I'm not saying it's harmless, I'm saying that even if it is harmful it's not by enough to justify the panic and sudden lifestyle changes these articles sometimes lead to.
Remember the black spatulas a while back, and how it turned out to be a math error?
Is scooping out your food out of the crappy plastic takeout container into a bowl before microwaving an example of “panic and sudden lifestyle changes”?
Seems like a pretty minor change to me. I’m already going out of my way to not put metal in there anyway…
Humans existed. They had an average life expectency of 'x'. Then we introduced plastic. The life expectency became x+y.
We cannot say that plastic caused the increase, but it is clear that any decrease was small enough to be hidden by other factors.
Am I saying that it's harmless? No. Am I saying that your effort and attention are better spent checking your fire extinguishers arent expired or that your brake pads don't need changed? Yes. Those things have significant and obvious impacts on your survival odds. This does not.
> but it is clear that any decrease was small enough to be hidden by other factors.
Yes, but those "other factors" being antibiotics and vaccine, it turns out that even the deadliest pollutants we know were hidden by other factors, so it really gives us no idea about how harmful it is, as it could go from "harmless" to "cause millions of death every year" that's why I say the argument makes no sense.
> Am I saying that your effort and attention are better spent checking your fire extinguishers arent expired or that your brake pads don't need changed? Those things have significant and obvious impacts on your survival odds. This does not.
That's the problem, you cannot make this conclusion at all, it could be much worse than those two while still being hidden in longevity statistics, just because antibiotics and vaccine has so strong of an effect on life expectancy! Having no fire extinguisher at home has pretty much no impact on your life expectancy, but at the time plastics were introduced a significant fraction of the newborn didn't reach 10yo because they died of an infection of some sort.
> it could be much worse than those two while still being hidden in longevity statistics
I see what you mean, and I think we're basically coming at the same point from different angles. If you are a medical researcher or involved in crafting legislation this is probably important. You could help save millions of lives in aggregate. However, I'm suggesting that individual people should think of the opportunity cost before they panic. After all, a person can only worry about so many things and almost everyone is at or past their capacity.
To use another half baked example, if plastics take away a year, and antibiotics give you 5 extra you still win. However, if smoking cigarettes, obesity, or driving too fast risk taking away 10 years, start with one of those first.
Optimizing the bits of life that are too small to reliably measure is just not a great way to live, unless you've already handled all of the low hanging fruit in your life. Anxiety kills people too.
[†]: Works as well for high fructose corn syrup or Fentanyl.