Plastic. Its in your blood ffs
This may be true but I hate the practice of referring to “plastic” as if it’s a single substance. It’s a bunch of different materials that don’t really have that much in common with each other, especially from a health/toxicity standpoint.
For example, people treat it as common sense that “you shouldn’t burn plastic” because the smoke is “toxic”. For PVC this is totally true, it makes very nasty stuff like dioxin that will poison you. But on the other hand you can burn polyethylene (think milk jug) and it’s no more toxic than burning a candle. Definitely way healthier to breath than wood campfire smoke, for example.
There’s also such a silly pattern where people learn some chemical might have some effect on the body and suddenly everyone is up in arms about it. For example Bisphenol A in many applications was replaced by the very similar Bisphenol S just so things could be labeled “BPA Free”. BPS probably has similar estrogenic effects to BPA.
I’d say the moral of the story is be wary of received wisdom about chemical toxicity from people who aren’t chemists.
Not only BPAs but many chemicals like BPAs can cause birth defects because our bodies think they are estrogen.
If this worries you, read the books It Starts With the Egg and Grain Brain.
They both suggest that not only what you eat, but how it’s prepared can affect the health of a child.
For instance it’s a big no-no, according to It Starts With the Egg, to heat most plastics in the microwave. The heat breaks the plastic down, it can get in your blood, your body will think it’s estrogen, and they don’t even know the full effects of this yet.
So think about
- burritos in plastic wrapping,
- cling wrap on a bowl,
- reheating leftovers in Tupperware,
- disposable cutlery
These chemicals are not just in food:
- your car’s interior
- your cell phone case
- even the clothes on your back, unless they’re 100% pure, untreated, natural fabric, may have been made with these chemicals.
Have you heard of Dihydrogen monoxide? It literally kills hundreds of thousands of people every single year all over the world, including young children.
You don’t hear about it in the news though do you…
Sugar. People don’t realize how bad it is for you and how addictive it is.
Sugar is not bad. Abuse of sugar is bad. Sugar is absolutely fine, as long as one doesn’t exceed. Problem is that in American-inspired diets sugar is everywhere at gigantic doses
Do basic groceries abuse sugar? And I’m not talking about the “organic” ones
I’d go with high fructose corn syrup
Fructose is typically fine when it’s paired with equal amounts of glucose, like in fruit. Your body has a really hard time processing high concentrations of fructose alone, which is how most sugary food is produced now a days since high fructose is a much cheaper method of sweetening food than a balanced mix of sugars.
Social media. It wasn’t until very recently that people started to realize just how harmful it actually is.
Less social media IMO, more the weaponization of techniques first researched in the 60s-80s made real and pushed via automaton to all corners of the public internet.
The reason you become vulnerable is because you abdicate control (most had no idea) of your feed to providers that own domain names.
This was a co-option of how the internet worked previously.
What kind of techniques were researched? This sounds interesting to learn about. Do you have some terms I could search that will help me learn more?
Start with Cambridge Analytica for sure.
I always thought the Cambridge Analytical scandal was just the left trying to point fingers at how Trump could have possibly won, instead of blaming the Democratic party for their terrible handling of the Sanders campaign, and how Clinton was so utterly unlikable, they grasped at so many straws, we’re still reeling from it to this day.
The big ones being the Ukrainian war, the failure of the Afghanistan pull-out, and of course CA.
Micro plastics. We were advertising them in facial scrubs ffs.
This right here. We are undoubtedly the plastic generation. And it’s not letting up any time soon; our kids will be included in this cohort as well. Banning plastic bags in cities is next to useless when everything we eat, everything we drink, and everything we buy is wrapped in plastic.
Plastic in general, except that we know and just keep doing it. I’m trying to use less plastic if I can but it’s frickin everywhere. If you want to buy an ear of corn it’s wrapped in plastic as if it isn’t already wrapped in nature’s protection. Seriously people.
Perfluoroalkyls aka PFAS appear to screw with all manner of body functions.
Since you mention tobacco: It’s worth noting that the smoking/cancer connection was noticed long before peak cigarette smoking in the population. Prior to WWII, lung cancer was considered a rare disease. That changed with the mass marketing of cigarettes.
There’s a couple studies showing that even though your body can’t process and remove PFAS and it just keeps accumulating, if you donate blood regularly you reduce the amount in your body by a bit each time. There are other slight health benefits to donating blood and lots of places will pay you for it. So if you can reduce your PFAS intake and donate blood you can slowly get rid of it. I use arch linux btw.
Social Media
Social media.
vapes
Microplastics and PFAS
No, seriously, these two will kill Earth, and us
Tiktok.
You said product, and I mean this legitimately. Not because of meme hate or hating on what is trendy, but because it is and has been a tool of the CCP. This isn’t really in question, and it was one of the first large platforms to entirely erase the idea of a timeline and fully devote itself only to a algorithm feed. One that bytedance has put their finger on the scales of many times.
The effect this has is hard to quantify, but the postmortem on it is going to be incredible as we unpack exactly how much this influenced the trends and politics among zoomers, and to what extent.
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But is it sinophobia? It’s no secret that Xi Jinping and the party like to have companies firmly under their thumb. All you have to do is threaten a few execs. Or hell, a good chunk of companies have deference to the party baked into their charter.
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This is no secret. Maybe have a little skepticism towards your favored country’s claims that any opposition to the government is bigotry towards the people? They use that to maintain control over the population.
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Oh? And what about the party’s practice of disappearing execs when a company’s done something to displease the party? Are other governments not right to be afraid when the CPC exercises that type of control?
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++1 TikTok is only political because Americans want to own everyone’s data exclusively.
Vapes.
What will happen is one or another of the flavorings used will be safe to eat because of stomach acid and digestion, but inhaling it into delicate lungs will cause disease long term. Look up popcorn workers lung to see how a common butter flavoring in the past that was meant for eating on popcorn harmed factory workers breathing it in daily.
One of the existing vape flavors… or a new one… will eventually be shown to cause simular lung disease due to daily breathing it in never truly being studied. Someone with a favorite flavor will use it for years, like any smoker with a favorite brand of cigs, then probably get sick from constant long term exposure.
Social media
Microplastics are the new lead, and screens are the new tobacco, in my opinion. Overuse of sugar in processed foods is the new version of how they’d cut food with inedible stuff like sawdust back in the day.
My mom become an avid anti-plastic person after watching videos and reading things about the damages that microplastics do to the health, nature and the planet. She does everything she can to avoid using plastic things!
Care to elaborate? Always looking for new tips to cut back on my personal plastic use.
There is an ongoing study showing that artificial sweeteners (Aspartamein particular) cause cancer.
All those people trying to stay healthy to drinking diet things… are giving themselves cancer instead.
There are studies showing something is causing cancer for almost everything you eat. Wasn’t there even a study that showed increased cancer risk if you eat potato chips? Or eggs?
You’re knowledgeable and capable enough to sign up for Lemmy, but you don’t know aspartame is bad?
What makes you think there is any correlation between being able to sign up for Lemmy and knowing anything about artificial sweeteners? Those two things seem completely unrelated to me.
Late to reply, but generally Lemmy users are advanced/veteran Reddit users, and advanced Reddit users more or less share a pool of common knowledge based on topics that often come up or were significant, etc. Aspartame is up there with things like fluoride in the water supply in terms of notoriety. Not saying people agree one way or the other, but it should at least be well known that it’s controversial.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/
Probably brake pads. Everyone’s living in cities now, just breathing in brake pad and lead particles.
Oh and car tires. Just huffing those all day.
Brake pads used to use asbestos.
Aftermarket pads are still allowed to.
Well, that’s fucked up.
there is a comically high amount of random shit that can be made of highly dangerous materials just be cause no one bothered to make regulation against it
like motherfucking breakpads. The average lawyer has more to do than care about the law on the materials of breakpads.
I thought that asbestos was outlawed. Though I do remember learning about its anti - fire uses in school. Yes, I am kinda old.
