food I eat to be the best we have--fresh land greens, less-fresh sea greens, fruits and vegetables, whole grains (oat groats, wheat berries, etc.), local eggs, and definitely-not-local sardines, mackerel, and oysters because I love seafood and my child's pediatrician says the omega-3s are good for a child's brain development (and no, I don't impose this regimen on anyone else in my family--I still make meals and sit down together with my warm salty water). Red meat maybe once a month, maybe. Delicious bacon a few times a year. Mostly chicken, eggs, fish, and butter when I eat animal products. I'm not wasting my eating time with anything sweet or "deliciously processed" because it doesn't feel good afterwards and is not as nutritious as the other stuff (this after half a lifetime of snacking on sweet foods, prepackaged and homemade).
I know fungus can supply some things meat otherwise would, like cyanocobalamin (B12, I think). I like nutritional yeast for that. Feel free to refute and/or add to any of this mostly emotion-based perspective--I'm still learning.
Eating only 3 times a week? The metabolic breadth of the human body is impressive. I have a hard time eating only 3-4 times a day. I do 2-3h of solid exercise every day, so I burn a lot of calories. I'm pretty sure I could get away with less, but I'm fit, not getting injured, and doing a lot more than 99% of people my age, so not going to mess with my eating habits too much at this point.
From what I understand fungus does not produce B12, it's only produced by bacteria. It's added to nutritional yeast ... to make it more nutritional. Bacteria in our (and other animals') guts do produce B12, but we tend to need extra B12 nonetheless.
I don't eat meat aside from a bit of fish, but I agree that a little meat in everyone's (especially children) diet would not be a bad thing. It's best not to be puritanical or extreme when it comes to diet. We're omnivores after all.
I have a pet idea that a real paleo diet would include insects and grubs, but not sure if there's much anthropological evidence for that.
Extrapolating one video filmed by a non objective part, in one "farm" as a proof that everybody is doing the same is just lying to yourself. Anybody could feed pigs gross things to videotape it.
On the other hand anecdotes like these are plentiful, and eventually they add up to a pattern that causes cognitive dissonance vs the story we'd like to believe.
It's a brutal industry where profits come down to how cheap you can raise a pound of flesh.
It's also prohibited in Islam. One of the most important things to understand is that why something is prohibited may not be immediately (or even ever) apparent to us, The Creator knows us better than we know ourselves.
Seems like a bit of a dangerous game of broken telephone though, if The Creator is giving very specific tips to barely literate people in the desert and then never bothering to check back to clarify.
Maybe Moses was told "Be careful with consuming those underground fossil fuels" and, lacking context, he wrote down: "Be careful with eating those underground ancient insects" - which turned into a ban on eating grasshoppers.
Very bad analogy. The Quran has been preserved word for word since its revelation. The Arabs went on to become one of the most advanced societies history has ever seen, read up on the Islamic Golden Age. Many things we take for granted trace their roots directly to that era.
Secondly, you're making a huge fallacy. While many Arabs did not read or write at the time (and this wasn't just specific to the Arabs), they were not ignorant or dumb, which you seem to be implying. We have many surviving poems from the pre-Islamic era. They were very smart people, as we know from history.
Remember reading about ancient people foolishly consuming led or kings that went mad from consuming gold? I guess we are those people for microplastics.
It's common in many spices we use today, unfortunately. Consumer Reports published tests on this recently, following-up on other studies, and they have a campaign to get the FDA to regulate heavy metals because so few companies test. Fortunately, you can find brands that do independently test on Amazon, and some brands seem better than others (ie. Simply Organic).
Worse, there are unacceptable lead levels in the glazing of any dishware coming from China (which is most of it). These are levels considered unsafe for children by FDA standards (which aren't as stringent as EU standards).
There are very few safe brands in this regard. One from France and one from Turkey, at least on the US market.
The brand we settled on was Pillivuyt (better quality). You can get Corelware for cheaper that seems to be tested safe, but if you're looking for stuff that's going to last, you want actual porcelain dishware.
The other brand that we found was sold by Sur La Table, made in Turkey.
We chose porcelain over some other materials (like glass) because it's more durable, and Pillivuyt has been making the stuff for a long time (simple, high quality).
You will not find this brand among her recommendations, but my wife went to the trouble to research stated lead levels in glazing processes from a number of manufacturers. There are differences in their lines, as well. The ones you get direct from France, or through Nordstrom are the "good" lines and the William Sonoma lines are cheaper (for Pillivuyt).
That's nuts. Why are heavy metals even showing up in these? Are the herbs/spices just picking the metals up from the soil and then they become concentrated because of the drying? Do plants end up concentrating heavy metals in the seeds?
Not gold, but similar: consuming silver has a long history, continuing right up to this day, in spite of the fact that it just seems to ruin your complexion. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2297471.stm
It's quite possible the gold was alloyed with lead or other toxic/poisonous heavy metals and consumed. Though I have myself not heard of kings ingesting gold directly, though I am sure it has been done for a variety of dubious reasons.
Everyone loves to flaunt this theory, as well as the sperm quality one. I think both are wrong, or at least, minor effect sizes relative to the bigger picture. The sperm quality drop is due to obesity plain and simple. It's a well studied, strong effect size.
The rise of obesity itself has many obvious causes. Sedentary work, high calorie, high sugar/sweetener diets. If it were microplastics you would expect to see this as a universal effect, but it's really not. While obesity is rising on average, it's highly concentrated. Many communities, especially affluent ones, have very low obesity rates still. Very few people in my social / work circle are obese. And like, although I've cut out soda and most of the obvious bad things, its still apparent to me that my diet is likely overloaded with sugar and sweeteners much more than past generations. Poor people have high stress, insufficient money to buy quality food, and insufficient time / hardware to invest in food preparations on a regular basis.
And we have case examples too. Remote Amazonian (brazil) populations get introduced to nestle food? Wait several years and bam, fat.
Why are pets getting fatter? Because they're eating garbage too. Why are wild animals getting fatter? Because they're eating garbage too. You then see follow up questions like "Why are sperm quality readings dropping in dogs?" It's because they're fucking fatter. "Why are sperm quality readings dropping in people that aren't obese?" Because the whole population is shifting right and is fatter within their BMI bin.
Antibiotics are a real studied cause as well of causing fattening.
Frankly it would be extremely surprising to me if we didn't see the outcomes in obesity that we are seeing given the dietary crises the world is facing. Microplastics need not appear in this picture.
> "Why are sperm quality readings dropping in people that aren't obese?" Because the whole population is shifting right and is fatter within their BMI bin.
I can't make sense of this statistically. Bins are just arbitrary cutoffs on a distribution. It's not like people know where the lines of bins are and crowd up against the edge, throwing off the median inside. People shifting "within" a "bin" doesn't change much. Instead, people shift bins. Some bins have more people, some bins have fewer people.
I think obesity is a huge factor, maybe 80%. But I don't know why you feel so strongly that every other explanation is completely false.
It's a minor argument for something that tends to come up. It's come up a few times on HN some studies that show sperm quality is much lower in obese men, and that there are more obese men. There also tend to be small effect sizes that suggest within the healthy weight bin, sperm quality has dropped a small amount over time. But its naive to think that this means it still isn't a weight effect.
The bin argument is basically saying that if the entire population gets fatter, you would expect the average weight within a bin to go up, even if some people move into the next. This depends somewhat on the shape of the curve, and the bins. But on a whole it's simply saying that the average weight of people between X lbs and Y lbs is higher than it was before.
Really what it's saying is that the bins obfuscate what could be better analyzed as a continuous variable effect. The bins are arbitrary and misleading. People can fall within the same bin at t1 and t2 but be fatter at t2.
> I think obesity is a huge factor, maybe 80%. But I don't know why you feel so strongly that every other explanation is completely false.
The evidence and effect size is simply extremely strong, and the prevalence of obesity is very high. I estimate obesity to account for more than 90% of the sperm effect and diet to account for more than 90% of the obesity effect.
I'm not opposed to the idea that plastics might have some small single digit effect size. Nor am I opposed to the idea that we might see an inflection point where more plastics start being significantly worse. But for now, it seems to be a tiny, unimportant part of the story.
> The bin argument is basically saying that if the entire population gets fatter, you would expect the average weight within a bin to go up, even if some people move into the next. This depends somewhat on the shape of the curve, and the bins. But on a whole it's simply saying that the average weight of people between X lbs and Y lbs is higher than it was before.
It does depend on shape of the distribution, but it is generally not the case that the average within a bin will go up. It is certainly not true for a bell curve, where if you push the curve out to the right (and flatten it), some bins will have higher averages (because they are weighted more to the right than before), but some bins will have lower averages (because they are weighted more to the left than before). If we wanted to go way deep on this, it really depends on the second derivative of the curve within a bin, not even the first derivative (a flat or even straight line through the bin will always give an average right in the middle).
Though I would assert that my premise for this particular distribution held true and that binned analyses were misleading. I tried to find the article. I could not.
This particular example was had no lower bound on the left below overweight, and was skew right with the peak of the curve in this lowest category if memory serves. I remember thinking it was visually obvious that the bin would get on average fatter but I suppose it does not generalize.
BMI was always intended to be used at a population level because because you get lean and jacked outliers who have an obese BMI. I wonder if it has issues at the population level as lifestyles change and people engage in less strenuous physical activity.
It seems like we've discovered things that are obviously bad for us within a decade or two of use. Leaded gas, DDT, ionizing radiation, asbestos. I'm sure there are loads of things that are less than ideal, but it looks like they're all at least an order of magnitude safer than bad things that came to use in the 20th century. It's at a point where the data has problems with statistical significance and confounding variables.
I would be very wary about that. Plastic seems highly likely to be the kind of thing that will, at some level of bio accumulation, cause cancer. I just don't think it's a substantial factor in obesity or sperm declines at the moment.
Ok then explain why the testosterone reference ranges have went from like 800-2000 in the 60s to 200-800 now. Not just obese people, a "normal" healthy young man these days has the test levels of like a 60-80 hear old then. I think it's something more than just obesity causing endocrine disruption.
I have never looked into testosterone before. After some research, I cannot find anything to support your claim about what's happened since the 60s, but it sounds unreasonable to me. Average levels appear to have been dropping since the 80s, but not by such a significant scale as you claim. I did however find this harvard article with the following passage:
> Obesity lowers testosterone levels. For example, a 2007 study of 1,667 men ages 40 and above found that each one-point increase in BMI was associated with a 2% decrease in testosterone. In addition, a 2008 study of 1,862 men ages 30 and above found that waist circumference was an even stronger predictor of low testosterone levels than BMI. A four-inch increase in waist size increased a man's odds of having a low testosterone level by 75%; for comparison, 10 years of aging increased the odds by only 36%. All in all, waist circumference was the strongest single predictor of developing symptoms of testosterone deficiency.
Table 4 has the highlights. An extra 10 years of age has an odds ratio of 1.4 and a p value of 0.02. A 10 cm increase in waist size has an odds ratio of 1.9 and a p value less than 0.001. That is to say, this same author found waist size was a stronger predictor of testosterone than age. This study occurs a few years after the one referenced in the article.
Here's the actual study which does make the claim that these factors are insufficient on their own to explain age-normalized t levels. Personally I'm not totally convinced by their methods to control here. It's surprising to me that the later cohorts studied were seemingly the same weight but had poorer health metrics for one. The initial cohort also had an age range of 47-71. The later cohort had an age range of 57-80. The average age being 10 years older. I'm not convinced their mixed effect linear model is going to get a good comparison between these too.
I love how we will blame anything besides admitting we stuff our holes too often, know it, and still don't stop doing it. Excessive food, especially sugar, is the biggest undercurrent in harmful substances in our modern age and hardly anybody wants to do anything about it.
When talking statistical trends, keep in mind that even animals in tightly-controlled settings are getting obese in aggregate [1]. This is scientifically curious.
The question is why we stuff our holes too often now. It is not just availability of food. Even comparing to the 1970's or 1980's when food was already widely available and cheap obesity prevalence is still increasing.
The shift from manual labour to sedentary jobs doesn't explain it. Office workers in the 1980's on average were less obese than the general population now and even people with physical jobs (construction workers) are more often obese.
Obesity has become far more socially acceptable since the 70's/80's. Being the "fat kid" at school was a big deal back then. Now it is completely normal in many places.
I would speculate the issue has just been slowly progressing for the past couple decades. The same amount of negative social pressure from being 15 lbs overweight in the 90s may be closer what somebody receives at 50 lbs now.
It obviously is. First and second generation immigrants from Asia don't get fat, despite eating much the same Western food. It's extremely shameful for them.
Maybe it's a combination of sedentary jobs and also sedentary leisure. In the 1970s or 1980s people didn't have the plethora of activities we have today that involve staring at a screen.
Maybe, but, I remember newspapers saying things like "Americans now watch an average of 5 hours a day of TV", in the 80s. And the term "couch potato" was common.
In the 1980s, fat (the dietary kind) became evil. All the prepared foods that were high in fat started to reformulate. What did they replace it with so it still tasted good? Sugar, primarily corn syrup. "Fat Free" became the label they wanted. The prepared and snack foods of the 1970s often had sugar, but by the 1990s more of the products had a lot more, and more of it was HFCS not the more expensive cane sugar.
Not everywhere, but it certainly seems like that's happened in the US. Most people I know (from here in the UK) who have been on trips to the US have come back shocked at both the portion sizes and the lack of opportunities for exercise in everyday activities (apparently this is a lot to do with a culture of driving everywhere). And if it was a longer trip (weeks/months), they've often also put on a noticeable amount of weight that they then quickly lose once they're back home.
The very first thing I ate in the US (in 1995) was a club sandwich - it was huge and had been battered, deep fried and served sprinkled with icing sugar.
Even by Scottish standards that seemed a bit much!
Not only that but I'll bet my next ten paychecks the average American is more sedentary in 2013 than they were in 1961. So I would expect the net surplus calorie increase to be a lot more than 24%.
There's no mention of "sudden change" in parent's post. The reference is to "modern age", which is consistent: shift from manual to sedentary job, increase of processed foods, increase of food availability, increase of pressure from industry to eat more and more processed foods; it's a very linear phenomenon.
Changes in food, availability, cost, marketing, etc would be obvious things that could cause it.
Whereas plastics -- When you look at the staggering amount of plastics pollution coming out of rivers in East and South East Asian and the subcontinent, it correlates pretty well with some of the lowest obesity rates in the world.
Unlimited free refills on sodas at restaurants didn't become normal to the point of being the expected default, IIRC, until the mid 90s or later.
I think the effects of the unlimited-refills thing, and (relatedly) of to-go soda cup sizes becoming insanely large, doesn't explain the whole thing but probably is a big enough factor to be worth looking at.
Obesity is due to the introduction of high fructose corn syrup and decades of the sugar industry making out that "low fat" foods in the shops are better for you, whilst lacing them with sugar to make them taste better.
Monocausal thinking doesn’t suit a complex system.
HFCS increases obesity. But you have increasing obesity in regions without it, and have people who eat it who aren’t obese. It’s neither necessary nor sufficient and your comment contributes nothing to evaluating the role of microplastics.
Vast quantities of extra calories are needed for large segments of the population to be obese. That kind of surplus is very recent and absolutely required for an obesity epidemic.
So we absolutely have the root cause, but not perhaps the only one.
Not really. The difference between obese and healthy weight is about 40 pounds. At 3,500 calories per pound, that is only 140,000 surplus calories to become obese. Over a period of 5 years, that is about 77 calories a day, or roughly 1 egg.
Obesity is not caused by a vast availability of calories. It is caused by a breakdown in the bodies ability to match caloric input with output.
To be clear, vast amounts of added sugar seem to cause this system to breakdown, but the mechanism is more complicated than simple calories available in the environment.
> It is caused by a breakdown in the bodies ability to match caloric input with output.
Not a breakdown. The human body is just way too efficient. Absurdly so. Humans can exercise for hours and not burn 1000 kcal but it takes mere minutes to ingest that many calories.
That depends on the exercise and your body eight. A 200lb guy can burn over 1,000 calories an hour during a heavy workout. Though few can keep that up for a full hour.
That’s how you end up with serious athletes on 8-10,000 calorie diets.
Fat cells also require energy to live and you need energy to move them around.
For a 25 year old 5’10” male living a sedentary lifestyle the difference between 160lb and 200lb is ~2,060 vs 2,278 calories or about a 10% surplus. A more active lifestyle increase that difference ~3,262 vs 3,607 is about 380 calories per day or a 12% surplus.
Though I suspect the average obese person is significantly more than 40lb overweight. At 300lb he needs ~2,822 or roughly a 40% surplus while sedentary.
HFCS is "high" in fructose in relative terms but is actually quite similar to "normal" sugar (55% fructose vs 50% fructose). I think you're right that the real culprit is probably that sugar is being shoved into everything, including staples like bread.
At least in the UK, we consume very little HFCS, but we are one of the European nations closest behind the US on the obesity scale.
No idea how much HFCS you have in Poland, but you're relatively thin compared to us, so if you have more HFCS.. possibly points the finger at something other than HFCS content.
Also it's interesting that pets, lab animals and city wildlife are getting fat globally too on a similar curve to humans.
Poster said these days, so it may be HFCS just hasn't been common in Poland for long enough to have a demographic effect. Personally I think yes HFCS is a problem, but basically it's just massive consumption of surplus calories.
How what would affect them, massive consumption of excess calories or consumption of HFCS? And affect them how? I'm guessing it makes them fat, but as I said I know it's a problem. I've no idea what point you're trying to make.
Lab animals on a controlled diet are also gaining weight, without taking in excess calories. This would suggest that some environmental factor is causing the weight gain.
Obesity is a problem in lots of places where the use of HFCS is uncommon. I would say the main issue is sedentary lifestyles and the high availability of cheap and unhealthy fast foods (in crazy portions).
I think it's not about HFCS specifically, but rather the norm that was established by the availability of cheap (via a subsidized corn industry in the US) sugars that could be placed in anything. As far as I understand, HFCS does not have any biochemical effects that are different from other added sugars. It's more the economics and culture it created for food production.
Another hypothesis: Endocrine disruptors in pregnancy lead to damages in the endocrine system and development of children, and contribute to some of the issues many people are nowadays facing.
>> In a further study, following 28 days exposure by oral gavage (100 μL PS-MPs (10 mg/mL)) PS-MPs (0.5, 4, 10 μm) bioaccumulate in mice testis altering spermatogenesis progression, SPZ morphology, testosterone biosynthesis and body weights and inducing inflammatory response [73]; interestingly, in vitro MPs enter into germ cells, Sertoli and Leydig cells [73].
How about a source that isn't a magazine interview from someone trying to sell their book?
There are sibling comments elsewhere in this thread that go into much greater detail than I can about how the link between plastic and fertility is tenuous at best. But the most significant piece of evidence against it IMO is that plastics are more or less evenly distributed. You don't have a lot more exposure at various socio-economic levels. But higher socio-economic class has a distinct negative correlation with obesity.
The (US) obesity epidemic comes from a food landscape obsessed with sugar. Most things you will find in supermarkets and restaurants are just significantly more calorically dense than it needs to be. That's your cause. The epidemic comes from eating too much.
Pointing fingers at other things might be useful, after the biggest issue is tackled.
Unsure if we have evidence that microplastics build up in our food supplies and bodies at the same rate across the world, especially if this is the first study to even detect microplastics in the body.
I doubt we're ever just going to "get rid of them", how would anyone supposed we do that?
Microplastics have been found in ice in Antarctica this stuff is here to stay and is accumulating in our bodies and the environment more and more each day.
Ok, I admit that may have been a little bit of hyperbole. But I expect in such a scenario some (very expensive, wide reaching) mitigations might be put in place such as banning the relevant types of plastic and introducing some kind of specially targeted filtering/treatment in fresh water supplies in areas where that's logistically/politically possible (assuming an effective system for it can be found).
Possibilty 1a: microplastics causes reproductive issues that contribute to plummeting fertility rates, mass human extinction ensues and consequently the problem sorts itself out quite nicely.
It's the same problem: the extraction of fossil fuels. We have plastics because they're close to free as a byproduct of that process and the ocean is acidifying mostly because of dissolved atmospheric CO2.
> we care about how bad...compared to Y amount of sugar intake
Microplastic pollution has an effect on the entire biosphere of the planet. It's just another factor contributing to the accelerating global extinction event we've set in motion.
It's probably nearly impossible at this point to avoid them entirely. They're in the air and have been detected in remote parts of the world with little human activity.
You could minimize contact more: prefer clothes without synthetic fibres. One possible vector for microplastics could come from dryer lint containing broken down bits of plastics from clothing: acrylic paints off of metal buttons, fibres, plastic buttons, etc.
If you eat fish, minimize your intake or consider avoiding them entirely. Another possible vector is accumulation through the food chain.
As always: reduce the need or dependence on plastic products in general.
Buy produce from local producers and wholesalers instead of grocery chains that wrap food in way too much plastic and packaging.
If you shave body hair consider using a straight or safety razor instead of disposable ones.
This isn't from using plastic utensils. It's from consuming meat that comes from animals that had plastics in their food, drinking local water supplies that have been tainted with microplastics and not treated (from what I've seen I think the only "proper" treatment here is reverse osmosis/distillation), and other random things listed in the article like toothpaste, tattoo ink, and lip gloss.
This is a bit terrifying for me as one of my favorite hobbies is putting together plastic Gundam model kits, which entails grinding the plastic down to a fine dust with sandpaper and aerosolizing acryllic paints through an airbrush.
Whatever happened to hemp plastics and other natural non-toxic biodegradable plastics?
It's amazing how the world is letting the oil companies (who make the plastics) poison us and destroy our environment at will. Microplastics even in the blood of babies... Yet, seems to be no sense of urgency to stop this catastrophe and insanity.
It's like driving a car, seeing you are about to go over a cliff, but the foot is still firmly planted on the accelerator.
