The study presents three scenarios assuming different assumptions about the mass of plastic particles. In the worst case scenario, where I think the assumptions are bad, they estimate 5g of plastic per week. In the other two scenarios which used more complex but more realistic modelling they estimate 0.15 and 0.3g of plastic consumed per week so only a credit card sized amount per year.
In these scenarios (0.15g and 0.3g) about 90% they estimate comes from salt.
What’s worrying about this is that we’re about 50 years into an unexplained epidemic of obesity and metabolic disease that nobody has a clear explanation for, and is also affecting lab animals fed controlled diets. It would be fascinating if this was all correlated with a common environmental contaminant, and the increasing use of various plastics could line up well.
I don’t think it’s unexplained at all. People just don’t like the explanation. People simply eat too much and don’t move enough. The secondary reasons behind that are many but again pretty easy to see (more desk jobs, cheap high calorie foods, automobile ownership etc)
Most folks who respond like this are not looking for reasons to believe they might be wrong, but just in case you are, please take a look at A Chemical Hunger [0], which explores these questions in some depth.
It turns out, the simple explanations (people eat more & move less! too much sugar! etc.) are in fact insufficient.
Obviously there are a large number of factors which affect the weight of a specific individual, and food intake and exercise are only two of them, but that blog's attempts to deny the causation behind the correlation looks far more highly motivated than anybody pointing out that trends in obesity mirror trends in diets and lifestyle changes.
I mean, he handwaves away the statistic that suggests the mean US citizen's calorie intake increased by nearly a quarter over the period that obesity rose simply by saying "that's not a jaw dropping increase". He thinks a study in which people's food intake was increased by 50% showed a significant average weight gain in just three weeks undermines the argument that feeding a population an average 25% more per day for the rest of their lives could increase obesity! I'm actually less suspicious that calorie counts are an oversimplification after reading what he citates as evidence against them; you could make a pretty good case for diet being the sole cause of increased obesity in the US from the references he makes to argue it's unrelated!
(Nothing wrong with the "lipostat" hypothesis he proposes as the alternative per se, but moving the cause of obesity onto "changes in how many individuals' bodies identify satiation points and metabolise food intake" doesn't result in a hypothesis which is independent from how diet has changed, it just complicates the causation a bit)
> mean US citizen's calorie intake increased by nearly a quarter over the period that obesity rose simply by saying "that's not a jaw dropping increase"
I think the context here is that while 400 extra calories a day might seem like a lot, it's within the observed variability going back as far as we have measurements. Americans ate more calories in 1909 than in 1960, and were no more obese then.
> He thinks a study in which people's food intake was increased by 50% showed a significant average weight gain in just three weeks undermines the argument that feeding a population an average 25% more per day for the rest of their lives could increase obesity
Hmm, I think the point here is that there is more complexity than the "eat more, gain weight" hypothesis: there was wide variability in how much weight people gained when being overfed, and all of these people, when they stopped being overfed, lost the weight they'd gained effortlessly -- which is emphatically not the case for most obese folks today.
This implies something is different about being temporarily overfed (which makes weight loss trivial) and what's causing the obesity epidemic (which makes weight loss very challenging).
Also worth noting that the increased caloric intake also doesn't answer the question of what's causing people to eat more than they burn. (And again, there's not really any question that obese folks are eating more than they burn -- it's the only way to actually gain weight, after all -- the whole point of this line of inquiry is to figure out why.)
I'll cite what they say about this:
> From this study [0], for example, consider this sentence: "TDEE was 2404±95 kcal per day in lean and 3244±48 kcal per day in Class III obese individuals.” From this perspective, the average daily consumption per Pew being 2,481 calories per day doesn’t seem like much — that’s about what lean people expend daily. Obese individuals generally burn 3000+ kcal/day, and while not every modern person is obese, it does make the increase from 2,025 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,481 calories per day in 2010 look relatively small.
> Americans ate more calories in 1909 than in 1960, and were no more obese then.
That's his assertion, but all we've got is a link to a complex dataset on "food availability" and his word for it (and some probably-unjustified ancillary assumptions about calorie burning between the two eras being similar, of course). Extraordinary claims, I think, demand a higher standard of evidence.
> Hmm, I think the point here is that there is more complexity than the "eat more, gain weight" hypothesis: there was wide variability in how much weight people gained when being overfed, and all of these people, when they stopped being overfed, lost the weight they'd gained effortlessly -- which is emphatically not the case for most obese folks today.
Sure. But that's furiously demolishing a straw man that there's no variability in weight gain between individuals whilst dismissing the actual finding that it takes as little as 3 weeks to show a clear increase in weight from eating 1000 extra calories as incidental. And he's trying to use it to argue against the notion that average calorie intake data consistent with the obese ~40% of the US population eating ~1000 extra calories on a permanent basis could have caused the latter group to have gained weight!
> This implies something is different about being temporarily overfed (which makes weight loss trivial) and what's causing the obesity epidemic (which makes weight loss very challenging).
One obvious difference is that people overfeed for longer. This doesn't seem to be a gotcha for the basic assumption "people eat too much" and nor does the fact that eating "too much" is obviously likely to be caused by different factors in different people. But whilst "people eat too much" might have little explanatory power, its not nearly as dubious as the blog's assertion that "diet and exercise are out as explanations for the epidemic" despite them being both consistent with macro trends and a change in one undoubtedly entirely to blame for some individuals' weight changes
Wait, I think we’re talking past each other. “People eat too much” (where “too much” is defined not in raw calorie numbers but in terms of “more than burned or excreted”) is the obvious proximate cause, and I don’t think these folks are denying that.
The confusing question is: why is everyone suddenly eating “too much” and seemingly unable to control it? Why does it now require willpower and dieting to not become obese? People in the 1960s had plenty of food access, plenty of cars, etc. etc., and did not have obesity rates in the 40%+ range. Their diets were not so different from today’s diets in terms of macronutrient composition, in fact they were probably worse: plenty of sugar, fat, etc., components that have since been demonized.
In general, I agree with stance that obesity issue is more complicated. But:
> People in the 1960s had plenty of food access, plenty of cars, etc. etc., and did not have obesity rates in the 40%+ range.
I don't think they had comparable level of physical movement. They had more of it just by existing. Take office worker - today I come to work and sit on chair until I go to toilet or home. Communication is done via keyboard, documents are in computer. Compared to my parents in 80-90ties - when they wanted to talk to people, they would stand up and go physically to another office. If they wanted documents, they would stand up and search for it. People did used walking to stores and public transport more too. In 1960, 1980 kids walked to school and that includes 6 years old. They played unsupervised outside for hours. Again, expectation today is that they are driven. The 6 years old playing outside is outrage, so they dont do it (plus indoor tablet is more fun to them subjectively).
None of that is huge amount of movement. But I think these frequent low effort movements counts and adds up. And, just turning wheel on 1960 car requires more strength then on current one. A lot of housework (both the one done by women and men) requires less effort then people in 1960 needed - cleaning cooking too. Everything is physically easier.
I have car, but used public transport to get to work. I made around 8000 steps every day just by existing. When covid hit and I was at home, the amount of steps went down drastically - could be just few hundred.
I am baffled by this explanation. Physical movement is one of the things we have lots of and lots of data about. We can even measure it reasonably accurately using devices that most people always carry in our pockets. If the solution to the obesity epidemic was as simple as "walk around more" then we'd have already solved it. But while there are huge benefits to going from zero walking to "some walking", those benefits don't scale to the levels needed by simply adding more steps.
TL;DR If adding a couple miles per day of walking would resolve the obesity epidemic, it'd already be resolved across a huge swath of the population. But all evidence is that the marginal weight-loss benefit of walking tails off rapidly, unless it's paired with a restricted-calorie diet (which is exactly the point: our 1960s parents/grandparents didn't need that.)
> Americans ate more calories in 1909 than in 1960
They also did A LOT more manual labor back then. Heavy construction projects (roads, dams etc.) were still performed by thousands of people literally swinging a pick-axe 10 hours a day, slowly chipping away at the hill that stood in the way. That must have required couple thousand of extra kcal per day. Meanwhile, in 1960, a lot of most energy-consuming work was already performed by machines.
Some of them just worked at desks. Actually quite a few. And they were thin too. You can find pictures of the typical city office-worker if you hunt through the Library of Congress archives.
True. It's insufficient. But it's not nothing. The article later claims that calorie consumption has "only" risen by about 20%. I find this take to be ridiculous. 20% is a lot. If I eat 20% more, I'll put on weight.
Article also claims sugar consumption is down and carb consumption is down so therefore they can't be the cause. Yet in prior years we see an extremely strong correlation between carbs and sugar consumed per person and % obesity. Corn vs. actual sugar. Artificial zero calorie sweeteners. It all adds up.
Exactly! That’s 400 calories a day for the average person. Combine that with less physical activity and you’ve just found the source of your problem.
We can even work it out: 1lb of human fat has ~4000 calories in it. If we assume that only 10% of those excess calories actually end up as fat thats still 70lbs of additional weight by the time you’re in your mid 20s.
Watch Robert Lustig's presentations on Sugar: the bitter truth. I think he explains what's happening quite well. Unfortunately it seems to "sciency" and most people aren't disciplined enough to stay with it and hear him out because they don't understand chemistry and physiology. :(
I think the issue is that calories in calories out is very hard to measure outside of clinical settings.
1. Bulk food manufacturers can have a decent variance in the actual calories compared to the anticipated calories. Nutrition labels can be inaccurate by up to 20% when it comes to listing calories, according to the FDA, so that 400 calorie meal could be 320 or 480. If you're eating for 1600 calories a day and relying on pre-made foods, then you could be eating 1920 calories a day unintentionally.
2. Not every body processes every calorie consumed. A simple example of this is the weight loss medicine Alli, which can prevent your body from absorbing fats. So even if you ate a 400 calorie cup of olive oil you may only absorb 360 calories of it.
3. Metabolism itself isn't a set standard. Unless you have had your metabolism tested to ensure that it is operating at the standard level, you may be naturally burning fewer calories than your height, weight, body fat, muscular density, and age would otherwise indicate.
A simple test for the last one is to take your temperature in the morning, afternoon, and evening. Standard is 98.6, but in metabolically impaired people, it can decrease by a few degrees. Colder body means fewer calories being burned. This happened to me, where at ready my body was burning 300 calories a day under my expected TDEE and to reverse it I had to eat more, put on weight, and exercise heavily with weight lifting heavy weights to build muscle to reverse it. My standard body temperature had dropped to 97.3 or less, and it's been months of undoing the weight loss that I had achieved to get it back to normal.
4. We are still learning about the various effects of microplastics and other man-made forever chemicals on the human body, but many of them are known endocrine and hormone disruptors so it is likely that future science will discover that these unavoidable chemicals may increase the likelihood of obesity by either interrupting the satiation mechanism or decreasing the body's ability to respond to insulin.
5. Once you become obese in the modern sense, you are now the proud owner of an oversized organ of fat cells that do not simply die when you lose weight. They will release their lipid stores, but the cells themselves remain, sometimes for life. When your normal organs are not signalling that they need nutrition immediately, these fat cells will preemptively consume any excess sugars and fats in your body to refill themselves. Being previously overweight dramatically increases the likelihood that you will become overweight again because of this, and the only potential solution is either having liposuction or using some other non-invasive technology that can literally directly destroy the fat cells, and either option is going to be expensive, time-consuming, and risky to some degree.
If environmental factors cause you to overeat, due to stress, maladaption, or due to exogenous chemical exposure and you become overweight because of it, there can be many, many reasons why you would then become more and more overweight afterwards.
Yes, at its basic level, it is calories in > calories out, but that overlooks external factors that can make consistently eating fewer calories than you burn a herculean effort that can very well never ever end.
Thank you for this citation!
I've at least heard that CICO was nonsense, but the author has done a fantastic job researching the subject, breaking down common approaches to weight loss, and studies which have examined them.
How is CICO nonsense...? Unless you are breaking the law of thermodynamics, there is no way you could gain more from what you eat. The best you can do is utilize 100% of the calorie intake. It's physically impossible to gain weight if you are burning for example 150% of the total calories intake! The fuel has to come from somewhere.
The variation lies in different utilization rate, the burn rate, and all other variables, but within the limit of PHYSICS.
CICO is nonsense not in the sense that it's wrong, but because it's useless. It implies that the solution to obesity is either eating less or working out more. However, both of these do not work for vast majority of people. Diets for example fail for 98% of people over 1 year of dieting.
If people, try to eat less their body gets unhappy -- it starts to burn less calories. Furthermore, it starts ramping up your hunger trying to convince you that you are starving. Over a year it typically wins.
> The variation lies in different utilization rate, the burn rate, and all other variables, but within the limit of PHYSICS.
CICO is useful as an upper bound on calorie utilization, but unfortunately not relevant to the problem of obesity, which deals with the exact opposite end of the problem space.
CICO might be important if the problem was that people in first world nations were starving due to an insufficient supply of calories. But the obesity epidemic indicates that this is not the case. So CICO is relevant to the problem in the same way that a theoretical understanding of the gasoline-air reaction is relevant to understanding why my car's gas mileage has dropped recently.
CICO is nonsense in the sense that it simplifies something to the point of being unhelpful. Similarly to if anyone claimed "garbage in, garbage out" is all there is to producing good code.
Personally, when I reduce CI, my body responds by decreasing CO: I don't think as clearly (problematic for being a functional adult), and I'm even colder than normal. With no reasonable way to accurately measure the change in CO, it's difficult to balance the equation.
tldr: what's simple and obvious with spherical cows in a vacuum is not so simple in the real world
That's such a typical straw-man argument. Firstly nobody with the right mind will say "garbage in, garbage out" is all there is to producing good code. Knowing principle doesn't automatically helps you solve the problem. It's like saying I know programming but why aren't I a successful tech company billionaire? Knowing the principle gives your a solid start, it doesn't guarantee your eventual success
Similarly, CICO is just an simple scientific fact to give you the idea what's happening physical world. Did anyone say CI and CO calculation is simple? Are you seriously telling me your could gain weight when you just eat air?
Tell me just one dieting method is simple, effective, helps everyone 100% to achieve the target weight again? As I mentioned in the above post, a good recipe doesn't make you a successful cook. You are not going to become Gordon Ramsay by watching his video alone
Yes, I have seen and heard plenty of people say CICO is simple and "all there is to it", often along with some "laws of physics" snip, as included in your previous comment.
> Are you seriously telling me your could gain weight when you just eat air?
> Yes, I have seen and heard plenty of people say CICO is simple and "all there is to it", often along with some "laws of physics" snip, as included in your previous comment.
Your problem is with the people who say it, not CICO itself. Once again, if you can't cook with a recipe from Gordon Ramsay, are you saying the recipe is bad? Btw I replied to above post when he said CICO is nonsense. Do you have a problem with his claim?
> That's a straw man if I've ever seen one.
Because I am countering his arguments? All am I saying CICO is simple physics, I am NOT saying CICO is simple weight reduction method. Can you tell the difference? If someone are saying the CICO nonsense, then isn't the logical conclusion is that you can defy physics and gain calorie from the thin air?
>CICO is nonsense in the sense that it simplifies something to the point of being unhelpful.
100%
Not all calories are equal.
Watch Robert Lustig's presentations on Sugar: the bitter truth. I think he explains what's happening quite well. Unfortunately it seems to "sciency" and most people aren't disciplined enough to stay with it and hear him out because they don't understand chemistry and physiology. :(
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+bitter+trut...
Anecdotal really. I honestly probably overstated that.
I've seen it fail people on it's own more often than not. I've generally seen folks succeed more often when they change WHEN and WHAT they eat.
Not a scientist, nor a nutrition expert, so I'm not going to pretend to try and convince anyone.
Can you define their failures as they burnt more than they eat and still gain weight? Did they checked strictly with the math? Are you 100% sure when they fail, they were eating less calorie in total than the amount they are burning!?
If a person is eating 1000 calories per day regardless what what food, and is burning 2000 calories per day (CO), how is anyone going to gain weight this way?
Please, as I mentioned above, there are many variables, but not the core principle of CICO which is basic math. You cannot create calories out of thin air! It doesn't mean anyone can stick to strict diet with CICO calculation. It doesn't mean they always measure accurately. Don't mix up the failure in application with the principle. I watched many cooking videos in youtube. It doesn't mean that im gonna cook well; It doesn't mean that the recipe is bad
> I don’t think it’s unexplained at all. People just don’t like the explanation. People simply eat too much and don’t move enough.
It wasn't sourced, but if the claim that animals on controlled diets have also gotten fatter over recent decades it would mean that there is something more going on here.
While weight gain is nearly always an issue of excess calories that doesn't explain why it's suddenly a huge and worsening problem seen all over the planet. An explanation for that is certain to be far more nuanced and will likely involve a large host of factors (your "secondary reasons" for example).
At the scale and timeline we're talking about here "People simply eat too much and don’t move enough." is about as useless an explanation as saying "Don't eat so much fatty!" is a solution.
A lot of variables can make an animal or person obese. Hypothyroidism for example will cause weight increase even with a limited diet. Cushing's syndrome is another that comes to mind. Growth hormone deficiency can also cause increased body fat. The list goes on.
an increase in the effectiveness of absorbing calories, or something in the food affecting their metabolic rate.
you aren't a blast calorimeter, the food you eat obviously is not reduced to actual ash, so it's certainly possible that there are changes in either the inflow of calories that your body is able to actually absorb or that something in the food is changing the rate at which you burn it. There are also various diseases and syndromes that could affect either of those processes.
"calories in, calories out" is the only useful advice you can really give to people trying to lose weight, but that is not a scientifically rigorous position as far as the sum total of hormonal and microbiome processes involved in digestion and metabolism. Again, the food you eat is not reduced to ash, and there can definitely be changes in the processes involved.
And indeed that is what the facts show - lab animals being fed controlled diets are now getting fat, as are feral animal colonies, so it doesn't make sense to make reductive and antagonistic remarks like "thermodynamics suddenly not a thing!?". The scientific process has showed you that your hypothesis is wrong, and it's now your duty to re-examine your hypothesis and account for the discrepancy. Maybe it's the study, maybe not.
But to be similarly reductive - "what, do you think feral cats are suddenly spending too much time at their desk job?"
Feral cats aren't getting sugar in their diets, they haven't reduced their activity levels, and any increase in food supply should result in an increase in feral cats until the population can no longer be sustained, the predator-prey population cycle is as immutable as thermodynamics. Why are they getting fat, if calories in = calories out? Thermodynamics still works, right? So what's your alternative explanation? Maybe it's... not quite that simple?
The most worrying potential answer is that we've created a variety of endocrine disruptors and those have permeated our environments. They get picked up by scavengers like mice and birds from our food and its packaging, they get picked up by cats who eat the mice and birds, etc. Potentially, they could end up even in things like fertilizer or pesticides that get turned into animal feed and fed to lab animals.
This is also potentially backed by other effects, such as the continuing decrease in the age of menarche. Nobody really knows whether it's tied to changing patterns of exercise/weight, or whether those are comorbid effects from exposure to endocrine disruptors/pseudo-hormones. It is definitely decreasing in societies where not everybody is working a desk job and eating 3000 calories a day but people would be exposed to the chemicals endemic to modern society.
Things like bisphenol compounds in receipts that we handle daily worry me greatly. 100 years ago people still had desk jobs, but they weren't handling thermopaper receipts and then throwing them in the trash where rats get them in the dumpster/etc. They weren't getting all their food in plastics and BPA-lined cans (or whatever the new compound they've moved onto since then). Food wasn't packaged in wrappers lined with BPA, they used wax paper. Etc etc.
"lab animals being fed controlled diets are now getting fat, as are feral animal colonies"
What does "now" refer to here? I imagine in the case of the human population's growing obesity, the "now" means contemporary western diet. If this weren't lab rats, I guess I would assume you mean street rats eating trash produced from contemporary western diet is leading them to get fat. But these are lab animals and the diet is "controlled".
Yeah, and it's all due to us having evolved in a world where famines were a constant threat, but now that's not an issue for many (although it's still a problem for many others.)
It’s not at all clear that the current epidemic is caused by sugar.
Lustig is a great speaker, and I’ll admit that when I first watched that I was quite convinced.
His position, however, is still not representative of a consensus within the field, and for good reason. While sugar consumption is likely detrimental to one’s overall health. Simply cutting out sugar is not necessarily going to lead to better weight management outcomes.
While sugar consumption has increased over time, so have added fats and oils [0]. Which are much more calorically dense. It’s unlikely that any one food source is leading to the increases in obesity that we are seeing.
What food you eat certainly influences conditions in your gut, which influences your gut microbiome. On the other hand, your gut microbiome is highly persistent and even efforts to diet may not have the direct impact you'd think it would. Also, other factors (like conditions at birth) have strong effects that are highly persistent.
If you're not familiar with this research you really owe it to yourself to learn about it.
Indeed, this was very interesting. However, I missed a bit what changes to my diet I could do to improve myicrobiome. I would be glad to hear a scientist like her discussing this.
This may not directly answer your question, but the Huberman Lab podcast [1] is done by a Stanford professor and generally includes very high quality summaries of recent research. He also provides actionable suggestions (though sometimes, the research is so new that they're still in the process of figuring this out). You can scroll through the home page and see the variety of topics he covers, there are a number on gut health.
Consensus is not a necessary condition for truth. An idea can have no one believing it and be correct, and another idea can have everyone believing it and be wrong.
That said, it does beg the question: why, 12 years after that video was published, has the field not come to an agreement, if it is “pretty clearly” the truth?
One could come up with various explanations, including lobbying by big sugar, but it falls flat when you consider that the sugar industry is only a small fraction of the industrialized food industry, there’s plenty of lobbying and influence to go around.
At the end of the day, there are only a few things that are clear: junk food is bad, Americans eat too many calories, and could stand to eat more fruits and vegetables.
I don’t think I ever disputed that it can take a long time to reach consensus.
It’s quite clear that there isn’t a consensus on what the truth is, ergo the truth is out there on what causes obesity and it isn’t to be found within the current consensus.
However, do we take that to mean that sugar is the cause of obesity? I don’t see overwhelming evidence to that fact, so I personally don’t.
What we can take is that whatever the truth is, it is not “clear” nor obvious at this point.
> One could come up with various explanations, including lobbying by big sugar, but it falls flat when you consider that the sugar industry is only a small fraction of the industrialized food industry, there’s plenty of lobbying and influence to go around.
Are you saying that the sugar industry would be lobbying against larger industries with opposing goals? Or are you saying the sugar industry is just one of several industries who would like to use their money to push the blame around?
I am not well versed in the agricultural industry, but doesn't the majority of our mass produced sugar come from the corn industry which is absolutely massive and will obviously do anything it can to protect its sources of income (sugar, ethanol, alcohol, oil, etc.)?
I can’t say I have any special insider knowledge of food industry lobby.
My statement was to preempt the common argument that somehow the sugar industry is so powerful that it was and is able to divert all of our collective attention from it, when it is the real culprit.
The corn industry is a large industry, but so is the meat industry, dairy industry, processed food manufacturers, soy beans, etc. many of them, possibly even including corn, benefit from diverting attention away from their products towards sugar as the main villain. Even if sugar is a revenue source for corn, it pales in comparison for its main product: animal feed.
None of that is to say that I think any of the above industries I listed is “the culprit” I only list them to illustrate my point. Big sugar has lobbying power, but it is all too common that the simplest story gets repeated, “it’s all because of powerful lobbying group X”
No they are making the argument that people have been right in the past and it took forever for the community to find "consensus" on that position if ever.
So to doubt something is true just because "it's been 12 years and there's no consensus" is not necessarily a good rebuttal to something being true or not.
Sure, simply cutting out sugar but otherwise making poor dietary choices isn't going to lead to weight loss. Cutting out sugar tends to make it easier to eat healthy, though. Long term weight loss requires lifestyle changes.
In my personal anecdotal experience, my weight gain and loss correlates to my caloric intake. When I've explicitly calorie counted, foods with refined carbohydrates are typically what blows up my count. When I've done low carb high fat and protein diets, I've found it difficult to eat too much, to the point of coming up several hundred calories short per day.
Can you give an example of what a typical high calorie / high carb day looked like for you?
I eat lots of carbs, always have... yet I don't seem to gain weight. I generally feel like, and am regarded by people who know me, as someone who "eats a ton" yet I have never struggled to lose weight.
The X food causes obesity theory is just too simple IMO, that or I have a tape worm or some kind of undiagnosed disorder that results in me maintaining a pretty consistent BMI despite eating whatever and whenever I want.
Have you ever tried tracking calories, not necessarily with the intention of hitting a goal? If not, the data can be rather informative, and doesn't necessarily match intuition. There's free apps like MyFitnessPal that makes it pretty easy. When I have done it, I've been able to correlate weight gain and loss to caloric intake. There are a few pounds of fluctuation from things like water retention and amount of food in your gut of course, but it's visible over the timespan of a week. If you eat a very consistent diet, you can measure differences on a scale across a few days.
I mean yes, that’s something of a tautology though.
Cutting down on calories necessarily means cutting down on fat, carbs, or both (technically protein as well, but protein doesn’t generally seem to be the issue.)
If you were to follow an explicitly low fat diet, it would be very difficult to eat junk food as well. Almost all junk foods are high in both fat and carbs at the same time.
You are right about refined carbs. Most public health organizations advise limiting one’s consumption of those.
I don't think "refined carbs are bad for you" is correct. Consider that many of the healthiest, least obese, longest lived societies on earth (e.g. Japan) have diets heavy in refined carbs (e.g. white rice).
I learned a while back but don't have time to dig up sources now that eating simple carbs and fats together encourages your body to take the fast calories and store them as fat, moreso than eating simple carbs alone (fast energy, relatively clean-burning) or fats alone. These kinds of interactions are historically very important for explaining particular quirks of the effects of diets and I wouldn't be surprised at all if microplastics had some sort of catalytic effect, e.g. by being nucleation points for buildup of something (arterial plaque or whatever else).
Highly unlikely. The obesity epidemic is very well explained by diet and lifestyle choices, and regional variations in average body mass correlate with these explanatory variable pretty well.
This is largely debunked by a paper posted on HN a while back I can’t seem to find right now.
Even our pets are getting fat.
Previous experiments both natural and manmade indicate that homeostasis prevents long term weight gain in situations of high caloric availability.
The conclusion of the paper was that something was introduced into the environment in the 70s that is disrupting humans’ and nearby mammals’ homeostasis mechanisms.
Yes. People and jobs are more sedentary. Kids sit in front of screens instead of riding bikes to the park and playing ball or just running around. Fat in prepared foods has been reduced, replaced with corn syrup. Portion sizes for food and drink at restaurants have probably close to doubled since the 1970s.
We are less active and we're eating more. Thus we got fat.
Exactly. Fats were deemed the enemy #1 and the problem with corn syrup has relatively only recently been brought to public's attention. A friend of mine from Europe spent the summer in Florida riding bike all day long under a swelling sun, selling encyclopedias. He should have lost weight, but he came back with puffy cheeks and belly. I blame corn syrup for that :)
Not corn syrup. He probably ate well while he was vacationing in Europe. Exercise doesn't really burn as much calories as people think.
I did similar things where I probably had 10k steps a day in Europe because we walked everywhere all the time. We also ate a lot and often. So my weight didn't change. Heck, I thinks some people gained.
Plot the rise of computer related desk jobs on a graph and then overlay that with the same graph for obesity. Obviously not the sole cause but they line up pretty nicely
Even they admit that in the end CICO is correct. You cannot escape physics.
That being said, the real question is: if somebody stopped eating, would their body die instead of using their fat for energy? There could definitely be cases where that happens (likely caused by modern tech / science), but given things like this happen:
It’s likely just a willpower/intellect issue once cico is handled. How long can you keep it up, are you able to make effective modifications, etc until you reach your goal weight.
I’d wager that it’s much more likely society lacks willpower & intelligence (when presented with excess resources) instead of we introduced something that makes our bodies unable to lose weight.
Anecdotally, as a former obese person and with many family members who have dealt with/are dealing with obesity cico + willpower was always the answer. It’s very likely the willpower needed to lose weight is something a large portion of the population fundamentally can’t achieve without cultural enforcement.
Sure, CICO definitely applies, but so what? The first derivative of stored calories doesn't tell you anything interesting about causes.
Your bank balance is a sum of money coming and and money going out, but what causes money coming in and what causes money going out are much more useful to anyone trying to earn wealth or avoid debt than the mere fact that your bank balance is their sum.
Like you, many people are convinced that the issue is "willpower / intellect". But this doesn't share a causal relationship with CICO! The willpower argument is like saying "oh yeah, to become rich, just earn more than you spend!" -- sure, that's true, and then someone says "ok, how do I do that?"; if your answer is "willpower!" I doubt they'll find that very satisfying.
Since I suspect you didn't read the post either, I'll excerpt two questions here:
(1) Rates of obesity in lab rats -- whose diets haven't changed -- have also increased over the last 50 years. Do they lack willpower too?
(2) Average calorie consumption hasn't changed much over the last 50 years, and nor has calorie expenditure. Average weight gain is in fact super slow, on the order of a few pounds per year, for most obese individuals. That's the equivalent of overeating by ~7000 calories each year -- only 1% of typical annual consumption. It's hard to imagine that people don't have the willpower to reduce their food consumption by 20 calories per day. Losing weight by keeping up a caloric deficit requires a ton of willpower because your body super fights against starvation. But why would a lack of willpower be the reason people perpetually eat 1% too many calories? And why did they only start doing that 50 years ago?
CICO is not a useful causal explanation for the obesity epidemic. Obesity at the societal level is a more interesting problem than merely CICO, despite how many people think the reason is some variant of willpower.
> (1) Rates of obesity in lab rats -- whose diets haven't changed -- have also increased over the last 50 years. Do they lack willpower too?
There are so many explanations for this outside of "some environmental factor causing everyone to get fat" that I don't think it needs explaining.
> Average calorie consumption hasn't changed much over the last 50 years, and nor has calorie expenditure
The methods for estimating these are likely wildly off. At face value, this would be an incredibly difficult statistic to obtain accurately. Nearly impossible. I'd need access to more data than is available to trust such a tremendous claim. Trying to simplify complex data like this is borderline pseudoscience.
That being said, I'm not saying CICO is the casual explanation. I'm saying we have a large surplus of resources, and humans are designed to consume. Overcoming that drive is likely beyond many people.
> There are so many explanations for this outside of "some environmental factor causing everyone to get fat" that I don't think it needs explaining.
Do you not realise that this point alone jeopardizes your entire argument? If this effect is real, the rest of this discussion belongs straight in the trash.
Yes, that’s my point. Parent is trying to “appeal to authority” essentially. We’re both arguing with no evidence, but parent is trying to act like they aren’t.
Can you point to other contexts with an equivalent level of surplus of today?
Even if you could, our science is not advanced enough to control for all the confounds. You can’t point to “evidence” or “science” to prove your point because we are not advanced enough to accurately claim anything at the level you’re attempting to.
Research like you’re referencing is great for “this is interesting” and not “this is why the world works this way”.
This must be part of some disinformation effort to streer people away from the simple answer.
Their conclusion is that you're helpless if your fat and that's just not true. The idea that this is not in your hands is ridiculous. If you are fat and you don't want to be fat you simply change your eating habits. This can be very difficult to do because you have formed these habits throughout your life but it isn't complicated and you should just do it anyway.
Obviously you [0] didn't read the article, but that is not their conclusion.
There seems to be some kind of unfortunate "shame brigade" out on the Internet that comes out of the woodwork to overrun any conversation around obesity that even hints that there might be reasons for the obesity epidemic other than individual people's poor choices.
The lab rats whose rate of obesity has increased over the last 30 years, despite consuming the exact same controlled diets, are certainly not "changing their eating habits" -- there must be more to the picture than merely eating habits.
This set of articles explores that. We don't have answers yet, but these folks make a strong argument that the question is worth asking.
[0] It's an unfortunate fact of scientific progress that ideologues have, in other fields, at other times, held back that scientific progress for decades through their inability to consider disconfirming evidence against a favored theory. This kind of comment should be ignored by anyone who values truth over consensus.
When I was obese and I thought about my own obesity, I decided it was under my control and I changed my habits (this was hard!) and I lost 110lbs. There was no more to the picture than my eating habits. Perhaps I was a strange outlier; lucky for me.
But when I think about other people's obesity, I am not allowed to think that, because I would be part of a shame brigade.
I wish the shame brigade had gotten to me years earlier.
The question "what can I do about this thing affecting me personally?" and the question "what can the group do about this thing that is affecting the group in large numbers?" are going to have quite different answers. I'm glad you've found a solution that works for you, but there's a good deal of data to support that telling this story to more people will not fix the group problem.
Even if your obesity was helped along by plastic based endocrine disruptors or micro-biome based issues or weird viruses, you found a solution for you.
> Our suggestions are very prosaic: Be nice to yourself. Eat mostly what you want. Trust your instincts.
>
> Diet and exercise won’t cure obesity, but this is actually good news for diet and exercise. You don’t need to put the dream of losing weight on their shoulders, and you can focus on their actual benefits instead
I haven't read it all but I have read a lot and I have been doing this for a long time.
To give people an excuse that diet and exercise is not the answer, it's irresponsible.
Our world makes it incredibly difficult to be healthy. My opinion is simply that you should still try everything you can to be healthy. The problem as I see it is that people have no clue what to eat and what not to. Most people just eat what their parents ate and think nothing of it. We buy food at a grocerie store thinking this is food because it came from a grocerie store. Most stuff in a grocerie store will slowly kill you.
And about those lab rats. They are inbred clones. Maybe suitable for some lab work but the fact that they are getting fatter has to do with their awful genetics. And yes, there's obviously some variability there.
I've been thinking about what this blog series for the past days and they don't seem to understand that muscle gain and weight loss happens slowly over years. If you're fat and you don't want to be fat anymore you have a really difficult job a head of you.
To make up excuse to pretend and act as if reality isn't exactly this is disingenuous and it's going to lure people into false sense of security. Not good.
> This kind of comment should be ignored by anyone who values truth over consensus.
I hope you're talking about your own comment, because consensus is truth, for all practical purposes.
What's really toxic is taking a fringe theory and pretending it has equivalence and/or equal weight with scientific consensus, when it doesn't have even 1% of the rigor and reproducible evidence behind it. That kind of attitude is absolutely glorifying ignorance and is utterly toxic to actual progress.
Oof, you are definitely right about this. Very few people are able to distinguish truth where it deviates from consensus, and basically no one can do it in domains where they lack expertise.
That said, there is no scientific consensus about the causes of the obesity epidemic, so I'm not sure what criticism you're directing at me, exactly -- though I deduce from your tone that I triggered you in some way.
I'm not putting forth any fringe theory about the causes of the obesity epidemic; the link I posted examines common explanations for the epidemic and tries to figure out whether they're valid, and if not, what other causes there might be. They don't claim anything definitive, in the end, because it would take actual studies to prove any real connection. They're pretty clear about what they can and can't claim.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean:
> it doesn't have even 1% of the rigor and reproducible evidence behind it. That kind of attitude is absolutely glorifying ignorance and is utterly toxic to actual progress.
Also, the questions asked generally here "How can society as a whole have less obesity" is different from the one you are answering: "If I am obese, what can I do to improve my health."
I'm assuming you know we excrete unused chemical energy, so we aren't a closed system in which the CICO principal would be more deterministic.
I was similarly skeptical until I read it (ever since the first part appeared on HN) and it convinced me on many points.
That said, I think you're half right? SMTM's environmental contagion hypothesis is an explanation for population-level obesity rates, not individual cases of obesity. Anybody who cares sufficiently about their own obesity can change it through individual efforts. However, on a population level, "just change your habits", or even worse, shaming people who are obese, is a less effective strategy than "figure out what is causing their bodies to signal hunger and store fat in dysfunctional, self-harmful ways that they didn't used to anywhere on earth until the mid-1900s".
Well the messaging should be positive. Maybe we someday can have a public informed discussion on health. I don't think shaming will work too well but we have to acknowledge that being fat is not good. But also that it's a fixable thing you shouldn't be ashamed of. When we concede language to protect feelings I'm not sure we're going down the right road. I wish for people to be healthy and their best but you have to know that there are options to be better.
> 50 years into an unexplained epidemic of obesity and metabolic disease that nobody has a clear explanation for,
I think you need to look at how the food has changed in this time. For example, here in the UK supermarkets dont want pigs with 1 1/2" of back fat so the farmer get the nutritionist to make up a diet low in vitamin B5 because it helps to shift the fat under the skin. Nett result, you have fatty organs and marbleized meat as the fat remains else where in the body. We can grow chickens in half the time it took to grow them in the 70's, chemicals in the environment remain in the body for years even lifetimes, pollution levels are at their highest in a generation, people dont exercise like they used to.
If it is related to plastics obesity should have been distributed evenly worldwide. But it is not. Even among developed countries it isn't evenly distributed.
I'm often saddened to see how even on this kind of community where the level of discussion is relatively high given the openness of the platform, this kind of cross-country comparison is almost completely forgotten when it debunks so many, possibly even the majority, of arguments made on a host of topics including this one. It isn't helped by the fact that HN, given its roots and SV focus, is very Ameri-centric - ime e.g. Europeans are at least somewhat more likely to consider regional comparisons, though they're still underutilized.
A 20-second search for "obesity rates by country" will show that plastics or other chemicals are very unlikely to play more than a minor role. It's so straightforward, yet there are dozens and dozens of comments above this one with not a single one bringing it up.
In the end, CICO is correct. The question then becomes "why do certain countries have a higher CI" to which the answer is "culture", as with anything to do with human behaviour. But most are very unwilling to point at things about certain cultures that are very clearly negative, something that both mainstream Western political leanings have in common. One of them because they believe their culture is inherently Great (Again?) even if it's sending them to an early deathbed, the other because they believe (or at least outwardly adhere to the dogma) that cultures should not be compared in any kind of positive vs negative way unless it's one they see as a political opponent on the national scale.
Honestly communicating your results is just as important as getting good ones, and a junk chart like that is at best gratuitously confusing.
I'd say everyone should have to read Edward Tufte, but everyone has and it didn't much help. 90% of the Q&A at his seminars is people asking questions that are variants of "but I'm used to doing it the old bad way, so isn't that really just as good?"[1] It was mildly amusing watching Mr. Tufte grow increasingly exasperated realizing just how few of his students had learned anything from the experience. I imagine that was a big part of why he retired to become a sculptor.
[1] My personal pet peeve is the obsession designers appear to have with ensuring that there are no visible indications of which part of their design is meant to be clicked on.
Oh man. I was annoyed by the breakout of the second pie chart which seemed needlessly confusing. But the left one is worse for double counting everything.
And it has a typo! ("Analys"[sic]). That doesn't really bode well for how much rigor the rest of paper had, either in its creation or review(s).
Yes, you are of course right. One shouldn't dismiss good work because of some flaws.
But anyway... this is a rather silly pie chart and I wonder how this was able to pass through multiple authors and peer-review.
The popular conception of science is really outdated in this respect. Peer review still matters, but most meaningful peer review happens post-publication, not pre-publication. People should not take published papers as reliable statements of "what the science says".
Scientists are not going to expend a lot of effort on the thankless work of peer review, taking time away from their own careers, purely out of professional integrity and the goodness of their hearts. And their competency to do so is uneven at best anyway. What happens when the people who wrote this paper review other people's data?
You would probably never go to a doctor if you go to a medical conference. The number of red spelling lines from word you see on graphs would make you throw up lol
That's what came to mind. And they simply selected a pie chart instead of a bar chart, and it wasn't super wrong because they were trying to show subcomponents of a larger value.
Meh. Not worth the HN thread. It's like picking apart why someone wrote code in a suboptimal/messy way when in reality they just wanted to get something done under a constraint, and the author would totally agree if they were here to defend themselves.
Yet here are people saying the author can never be taken seriously because of it.
To properly burn plastic you need temps >1000 degC. Salt melts at 800 degC. If you vaporize plastic at lower temperature you release very nasty toxins.
nice. >In these scenarios (0.15g and 0.3g) about 90% they estimate comes from salt.
for a few years now we have switched to rock salt completely at home. it's like 20-40% more expensive and we have to use a hammer/grinder every month or so but we are doing that.
by reducing say 90% of the microplastics, is that.. good?
A thing to note there is that there are plenty of other contaminants possible (and found in studies) in brands of pink salt (basically all pink salt is branded Himalayan salt), at much higher concentrations than sea salt, including lead. It also has no added iodine, which depending on your diet and region and such may be a concern.
Honestly that's kinda cool. And I refuse to imagine anything but a melon sized hunk 'o salt on the dinner table, with a small hammer and chisel for those who want to salt their meal.
nah. we arent those kinds of brutes. we simply buy a big hunk, every other month on a sunday spend time with a hammer and break it down to small pieces. then use a food processor to powder it
Sea salt made from current seawater would include microplastics from that water, but rock salt would not as it was formed before these plastics existed. On the other hand, various mines of rock salt may have all kinds of other mineral additions that may be harmful for human consumption, so most rock salt is used for e.g. deicing roads.
In a lot of regions, "farming" sea salt basically means pouring sea water on top of plastic tarps and evaporating water. Over time, the plastic degrades and you get microplastic particles in your salt. You also need to rake these salt fields pretty heavily, which also generates microplastic particles.
i am thinking, most of the salt consumed comes from sea salt that has those microplastics. if we use rocksalt, well that microplastics wont come from seasalt.
Yeah, If I remember right it is pretty much that if you can't see plastic in the water you drink the assumptions that the credit card/week is based on are wrong.
i knew salt was bad for you but this is nuts. Normally salt isn't bad for you if you consume it in the right quantities < 1500g/day. but, knowing it's got plastic in it, is troubling.
I'm sure we eat that much silica powder.. what makes a granule of plastic worse? I'm not discounting the potential problem of microplastics, but I'm not seeing a clear description of what it actually does to a person. Embed and raise cancer risk?
For me it’s about baseline assumptions. When I’m eating food, I should assume that I’m not eating anything my great-grandmother would not recognize as food.
This article conflates particles of any size, and often does not even mention sizes, e.g., '28 particles' in a serving of beer? That is imprecise (doesn't mention size) and wrong: probably way to little, as nano particles are used in filtering (clarifying) beer.
The articles also doesn't really tell me how to avoid all that plastic. If 40 percent of human diet contains plastic, then there's hope, so which 60 percent do not contain plastic? This would be really helpful to check my own diet for surprises. E.g., I drink only craft beer and make my own ketchup, in order to avoid nano plastics -- but what elephant do I miss?
The problem is really serious, so articles about this should take more care to be helpful.
Personally, I think that in answer to the question of “how to avoid all that plastic?”, the article is leaning more towards “take action to stop the plastic from being produced and added to food in the first place”.
While it makes the problem larger from an individual perspective, the alternative of simply trying to avoid it in our own foods would mean that our available foods shrink over time as plastics continue to seep in to more and more places.
If consumers know which products have more microplastics and are able to avoid them, it'll produce market forces that encourage businesses to reduce the microplastics in their products. The free market doesn't always move in the right direction, but in this case aligning the incentives could really help -- if we don't even know which products to avoid, there's no chance of market forces helping to push businesses in the right direction.
> the article is leaning more towards “take action to stop the plastic from being produced and added to food in the first place”
Which is kind of nonsense unless someone happens to be CEO of Molson Coors or something. It seems obvious that if you want to avoid ingesting plastic, the clearest path to that is to know what foods are less likely to contain plastic in the first place.
Probably the plastic that was in those tomatoes to start with.
I doubt there's a practical way to avoid it, it's probably fairly random depending on where the food is from. Especially if I recall right it's often found in the water supply which you then drink directly or is used to water plants which you then eat.
Plants uptake chemicals and other smaller molecules through their roots. Oftentimes they will store pollutants in their fruit or stems because they don’t know what to do with it.
Here’s an article from Nature that specifically studied plastic uptake by plant roots.[1]
Yes, at the um scale and below it does happen, and such concentrating effects can really change it from a non-issue to a serious problem, depending on how chemically active the contaminant is.
TFA: "Yet despite all the new knowledge about microplastics and the even tinier nanoplastics, smaller than a millimeter, that enter the human body through ingestion or inhalation"
Microplastics are apparently taken as being a mm or larger, and 'nanoplastics' are anything smaller than a mm which is still very large. The ones you are talking about would be very much smaller than those by another 3 orders of decimal magnitude.
The article specifically says micrometer so it would be right between millimeter and nano sized plastics. They will only get smaller as they degrade.
> Our results provide evidence in support of submicrometre- and micrometre-sized polystyrene and polymethylmethacrylate particles penetrating the stele of both species using the crack-entry mode at sites of lateral root emergence.
In a slightly different direction than consumption, if you're worried about inhaling plastic particles:
I haven't personally gotten the equipment to do actual measurements yet, but I keep pet rats and they have pretty fragile respiratory systems, and anecdotally when I put together a Corsi Rosenthal Box[0] and stuck it next to their cage their allergies/sneezing pretty much entirely vanished.
I still need to get air quality measuring equipment and more objectively confirm that it's working, but the research I have read suggests that spending ~$100 to put together a DYI box with good MERV13 filters or higher will solidly outperform the majority of commercial consumer-grade air purifiers out there. And subjectively, I do notice a difference in air quality, although that could be a placebo effect.
Regular vacuuming will also help a lot with dust and micro-particles, but that's a lot more work than just plugging in a box fan.
it's true that cube might outperform many commercial grade purifiers but unfortunately it's only because fires/pandemic have skyrocketed prices on purifiers and made a bunch of scammy looking ones. As you see with that box, having a filter medium and a fan is all you need. No plasma/uvc or charcoal filters necessary. I only have a couple purifiers that are $100 each and have a good centrifugal fan and a filter in front of it that can be replaced for $30. A box fan as pictured doesn't have as much static pressure to pull through the filter well, but because you have four filters worth of surface area its fine. All you could upgrade with a commercial solution is having a smaller physical footprint.
I haven't done a ton of research into VOCs, but my understanding is that most purifiers targeting them use activated charcoal filters?
Those filters are pretty cheap, you can tape them to a Corsi-Rosenthal Box without adding much cost at all. If there's something more complicated going on then maybe that wouldn't be effective, but in general air filtration is just a combination of how much air your filter is moving and what the surface area of the filter is. In theory (I haven't confirmed) tying your own activated filters to a box fan will probably be pretty effective.
A big reason why the Corsi-Rosenthal Box works so well is because there's not a lot of innovation or complexity in how good purifiers work. You just want a lot of air to go through a good filter with a sizeable surface area, so it's hard to compete with a 20 inch fan tied to 4 good filters. But again, take that with a grain of salt, maybe VOC purifiers are doing something more complicated that I'm not aware of.
The cheap activated charcoal filters are bullshit.
You can't absorb things without absorbant mass. The black plastic sponge has hardly any mass at all, period.
I however do not have a good solution. I've DIY'd my own filter with charcoal pellets, but I've been unable to test it, and I'm somewhat unhappy with the design anyway.
Are commercial air purifiers using something better? Part of the reason I'm skeptical of the commercial market is that when I look at the teardowns of these products they're either doing something questionable where they're sacrificing air volume for noise, or they're basically using regular filters of the same or less quality that you can buy from a store.
I don't doubt you at all that cheap filters work less well, but at the same time, what are the consumer-grade commercial purifiers that aren't using cheap charcoal filters? I don't think I've ever noticed an in-store purifier that took pellets, but maybe I missed something.
Edit: it does make me curious if with a Corsi-Rosenthal box you could hang a non-enclosed/mesh bag/basket of charcoal pellets under the fan inside of the box and if that might produce better results than attaching charcoal filters to the sides. The obvious problem that springs to mind though is that this would make the design a lot more complicated and annoying to build. Might also result in charcoal dust spread around too, which might defeat the purpose of a purifier in the first place.
Unfortunately it seems like the air filtration market as a whole is incredibly prone to snake-oil claims.
As far as your idea goes, I'm not sure. And I don't have a great idea of how to test something like this. I've seen bags of activated charcoal marketed as something you can leave around for better air (sounds like bs).
correct, i remember discussion a long time ago that people would buy HVAC booster fans that look like inline duct fans and then put a giant bucket of pellets on the top of it to suck through
I will make one last pitch though that if you don't want to spend the hour putting together a full box or researching it, the most primitive filter you can build that will (as far as I can tell, again take my opinions on VOCs with a grain of salt) be decently competitive with commercial filters and will require less time to find the parts for and put together than you'll spend researching commercial purifiers is:
- 1 20 inch box fan (any brand) from any store
- A 20x20 MERV13 filter or equivalent (FPR 10 if you're buying from Home Depot), these will all be located right next to the commercial filters/purifiers in any store that sells them.
- An activated charcoal filter (optional if you care about odor or VOCs, aprox 20x20 but it's likely okay if you go a bit smaller). Will likely also be next to the purifiers/filters in any store.
- Duck tape or string in a pinch if you don't have tape.
Tape them all together (make sure that arrows on the side of the filter point in the same direction as the fan is blowing) and run the fan at speed 2 or 3; don't worry about building a fan shroud or perfectly aligning things.
----
That comes at the cost of:
- Extra noise
- General ugliness
But it will still perform pretty decently well and takes less time to set up than it will take to read the instruction manual for a commercial purifier. The noise from running the fan at full speed is a downside though, so I'm not knocking anyone who wants to go commercial for an out-of-the-box solution -- just saying that if what's putting you off is the time/building requirements, you can do a hacky version of this in 3-5 minutes that will get the job done for an average small apartment, and there's basically no way to mess it up as long as you don't tape the filter on backwards.
Again though, nothing against people who want to just order something, that's a totally reasonable ask. I just don't want people to get scared away thinking this has to be a full-fledged project, it's DIY but it doesn't have to involve any measurements or tools or any particular effort beyond slapping some duck tape around a single fan.
Consumer grade filters have nicer fans that let them push move more air with less noise. I have multiple in my house and it's amazing how quiet they are.
Not to doubt you, but have you actually measured that they're moving the same amount of air?
Circulation-to-noise ratio is something that pretty much every fan manufacturer cares about; I'm a little bit skeptical that there's an innovation here that wouldn't be applied to consumer-grade fans in general; or that you wouldn't be able to find a good box fan outside of the entry-level Walmart offerings that doesn't offer the same quality for a cheaper price. The "vornado" fans seem to get recommended a lot in this area, but I don't know if they're actually moving more air or just directing it better.
Anecdotally I did look into a few fan options from purifiers that claimed to be silently moving the air, and was pretty disappointed with the specs on what I was seeing. The conclusion I drew was that increasing the size of the unit and the intake area was the best way to allow for reduced fan speed/noise/power-consumption.
But it is completely possible that there's something I missed; again I haven't done my own testing.
The plastics themselves are only part of the story - they are relatively inert. However chemicals used to plasticize them and prevent fire are not, and some of them are already banned, but we have insufficient days on the replacements used.
(Phenolics such as Bisphenol A - have hormonal effects causing direct cancer risk. And other effects too.)
Also, note that while bisphemol A is largely banned from certain food-contact plastics, it has been replaced with other "plasticising" chemicals which are largely "the same" such as bisphemol E, F, S, or AF
Also note n2, variations of vinyl or pvc plastic makes strong use of bisphemols for flexibility, pvc is being used to replace ageing copper or lead piping across the world, it is also largely unexplored the degree to which there is legislation regarding the sourcing and chemical composition of said water pipes over most of the world (as in, if there is a new international hotel building being built in, let's say brazil, what type of water pipe will the construction company use? You honestly think they would use copper everywhere and pay a 5x premium on it, or just use some random pvc pipe embedded on the walls? And then, if it proves to be that the pvc had bisphemol X on it, how would you even fix it? Rip it all up? We are talking of literal concrete bricks. Or just hide it from the public? )
> pvc is being used to replace ageing copper or lead piping across the world
PVC for water pipes seems to be a relatively US-only thing as far as I can tell. I don't think it's legal in the EU, for example; plastic piping here is PE-HD.
I actually suspect the plastics are not a big health problem. The exception is inhalation. Inhaling basically anything solid is bad for you. Silicate, dust, smoke, fine plastic particles, flour, pollen, it’s probably all bad for you.
Interestingly a friend of mine was discussing this with me yesterday and proposed that such a bacteria, if prolific, would be one of the more appealing causes of the end of modern civilization.
Not gonna happen. Why? Because AFAIK all life on earth uses water as a solvent. Unless your plastic is constantly/regularly exposed to water, bacteria will have almost no chance of catabolizing it.
I wonder how much evolution pressure you must exert onto a living thing for it to start consuming something as complex as plastic. And how many generations past time they are not in the lab anymore they figure out there’s simpler solutions to nutrition, especially in the gut.
There was a story on HN today about a plastic-eating enzyme:
>Researchers at the Cockrell School of Engineering and College of Natural Sciences used a machine learning model to generate novel mutations to a natural enzyme called PETase that allows bacteria to degrade PET plastics. The model predicts which mutations in these enzymes would accomplish the goal of quickly depolymerizing post-consumer waste plastic at low temperatures.
Maybe one of the human gut bacteria could be modified to also produce this enzyme? Though presumably it would be outcompeted by the natural variant (assuming dissolving plastic confers it no advantage).
Also, I have to wonder if the monomers are more harmful than the plastic? Being smaller particles they might perhaps end up in the bloodstream?
You can, there are cellulase enzymes sold for human consumption. I don't know how much cellulose you'd be able to eat in one sitting, though. Cellulase is pretty slow.
We’d have to have a huge array of enzymes to deal with the dizzying array of chemicals we group in under “plastic”.
For example, the linked article specifically targets polyethylene terephthalate which they say is a huge target because it accounts for 12% of all plastic waste.
Two simple things that you can do are to (a) don’t wash plastics in the dishwasher and (2) don’t microwave stuff in plastic containers. This last will require taking stuff out of the disposable container that many frozen meals come in to cook it. Some brands have a cardboard/waxpaper tray instead of a plastic one although there might be identical looking packaging that has different internals based on the store (I remember being surprised to discover that a frozen meal I bought at Whole Foods had the cardboard bowl while the same meal from a regular supermarket had a plastic bowl).
The cardboard bowl from Whole Foods is likely water-proofed with PFAS.
People with PFAS in their blood tend to be overweight or underweight. The body eliminates PFAS very ver slowly. There was a recent study that showed that replacing a person's blood plasma was an effective way to remove PFAS. Keeping it out of the blood seems to be much harder.
I saw a neat video which I cant find where a guy buys Himalayan salt, puts it under a microscope, and pulls out plastic. It's disturbing how plastic is in the salt and almost impossible to remove.
I would assume it's being added in the supply chain unintentionally on its way to you. You would think that the Himalayas would be presitine, but because of no solid waste systems plastics trash builds up very fast in the environment.
It's not as if they are bottling it right at the source, presumably it goes through an industrial process to clean the stuff and get it into containers.
My assumption is that because salt is mined and stored in open air, plastic particles from the ocean's non-trivial cache of microplastics being brought up into the atmosphere by evaporation and weather, and from ashes/plastics from trash incineration are potentially finding their way onto the piles.
If water is used during the processing of the salts it could be that as well.
Well, SiO2 is pretty different from plastic, chemically speaking. And I would expect that we inhale several grams of fine sand dust per week too.
In other words, the amount of "glass" entering your body because you drank a beer is probably irrelevant compared to e.g. Sahara dust (if you're in Europe) in the air around you.
Yes and silicate is an environmental component that's well understood and our bodies have adapted to it because sand has been a thing forever. And glass is chemically inert.
Dust or soil has thousands of components, metals, bacteria, fungi, molds, organic matter, feces etc. It can give you farmer's lung and other illnesses. Plastic is comparatively inert. Weird that there is not environmental movement to reduce soil from the environment.
Plenty, same with pollen; the difference is that glass / silica is pretty inert, whereas microplastics release chemicals that according to some research mimic that of hormones. It's one theory behind humans' fertility declining - not just that they have less children, but they produce less sperm and the like.
>> When it comes to eating microplastics, scientists have documented plastic particles in about 40 percent of the human diet, including beer, honey, salt, and seafood
I was surprised about the honey. Geezz.
Anyways, i've got about 35 fruit trees, and 90 berry bushes in the backyard and I plan to eat primarily from that as soon as they generate enough food..
AFAIK that probably won't help you much as rain also contains plastic particles, which is also why all bodies of water tested (so far), even underground, contain plastic.
We aren't. We're against some of the predicted negative consequences of plastic waste, but we like plastic. It's cheap, and incredibly useful.
Plastic goods enable the world we live in. For example, it would be interesting to see a mouse, and keyboard, and monitor housing made out of bronze, or wood, or cast iron, but I bet they would be worse in pretty much every other way — heavier, harder to shape, and very expensive not only because of the cost of materials, but because they'd take so much more work to make.
When I look around at all the plastic stuff around me, I think that some of it is unnecessary, but much of it isn't. Some of the necessary stuff could be made out of other materials, but much of it couldn't. At least not very well, and not at a price many people could afford.
Better for us if we can figure out a way to effectively recycle plastic, and capture microplastic in the wild.
I just want to clarify that the "we" in parent post does not include me personally, and I was not consulted on this matter prior by parent commenter. Thank you all for coming to my ted talk.
Probably most people don't have a strong opinion on eliminating plastic and even in that subgroup, few would be willing to pay the price (both in utility and literal price) to avoid plastic. In fact, if you're willing to go to a shop offering unpackaged goods, you can already eliminate a lot of plastic in your life.
#1 on the list would be the coca cola corporation. They fight anything that would reduce plastic waste viciously.
#2 on the list is everybody else. Once you start looking at what is made out of plastics you'll realise the modern world is completely dependant on it. The use of plastics on food and medical devices dramatically reduces bacterial contaminantes saving millions of people a year from sickness. It's used on structural components of all kinds of device to reduce weight, thereby decreasing energy usage. It is a very difficult problem to solve.
As someone else said, we aren't. I am, but "we" aren't. But I'm also complacent as many if not most people are, even though I think I "do my part", I don't really do much. I can see probably a hundred bits of plastic in this very study room.
Nothing really, except our preferences. We could ban all plastics tomorrow in the US, if we wanted to. But I don’t think we’d be happy with the quality of life trade-offs.
Libertarian me, age 20, is screaming "I'm so glad we let the free market produce whatever they see fit, with little regulation!"
Now me, age 42, has eaten an untold amount of everyone else's garbage and can now literally no longer avoid eating the chewed-up-and-spit-out refuse of our bad choices that now cannot be reversed.
>bisphenol A mimics the hormone estrogen and can lead to damage in sperm development.19 Further research has shown that microplastics, and not just those with bisphenol A, can cause damage to the testes and lead to the production of deformed sperm cells that have a harder time reaching eggs.
I'd more interested in hearing what microdosing xenestrogens on a large scale does to our collective psychology. I think this is an extremely important but understudied effect. Much like birth control, which is known to influence decision making and behavior, and probably affects collective behaviors like vote outcomes and such.
I have a haunch that a number of modern western ills are influenced by or rooted in the psychological influence of BC hormones. We know [0] that fertile women have different preferences in men, different risk tolerance, and different social behavior (increased mate seeking)...imagine what dosing tens of millions of women does to a country's politics? Now imagine dosing the entire population with chemicals that mimic estrogen...
Obviously prevention is better than treatment, but my suggestion for men would be to get tested to check their hormone levels and do Enclomiphene to address their deficiency https://www.maximustribe.com/science
The magnitude and duration of exposure is probably lower, since plastic is a western and relatively recent invention.
Moreover, it is precisely because transgenderism is primarily a cultural (rather than biological) phenomenon, that rates between two otherwise identical populations are going to differ based on the culture's attitude toward transgenderism and the likelihood that a doctor is to diagnose someone with gender dysphoria.
That latter point is severely understudied because transgenderism is one of the wests many recent sacred cows which are beyond criticism. But overdiagnosis should be a much greater concern than it is. Especially since puberty blockers and hormones given to adolescent boys will undoubtedly exacerbate any feelings of dysphoria and I am astounded that no one is talking about the reinforcing effects of these "treatments".
But I digress. Point being comparing rates of transgenderism between first and third worlds is like comparing apples to oranges because transgenderism is a cultural phenomenon.
Maybe, though I think it's better explained by the widespread availability of pornography, and the power of the internet in reinforcing cult-like behaviour.
There's a huge amount of "forced feminization" pornography out there now, accessible by children at a very young age. As well as "lesbian" pornography designed for the male gaze. It's no wonder some males end up feeling they should be like the characters in the pornography they consume.
It's controversial to say this these days, but old school transwomen such as Anne Lawrence were very open about the sexually-charged nature of their dysphoria. (And she published extensively on this topic.)
On top of that, there are many trans-encouraging echo chambers in the form of online forums, subreddits, and Twitter - ready to help anyone even vaguely curious to "crack their egg", as they say.
Maybe environmental estrogens play some part in this rise, but I suspect it would only be a small piece of the larger puzzle.
I mean, there's a name for it, I don't think its a new phenomenon: autogynephilia. If it becomes so severe as to interfere with daily life then I don't think indulgence is an appropriate treatment, any more than I would expect telling a schizophrenic to listen to the voices in their head to be responsible medical practice.
We've gone too far with all of this acceptance stuff, because these modern acceptance movements brush off any criticism, however logical or valid, with accusations of bigotry. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then puberty blockers, affirmation treatment, and SRS are premium quality cement.
Edit: hilariously ironic that the wikipedia page for autogynophilia has been deleted from the english wiki, though there is a talk page discussing its restoration[0]...how uncomfortably dystopian. I can only hope that average people are catching onto the games played to justify this irrationality.
I've seen memes showing a news headline "doctors baffled by microplastic in human lungs", juxtaposed with an unrelated headline that mentions face masks are made of the same plastic.
The form matters. The plastic in masks is not inhalable, and in all likelihood wearing a mask reduces inhaled plastics like it reduces inhaling of any other solid.
The article specified that all masks tested other than KN95 masks produced more microplastics than they filtered out (it didn't mention if they tested surgical masks).
This is not a bad result, since if you want to filter out viruses to protect the wearer (vs minimize general transmission), the N95/KN95 masks are the only ones worth wearing.
Quality matters, all items in a category are not the same.
Oh, agreed, there. KN-95 masks are the only types I’ve been using for over a year, so I just kind of assumed that. Many cloth masks do very little so I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually make it worse.
My concern is with all the infants. Being able to gawk out and stare at all the many faces you see, and how they respond to you has got to be foundational to your discovery of the world. If had to place a bet on a major "net negative" I'm going all in on this.
I have one friend who absolutely swears that "covid babies" are a thing, and that you can spot them from across the room. I haven't yet figured out what that means, but I tend to believe her.
So not sure I can really quality/quantify it, but just like this article, maybe someone will try and an article with a catchy title will be written about it.
Infants basically ignore strangers or have mild interest in them.
Infant eyesight is not good for distance; their perception is also in its infancy (their eyes detect photons but their brains are still learning to interpret the signals); their attention is correlated more strongly to sound than vision because sound is what they get in the womb.
I mention strangers because the immediate caregivers of infants were generally not wearing masks around them most of the time even during the depths of the pandemic.
Your friend is most likely engaged in motivated reasoning via confirmation bias; they are seeing what they expect and want to see. Infants in general often look spaced out or alarmed. Their facial expressions should not be taken to infer internal emotional state comparable to what an adult feels. Infant brains don’t yet work like adult brains.
In addition, it’s not like COVID-19 is the first time human babies have been exposed to masks. Mask-wearing in public has been normal in some Asian cultures for decades, and of course some Muslim women cover their faces at all times outside the home.
As a parent in the thick of babies exactly at this age and surrounded by other parents in the same situation, I cannot tell the difference between a "covid" baby and any other.
What I can tell you is how much time and effort the parents are putting into the baby, and whether is home-schooled or goes to school/daycare.
First child? They're probably walking early. Third kid? They'll be pushing a year and a half old with barely 5 words in their repertoire and I'll consider them lucky if they can hold themselves upright using a chair for support.
The parents with 3 young kids just don't have the bandwidth to provide the kind of attention that the baby needs.
I essentially think about it this way - consider how much information AlphaGo has to learn with. Now consider how much information your brain processes with only your vision. You think there's gonna be a statistically relevant causation because there's a piece of fabric on the adult's face?
I can't say for certain, but from my daily sampling it's much less than you intuitively would think. Kids are resilient and motivated to learn.
Also good points to consider. The parental investment factor probably is a much more dominant factor in the equation too. Curiosity and resilience too.
And thanks for a charitable understanding of the "covid baby" idea: obviously "all babies right now are covid babies" so this is a comparison of "pre-covid" vs "now" (and that early on, that line was much blurrier).
I've got a covid baby, born June 2020. We're lucky enough that she was able to start school at 3 months old, and since then basically every adult she's interacted with (excluding us parents, but including grandparents) has been masked. These days her and her classmates are starting to wear their masks more often, but it's not fully required until she's 2. She seems well adjusted, social, super playful, and loves exploring the world as much as any kid I've ever known.
I also grew up in the era where you were never ever supposed to use your real name or upload pictures of your face to the internet, and have absolute disdain for this weird webcam culture where people insist on seeing each-other's faces while interacting with them.I think the rise in racism and other forms of hatred on the internet ties directly to the increase in people making photographs of themselves central to their identity. I'm actually kind of hoping her generation grows up with less emphasis on appearance. Maybe we have a couple years here with a few less narcissists. Only good things can come out of such developments IMO.
> I have one friend who absolutely swears that "covid babies" are a thing, and that you can spot them from across the room.
I don't dismiss this out of hand, it is at least somewhat plausible to me that less facial exposure might impact infant development. However, I can also probably spot a covid baby at least somewhat reliably across the room, because I'd just look for any baby that's seems like they're less than 2-3 years old, so I'm not certain that being able to do so reveals very much.
I can also spot a Trump baby across the room, which is obviously totally different than a Biden baby. I'll take the liberty of not revealing my meaning either, of course.
You'd notice it in professional populations, I'd wager.
I also assume it would be a confounding factor in any study that involved masks, if it was a significant effect. "Weird, the group that breathed in asbestos for 20 years without wearing a mask had 90% more lung cancer than the masked group, but 20% less XYZ. Does asbestos exposure prevent XYZ?"
Dental hygienists might be another group that could be studied, and hopefully one with fewer confounding factors.
As an added bonus they're usually (in the Before Times) wearing surgical masks as opposed to a [K]N-95, which is anecdotally a lot more reflective of what the general population is wearing (if they're wearing anything at all).
Edited to add:
As an added, added bonus, dental hygienist skews heavily female, whereas construction and remediation skews heavily male. Female populations also wouldn't have the confounding factor of facial hair, which interferes with the seal of a respirator.
Full disclosure: I type all this while I'm wearing a half-face respirator with P-100 cartridges on it because I'm doing a bunch of sanding today. I also have a goatee. Read into that what you will.
It didn't seem to make a difference at all when Scotland and Wales had mask mandates but England didn't, although I've not seen a rigorous analysis of why this was.
Fun fact: 0.3 micron particles are the most penetrating particles of any size, including smaller particles. It’s counterintuitive, but 0.1 micron particles will be filtered out more easily than 0.3 micron particles. [0] That’s in fact why all masks are rated this way, since it gives you the absolute worst case. It’s fair to say that an N95 would filter out at least 95% of all particles.
Fibers embedded in lung tissue is how asbestos causes lung cancer, so wouldn't surprise me. Wearing a mask for an entire work day, than inevitably some of those mask fibers will get to your lungs. Its only a question if your lung tissue is not able to clear out some of them, that will cause inflammation, that long term can lead to cancer.
certain groups (nurses, doctors or certain workers) have to wear a masks all of the time for years. It would have definitely been noticed if it would cause such effects...the control group exists, just compare it to the rest. It would have been obvious.
But those groups are particular ones that are also exposed to other environments that affect health so any discrepancy will be hard to attribute.
Also, doctors did not wear masks to the extend we did during Corona. They'd only wear them during some surgery, not the whole day including even outside.
True, I used a fresh one every day during the worst of it, but I have to say I've gone back to doing exactly what you describe. The only place I still need one is public transport and now that it's getting hot (Spain) I often go outside without a coat, so my pocket is the only place to leave it. And it seems like a waste to replace it after one 15 minute ride on the subway.
And I'm not the only one, I've seen a lot of people wearing ones that are all fluffy from long use and sometimes washing (some people really wash disposable masks). I'm sure that will increase shedding a lot.
Like hanoz says above, what professionals wear is not really comparable to what people wear on the subway these days. It's the cheapest of the cheap Chinese crap, and usually used so long and mishandled that it is becoming really fluffy. Especially now that nobody really cares anymore and the use of them is incidental they end up being lugged around more than worn and not frequently replaced.
A fresh mask doesn't shed a lot but I've seen ones that are all hairy and stringy from being rubbed around in pockets with other stuff. I'm sure they shed a lot more material than a fresh mask.
And a lot of the types you mention would not wear masks like this but powered respirators (e.g. people working in clean rooms)
Personally I have major issues the masks for past medical trauma reasons but I really don't think they are healthy to keep around forever.
>>certain groups (nurses, doctors or certain workers) have to wear a masks all of the time for years
Not really - doctors/nurses etc have for a very long time worn masks for short periods of times, for certain procedures, for certain hours of the day for some days in the week- very few HC professionals have ever had to wear masks continually all day long, day after day and then also for additional chunks of time as they go about their non-work life.
However on the other side: there were some rather poor quality masks produced during the pandemic, so I would not be surprised to see future data about those being linked to health problems.
”Fun” fact: cigarette filters were made with asbestos.
> From 1952 to 1956, Lorillard Tobacco Company's Kent Micronite cigarettes were made with asbestos filters. The filters were advertised as increasing the experience and safety of smoking
I've been noticing some funny looks at my mask wearing.
I usually walk with my mask on. I have done this way before Covid.
I used to wear it for allergies. My allergies just felt better when I wore a mask.
Tonight I could smell burn't tires on my walk. A older guy happened to be doing a burn out in his Tesla. Yea--I know, not the typical burnout guy. A few Japanese beers might have something to do with the stunt.
I left, and thought about why I like to wear a mask. We have so much pollution in the air, it just seems prudent? I'm not even that worried about Covid right now.
(I do believe we consume way to much plastic, and other chemicals (Dawn Dish soap has 13 chemicals. Why? It cleans well. I am not a great dishwasher though.)
So if you see a "jerk" wearing a mask on Sir Francis Drake look away. I know it bothers some folks.
> Pathological and perverse, perhaps. But also totally cool and in agreement with the experts.
Um... "perverse"?
I have a lot less patience for these takes than I used to because at least early on in the pandemic people could convincingly claim that wearing a mask was "cool". There was at least truth to the idea that you would be shamed for not wearing a mask. But that's not the situation anymore -- GP wrote a comment about how they're getting a lot of weird looks in public for wearing a mask to help with pollution. If the response to that is, "what's up with this mask fad?", then I'm not sure you understand how fads or popularity work.
Anecdotally, even in a majority Democrat area the majority of people I see in just about every single social situation are not wearing masks, even in enclosed environments and at offices. The majority of retail workers I see don't wear masks. There are maybe 3-6 people total that I've seen in my entire church that wear a mask. And it's not exclusive to Republicans, most Democrats I know are not wearing masks -- to the point where people are far more likely to give funny looks or scowl at others for having one on.
As far as I can tell people wearing masks in public are pretty squarely the minority at this point, but the rhetoric against masking never really got updated since the early pandemic so people are still pretending like if they go to an average grocery store without a mask everyone there will judge them over it.
GP wears a mask to help with allergies and reduce road pollution -- this is pretty reasonable and would have been reasonable pre-pandemic. I don't understand why anyone would care about someone else making that decision in the first place, let alone why they would care so much that they'd call GP a pervert over it. :)
In a hundred million years of biological history, I doubt that there is anything as perverse as voluntarily blocking your own breathing hole. It's right up there with crowds throwing themselves off cliffs and maniacs walking down the sidewalk chattering at their plastic rat.
> In a hundred million years of biological history, I doubt that there is anything as perverse as voluntarily blocking your own breathing hole
Really? You genuinely can't think of anything in the entire history of humanity more perverse that someone could do than wear a mask? Have you spent much time on the Internet? And historically -- I mean, I'm just throwing out one idea off the top of my head, but how about public executions in the Colosseum for entertainment purposes?
This is pretty silly. :)
Even if you do somehow think that mask-wearers are all perversely deriving some pleasure from suffocating themselves and that they're walking around unable to breathe, there's still no way you genuinely believe that auto-erotic asphyxiation is the most perverse thing that society has ever invented.
> I doubt that there is anything as perverse as voluntarily blocking your own breathing hole.
Well, then I would recommend you to look more around you, very few to no animals intake air directly through their trachea, we evolved noses to both filter the small particulate with nose hairs, change the temperature of the air and later evolved the use of smell
So yeah, next time you go out I would recommend you to carefully review the faces of the beings you see around you and realize the existence and plurality of noses and "noseholes", and yes, noses themselves also inhibit oxygen flow vs "open trachea holes"
Lastly, you are welcome to give yourself a tracheotomy if you'd like too, just be careful, or maybe not
One of the sad things about the Internet these days is that into every conversation descends the Screaming Loonie™.
The Screaming Loonie doesn't waste any time but immediately dives into some world-class conspiracy theory - in this case, "Almost all the world's doctors, medical researchers and public health officials are in a century-long conspiracy to present a false theory, that masks help prevent infectious respiratory diseases."
I used to find this sad, but now the Screaming Loonies have killed a lot of people by hampering our response to COVID, and it's not sad or funny any more, it's enraging.
If we can jail people who call in prank bomb threats, we can should certainly jail the gloating and arrogant medical liars who have caused such carnage.
In a just world, medical liars would be given the same sort of sentence that we give today to
Do You Know That On Android (Using Gboard) You Can Select Your Text And Tap Shift To Switch Between Lower Case, Upper Case And Camelcase? Though Apparently It Only Works For A Single Line At Maximum.
What you're yelling about is true: fishing nets, car tires, and carpets are the major sources of microplastics, rather than plastic bags and drinking straws, but you wouldn't know that based on the public discourse.
I suppose the reason we focus on the wrong sources is that most people can't brag to their friends about switching their commercial fishing fleet away from plastic gillnets. Most of us don't even have commercial fishing fleets. But, we can buy a metal drinking straw and be seen using it, demonstrating virtuous behavior in a conspicuous way.
"While Devgon was wondering what was wrong, he started reading about the increasingly prominent theory that toxins in pesticides and plastics are throwing off men’s endocrine systems—and he started to wonder about his own testosterone levels."
The study presents three scenarios assuming different assumptions about the mass of plastic particles. In the worst case scenario, where I think the assumptions are bad, they estimate 5g of plastic per week. In the other two scenarios which used more complex but more realistic modelling they estimate 0.15 and 0.3g of plastic consumed per week so only a credit card sized amount per year.
In these scenarios (0.15g and 0.3g) about 90% they estimate comes from salt.