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.
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.