this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
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The problem is that we'll never know because there's no control group. Everybody has them, even fetuses still in the womb. You would have to build bunkers with perfect air filtering, and then go through, like, four generations of humans to breed microplastics-free specimen, which you could then use a the control group for the rest... Only them never leaving the bunker would already invalidate the tests... So, yeah...
If micro plastics were a problem then we should expect to see rapid increases in cancers in younger adults.
Handed a note
Huh. No shit.
Though even that is complicated by 50 or so years of nuclear weapons testing, which likely also increased cancer rates. Not to mention all that lead everywhere. Produce gradually losing nutrients because farming mostly just focuses on the big three with fertilizer and the others are being mined out of the ground and sent to landfills, septic tanks, waste processing facilities, cemetaries, and crematoriums also doesn't help (though I'm not sure waste processing and crematoriums remove those nutrients from the cycle like the others, since the one could produce fertilizer and the other might be sending it out into the atmosphere where it could eventually end up back in the soil).
There's so much chaos that it's hard to isolate causes, which then makes all the causes kinda "hide in plain sight" because they can perpetually blame the others and shit only gets worse over time.
Let's not forget the industrial pesticides, which are also everywhere.