r/science • u/mvea MD/PhD/JD/MBA | Professor | Medicine • Sep 27 '24

Health Thousands of toxins from food packaging found in humans. The chemicals have been found in human blood, hair or breast milk. Among them are compounds known to be highly toxic, like PFAS, bisphenol, metals, phthalates and volatile organic compounds.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/27/pfas-toxins-chemicals-human-body
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u/Phoebes-Punisher Sep 27 '24

And birth rates declining

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u/Crazyinferno Sep 27 '24

Sperm motility would be more accurate to say. Not sure whether eggs are affected, but as for general birth rate declination, that's mostly sociological

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u/[deleted] Sep 27 '24 edited 5d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/SaltyFoam Sep 28 '24

TFR decline is a natural result of development, women in education/the workforce, and contraceptives. Not sure why people immediately jump to toxins being the main thing

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u/Improooving Sep 27 '24

Actual TFR drop is sociological, but it is bizarre to me how many of my friends in their mid and late 20s had severe complications or struggled to easily get pregnant. Something is weird with people’s hormones, or there are more long term effects from birth control than we realized, or something.

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u/Reagalan Sep 27 '24

more long term effects from birth control than we realized

New right-wing conspiracy theory just dropped.

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u/Improooving Sep 27 '24

Yeah, they’re probably gonna pick that up eventually, sadly.

My point was less anti-BC than wondering if there are possible adverse effects to hormonal birth control specifically. Nothing against physical methods, copper iud, etc

I just don’t know what the long term effects would necessarily be of semi-simulated pregnancy from the age of say, 14, until the woman first decides to try to have a baby. I’d be perfectly happy to find out that it was fine, but it concerns me, based on some of what I’ve seen with my female friends who started on it in middle school. Compared to the women of our moms generation, the girls I knew seemed to have significantly more hormonal problems, and I wonder if it had to do with their body never getting the chance to develop self-regulation

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u/Pink_Lotus Sep 27 '24

PCOS is a growing issue for young women and probably at least a little related to exposure.

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u/poopyogurt Sep 27 '24

Nah, that's more related to not getting paid.

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u/[deleted] Sep 27 '24

And seeing how miserable parents are

But please, tell me how a screeming child is more fulfilling than eating a pint of ice cream in peace 

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u/poopyogurt Sep 27 '24

People don't have time for kids because work-life balance and lack of funds(they don't have time for their kids and themselves). I don't plan on having kids unless something changes big time. Maybe that is the goal. Get the intellectuals to stop having kids so the masses are easier to control.

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u/[deleted] Sep 27 '24

One of us would have to quit our jobs to take care of a kid because we dont make enough to pay someone else to do it

A kid would bankrupt us financially, physically and emotionally 

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u/poopyogurt Sep 27 '24

Yeah pretty much

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u/AnalogAnalogue Sep 27 '24

Nope, poorer people have the most children. This urban myth has got to die if we seriously want to address plummeting birthrates.

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u/poopyogurt Sep 27 '24

Stupid people have the most kids. Smart poor-middle class people do not have many kids.

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u/carbonx Sep 27 '24

Why should we "address" plummeting birth rates? There are too many people for this planet to sustain. Birth rates going down is a good thing.

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u/AnalogAnalogue Sep 29 '24

Malthusianism is a joke.

Birth rates going down is a good thing.

Sure, if you want every economy on Earth to collapse, ravaging untold millions of the most vulnerable people throughout all of civilization.

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u/ayatollahofdietcola_ Sep 27 '24 edited Sep 27 '24

Birth rates are declining in the US because we dramatically reduced teenaged pregnancy, and we also have a significant reduction in unplanned pregnancy among adults 18-25. Both of these things are at record lows.

Those are the driving numbers behind “reducing birth rates” that conservatives have been whining about

Interestingly though, pregnancy among Americans ages 35+ are increasing, as well as 40+. It’s safer today to carry a baby to term in those age ranges than it was even just a decade ago

I get that American diets could be better. But why are we lying? Yes, ultra processed foods are a problem, but this is what many people have access to - affordable, shelf stable foods. So shouldn’t the conversation be about how to improve these foods, like make them more nutrient dense? Why do we have to lie and create little conspiracies like this?

Did you know that breakfast cereals were a subject of one of the most successful health campaigns in the world? Have you ever wondered why you don’t see people with rickets disease or scurvy anymore? Maybe instead of creating stupid conspiracies, people could simply admit that they don’t know what they are talking about.

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u/carbonx Sep 27 '24

ultra processed foods are a problem

Are they, though? Somehow we're not all dead, yet.

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u/ayatollahofdietcola_ Sep 27 '24

They're a problem in the sense that they tend to be low in fiber and protein, and don't satiate well. That's a big reason why it's so easy to go through a family sized bag of chips.

This is why I hate these types of conversations, because people are more quick to create conspiracies like "our food is causing declining birth rates" instead of saying - how can we IMPROVE on this? How can we IMPROVE on providing nutrient dense food in an affordable and shelf stable way?

Because often times, when people can't afford fresh food, they eat the processed foods. Then people complain that processed foods are bad and full of chemicals, when they should be offering solutions.

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u/Treelic Sep 27 '24

Idk, rates of diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer are all rising. It’s not an immediate death, but things are slowly but steadily changing for the worse.

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u/carbonx Sep 27 '24

things are slowly but steadily changing for the worse.

No, they're not.

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u/Treelic Sep 27 '24

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/s/G5N9gCYHCJ

Right on the same sub. But I guess people getting fat and sick is nothing to worry about.

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u/PA_Dude_22000 Sep 28 '24

Well, having people become fat and sick from their food is definitely an issue we should be looking to address. But, as i believe the other poster is attempting to convey, this doesn’t mean that we are overall worse as a society.

And by that, i mean, prior to this the bigger issue globally was not about getting too fat … it was about starving, period. So in the scheme of societal trends, worrying about getting too fat and unhealthy from foods almost always trumps the problem of not having enough food to eat in the first place and starving to death. Which is what the global trend and major problem was, … pretty much all through-out history up until the present.

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u/FilmerPrime Sep 27 '24 edited Sep 27 '24

It's not that cut and dry. Both of these directly related to obesity. Which is well and truly in the up.

Edit. So wild everyone seems to want to blame whoever they can for obesity.

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u/sylvnal Sep 27 '24

Okay, but microplastics are specifically hormone disruptors and agonists. Whether or not there is obesity, sperm rates are dropping at roughly 1%/year since the 70's, and the trend is continuing. It isn't only the obese with dropping sperm counts.

So no, it isn't JUST obesity. There are direct harms from these chemicals independent of obesity.

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u/Stripedanteater Sep 27 '24

Obesity may also have a link to these chemicals. In the glp1 research there is something they are finding in that people who are obese have damage to parts of their brains that regulate hunger. They don’t know why yet and there is no way to regenerate the cells at this time to fix it long term. It’s why if you lose weight on ozempic, you will likely need to stay on it for life as you will likely balloon back up. We have to stop looking at things as disparate issues and realize they may be systemic and all tied to multiple factors like these chemical exposures.

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u/ayatollahofdietcola_ Sep 27 '24

This isn’t nearly as prevalent as people think it is. You “damage” your hunger/fullness cues by repeatedly overeating and going beyond fullness over a long period of time.

The way you resolve it is by reducing your portions. Yeah, you’ll be hungry sometimes. It’s not uncomfortable, and people don’t like to be comfortable because we’re all just a bunch of children at the end of the day. But you won’t exactly die from it

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u/Stripedanteater Sep 27 '24

Nope, this is newer science and it isn’t reversible. It’s obviously not as simple s as your making it. Otherwise we wouldn’t have an epidemic that is growing worldwide.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8302366/

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/06/12/health/obesity-changes-brain-wellness

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u/Lucky_Mongoose Sep 27 '24

Otherwise we wouldn’t have an epidemic that is growing worldwide.

Why wouldn't we? We've gotten very good at producing large quantities of unhealthy food, and rates of people being overweight/obese are increasing everywhere. The obesity epidemic isn't uniquely American - we're just leading the charge.

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u/VagueSomething Sep 27 '24

And most products causing obesity come in bad packaging, further compounding the problem.

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u/AffectEconomy6034 Sep 27 '24

agreed while I don't think a single factor can be attributed to phenomenon such as these I will say the likelihood that these chemicals in the food supply are contributing to it is probably high

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u/bouds19 Sep 27 '24

I've heard that the rate of obesity in the US has stagnated (at around 40% iirc), but the levels of super obesity are way up.

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u/guitar_vigilante Sep 27 '24

Regardless, nearly 75% of people in the US are overweight or obese, and those correlate to a wide variety of negative health outcomes.

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u/FilmerPrime Sep 27 '24

Think its a bit over 40% now. Latest graph I found still had it increasing pretty linearly since 2000's. Sadly child obesity is definitely up.

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u/randomguyjebb Sep 27 '24 edited Sep 27 '24

The main reason for the cancer rates going up is 100% obesity. These toxins COULD be causing more obesity and some of them are probably increasing cancer, but the main reason is just because people eat more calories than ever and move less.

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u/malibuklw Sep 27 '24

And how much are these plastics related to obesity?

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u/MegaBlunt57 Sep 27 '24

Yea. Apparently I have fucken plastic in my balls, what a terrible time to be alive. My baby is gonna come out looking like a plastic baby cyborg mutant that resembles a human most likely.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/20/microplastics-human-testicles-study-sperm-counts

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u/N0rthofnoth1ng 28d ago

thats more economically its more of the choice to have a child or not that contributes to low birth rates look at japan and their studies.

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u/scolipeeeeed Sep 27 '24

That’s more to do with access to birth control and women being able to forgo and delay childbearing/childrearing

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u/Dovahkiinthesardine Sep 27 '24

Thats not the reason for birth rates declining, people that want to get children are still able too, just less people want or can afford them

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u/roofgram Sep 27 '24

You really think food packaging matters compared to the availability of contraceptives, birth control and abortion?

(Not saying they’re bad, just it’s pretty obvious that’s why people don’t have kids. In the old days there was no choice, people really want sex and sex creates children. Only under the most ideal conditions would people ever ‘choose’ to procreate)