- #51
Laroxe
Science Advisor
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- 839
I do wonder if this sort of article is worth the bother, it's pretty well established that the soluble fibre in oats slows the absorption of all sorts of things. It's often recommended in type 2 diabetes, as it's a useful way to reduce the rapid increase in blood sugar after meals. Some people consider the soluble fibre found in oats to be anti-nutrients, as they have the capacity to bind to some essential nutrients in the diet and prevent their absorption. This capacity is increasingly recognised in a variety of plants as a defence against their predators, while in most cases the effect seems to be one of restricting any nutritional value to the predator, some plants have been shown to induce deficiency states. If oats do reduce absorption of microplastics, it's probably as a result of this effect and so this does seem credible, but essentially meaningless.Cepacia said:
It's still not well explained how the microplastics found in various organs got there, we still don't have a clear picture of their absorption and distribution in the body. Many of the studies claim to find microplastics in areas of the body that have particular protections in place to prevent pathogens and harmful chemicals gaining access, the brain is a good example of such an area. The brain, is isolated from and effectively protected against many of the bodies own chemicals physiological products that could damage it and many of the drugs we use have difficulty accessing this area this is despite the fact that these are all highly soluble. Actually, the detection of microplastics in tissue is technically problematic, they are usually of a size that make them difficult to actually identify as distinct chemicals and the techniques used to identify them are still being developed. Many of the studies describe distinct particles visible under a microscope. The problem is that people also remember studies and articles, usually supported by photographic evidence, of animals containing more plastic than the rest of their body mass, the plastic being of a size that the animal could never have ingested. This sort of scientific fraud became so laughable the plastics involved have had to rapidly reduce in size, simply to be credible, even so there are still serious issues in explaining how these plastics maintain their structure and distinct chemistry. Something our digestive system is designed to destroy. It's only relatively recently that some techniques have been shown to be reliable in identifying microplastics but there are few studies that have described reliable ways of isolating tissue samples to prevent contamination. I remember reading about these issues, but that was some time ago, and I haven't seen anything more recently, so maybe it's all changed, but personally I doubt it.
There is such a vast array of variables that impact on health and the rates of disease, I simply don't think it's reasonable to attribute harm to such a common environmental contaminant when, despite the incidence of some specific health problems changing human health and human lifespan have continued to improve. Even when we do have evidence that some chemicals are possibly carcinogenic for most, the evidence is weak to non-existent. I noticed that Glyphosate has been mentioned as one such product, it was in fact developed to be safer than other herbicides and the evidence used to introduce some limited control was based on campaigning rather than science. People tend to focus on diseases like cancer, it induces fear and sells newspapers, however that doesn't change the fact that cancer is overwhelmingly a disease of old age, the effects of environmental exposures are relatively tiny with a few notable and well described exceptions, but getting that sort of evidence is proving to be difficult, and really if the risk was there, it shouldn't be.
