re: #25 JC1

Isn’t plastic largely biologically inert? Seems like the fa(s)t food lobby is looking for a new boogeyman to blame for heart attacks.

Plastic is organic polymers. Under the right circumstances it decays and breaks down into smaller organic components.

The question then becomes at what point a stray subcomponent fucks with the organic molecules that make up biological life. Cell signaling is all “put organic widget a into receiving slot B”; things like protein folding are effected by other molecules within the cytoplasm; etc.

And that just the intracellular level. There’s an open question of whether plastic decay results in endocrine disruption, because that’s a particular unusual intercellular information relay that involves cascades of molecule…and it’s maybe not good to have similar molecule bits just kind of…in you floating around.

Literally just having non-tissue stuff interspersed amongst tissue is an issue independent of reactivity. The body respond to stray…stuff…by creating plaques, enclosing it like a grosser version of a pearl.

Everybody having stray stuff in them is probably an issue…but it’s also one of those things where it will take forever to describe the mechanism, and the profit motive means that such concerns will be sandbagged in ways that resemble the “skepticism” that inhaling volatized (on fire) organic material that formed tar on lung tissue could be mutagenic. Consider that here and now pesticide companies still won’t acknowledge how carcinogenic long-term, low-dose exposure is.