One class of items not listed here, which I'd recently started to think might be less-than-optimal: pepper sold in jars with built-in, plastic, grinders.
I'd long since noted that as the jar emptied the grinders were increasingly ineffective. Thinking on why that might be ... I realised that this was because as you grind the pepper, you're also grinding plastic directly into your food.
There's surprisingly little discussion about this that I can find, though this 5 y.o. Stackexchange question addresses the concern:
Seems to me that plastic grinders, whether disposable or sold as (apparently) durable products, are a class of products which simply shouldn't exist.
Searching, e.g., Walmart for "plastic grinders" turns up five listings presently, though it's not clear whether it's the body or the grinder itself which is plastic. In several cases it seems to be the latter.
Peugeot—yes, they of the cars—make an excellent line of steel-based pepper grinders, and a great nutmeg mill as well. Along with hoop skirts and lawnmowers and much more, apparently, over the 200 years since the family started their first steel mill:
definitely one of those buy it for life type of thing, very satisfying once you get used to it, and it does take time to get used to it. the labelling is carefully designed to fade away just around the time you got to know how to use one, masterfully done lol
The mechanism is probably good forever but the bottom ring is liable to crack over time. They usually last me a decade or so which is fine for the price.
I love them and have bought half a dozen over the years. My dad gifted me one when I moved out decades ago.
A good pepper grinder (and the Peugeot’s are top notch) is such an obviously valuable purchase. Lasts a decade and fresh pepper from a good grinder is much tastier. One of the best $35 to spend imo
My grandmother has a very old Peugeot grinder. The new ones are much smaller and look like the ones from other brands, but I guess with higher quality.
meh. I like the aesthetics of the Peugeot grinder but it is flawed.
Specifically: the grinder top is not mated with reverse threads. This means the act of grinding loosens the top. I have to stop and re-tighten quite frequently.
I suppose the design is perfect if you are left-handed ...
If it were the other way it would tighten with use and eventually strip the threads or crack the wood top. Anyway it's an almost unbelievably petty bit of cooking technique but there is actually a "correct" way to hold and turn a pepper grinder lol.
Your palm is meant to hold the nut in place. On the old ones the tightness of the nut was the control for fineness so it was necessary to hold it as you turned anyway. They moved that control to its own thing on the bottom a few decades ago (iirc) but kept the rest of it the same.
Thanks, I hadn’t considered the plastic on the pepper grinder. Guess I’ll be looking for a new pepper grinder as I continue my pursuit of removing plastic and dangerous chemicals from the kitchen. So far the pans, tupperware, and cooking utensils have all been replaced.
While not food, another not so frequently talked about plastic exposure could be clothing dryer vents pushing materials from synthetic clothing into the air. It’s likely less of a problem than the rubber tires on our cars making their way into the air. But it was something that occurred to me while cleaning out the dryer vent this past weekend.
I’m definitely buying natural fiber clothing moving forward for this reason.
However, I wonder how bad eating bits of the plastic burr grinder actually is. Presumably, they mostly pass through. Stomach acid probably leaches a bunch of stuff, but is it worse than (say) canned tomatoes that were sitting in a plastic liner for a year? I’d wager the grinder bits have a lot of surface area from scarring. That’d increase leaching.
Anyway, I strongly recommend small turkish-style grinders:
(No idea if this brand is decent; the form factor is great, especially for $14)
It has roughly a single-recipe capacity, so I stick crushed red pepper flakes, cumin seed, celery seed, black pepper kernels, etc in it per the recipe, then grind until it is empty. The burr on the one I linked is metal.
I’d probably prefer stainless body + whatever is commonly used for espresso grinders, assuming such a gadget exists.
Your biggest exposure is going to be water, hands down. What you store it in, how you filter it, these are going to be major sources of plastics and pfas.
Agreed, already on it! I put Wedell Water filters on all of our shower heads and we have a filtration system for our kitchen sink water. I’d love to get a whole home water filter at some point.
Nothing says capitalism quite like a corporation polluting the entire planet with something they knew caused disease, actively gaslighted everyone involved, transferred liability to a sacrificial entity so they got zero punishment for it, and the rest of us are left to buy water filters for the rest of history if we want clean water.
3M and Dupont deserve the death penalty for it and should've been dissolved completely for crimes against humanity.
If only it would be so easy to blame it all on capitalism.
I've lived in communism and it was exactly the same. Pollution beyond any reasonable levels, testing chemistry on products and people, rules and regulations coming from government and faceless bureaucrats... The result was the same, but instead of corporate greed the reason was lack of any interest and foresight.
Well regulated capitalism is probably best equipped to deal with such. Whether ours is well equipped to deal with this is another question.
The problem occurs whenever there aren't competent and powerful institutions working to protect the interests of the people, so indeed.
But the thing is capitalism is a tremendously powerful machine, so it's really more dangerous than an unmotivated Polish bureaucrat. The Soviets may have drained the Aral sea but capitalism has poisoned the entire planet (with TEL even before PFAS).
Reverse osmosis is pretty much the gold standard for removing PFAS. You can get countertop units for a reasonable price. Look for the lab testing or certifications rather than random anecdotes since they appear to work fine to the end user.
As someone new to this how do the details work?
Do you need to buy a new membrane often like I imagine?
Do you have any issues with your water lacking minerals? (in the same way drinking distilled water is bad for you)
The model I have says to replace the filter once a year, and it's $170 AUD. I imagine you could probably get away with using it longer than the OEM recommendation though.
I had the same thought about demineralised water, you can get more expensive models which remineralise the water after, but it looks like it's not actually that important health wise because you get the absolute vast majority of your minerals through food, not water. And remineralisation is mostly for taste rather than health. Though I don't find the demineralised water tastes bad, but if you're used to drinking hard water it might be different.
Do you happen to know of any 10" water filter enclosures that are not made of plastic? I recently started looking for a two-stage one (meaning two enclosures connected in series) but haven't found one yet.
Same here. I am going to disassemble the cheap pepper grinders I recently bought to make sure there is no plastic in the grinding operation.
I switched to bamboo toothbrushes from plastic a while ago, before de-plasticizing was really a thing. Now I'm glad I did, because plastic bristles grinding against my teeth seems like an easy way for plastic to get inside my body. The bamboo toothbrushes are pretty nice too, the bristles are soft but firm, and the handle is made of bamboo too.
All disposable grinders are going to be plastic, and likely none of the refillable ones will be since the plastic burrs only last one usage before they are all chipped off in to your food.
and... plastic is not that hard, so the teeth should be able to grind down the plastic bristles as you brush your teeth. I'd find it hard to believe that no plastic is lost during brushing of teeth.
The idea of brushing my teeth with plastic has lost its appeal for me and will never be recovered.
I am a huge fan of Unicorn Pepper Mills: https://www.unicornmills.org/ as a buy-it-for-life item that truly works better than alternatives. That said, they do have plastic bodies, but the grinder mechanism is entirely made from metals and ceramic.
> After reading about micro plastics in the disposable salt and pepper grinders from the big box, stores broke down and bought these very nice all metal mechanism grinders.
Posting ones "just bought" product to "BuyItForLife" is an irony I had not thought of before. Especially considering one of the metal grinders contains salt...
It's a dream of mine to learn enough stoneworking to turn a pair of stones from a local river into a mortar and pestle, ideally without contracting silicosis at the same time. Much cooler than shipping granite mined and cut on the other side of the globe.
metal ones are also available in india, made of stainless steel and maybe other metals instead.
traditionally, people in india used a thick flat wide stone and a thick cylindrical stone grinder applied back and forth on top of the lower stone, to grind spices, onion, ginger, chilllies, turmeric, etc., into a paste or masala, which was then used in making curries, sambar, and other dishes.
Traditionally grinding things with stone ended up with people eating stone which ground their teeth down[1]:
> "A. When soft stone like sandstone was used for milling grain, as the ancient Egyptians often did, residue from millstones could cause a serious problem over a lifetime, said Dr. Robert K. Ritner, associate professor of Egyptology at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Egyptian teeth have been well studied in mummies, and only the rare mummy had good teeth, said Dr. Ritner, who lectures on Egyptian medicine. ''They usually had heavy abrasion, and were sometimes so worn down at the crown that the pulp or even the root was exposed, which must have been horribly painful,'' he said. The Egyptians were obsessive about cleanliness, using a natural soda compound called natron for cleaning the mouth and sometimes a chewing reed to massage the teeth. They had few cavities, and the damage seen in studies pioneered by the English researcher F. Filce Leek almost certainly resulted from the residue of disintegrating millstones."
also called aattukallu in tamil and iman dasta (iirc) in hindi or urdu, but searching for the latter only gave results for mortars and pestles, which are not the same thing as the one above, the ammikallu.
Kind of surprised there’s no mention of Fletchers’ Mill [0] here, they’re good quality mills made in Maine. The pepper mills use stainless steel while the salt mills use nylon (corrosion resistance), so you’d have to look elsewhere for salt.
Personally I just dump kosher salt into a salt cellar and call it a day but I am sure there are plastic-free salt mills out there somewhere.
Is the plastic you ingest this way significant though? I don't remember the details, but the Veritasium video on this subject suggested that the scraped teflon you ingest from pans is less significant than the plastic that leeches into food in products like microwave popcorn. I assume this has to do with the reaction between the substance being contained (popcorn oil, in this case) and the item containing it (plastic-lined paper).
If the plastic particles are large enough, I assume we pass them.
> Is the plastic you ingest this way significant though?
The follow-up question you might want to ask though is: How often do you want to ask that question?
Yes, every tiny little bit is insignificant. That is true for most things, including actual direct poisons.
A better way to look at such discussions is not to assume that this very specific thing you are currently looking at is the one, only complete problem. Remember instead, in these posts we are looking at lots and lots and lots of tiny details, only a tiny part of the whole problem space.
Do you repeat that relevancy question for every single part? The answer, when you split the problem enough, is always "relevance is near zero".
That is the problem of our tiny brains not being able to comprehend the whole, requiring us to look at tiny parts one at a time. When you create the sum, or the integral, of a huge number of rounded-down zeroes you get zero, and now you have the wrong answer for the whole of the problem.
Even big problems consist of a huge number of tiny parts. Asking the summary question on each tiny part is not a good method.
Every tiny bit of plastic we find is exactly just that - one tiny piece of the big picture. By itself and alone it would be inconsequential. If it was just that one single source of plastic particles, we would not have this discussion. We are here, performing such research, having such discussions, because we have a very large number of such tiny pieces. The question of relevancy is for the whole. Whether this one particular piece of microplastic you ate today, which came from your plastic pepper mill, is the tipping point is not a useful or answerable question, it's all of them combined over time.
Teflon is typically not the issue, it's very non-reactive and non-sticky (duh), meaning it just passes through.
Attaching such material to metal takes some serious chemistry, though.
The why is that plastic is an extremely convenient, cost effective way to make lots of things. And the evidence that it was deleterious to human health was negligible.
And to be fair, it's still fairly uncertain. We demonstrated endocrine problems with BPA, but aside from that microplastic consequences on health still seems uncertain. At best we're mostly doing the correlation/causation thing that leads people down a confusing path of cure-alls and snake oil.
If there was a smoking gun for the consequences of this in our day to day living, surely it would be regulated out of existence[1], but thus far that evidence doesn't exist.
[1] - ha ha, who am I kidding. In reality industry groups would muddy the waters, try to pretend it's "political", finance astroturfing groups, and soon enough a certain segment of society will be proudly clutching onto their microplastics, demanding higher dose services, and ascribing it with magical cure-all powers.
> surely it would be regulated out of existence[1], but thus far that evidence doesn't exist.
surely, it's not so sure, especially with the current administration reversing so many existing policies. for example, reversing the restriction of asbestos is currently in the works. so adding new regulations on plastics use seems like something that the current policy makers will absolutely not be considering. at this point, I would not be shocked if they said they were reversing the bans on lead in gasoline or paints
I used to work for a company that makes equipment for the food processing industry.
Sometimes conveyor belts would be left running for days or even weeks in the test area. After a while, you would start to see very fine dust on and around the conveyor belts. This was finely ground POM plastic. On some occasions, there were actually heaps of that stuff forming beneath the conveyor belts.
In the factories, everything gets washed down with pressure washers at least once per day, so very little of this stuff goes into the food, but it definitely gets washed away out to sea.
I think that there is probably a wide-spread misunderstanding on how the micro-plastics enter the food. It does not seem very likely that it would come from the packaging or your tupperware (unless your tupperware is so old that it has actually started to disintegrate). It seems much likelier that the plastics were in the food before it was packaged.
Maybe not? We already have a variety of metals in our bodies, and cells already interact with them as needed and filtering them if not. (I'm obviously being very generic here. Heavy metals are an obvious exception to this.)
Meanwhile, biology has no idea what plastic is and it seems like our bodies have a hard time filtering it out.
Going by the lower limit of 20,000 ng/kg, a 70kg person has a limit of 1,400,000 ng/day for DEHP and 70MM ng/day DEHT.
So am I reading this right you're probably an order of magnitude below the 'safe' limit even if you subsist solely off of RXBars and Sweetgreen? Which is not so far from me at one point in my 30s...
I didn't expect to open this chart and feel _better_ about my plastic consumption, maybe I'm just misunderstanding the chart. It seems even if the limits are 10x too high, you're still probably fine.
The "report" tab on the website shows which items are above federal recommended limits. The vast majority of tested items are within the limits. So yes, if you're only concerned with what the federal government considers safe, the action item is "probably nothing". But the report page also brings up a lot of good reasons to doubt that the federal limits are sufficient.
The "Are the intake limits correct?" section (and the whole report, really) is fascinating and worth a read, but just to provide a concrete example of why federal limits might not be sufficient:
3M began producing PFOA (the most infamous "forever chemical") in 1947. It has been widely used in industry, and many millions of pounds of the stuff have been dumped into waterways since then. PFOA manufacturers were aware of some of the negative health effects of the substance in lab animals in the 1960s. Researchers outside of corporate America began studying PFOA in the 1980s. In the early 2000s, PFOA exposure via drinking water began to get public attention due to a lawsuit against DuPont.
As far as I know, the US government had no recommended limit on PFOA exposure in drinking water between 1947 and 2009.
In 2009, EPA established provisional health advisories for PFOA at 400 ppt and for PFOS at 200 ppt.
In 2016, EPA set a lifetime health advisory of 70 ppt for PFOA and PFOS combined.
In 2022, EPA published interim lifetime health advisories of 0.004 ppt for PFOA and 0.02 ppt for PFOS.
In 2023, EPA proposed health-based maximum contaminant level goals (MCLGs) for PFOA and PFOS of 0 ppt.
A lot of these chemicals are newer and less well-studied than PFOA, and we may still be in the period where federal limits are hundreds or thousands of times higher than the true safe level.
It's very hard to maintain a mental ranked list of health things to be worried about when hypothetical concerns get more attention/coverage the confirmed ones.
"despite no(?) evidence of harm"
If you look up most of the chemicals on the list, all of them have suspected health impacts and the most have been confirmed to be harmful in some degree or another.
For example:
DEHP - Endocrine disruption, disruptor of thyroid function, Ingestion of 0.01% caused damage to the blood-testis barrier... etc
I came here to be explained to how eating plastic is not only not bad, but actually good for you. And HN, as always, did not disappoint, like the other day when a guy here explained to me that lead is good for you and iron is poison, and if I disagree I should prove it to him.
> findings in models show inflammation, cell death, lung and liver effects, changes in the gut microbiome, and altered lipid and hormone metabolism.
Microplastics aren't anywhere near as well understood as sugar or alcohol. There's a growing body of research associating them with negative health outcones, inluding observing them causing harm on a cell level (i.e. not just correlational studies).
It's definitely not true that there isn't evidence of harm. There's a lot. It's more that this is a new field of research and not yet fully understood.
Cheap, ubiquitous plastics have revolutionized every industry (tools, food, automotive, etc...). We wouldn't be able to consume anywhere close to current level without them.
Not saying that's a good thing. But giving up plastics (not just in our personal life, but across the entire supply chain we rely on) would probably be harder for the average American than giving up alcohol for a drunk.
Yeah giving up plastic would be hard but we have to _start_ pushing it in the right direction. A person in 2025 might find it basically impossible to avoid microplastics but if we make changes now someone in 2040 might be able to do it
Yes but the worry is that it a significant amount doesn't pass through us and gets stuck inside our bodies. Not only our bodies, but animals and plants also. Plastics don't occur naturally and thus evolution has not provided life with a way of dealing with it. If you ignore the problem you're just going to end up with more and more microplastics in the environment and we don't know the long term risks, we've only been using plastics at scale for a couple of decades. We used to think asbestos, cigarettes, radium, pfas, leaded gasoline, cfk, etc was all fine and good and only found out about the adverse effects after prolonged exposure.
I think this new microplastic-in-food hysterics is just another way to milk money on "microplastic free" badges/tags: selling usual items under new "MPF" brand with increased costs.
Sugar and alcohol have had decades of attention and public health campaigns. HN doesn't care because it's not new or interesting news and they are fairly easy to avoid.
Can the conclusion of ‘no risk’ be supported by ‘no data’? One of the common pitfalls in critical thinking is to neglect the logic that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The ‘having plastic particles in your body is safe’ conclusion conjures up a classic error known as the ‘appeal to ignorance’ fallacy Locke (1690), which is, ‘there is no evidence against x. Therefore x is true.’ This type of statement has no place in rational thinking. Note that to propagate claims of this type is to unduly shift the burden of proof onto those seeking conclusive evidence.
...
The European Environment Agency’s two Late Lessons from Early Warnings reports (European Environment Agency, 2013, European Environment Agency, 1896-2000) highlighted the danger. The reports analyze the impact of past inaction (or action) on environmental damage caused by, for example, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and public health issues generated by exposure to asbestos or diethylstilbestrol (DES). Each case is deconstructed to identify patterns leading to delays in appropriate decision making. The insights led to recommendations regarding how to respond to new warnings with the precautionary principle, i.e. to act to reduce potential harm as the preliminary signs of harm are still arising. It is interesting to note that the EEA had difficulty in identifying any cases of overregulation of a pollutant that had turned out to be benign when all the science was in. Most early warnings turn out to be legitimate. The costs of inaction are often drastically underestimated (European Environment Agency, 2013).
"Where is the evidence that human exposure to microplastics is safe?", HA Leslie, MH Depledge, Environ Int. 2020 Jun 26;142:105807.
The most disturbing is "Raw Cow Milk from Farm in Glass". It still is loaded with plastic, even though it is one of the least processed things on the list.
My only question is was the cow milked by hand or by machine? The tubing in a milking machine almost certainly contains plastic.
I visited the largest pig farm in Ohio and they grind up bags of old dog food, plastic bags and everything. Literally pallets full of expired food, just dumped into the grinder. Then they spread the waste and sell it as organic fertilizer, plastic is now everything.
Hay is often bound up into bales with plastic twine. Cattle happily eat bits on accident. They used to use wire, but that caused a much more serious problem for the cattle.
They used to use natural twines like jute, which was better. They really don't eat much of the plastic stuff. The larger pieces of it do kill them (choking, cholic, etc).
I bring up raw milk because it is minimally processed (I don't even consume it personally). I used it as an example because it shows how much plastic is embedded in the food chain and ecosystem by looking at one of the least processed items on the list.
It's interesting that several products from the 1920s contain measurable quantities of DEHP, which was apparently first synthesized in the 1930s. How did that happen?
I'm very skeptical of plastics research at this point. Remember the "we have a plastic spoon worth of microplastics in our brains!" hype cycle. Turns out their methods were highly flawed and "not a suitable analysis method for PE and PVC in biological matrices" (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11800385/)
Can anyone comment on the methods used here? Seems they don't have the same issues.
The PlasticList tests seem to have accounted for matrix effects / contamination.
They used several various reactions (w acetonitrile, PSA, MgSO4, C18) to selectively dissolve / isolate the plastic compounds. This is also assisted by certain techniques (sonication, GC-MS/MS). They also added isotopically-labeled control plastic samples. That should enable them measure matrix affects and adjust for them in the non-control sample.
It is the isotopic labels that give me the most assurance.
While the ziploc bags had pthalates, I agree that it is probably not enough to impact the results, especially considering the lab used acetonitrile on the bags to test them. There's also the hand soap. These would probably cause a difference of + 80 at most.
Overall, I'd say the tests were the best we can get with current techniques / technology.
To fully assess the health impact of ingested plastics, we have to establish the underlying mechanism (e.g. bioaccumulation + endocrine activity) as well as the pattern of health consequences in real-world data.
The first part is easier and I believe has been demonstrated (especially regarding endocrine activity) fairly well.
The latter is notoriously difficult; it is probably better approached with animal studies as human association studies are too unreliable and would take too long to tease out effects.
Dosage is also an important factor and often makes poison-in-principle not poison-in-practice, though low-dosages over a long period of time may still have an effect that is not immediately noticeable. Bioaccumulation is also related to this.
The study you list is specific to analysis of human blood, whereas the original was done on human brain tissue. The original study cites other papers that have demonstrated the accumulation of plastics in other organ tissues using different techniques so I wouldn't discount plastics research because of the potential flaws of one method. Plus the fact that in the original study, the level of plastics increased by 50% between those who died in 2016 vs 2024 and increased further in those with dementia suggests that there is a real relationship here and something to be concerned about.
There are many other studies that establish a negative health relationship here. I don't think we should discount them.
Just thought it was interesting considering they are 'grass-fed'. Is that just a lie? Or maybe it's something else, like if they're drinking water from plastic containers that sit in the sun all day
It's a good point. I'm not an ag lawyer, but I am willing to bet that there's wiggle room in any grass-fed definition set by the USDA.
And you're right, there's also: plastic from water sources, plastic in the field that gets taken up by the gras, supplements given to the cow, plastic in the cutting board the meat was cut in, plastic the meat was wrapped in . . . it's hard to get plastic out of your supply chain.
While PlasticList has already tested hundreds of products and found plastic chemicals in 86% of them, laboratory.love lets you crowdfund testing for the specific products you actually buy.
Think of it as democratizing PlasticList's methodology: you choose what gets tested, we handle the logistics of sample collection + lab work, and results are published openly to pressure companies toward cleaner supply chains.
Super cool project, but I think there's pretty valid nitpick here:
It should clearly state the container (when multiple are possible) as that's likely the origin of 99.9% of the microplastics, as well as temperature. Prime example: "Starbucks Matcha Latte". I bet there are orders of magnitude difference in microplastic content between getting a hot one in a plastic (coated, if not fully) takeaway cup vs an iced one in a mug.
In general, containers and the way they're used generally make the difference, but all the focus here is only on the food item.
Another we refuse to accept and admit, due to the implications of other things that touch our skins, are the plastics from polyester fabrics that enter our body through our skin stream. The skin is the largest organ and has the largest surface area exposure, and these polyesters are one of the largest polluters of micro and nano plastics into the environment - and effectively, our bodies, the skin being one of the most efficient filters and processors of the plastic poison in them.
Don't research the poison of the plastics that wash out of those volatile fibers whiilst in the laundry machines. Oh, did you think that the only source of the micro-plastics in the water supply was water bottles?
I'm making a product to help trap plasticizers in the digestive tract and prevent them from getting into the bloodstream, NeutraOat (NeutraOat.com).
I was originally inspired by PlasticList, and actually made a quiz on my website based off their data for people to assess their plastics exposure (quiz.neutraoat.com)
Read through their "industry advice" section and thought this interesting:
> If you chop something on a plastic cutting board (because wood cutting boards are outlawed in commercial kitchens, apparently), test before and after chopping.
Who banned wood cutting boards from kitchens and for what purpose? I did some digging and some sources cite that neither FDA nor USDA strictly ban wood cutting boards, but individual state health departments are often strict on commercial kitchens that use wood instruments. I get concerns of wood being porous and all, but with the alternative being I have to ingest shavings from the plastic cutting board with every meal... Maybe it's time for a paradigm shift.
The only recall our cheese ever had was through a 3rd party who was cutting our cheese on a wooden cutting board which was contaminated with listeria. Really kinda annoying, since we have absolutely no control over that, and it's hardly good brand optics.
Man, remember a few year backs some magic microbes that eat plastic were making the rounds in news? Whatever happened to those, did not work out, are still worked on, lack of funding...?
This site has been posted to HN before, but it's definitely interesting to revisit in light of drastic cuts to federal agencies like the FDA, USDA, and CDC.
Independent efforts like PlasticList are probably going to be more and more important as research funding gets slashed and health-related data is suppressed or manipulated.
Jesus christ at the numbers on the Rxbars. So much for "4 ingredients with no B.S.". Kind of insane that they could get up to 30,000 ng/serving with such a small serving size consisting of something like 4 blueberries, 4 cashews, and 3 dates.
Also the negligible levels of plastic detected in plastic water bottles is surprising. I was under the impression, based on other reports, that water in plastic bottles is something we should avoid.
I think that's mostly BPA and phthalates, and microplastics are often listed along with those, but I'm unsure if it was actually tested or if we notices people had a lot of microplastics and just assumed that was a likely source.
I remember at least one study that pointed to 250k nanoplastics in a liter of bottled water [0]. Possibly these types of particles weren't studied. There are certainly many different toxicants to be looking out for; overwhelming to the point of being pointless.
Thank you for sharing this data, it is really helpful. Now it feels like microplastics are almost everywhere in life, even breathing and eating are difficult to completely avoid. What we can do is probably to try to understand their sources, and then reduce contact as much as possible, make a little bit of active choices, at least to protect ourselves and our families.
This list is amazing, but at some point you have to prioritize what you’re paying attention to.
Your most dangerous plastic or microplastic is the PFAS. And the biggest source of PFAS is the water you drink. Does it run through plastic tubing? A pfas filter at any point? Sit in a plastic jug?
The most effective way to deal with this is to distill your water. Distilled water is nearly pfas free, and also removes bpas, lead, mercury, and any bacteria.[1]
I struggle with taking this too seriously YET, knowing that we ingest all manner of tiny things, and breathe in all kinds of particles and toxins all the time. NOT SAYING this is fine, but rather I haven’t heard anything yet to bump it up higher in the list of concerns.
I mean I already have exposure to lead and asbestos, and the random particulates I breathe in aren’t going away. I feel like this is getting attention because it’s a new issue, not that all other concerns pale in comparison.
I used to hand sort damaged batteries without gloves. I feel like I am not going to see much benefit from trying to minimise microplastic consumption. But maybe the next generation will see some benefit.
The per-gram reading is good for things without real servings (e.g., per gram of water).
However, for a single-serving meal, winning on per-gram isnt really helpful since we wouldnt eat a gram of a 1-serving salad.
Its sort of like how McMansions are actually inexpensive on a per-sqft basis, but how that isnt helpful since you have to purchase all 5000 sqft of the McMansion
I've taken prenatal vitamins for as long as I can remember because they're FDA regulated to actually contain the nutrients they claim to include. I never would've thought that could be a source for microplastics.
Separately, I always knew there was a reason those RXBars taste like plastic. /s
> Consider this a snapshot of our raw test results, suitable as a starting point and inspiration for further work, but not solid enough on its own to draw conclusions or make policy recommendations or even necessarily to alter your personal purchasing decisions.
What are we complaining about? Is it about the industrialization, economy and jobs that produced plastics? How far do we want to go back? Industries came out of scientific advances and business, which came from social dynamics and foundational academics such as mathematics and logic, which in turn were a result of leisure time due to civilizations, settlements, more food availability, farming, tools etc. All this was inevitable and incremental. Nothing happened overnight. We didn't cause it. And we won't be doing anything to stop it.
There is a story in Hindu mythology about churning of the milk ocean, by gods and demons in cooperation, using a mountain as the churning rod, with an objective of extracting the nectar of immortality. After a great amount of churning, a great poison comes out which must be consumed, otherwise it ends the universe. Lord Shiva consumes it, but keeps it in his throat, to save himself and the universe. When the Nectar finally comes out, somehow gods trick the demons, to keep the nectar to themselves.
Sometimes it occurs to me that this story foretold the extraction of oil from ocean deeps, giving the luxuries to the developed world and pollution to the third world.
Well, I don't know if the story foretold the future or not. But in any case, why didn't Shiva let the world end? We would not have all this shitty problems now. Look at it: we can't even drink water anymore without getting harmful chemicals.
One class of items not listed here, which I'd recently started to think might be less-than-optimal: pepper sold in jars with built-in, plastic, grinders.
I'd long since noted that as the jar emptied the grinders were increasingly ineffective. Thinking on why that might be ... I realised that this was because as you grind the pepper, you're also grinding plastic directly into your food.
There's surprisingly little discussion about this that I can find, though this 5 y.o. Stackexchange question addresses the concern:
<https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/103003/microplas...>
Seems to me that plastic grinders, whether disposable or sold as (apparently) durable products, are a class of products which simply shouldn't exist.
Searching, e.g., Walmart for "plastic grinders" turns up five listings presently, though it's not clear whether it's the body or the grinder itself which is plastic. In several cases it seems to be the latter.
<https://www.walmart.com/c/kp/plastic-grinders>
(Archive of current state: <https://archive.is/yIIX4>
Peugeot—yes, they of the cars—make an excellent line of steel-based pepper grinders, and a great nutmeg mill as well. Along with hoop skirts and lawnmowers and much more, apparently, over the 200 years since the family started their first steel mill:
https://us.peugeot-saveurs.com/en_us/inspiration/history/
The car business sold to Stellantis, but the lineage’s kaleidoscope of other enterprises apparently continues.
definitely one of those buy it for life type of thing, very satisfying once you get used to it, and it does take time to get used to it. the labelling is carefully designed to fade away just around the time you got to know how to use one, masterfully done lol
The mechanism is probably good forever but the bottom ring is liable to crack over time. They usually last me a decade or so which is fine for the price.
Ikea makes one with ceramic burrs which also solves the issue most of them have where the grinder faces down and drops grinds on your table.
OXO too. The IKEA one does appear to be glass and cheaper, though. Looks good.
Could you tell me which model as they have a few?
The 365+ is the one I've got https://www.ikea.com/au/en/p/ikea-365-ihaerdig-spice-mill-bl...
I love them and have bought half a dozen over the years. My dad gifted me one when I moved out decades ago.
A good pepper grinder (and the Peugeot’s are top notch) is such an obviously valuable purchase. Lasts a decade and fresh pepper from a good grinder is much tastier. One of the best $35 to spend imo
My grandmother has a very old Peugeot grinder. The new ones are much smaller and look like the ones from other brands, but I guess with higher quality.
meh. I like the aesthetics of the Peugeot grinder but it is flawed.
Specifically: the grinder top is not mated with reverse threads. This means the act of grinding loosens the top. I have to stop and re-tighten quite frequently.
I suppose the design is perfect if you are left-handed ...
If it were the other way it would tighten with use and eventually strip the threads or crack the wood top. Anyway it's an almost unbelievably petty bit of cooking technique but there is actually a "correct" way to hold and turn a pepper grinder lol.
Your palm is meant to hold the nut in place. On the old ones the tightness of the nut was the control for fineness so it was necessary to hold it as you turned anyway. They moved that control to its own thing on the bottom a few decades ago (iirc) but kept the rest of it the same.
Hario ceramic coffee grinders also work for pepper.
Thanks, I hadn’t considered the plastic on the pepper grinder. Guess I’ll be looking for a new pepper grinder as I continue my pursuit of removing plastic and dangerous chemicals from the kitchen. So far the pans, tupperware, and cooking utensils have all been replaced.
While not food, another not so frequently talked about plastic exposure could be clothing dryer vents pushing materials from synthetic clothing into the air. It’s likely less of a problem than the rubber tires on our cars making their way into the air. But it was something that occurred to me while cleaning out the dryer vent this past weekend.
I’m definitely buying natural fiber clothing moving forward for this reason.
However, I wonder how bad eating bits of the plastic burr grinder actually is. Presumably, they mostly pass through. Stomach acid probably leaches a bunch of stuff, but is it worse than (say) canned tomatoes that were sitting in a plastic liner for a year? I’d wager the grinder bits have a lot of surface area from scarring. That’d increase leaching.
Anyway, I strongly recommend small turkish-style grinders:
https://bazaaranatolia.com/products/turkish-grinder-pepper-m...
(No idea if this brand is decent; the form factor is great, especially for $14)
It has roughly a single-recipe capacity, so I stick crushed red pepper flakes, cumin seed, celery seed, black pepper kernels, etc in it per the recipe, then grind until it is empty. The burr on the one I linked is metal.
I’d probably prefer stainless body + whatever is commonly used for espresso grinders, assuming such a gadget exists.
> (No idea if this brand is decent; the form factor is great, especially for $14)
> These grinders are made of Zamak (brass and zinc)
If it's real brand-name ZAMAK, then it should at least be low in lead :)
Your biggest exposure is going to be water, hands down. What you store it in, how you filter it, these are going to be major sources of plastics and pfas.
Yes and PFAS/PFOS is now getting directly linked to rise in colorectal cancers.
Personally I would prioritize water filtering for PFAS over microplastics worries if you have limited budget to start changing consumption patterns.
Agreed, already on it! I put Wedell Water filters on all of our shower heads and we have a filtration system for our kitchen sink water. I’d love to get a whole home water filter at some point.
what’s the vector for microplastics in shower water causing you harm ? swallowing some of it or through the skin or something else ?
Microplastics was only one of my concerns. Their “why” page does a good job explaining the benefits. https://weddellwater.com/pages/why-duo
Nothing says capitalism quite like a corporation polluting the entire planet with something they knew caused disease, actively gaslighted everyone involved, transferred liability to a sacrificial entity so they got zero punishment for it, and the rest of us are left to buy water filters for the rest of history if we want clean water.
3M and Dupont deserve the death penalty for it and should've been dissolved completely for crimes against humanity.
If only it would be so easy to blame it all on capitalism.
I've lived in communism and it was exactly the same. Pollution beyond any reasonable levels, testing chemistry on products and people, rules and regulations coming from government and faceless bureaucrats... The result was the same, but instead of corporate greed the reason was lack of any interest and foresight.
Well regulated capitalism is probably best equipped to deal with such. Whether ours is well equipped to deal with this is another question.
The problem occurs whenever there aren't competent and powerful institutions working to protect the interests of the people, so indeed.
But the thing is capitalism is a tremendously powerful machine, so it's really more dangerous than an unmotivated Polish bureaucrat. The Soviets may have drained the Aral sea but capitalism has poisoned the entire planet (with TEL even before PFAS).
Any specific products you’d recommend for this?
Reverse osmosis is pretty much the gold standard for removing PFAS. You can get countertop units for a reasonable price. Look for the lab testing or certifications rather than random anecdotes since they appear to work fine to the end user.
As someone new to this how do the details work? Do you need to buy a new membrane often like I imagine? Do you have any issues with your water lacking minerals? (in the same way drinking distilled water is bad for you)
The model I have says to replace the filter once a year, and it's $170 AUD. I imagine you could probably get away with using it longer than the OEM recommendation though.
I had the same thought about demineralised water, you can get more expensive models which remineralise the water after, but it looks like it's not actually that important health wise because you get the absolute vast majority of your minerals through food, not water. And remineralisation is mostly for taste rather than health. Though I don't find the demineralised water tastes bad, but if you're used to drinking hard water it might be different.
Do you happen to know of any 10" water filter enclosures that are not made of plastic? I recently started looking for a two-stage one (meaning two enclosures connected in series) but haven't found one yet.
I wonder why do you think that? According to the website, unfiltered tap water is not really bad. Am I missing something?
Same here. I am going to disassemble the cheap pepper grinders I recently bought to make sure there is no plastic in the grinding operation.
I switched to bamboo toothbrushes from plastic a while ago, before de-plasticizing was really a thing. Now I'm glad I did, because plastic bristles grinding against my teeth seems like an easy way for plastic to get inside my body. The bamboo toothbrushes are pretty nice too, the bristles are soft but firm, and the handle is made of bamboo too.
Personally, I spit out whatever happens when I brush my teeth. But bamboo does sound like a more pleasant experience all the way around.
All disposable grinders are going to be plastic, and likely none of the refillable ones will be since the plastic burrs only last one usage before they are all chipped off in to your food.
Mentioned elsewhere too but Peugeot (yes the car company) has been making top quality affordable pepper grinders for over a century.
The simple wooden ones last a decade or longer and cost about 35 $/€/£
Your teeth seem pretty hard though, to the point that a specialist has to go over them with metal tools every year to clean them.
and... plastic is not that hard, so the teeth should be able to grind down the plastic bristles as you brush your teeth. I'd find it hard to believe that no plastic is lost during brushing of teeth.
The idea of brushing my teeth with plastic has lost its appeal for me and will never be recovered.
I've been using a mortar and pestle. Easy to control fineness and no plastic to be concerned with.
I am a huge fan of Unicorn Pepper Mills: https://www.unicornmills.org/ as a buy-it-for-life item that truly works better than alternatives. That said, they do have plastic bodies, but the grinder mechanism is entirely made from metals and ceramic.
This was just posted today on r/BuyItForLife,
> After reading about micro plastics in the disposable salt and pepper grinders from the big box, stores broke down and bought these very nice all metal mechanism grinders.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/comments/1liyril/after...
Posting ones "just bought" product to "BuyItForLife" is an irony I had not thought of before. Especially considering one of the metal grinders contains salt...
I don't know why people buy salt grinders. They serve no point.
I buy both coarse and fine grain salt. It's extremely cheap. You don't need to grind salt.
I think it must just be the association with grinding pepper being fancy, and the fact that they are neighbors on the table.
I use a mortar and pestle (both made of stone) and would highly recommend it!
It's a dream of mine to learn enough stoneworking to turn a pair of stones from a local river into a mortar and pestle, ideally without contracting silicosis at the same time. Much cooler than shipping granite mined and cut on the other side of the globe.
While I still have a pepper mill (stone based grinder), I haven't touched it once since I got a mortar and pestle.
It also has the added advantage that I can go completely overboard on black pepper and I love it!
good option.
i like that too.
metal ones are also available in india, made of stainless steel and maybe other metals instead.
traditionally, people in india used a thick flat wide stone and a thick cylindrical stone grinder applied back and forth on top of the lower stone, to grind spices, onion, ginger, chilllies, turmeric, etc., into a paste or masala, which was then used in making curries, sambar, and other dishes.
Traditionally grinding things with stone ended up with people eating stone which ground their teeth down[1]:
> "A. When soft stone like sandstone was used for milling grain, as the ancient Egyptians often did, residue from millstones could cause a serious problem over a lifetime, said Dr. Robert K. Ritner, associate professor of Egyptology at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Egyptian teeth have been well studied in mummies, and only the rare mummy had good teeth, said Dr. Ritner, who lectures on Egyptian medicine. ''They usually had heavy abrasion, and were sometimes so worn down at the crown that the pulp or even the root was exposed, which must have been horribly painful,'' he said. The Egyptians were obsessive about cleanliness, using a natural soda compound called natron for cleaning the mouth and sometimes a chewing reed to massage the teeth. They had few cavities, and the damage seen in studies pioneered by the English researcher F. Filce Leek almost certainly resulted from the residue of disintegrating millstones."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/06/science/q-a-teeth-and-mil...
[2] https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-whole-grains-damage-you...
paywall for 1, nyt. I tried reloading the page a few times, but there was no effect. that sometimes did work earlier.
thanks. i can imagine, now that you say it. wonder if there were / are other bad effects too, like on other parts of the body.
Archive Today ... should be ... your friend. Existing archive was also paywalled, this recent resubmission may work:
<https://archive.ph/3EIHG>
thanks, will check that out.
here is an image of one such stone pair, not exactly what we had at home, but close:
https://www.natureloc.com/products/ammikallu-grinding-stone
also called aattukallu in tamil and iman dasta (iirc) in hindi or urdu, but searching for the latter only gave results for mortars and pestles, which are not the same thing as the one above, the ammikallu.
Kind of surprised there’s no mention of Fletchers’ Mill [0] here, they’re good quality mills made in Maine. The pepper mills use stainless steel while the salt mills use nylon (corrosion resistance), so you’d have to look elsewhere for salt.
Personally I just dump kosher salt into a salt cellar and call it a day but I am sure there are plastic-free salt mills out there somewhere.
0: https://fletchersmill.com
Salt mills are sort of useless anyway… salt is just a bunch of little rocks, unlike pepper it doesn’t need to have been recently ground to be “fresh.”
Get some large sea-salt flakes if you want to be fancy with salt.
The grinder itself is almost certainly always plastic in these. Even in refillable grinders, in the low-medium range the burr is often plastic
It's (thankfully) still possible to buy all-metal grinders, ensuring one a reliable source of dietary steel.
Krell or otherwise.
Is it? I always thought the cheap ones were ceramic. Or is ceramic also somehow a type of plastic?
Ceramic are also a thing, but plastic burrs do exist afaik (don’t know which is more common). Plastic < ceramic < metal
I got a $7 ceramic pepper grinder from Ikea.
Is the plastic you ingest this way significant though? I don't remember the details, but the Veritasium video on this subject suggested that the scraped teflon you ingest from pans is less significant than the plastic that leeches into food in products like microwave popcorn. I assume this has to do with the reaction between the substance being contained (popcorn oil, in this case) and the item containing it (plastic-lined paper).
If the plastic particles are large enough, I assume we pass them.
> Is the plastic you ingest this way significant though?
The follow-up question you might want to ask though is: How often do you want to ask that question?
Yes, every tiny little bit is insignificant. That is true for most things, including actual direct poisons.
A better way to look at such discussions is not to assume that this very specific thing you are currently looking at is the one, only complete problem. Remember instead, in these posts we are looking at lots and lots and lots of tiny details, only a tiny part of the whole problem space.
Do you repeat that relevancy question for every single part? The answer, when you split the problem enough, is always "relevance is near zero".
That is the problem of our tiny brains not being able to comprehend the whole, requiring us to look at tiny parts one at a time. When you create the sum, or the integral, of a huge number of rounded-down zeroes you get zero, and now you have the wrong answer for the whole of the problem.
Even big problems consist of a huge number of tiny parts. Asking the summary question on each tiny part is not a good method.
Every tiny bit of plastic we find is exactly just that - one tiny piece of the big picture. By itself and alone it would be inconsequential. If it was just that one single source of plastic particles, we would not have this discussion. We are here, performing such research, having such discussions, because we have a very large number of such tiny pieces. The question of relevancy is for the whole. Whether this one particular piece of microplastic you ate today, which came from your plastic pepper mill, is the tipping point is not a useful or answerable question, it's all of them combined over time.
Boy, that's a lot of words to say "care about everything".
Asking the summary question IS important. If we all switch to reusable straws, will that save more or fewer whales than shutting down one coal plant?
If my tap water is injecting 99% of the microplastics in my bloodstream, IDGAF about pepper grinders.
And I eat pepper like it's "the black vegetable".
Teflon is typically not the issue, it's very non-reactive and non-sticky (duh), meaning it just passes through. Attaching such material to metal takes some serious chemistry, though.
PlasticList is amazing and thank your raising these issues, it never crossed my mind and I use this everyday!
That linked StackExchange thread perfectly portrays why the site went down the drain.
>Maybe you'll ingest more microplastic on fish or proteins in higher food chain than grinders.
>If you drink tea you've got a lot more to worry about in terms of ingestion.
OK ... ?
>Your concern, although logically valid, is nearly impossible to regulate or even measure.
And yet, PlasticList is a thing.
>We're talking about amount that is, literally, microscopic.
Yeah Einstein, that's why they're called microplastics.
I am SO glad that place is extinct now.
We 100% know and are well aware that food items like cutting boards, plastic-ware, etc. are all sources of plastic we ingest.
We are doing it on purpose, eating plastic that is, the only question is why!
The why is that plastic is an extremely convenient, cost effective way to make lots of things. And the evidence that it was deleterious to human health was negligible.
And to be fair, it's still fairly uncertain. We demonstrated endocrine problems with BPA, but aside from that microplastic consequences on health still seems uncertain. At best we're mostly doing the correlation/causation thing that leads people down a confusing path of cure-alls and snake oil.
If there was a smoking gun for the consequences of this in our day to day living, surely it would be regulated out of existence[1], but thus far that evidence doesn't exist.
[1] - ha ha, who am I kidding. In reality industry groups would muddy the waters, try to pretend it's "political", finance astroturfing groups, and soon enough a certain segment of society will be proudly clutching onto their microplastics, demanding higher dose services, and ascribing it with magical cure-all powers.
> surely it would be regulated out of existence[1], but thus far that evidence doesn't exist.
surely, it's not so sure, especially with the current administration reversing so many existing policies. for example, reversing the restriction of asbestos is currently in the works. so adding new regulations on plastics use seems like something that the current policy makers will absolutely not be considering. at this point, I would not be shocked if they said they were reversing the bans on lead in gasoline or paints
> reversing the restriction of asbestos is currently in the works.
I really, really hoped you weren't being serious...
But https://web.archive.org/web/20250624143349/https://www.nytim...
I used to work for a company that makes equipment for the food processing industry.
Sometimes conveyor belts would be left running for days or even weeks in the test area. After a while, you would start to see very fine dust on and around the conveyor belts. This was finely ground POM plastic. On some occasions, there were actually heaps of that stuff forming beneath the conveyor belts.
In the factories, everything gets washed down with pressure washers at least once per day, so very little of this stuff goes into the food, but it definitely gets washed away out to sea.
I think that there is probably a wide-spread misunderstanding on how the micro-plastics enter the food. It does not seem very likely that it would come from the packaging or your tupperware (unless your tupperware is so old that it has actually started to disintegrate). It seems much likelier that the plastics were in the food before it was packaged.
beats metal shavings I guess...
Maybe not? We already have a variety of metals in our bodies, and cells already interact with them as needed and filtering them if not. (I'm obviously being very generic here. Heavy metals are an obvious exception to this.)
Meanwhile, biology has no idea what plastic is and it seems like our bodies have a hard time filtering it out.
Sorry if you were joking and I missed it.
Metals, yes. Metal shavings can have sharp edges, which may not do good things to the inside of your mouth (nor to your GI track if you swallow them).
Going by the lower limit of 20,000 ng/kg, a 70kg person has a limit of 1,400,000 ng/day for DEHP and 70MM ng/day DEHT.
So am I reading this right you're probably an order of magnitude below the 'safe' limit even if you subsist solely off of RXBars and Sweetgreen? Which is not so far from me at one point in my 30s...
I didn't expect to open this chart and feel _better_ about my plastic consumption, maybe I'm just misunderstanding the chart. It seems even if the limits are 10x too high, you're still probably fine.
The "report" tab on the website shows which items are above federal recommended limits. The vast majority of tested items are within the limits. So yes, if you're only concerned with what the federal government considers safe, the action item is "probably nothing". But the report page also brings up a lot of good reasons to doubt that the federal limits are sufficient.
The "Are the intake limits correct?" section (and the whole report, really) is fascinating and worth a read, but just to provide a concrete example of why federal limits might not be sufficient:
3M began producing PFOA (the most infamous "forever chemical") in 1947. It has been widely used in industry, and many millions of pounds of the stuff have been dumped into waterways since then. PFOA manufacturers were aware of some of the negative health effects of the substance in lab animals in the 1960s. Researchers outside of corporate America began studying PFOA in the 1980s. In the early 2000s, PFOA exposure via drinking water began to get public attention due to a lawsuit against DuPont.
As far as I know, the US government had no recommended limit on PFOA exposure in drinking water between 1947 and 2009.
Since 2009, limits have become progressively stricter. (For the timeline below, I'm quoting https://www.nrdc.org/press-releases/epa-restricts-toxic-pfas... )
In 2009, EPA established provisional health advisories for PFOA at 400 ppt and for PFOS at 200 ppt.
In 2016, EPA set a lifetime health advisory of 70 ppt for PFOA and PFOS combined.
In 2022, EPA published interim lifetime health advisories of 0.004 ppt for PFOA and 0.02 ppt for PFOS.
In 2023, EPA proposed health-based maximum contaminant level goals (MCLGs) for PFOA and PFOS of 0 ppt.
A lot of these chemicals are newer and less well-studied than PFOA, and we may still be in the period where federal limits are hundreds or thousands of times higher than the true safe level.
There is an option to view the total daily recommendations, and many of the tested-for items do not have one. So, what is OK for those?
But yes, eating even a pound of the 100th percentile food daily seems to have well below the recommended amounts. So - update the recommendations?
Weird to see how much attention plastics in food are getting despite no(?) evidence of harm vs. something like consuming too much sugar or alcohol, and BPA/BPS in receipt paper (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/well/health-effects-paper...).
It's very hard to maintain a mental ranked list of health things to be worried about when hypothetical concerns get more attention/coverage the confirmed ones.
"despite no(?) evidence of harm" If you look up most of the chemicals on the list, all of them have suspected health impacts and the most have been confirmed to be harmful in some degree or another.
For example: DEHP - Endocrine disruption, disruptor of thyroid function, Ingestion of 0.01% caused damage to the blood-testis barrier... etc
source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bis(2-ethylhexyl)_phthalate
I came here to be explained to how eating plastic is not only not bad, but actually good for you. And HN, as always, did not disappoint, like the other day when a guy here explained to me that lead is good for you and iron is poison, and if I disagree I should prove it to him.
Iron certainly can be poisonous https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK459224/
Sugar and alcohol are clearly labelled and provide an obvious benefit, so people feel empowered to make that cost/benefit trade-off.
Microplastics do nebulous harm, and it's difficult or impossible to control intake.
Plastics provide an even more obvious benefit than alcohol.
Key difference is I have no choice but to ingest it, unlike alcohol.
What are the nutritional benefits of consuming plastics?
Wrong question.
How can ingesting plastics get me high?
What is the obvious benefit of alcohol?
Relaxation. Stress reduction. Being able to connect with people in a way you might not be able to otherwise.
Obviously, varies dramatically from person to person.
“Obvious” is maybe not quite the word I’d use, but lower inhibition, fun and social aspects are benefits of (a reasonable use of) alcohol
(Not saying it’s a good trade off or that it’s the only or best way to achieve these things obviously)
It's easier to walk up to the woman that's been eyeing you at the party, speaking from experience.
So does cocaine
However, unlike cocaine, alcohol(in reasonable amounts) doesn't make your dick useless...
The phrase "whiskey dick" does not exist in a vacuum. (Or maybe it does, literally?)
Is that a thing? Any amount of Alkohol makes me a useless adult baby, but a little cocaine definitely makes me more active.
Calories.
While you're correct, my freakout lies in the fact that microplastics have been found to bypass the blood brain barrier...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1
Quote from Harvard medicine magazine:
> findings in models show inflammation, cell death, lung and liver effects, changes in the gut microbiome, and altered lipid and hormone metabolism.
Microplastics aren't anywhere near as well understood as sugar or alcohol. There's a growing body of research associating them with negative health outcones, inluding observing them causing harm on a cell level (i.e. not just correlational studies).
It's definitely not true that there isn't evidence of harm. There's a lot. It's more that this is a new field of research and not yet fully understood.
https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/microplastics-ever...
No one wants to consume plastic however, while with sugar and alcohol consuming it is the goal. What is the upside to consuming plastic?
Cheap, ubiquitous plastics have revolutionized every industry (tools, food, automotive, etc...). We wouldn't be able to consume anywhere close to current level without them.
Not saying that's a good thing. But giving up plastics (not just in our personal life, but across the entire supply chain we rely on) would probably be harder for the average American than giving up alcohol for a drunk.
Yeah giving up plastic would be hard but we have to _start_ pushing it in the right direction. A person in 2025 might find it basically impossible to avoid microplastics but if we make changes now someone in 2040 might be able to do it
This website does have a column for BPA/BPS and receipts are indeed listed.
I'm assuming because the body can break down sugar and alcohol but not plastics?
If the plastic passes through us without breaking down, how worried should we be?
Yes but the worry is that it a significant amount doesn't pass through us and gets stuck inside our bodies. Not only our bodies, but animals and plants also. Plastics don't occur naturally and thus evolution has not provided life with a way of dealing with it. If you ignore the problem you're just going to end up with more and more microplastics in the environment and we don't know the long term risks, we've only been using plastics at scale for a couple of decades. We used to think asbestos, cigarettes, radium, pfas, leaded gasoline, cfk, etc was all fine and good and only found out about the adverse effects after prolonged exposure.
I think this new microplastic-in-food hysterics is just another way to milk money on "microplastic free" badges/tags: selling usual items under new "MPF" brand with increased costs.
It’s almost impossible to remember to do all the things to keep healthy for sure.
Sugar and alcohol have had decades of attention and public health campaigns. HN doesn't care because it's not new or interesting news and they are fairly easy to avoid.
Can the conclusion of ‘no risk’ be supported by ‘no data’? One of the common pitfalls in critical thinking is to neglect the logic that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The ‘having plastic particles in your body is safe’ conclusion conjures up a classic error known as the ‘appeal to ignorance’ fallacy Locke (1690), which is, ‘there is no evidence against x. Therefore x is true.’ This type of statement has no place in rational thinking. Note that to propagate claims of this type is to unduly shift the burden of proof onto those seeking conclusive evidence.
...
The European Environment Agency’s two Late Lessons from Early Warnings reports (European Environment Agency, 2013, European Environment Agency, 1896-2000) highlighted the danger. The reports analyze the impact of past inaction (or action) on environmental damage caused by, for example, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and public health issues generated by exposure to asbestos or diethylstilbestrol (DES). Each case is deconstructed to identify patterns leading to delays in appropriate decision making. The insights led to recommendations regarding how to respond to new warnings with the precautionary principle, i.e. to act to reduce potential harm as the preliminary signs of harm are still arising. It is interesting to note that the EEA had difficulty in identifying any cases of overregulation of a pollutant that had turned out to be benign when all the science was in. Most early warnings turn out to be legitimate. The costs of inaction are often drastically underestimated (European Environment Agency, 2013).
"Where is the evidence that human exposure to microplastics is safe?", HA Leslie, MH Depledge, Environ Int. 2020 Jun 26;142:105807.
<https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7319653/>
We are aware of harms from materials leaching from plastics, as well as direct harms from PFAS (<https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-human-hea...>) and BPA (<https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25813067/>), to name only two of the myriad compounds and constituents of plastics.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The most disturbing is "Raw Cow Milk from Farm in Glass". It still is loaded with plastic, even though it is one of the least processed things on the list.
My only question is was the cow milked by hand or by machine? The tubing in a milking machine almost certainly contains plastic.
https://www.plasticlist.org/product/29
> even though it is one of the least processed things on the list.
It is in a glass bottle, so maybe not the greatest example: https://www.sciencealert.com/glass-bottles-actually-contain-...
Straight from the cow would be far more interesting with respect to what you are bringing up, albeit beyond the scope of the broader discussion.
Many livestock feeds have some level of plastic in them.
I visited the largest pig farm in Ohio and they grind up bags of old dog food, plastic bags and everything. Literally pallets full of expired food, just dumped into the grinder. Then they spread the waste and sell it as organic fertilizer, plastic is now everything.
Hay is often bound up into bales with plastic twine. Cattle happily eat bits on accident. They used to use wire, but that caused a much more serious problem for the cattle.
Silage uses insane amounts of plastic wrap and then is left in direct sunlight to decay
They used to use natural twines like jute, which was better. They really don't eat much of the plastic stuff. The larger pieces of it do kill them (choking, cholic, etc).
Now we will wrap the bales in 5 to 10 lb of plastic each, so they last longer!
Milk is really great at extracting plasticizers from plastic. It contains natural fats and emulsifiers, after all.
I'd expect that it can pull all kinds of chemicals from the milking equipment.
No chance any commercially available milk is getting hand milked.
Fortunately, raw cow milk is unnecessary for humans (good for baby cows though!) and easy to avoid.
I bring up raw milk because it is minimally processed (I don't even consume it personally). I used it as an example because it shows how much plastic is embedded in the food chain and ecosystem by looking at one of the least processed items on the list.
It's interesting that several products from the 1920s contain measurable quantities of DEHP, which was apparently first synthesized in the 1930s. How did that happen?
For example, the cocoa powder from the 1920s https://www.plasticlist.org/product/990
That is interesting. I wonder if it's a byproduct of another process and the 1930s date was only when it was commercially produced in isolation.
I'm very skeptical of plastics research at this point. Remember the "we have a plastic spoon worth of microplastics in our brains!" hype cycle. Turns out their methods were highly flawed and "not a suitable analysis method for PE and PVC in biological matrices" (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11800385/)
Can anyone comment on the methods used here? Seems they don't have the same issues.
The PlasticList tests seem to have accounted for matrix effects / contamination.
They used several various reactions (w acetonitrile, PSA, MgSO4, C18) to selectively dissolve / isolate the plastic compounds. This is also assisted by certain techniques (sonication, GC-MS/MS). They also added isotopically-labeled control plastic samples. That should enable them measure matrix affects and adjust for them in the non-control sample.
It is the isotopic labels that give me the most assurance.
While the ziploc bags had pthalates, I agree that it is probably not enough to impact the results, especially considering the lab used acetonitrile on the bags to test them. There's also the hand soap. These would probably cause a difference of + 80 at most.
Overall, I'd say the tests were the best we can get with current techniques / technology.
To fully assess the health impact of ingested plastics, we have to establish the underlying mechanism (e.g. bioaccumulation + endocrine activity) as well as the pattern of health consequences in real-world data.
The first part is easier and I believe has been demonstrated (especially regarding endocrine activity) fairly well.
The latter is notoriously difficult; it is probably better approached with animal studies as human association studies are too unreliable and would take too long to tease out effects.
Dosage is also an important factor and often makes poison-in-principle not poison-in-practice, though low-dosages over a long period of time may still have an effect that is not immediately noticeable. Bioaccumulation is also related to this.
As for the "plastic spoon" claim, it originated from this study -- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12003191 -- in Nature.
The study you list is specific to analysis of human blood, whereas the original was done on human brain tissue. The original study cites other papers that have demonstrated the accumulation of plastics in other organ tissues using different techniques so I wouldn't discount plastics research because of the potential flaws of one method. Plus the fact that in the original study, the level of plastics increased by 50% between those who died in 2016 vs 2024 and increased further in those with dementia suggests that there is a real relationship here and something to be concerned about.
There are many other studies that establish a negative health relationship here. I don't think we should discount them.
What is the deal with whole foods grass-fed ribeye?
https://www.plasticlist.org/product/65
What are they grazing on, plastic lawn turf?
Beef cows are accumulators. And their feed often contains plastics.
Just thought it was interesting considering they are 'grass-fed'. Is that just a lie? Or maybe it's something else, like if they're drinking water from plastic containers that sit in the sun all day
You're probably imagining the marketing depiction of "grass fed"
https://www.primalmeats.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/gra...
But nobody said it was coming straight off the ground!
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/cows-eating-trough-made-blue...
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2CFFY4J/hay-bales-wrapped-in-heavy...
It's a good point. I'm not an ag lawyer, but I am willing to bet that there's wiggle room in any grass-fed definition set by the USDA.
And you're right, there's also: plastic from water sources, plastic in the field that gets taken up by the gras, supplements given to the cow, plastic in the cutting board the meat was cut in, plastic the meat was wrapped in . . . it's hard to get plastic out of your supply chain.
Even here in Switzerland grass fed means that like 70% of the year they eat grass from their fields, conserved in large plastic "rolls"
While PlasticList has already tested hundreds of products and found plastic chemicals in 86% of them, laboratory.love lets you crowdfund testing for the specific products you actually buy.
Think of it as democratizing PlasticList's methodology: you choose what gets tested, we handle the logistics of sample collection + lab work, and results are published openly to pressure companies toward cleaner supply chains.
Are you associated with plastic.love? If so you should be explicit about it.
Also, if it's crowdfunded, why am I unable to see any finished results without giving you my email?
What is the plastic.love you're referring to? That domain doesn't resolve for me. Do you mean PlasticList?
I meant the laboratory.love that GP mentioned
Super cool project, but I think there's pretty valid nitpick here:
It should clearly state the container (when multiple are possible) as that's likely the origin of 99.9% of the microplastics, as well as temperature. Prime example: "Starbucks Matcha Latte". I bet there are orders of magnitude difference in microplastic content between getting a hot one in a plastic (coated, if not fully) takeaway cup vs an iced one in a mug.
In general, containers and the way they're used generally make the difference, but all the focus here is only on the food item.
My suspicion as well, but so far we have only guesses, not data.
There's 10,000s ng of plastic in a Starbuck's Latte ... https://www.plasticlist.org/product/173
Another we refuse to accept and admit, due to the implications of other things that touch our skins, are the plastics from polyester fabrics that enter our body through our skin stream. The skin is the largest organ and has the largest surface area exposure, and these polyesters are one of the largest polluters of micro and nano plastics into the environment - and effectively, our bodies, the skin being one of the most efficient filters and processors of the plastic poison in them.
Don't research the poison of the plastics that wash out of those volatile fibers whiilst in the laundry machines. Oh, did you think that the only source of the micro-plastics in the water supply was water bottles?
Some previous discussion late last year:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42525633
I'm making a product to help trap plasticizers in the digestive tract and prevent them from getting into the bloodstream, NeutraOat (NeutraOat.com).
I was originally inspired by PlasticList, and actually made a quiz on my website based off their data for people to assess their plastics exposure (quiz.neutraoat.com)
> I'm making a product to help trap plasticizers in the digestive tract
That would be amazing... if backed by science, and not just of the "herbal cleansing" ilk of products.
What's the science behind your claims?
What is the scientific background for what appears to be an oat fiber supplement to "reduce plasticizer absorption by up to 70%"?
Read through their "industry advice" section and thought this interesting:
> If you chop something on a plastic cutting board (because wood cutting boards are outlawed in commercial kitchens, apparently), test before and after chopping.
Who banned wood cutting boards from kitchens and for what purpose? I did some digging and some sources cite that neither FDA nor USDA strictly ban wood cutting boards, but individual state health departments are often strict on commercial kitchens that use wood instruments. I get concerns of wood being porous and all, but with the alternative being I have to ingest shavings from the plastic cutting board with every meal... Maybe it's time for a paradigm shift.
The only recall our cheese ever had was through a 3rd party who was cutting our cheese on a wooden cutting board which was contaminated with listeria. Really kinda annoying, since we have absolutely no control over that, and it's hardly good brand optics.
Wood is very hard to clean.
Look at the report (https://www.plasticlist.org/report), it is very informative
Was wondering how they got hold of "Powdered Milk from 1952 Korean War Rations", but they even answer that!
Amazing how meticulous they've been, right down to recording the conditions that the package was shipped in: https://www.plasticlist.org/product/37Man, remember a few year backs some magic microbes that eat plastic were making the rounds in news? Whatever happened to those, did not work out, are still worked on, lack of funding...?
This site has been posted to HN before, but it's definitely interesting to revisit in light of drastic cuts to federal agencies like the FDA, USDA, and CDC.
Independent efforts like PlasticList are probably going to be more and more important as research funding gets slashed and health-related data is suppressed or manipulated.
Why are they measuring plastic in a "Paper Receipt in Water"???
https://www.plasticlist.org/product/754
RIP my RXBARs. I must be full of plastics at this point, they were my go-to snack for years.
A friend of mine built an alternative UI for this, that may be more digestible if you’re trying to lookup individual items.
http://plastic.food/
Jesus christ at the numbers on the Rxbars. So much for "4 ingredients with no B.S.". Kind of insane that they could get up to 30,000 ng/serving with such a small serving size consisting of something like 4 blueberries, 4 cashews, and 3 dates.
Also the negligible levels of plastic detected in plastic water bottles is surprising. I was under the impression, based on other reports, that water in plastic bottles is something we should avoid.
I think that's mostly BPA and phthalates, and microplastics are often listed along with those, but I'm unsure if it was actually tested or if we notices people had a lot of microplastics and just assumed that was a likely source.
I remember at least one study that pointed to 250k nanoplastics in a liter of bottled water [0]. Possibly these types of particles weren't studied. There are certainly many different toxicants to be looking out for; overwhelming to the point of being pointless.
[0]: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/plastic...
Shocking comparison (search for 'sugar', only 2 results) on:
- Korean War-era sugar ration
Vs.
- store-bought sugar
Well, more than food those are food products and other sort of products like toothpaste. Not sure you should consume them in the first place.
So, what's the action item for the consumers? How much if this gets outside of our digestion system? What's the impact of that? What are the remedies?
Thank you for sharing this data, it is really helpful. Now it feels like microplastics are almost everywhere in life, even breathing and eating are difficult to completely avoid. What we can do is probably to try to understand their sources, and then reduce contact as much as possible, make a little bit of active choices, at least to protect ourselves and our families.
Can anyone help test the plastic level of Coke? I wonder whether plastic or sugar would kill me first.
Canned versions (original, Diet, and Zero) are in the dataset if you search for "Coca-Cola"
This list is amazing, but at some point you have to prioritize what you’re paying attention to.
Your most dangerous plastic or microplastic is the PFAS. And the biggest source of PFAS is the water you drink. Does it run through plastic tubing? A pfas filter at any point? Sit in a plastic jug?
The most effective way to deal with this is to distill your water. Distilled water is nearly pfas free, and also removes bpas, lead, mercury, and any bacteria.[1]
https://learn.pfasfreelife.com/research/distillers-remove-pf...
The original article even alludes to this. The first thing at the top of the list is water from a purifier: https://www.plasticlist.org/product/460
The 1952 Korean war rations are comparable with Whole Foods Boneless Beef Ribeye Steak Grass Fed ?
zuck at least got this part right... got his own farm and everything
Oh shit I've been drinking powdered milk from 1952 Korean war rations basically every day.
Top tier shitpost
The amount of different units just stunts me, we are really early.
What table library does this wonderful site use?
I believe it is TanStack Table (https://tanstack.com/table)
Uh. Forget plastics, I love the presentation.
Any web dev type can tell me what framework, if any, is that done with?
Its a next.js site using Tailwind -- https://departuremono.com/ -- https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Mono -- some other fonts mixed in
Other that that just styled HTML based on a quick look at the debugger window if there was another framework used its not obvious...
Oh, so the magic is in the custom style and the fonts mostly. Thanks!
Not a fan of the scroll re-alignment behavior on mobile though.
Same. I would like to know too.
dont want to use this data for anything solid other than ... i will never visit the bay area
Love the UI !
I struggle with taking this too seriously YET, knowing that we ingest all manner of tiny things, and breathe in all kinds of particles and toxins all the time. NOT SAYING this is fine, but rather I haven’t heard anything yet to bump it up higher in the list of concerns.
I mean I already have exposure to lead and asbestos, and the random particulates I breathe in aren’t going away. I feel like this is getting attention because it’s a new issue, not that all other concerns pale in comparison.
I used to hand sort damaged batteries without gloves. I feel like I am not going to see much benefit from trying to minimise microplastic consumption. But maybe the next generation will see some benefit.
Imagine eating $22 SweetGreen salads each day for good health...and then seeing it on the top-5 list for plastics.
It's on the top 5 list when sorted "nanograms per serving" but if you re-sort the table by "nanograms per gram" it is quite low.
But by this same measure (intention of consumer vs. exposure) we find a deeper irony:
If you sort the entire dataset by "nanograms per gram", 3 of the top 5 items are prenatal vitamins:
https://www.plasticlist.org/product/260
The per-gram reading is good for things without real servings (e.g., per gram of water).
However, for a single-serving meal, winning on per-gram isnt really helpful since we wouldnt eat a gram of a 1-serving salad.
Its sort of like how McMansions are actually inexpensive on a per-sqft basis, but how that isnt helpful since you have to purchase all 5000 sqft of the McMansion
Seriously. I think their fibery-looking bowls also tested near the top on PFAS by Consumer Reports.
Anyone else notice the samples are stored/delivered in a plastic bag. Like wtf??
I've taken prenatal vitamins for as long as I can remember because they're FDA regulated to actually contain the nutrients they claim to include. I never would've thought that could be a source for microplastics.
Separately, I always knew there was a reason those RXBars taste like plastic. /s
The samples are stored/delivered in a plastic bag. LMFAO wtf??
Is this TikTok or HN!
> Consider this a snapshot of our raw test results, suitable as a starting point and inspiration for further work, but not solid enough on its own to draw conclusions or make policy recommendations or even necessarily to alter your personal purchasing decisions.
A fairly responsible caveat.
I know I promised not to, but I am indeed freaking out a little bit.
I will forever remember this list as the one that revealed that Shakeshack burgers have 5x microplastics than your average McD quarter pounder.
I've avoided Shakeshack ever since.
What are we complaining about? Is it about the industrialization, economy and jobs that produced plastics? How far do we want to go back? Industries came out of scientific advances and business, which came from social dynamics and foundational academics such as mathematics and logic, which in turn were a result of leisure time due to civilizations, settlements, more food availability, farming, tools etc. All this was inevitable and incremental. Nothing happened overnight. We didn't cause it. And we won't be doing anything to stop it.
There is a story in Hindu mythology about churning of the milk ocean, by gods and demons in cooperation, using a mountain as the churning rod, with an objective of extracting the nectar of immortality. After a great amount of churning, a great poison comes out which must be consumed, otherwise it ends the universe. Lord Shiva consumes it, but keeps it in his throat, to save himself and the universe. When the Nectar finally comes out, somehow gods trick the demons, to keep the nectar to themselves.
Sometimes it occurs to me that this story foretold the extraction of oil from ocean deeps, giving the luxuries to the developed world and pollution to the third world.
Well, I don't know if the story foretold the future or not. But in any case, why didn't Shiva let the world end? We would not have all this shitty problems now. Look at it: we can't even drink water anymore without getting harmful chemicals.