Micro- and nano-scopic sized pieces of plastic people use everyday can eventually find its way into the most unlikely of places, even in the plaque of clogged arteries of cardiac patients, a recent study found.
“If microplastics might be promoting coronary disease, you might not be able to avoid ingesting the microplastics, because they’re everywhere, but you can sure do the other things. You can keep your blood pressure low. You can exercise. You can get your cholesterol measured,” Gerber said.
Some plastics can leach chemicals which can have toxic effects on the body.
But overall this question is silly. “Toxic” can be defined as “capable of causing injury or death, especially by chemical means; poisonous”. So even if it’s not necessarily chemically or poisonously bad for the body, clogged arteries can cause injury and death via heart attacks and or strokes regardless of what is clogging them. So unless someone is trying to argue that microplastics found in the clog didn’t help contribute to the clog to any degree it’s clearly having a bad effect on the body.
So this is like trying to debate if a stainless steel knife found in someone’s heart could have had a “toxic” effect on their body.
Yes, I would assume that the presence of the microplastics in the plaque is not contributing significantly to the accumulation of the plaque or the development of the heart disease, since it is the plaque accumulation that causes the heart disease and the presence of microplastics is more like the presence of other bioaccumulators in higher-trophic organisms (like vitamin B12, mercury, or strontium-90).
I do agree this is like talking about the toxicity of the stainless steel of the knife found in someone’s heart - clearly the problem here isn’t the material of the knife and whether it is toxic, but the fact that someone was stabbed. Likewise, the problem is the accumulation of the plaque and the heart disease that follows - the focus on the microplastics is irrelevant except that it is concerning if we later find out microplastics are causing disease.
The only reason I’m focusing on whether the microplastics are indeed toxic or not is because that is a big claim, and if found to be true would be really big news. It sounds like that hasn’t been demonstrated yet, though I want to look at the link zero_spelled_with_an_ecks sent, it looks like the article talks about leaching from microplastics that may have more clear health impacts.
I don’t mean to be nit-picking, in university classes professors have discussed microplastics like in the context of agriculture and food-supply and my professors basically said the science is not out yet about what the effects of microplastics are, even if everyone felt they were probably bad there wasn’t evidence yet as to how they were bad. I couldn’t tell if the headline was implying there was a breakthrough in the science, and looking now it just seems like there hasn’t been one and it’s just more of the general sentiment that plastics are probably bad.
The study that is linked to in the article did find that “patients with carotid artery plaque in which MNPs (Microplastics and Nanoplastics) were detected had a higher risk of a composite of myocardial infarction, stroke, or death from any cause at 34 months of follow-up than those in whom MNPs were not detected.”
That should be enough to make a valid claim that microplastics can be “toxic” given that their presence has been correlated to higher risk of injury or death. Then there’s also knowledge of how they can leach and pose certain risks to people and ecosystems and so on.
I think the problem here is that it’s already mostly known that they’re probably bad so that’s not very news-worthy, but yes there’s no 100% conclusive evidence that they’re the direct cause of harm yet. It’s like the state cigarette smoking was in before there was 100% conclusive evidence that it causes lung cancer. Sure, there was already plenty of evidence that it was clearly unhealthy, it clearly contained various unhealthy things that would obviously have unhealthy effects on the body, and it was correlated with higher risk of death… but it didn’t make the big headlines until it did get that 100% conclusive evidence. And just like cigarette smoking mircoplastics have trillion dollar corporations that will use their bags of money to delay, confuse, and obstruct efforts to reduce microplatics because they want to continue profiting off their products so IMO any statements like “we won’t know until there’s 100% proof!” should be taken with many grains of salt. There’s already more than enough evidence to know that the sooner things are done to decrease the spread of microplastics the better.
Oh wow, yeah - the sample size is small but if I were playing devil’s advocate (which apparently I’m doing here, lol), while the correlation seems clear the cause could still be some other common root cause - maybe the same reason they have a diet heavy in plastics is separately why they had worse health outcomes, so it would be nice to reproduce this correlation and try to control for those kinds of differences. Just as an example of what I mean: perhaps the reason they have more plastic is because they ate more fast food, and fast-food happens to have more plastics in the food, but the causal mechanism for the worse health outcomes could come from the fast-food heavy diet, rather than just the presence of plastics in the plaque which happens to coincide with the worse diet. This is not meant to be proof it isn’t the plastics, I am just trying to show how hard it can be to move from demonstrated correlation to causal connections.
Still, if they can find a causal mechanism that explains how the microplastics are playing a role, that will be huge. It certainly seems like good enough evidence to be wary of microplastics.
Your comparison to cigarettes is apt, especially the way that the industry manipulated the public. I also agree that there is sufficient evidence to decrease microplastics, I just look forward to that causal mechanisms being discovered that demonstrate the ways they harm us.