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PlasticList – Plastic Levels in Foods

(www.plasticlist.org)
450 points homebrewer | 3 comments | 24 Jun 25 14:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.629s | source
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xnx ◴[24 Jun 25 15:37 UTC] No.44367367[source]▶
Weird to see how much attention plastics in food are getting despite no(?) evidence of harm vs. something like consuming too much sugar or alcohol, and BPA/BPS in receipt paper (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/well/health-effects-paper...).

It's very hard to maintain a mental ranked list of health things to be worried about when hypothetical concerns get more attention/coverage the confirmed ones.

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1. user____name ◴[24 Jun 25 17:38 UTC] No.44368698[source]▶
I'm assuming because the body can break down sugar and alcohol but not plastics?
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2. xnx ◴[24 Jun 25 19:31 UTC] No.44370056[source]▶
If the plastic passes through us without breaking down, how worried should we be?
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3. user____name ◴[24 Jun 25 23:23 UTC] No.44372139[source]▶
Yes but the worry is that it a significant amount doesn't pass through us and gets stuck inside our bodies. Not only our bodies, but animals and plants also. Plastics don't occur naturally and thus evolution has not provided life with a way of dealing with it. If you ignore the problem you're just going to end up with more and more microplastics in the environment and we don't know the long term risks, we've only been using plastics at scale for a couple of decades. We used to think asbestos, cigarettes, radium, pfas, leaded gasoline, cfk, etc was all fine and good and only found out about the adverse effects after prolonged exposure.