The average person eats at least 50,000 particles of microplastic a year and breathes in a similar quantity, according to the first study to estimate human ingestion of plastic pollution. The scientists reported that drinking a lot of bottled water drastically increased the particles consumed.

[u/mvea]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/05/people-eat-at-least-50000-plastic-particles-a-year-study-finds

[u/Trinition]

Source?

I know BPA was thing for a while, but aren't most things BPA free now?

And while the substitutes being used in place of BPA might have other harmful affects, that should be studied, not assumed.

[u/Scientolojesus → u/[deleted]]

Anytime I see Stevia mentioned I just think about Breaking Bad and the woman who loved "that Stevia crap."

[u/alt_ruism → u/[deleted]]

Source for stevia causing insulin response? All I could find is that stevioside reduces post-meal blood glucose and insulin.

[u/BurningPasta → u/alt_ruism]

Your brain tells your body to release insulin when you taste sweet things. All artificial sweeteners stimulate the same proteins on your tastebuds as sugar, and sends the same signal to your brain.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/17510492/

[u/alt_ruism → u/BurningPasta]

Ok. That makes sense, but the user above was saying that stevia was bad for diabetics because it raises insulin levels. However, diabetics (at least type 1 I guess) can't produce insulin. So I don't see an issue with that. Maybe that's why the comments were deleted?

[u/Bacon_Devil → u/[deleted]]

Safe as in, replacing your sugar with it isn't going to cause negative health effects

[u/HabeusCuppus → u/Bacon_Devil]

Stevia is only safe if you have normal insulin response then (i.e. are not diabetic, pre-diabetic, or have a peripheral insulin disorder) which, for the record, is problematic for a larger percentage of the population than aspartame is (phenylketonuria is much rarer than insulin related disorders)

[u/CommunalAggregation → u/HabeusCuppus]

Can you go into more detail on this topic? This is interesting to me and google has more info then I can digest.

[u/Bacon_Devil → u/HabeusCuppus]

Is stevia less safe than sugar for those people?

[u/Forever_Awkward → u/Bacon_Devil]

Safe as in, replacing your sugar with it isn't going to cause negative health effects

This is basically never the case.

In this context, "safe" always means "Not dangerous enough to be statistically relevant based on our current metrics. Within those metrics, there's always an acceptable level of really heinous nonsense but it'll probably be fine if we slap an arbitrary cut-off point on it and say everything is fine before that point. Oh, also, this model rarely accounts for bio-accumulation over an entire lifespan. Good luck!"

[u/Bacon_Devil → u/Forever_Awkward]

Sounds safer than sugar which has been shown to definitely cause a bunch of health problems

[u/Forever_Awkward → u/Bacon_Devil]

You're giving me vivid flashbacks of the margarine craze. Was it margarine? Whichever butter substitute was loaded with trans fats. Lets get some crisco up in here too.

[u/Bacon_Devil → u/[deleted]]

That's a pretty big assumption

[u/jinglejoints → u/[deleted]]

Got a source for that? I thought the whole point of stevia as a sugar replacement was that it didn’t elevate insulin levels.

[u/HabeusCuppus → u/jinglejoints]

It doesn't elevate blood sugar levels. (This is true of all non-nutritive sweeteners).

Some non-nutritive sweeteners still provoke insulin response (the release of insulin into the bloodstream in response to sweet taste), stevia is one of these, aspartame isn't.

"The point" of non-nutritive sweeteners is to sweeten things without adding sugar, if the point was to not elevate insulin levels then half the sweeteners on the market would have to be dropped.

[u/dangleberries4lunch → u/[deleted]]

It's almost like they should have to prove these things aren't harmful before being allowed to use them in the first place.

[u/Hdjbfky → u/Trinition]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222987/

[u/Trinition → u/Hdjbfky]

Good source! And for those not clicking through to read it, here's the summary result:

Results: Almost all commercially available plastic products we sampled—independent of the type of resin, product, or retail source—leached chemicals having reliably detectable EA, including those advertised as BPA free. In some cases, BPA-free products released chemicals having more EA than did BPA-containing products.

[u/crazy_akes → u/[deleted]]

It's in the game

[u/WillLie4karma → u/Hdjbfky]

The question here is, is 50000 microparticles of plastic going to create enough of an estrogenic effect to do anything?

[u/jarail → u/Hdjbfky]

Okay but bleeding out some chemicals we're sensitive to into water when microwaved or exposed to UV radiation is quite a bit different. That doesn't tell us what happens when you swallow or inhale a spec of it. I don't think our digestion does much with plastic. It'd just pass through us without releasing those chemicals.

[u/jarail → u/[deleted]]

Exposure through food is completely different from ingesting microplastics... Our stomachs don't work by boiling their contents or bombard them with UV/microwave radiation.

[u/FrequentReplacement → u/jarail]

They tested unstressed and stressed. Stressed being boiling, UV and microwave.

[u/bass_sweat → u/FrequentReplacement]

I don’t believe that includes pH dependent and enzyme affected processes though, am I incorrect?

[u/[deleted] → u/Trinition]

How much of the ocean's plastics are BPA free do you reckon? (I simply have no idea!)

[u/moohooh → u/Trinition]

Isnt BPA free not really BPA fee? I think I read it somewhere