Every generation has some product/ingredient that they didn’t know was dangerous at the time: tobacco, lead, asbestos, etc. What is that item for this generation?
Social media. It wasn't until very recently that people started to realize just how harmful it actually is.
Less social media IMO, more the weaponization of techniques first researched in the 60s-80s made real and pushed via automaton to all corners of the public internet.
The reason you become vulnerable is because you abdicate control (most had no idea) of your feed to providers that own domain names.
This was a co-option of how the internet worked previously.
I agree, and I think it's even more broader: Anxiety and stress. These are extremely dangerous and underrated, and even exploited by many (e.g. news, politicians, workplace, social media, marketing). It's like sticking a cigarette into your mouth without you able to immediately take it out.
Sugar. People don't realize how bad it is for you and how addictive it is.
Sugar is not bad. Abuse of sugar is bad. Sugar is absolutely fine, as long as one doesn't exceed. Problem is that in American-inspired diets sugar is everywhere at gigantic doses
I'd go with high fructose corn syrup
Fructose is typically fine when it's paired with equal amounts of glucose, like in fruit. Your body has a really hard time processing high concentrations of fructose alone, which is how most sugary food is produced now a days since high fructose is a much cheaper method of sweetening food than a balanced mix of sugars.
Look no further for the cause of the obesity problem in America. It's an everything. I bought what I thought were raw sausages and it was even in there.
Fructose is a type of sugar. High fructose corn syrup is almost pure sugar, like honey.
Totally. Sugar should be seen similarly like alcohol or cigarettes regarding the addictiveness. But we are consuming it everyday and feed our children with it.
This will be the next big class action suit similar to tobacco. Big sugar has been operating just like tobacco, denying negative side effects and lobbying at state and federal levels to stifle bans and regulatory actions.
America is on the verge of a sytemeic failure when it comes to health care, and a lot of that is due to the prevalence of diabetes in our aging population.
Right now one in every three medicare dollars goes towards treating diabetes, a perfectly preventable disease. It's not sustainable, and it's literally siphoning off our ability to treat other ailments.
I get withdrawal symptoms on a regular basis. Cold sweat, ravenous appetite, weak limbs, shaky hands. It's horrible, really.
This right here. We are undoubtedly the plastic generation. And it's not letting up any time soon; our kids will be included in this cohort as well. Banning plastic bags in cities is next to useless when everything we eat, everything we drink, and everything we buy is wrapped in plastic.
My country is exceptionally bad about this.
Buy a plastic package of crackers? It will be filled with smaller packages of crackers all wrapped in plastic with a plastic freshener pack for each one. I am not exaggerating. I am not sure I have ever bought something that didn't have at least two degrees of plastic wrap.
We did stop giving plastic bags out at cashiers unless requested, but that means shitall when everything you buy is triple-wrapped to begin with.
It's mostly from polyester and cotton/poly blends. They dredged the ocean floor and looked at the microplastics it dug up. Sourced it from clothing mostly.
Plastic in general, except that we know and just keep doing it. I'm trying to use less plastic if I can but it's frickin everywhere. If you want to buy an ear of corn it's wrapped in plastic as if it isn't already wrapped in nature's protection. Seriously people.
This, big time. Pretty much every product or package contains some plastics, including so many one-time use disposable ones. Plastics are infesting the Earth from pole to pole, they are everywhere. Clothes are made of plastic, do laundry and a bunch of microplastics go down the drain. Car tires drop microplastics as they wear. And then there's all the large ones we can see like plastic bags, bottles, etc.
Memory unlocked: "smooth, round microscrubbers" https://youtu.be/Hn15dtxL00A
So, the movie The Graduate was prophetic.
Perfluoroalkyls aka PFAS appear to screw with all manner of body functions.
Since you mention tobacco: It's worth noting that the smoking/cancer connection was noticed long before peak cigarette smoking in the population. Prior to WWII, lung cancer was considered a rare disease. That changed with the mass marketing of cigarettes.
Zembla, a Dutch independent journalism TV program, made a video regarding a big PFAS cover-up in The Netherlands: https://youtu.be/y3kzHc-eV88. If you ask me, PFAS is worse the plastic.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/y3kzHc-eV88
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
While what you say is generally true, I would add that many diseases were "rare" in pre-modern times because they were not easily diagnosis at the time or because people were killed earlier by something else that is now treatable.
Sure, but incidence of lung cancer went way up as tobacco consumption rose heavily in the early 20th century.
There's a couple studies showing that even though your body can't process and remove PFAS and it just keeps accumulating, if you donate blood regularly you reduce the amount in your body by a bit each time. There are other slight health benefits to donating blood and lots of places will pay you for it. So if you can reduce your PFAS intake and donate blood you can slowly get rid of it. I use arch linux btw.
I also use Arch btw
How do I avoid these?
Starbright boat polish contains and advertises that it has PTEF. Think about that , a product designed to be rubbed all over l boats until it "wears off" in waterways. I used to use it ( it is a good polish) until I realized how messed up that is.
A lot of good lubricants and dry lubricants and anti-sieze bolt coatings have PFAs. Most waterproof fabrics like tents, goretex jackets and boots, waterproofing sprays, etc also contain them. Atleast waxed canvas and wool is making a big comeback in the outdoors communities.
Non stick cookware. Water repellent and stain resistant items and coatings. Stuff like that.
Largely by avoiding waterproof or water resistant skincare products such as sunscreen and makeup. Also avoid using nonstick cookware.
I recently got a reverse osmosis water filter to remove it from my water. Since I rent I got a countertop filter but if you own your place you can get a filter installed for all your water.
Social media.
Agreed. Feels weird how normalied addictive social media behavior has become.
I think it's because we're social, we find it more normal to do parasocial activities than some other addictive behaviors which are often antisocial. But the reality is parasocial is just 3x antisocial in a trench coat.
Also how impossible the thought of a social media free future already is
Sadly I can't foresee a future where social media isn't a dominant force. Like what could possibly displace it at this point? Only dismantling GAFAM could make it work.
Yes I am aware of the irony of posting this comment on social media.
Microplastics are the new lead, and screens are the new tobacco, in my opinion. Overuse of sugar in processed foods is the new version of how they'd cut food with inedible stuff like sawdust back in the day.
My mom become an avid anti-plastic person after watching videos and reading things about the damages that microplastics do to the health, nature and the planet. She does everything she can to avoid using plastic things!
When plastics were first introduced to consumers it was sold as indestructible, it will never wear out, never degrade! People were actually concerned at the time, why anyone buy disposable products that never break down, won't they just pile up forever?
After much lobbying the concept of recycling plastics was introduced to help consumers stop worrying about all this indestructible waste and help push the sales of cheap plastic products. Your mom has the right idea, not buying it in the first place is the only way to drive demand down.
I'm not at the point in life where I can really avoid plastic, but I aspire to get there eventually.
Care to elaborate? Always looking for new tips to cut back on my personal plastic use.
Social Media
Microplastics
I think we all know that ones bad.
sure, but no one's doing anything about it
Plastics.
Yes, all plastics. Even bpa free plastics leak estrogenic chemicals into food, and fpod is often stored in plastic containers. Even milk cartons are lined with plastic.
Teflon(nonstick coated pans and pots) arr similarly terrible
Shoes with a raised heel is bad for your knees. (Easily measurably bad. Especially for running)
Vapes.
What will happen is one or another of the flavorings used will be safe to eat because of stomach acid and digestion, but inhaling it into delicate lungs will cause disease long term. Look up popcorn workers lung to see how a common butter flavoring in the past that was meant for eating on popcorn harmed factory workers breathing it in daily.
One of the existing vape flavors... or a new one... will eventually be shown to cause simular lung disease due to daily breathing it in never truly being studied. Someone with a favorite flavor will use it for years, like any smoker with a favorite brand of cigs, then probably get sick from constant long term exposure.
As somebody who vaped for a long time, I kind of disagree with this one. Of every method for quitting smoking, vaping was the easiest and most effective. It let me titrate down to eventually 0 nicotine juice, which let me stop altogether. I only very rarely vape anymore, I keep my mod around in case I am ever out drinking and get an urge, but it is definitely the reason I was able to quit smoking.
The popcorn lung thing is kind of an urban legend, there is no case of any vaper ever getting it from vaping, but diacetyl (the additive in question) has been discontinued in basically all juice just in case anyway.
The usual mantra in vaping communities was always to tell people that if you weren't a smoker already, don't start vaping. Is it better than smoking? Almost assuredly, but it's still not going to be better than just breathing cleaning air. The recommendation was always as a transition away from smoking. It's one of the few hobbies we would congratulate each other over leaving.
If you don't vape or smoke already, don't start though.
If it's so effective at helping people quit, why do you still vape?
I quit smoking a decade ago. I don't occasionally have a cigarette. I don't EVER have a cigarette. Or vape, because I'm an adult.
I've never thought vapes were not-dangerous. Do people really think that? I assume they're safer than cigarettes but less-bad doesn't mean good.
Yeah the sentiment surrounding vapes generally is that they're better than cigarettes. Most people still want to entirely quit vaping, quit nicotine altogether.
Unfortunately, vapes are super enticing to younger people. Even ignoring the underage market entirely, young people love vaping. I'm in the army, so maybe my demographics are skewed, but EVERYBODY is vaping super high nicotine disposable vapes these days.
When I first started vaping, nicotine concrentations were commonly 3 or 6 mg/ml, now 50mg/ml is common.
I think it depends on the vape (and ingredients) in question. Cannabis vapes from dispensaries are required to not have additives. They're all tested thoroughly. So those would be "safer" than things with added oils or flavoring. I'm not sure if they're better than vaporizing the actual plant flower instead of concentrate.
Nicotine based vapes, I can only assume use some interesting ingredients since it's not just a compressed/heated/iced tobacco plant. I've never used one, but I've also never seen someone ask for test results of a nicotine vape (or have them provided).
Tremedous amount of lung damage in the near future. At the most common sense level it makes zero sense to inhale shit into your lungs.
Microplastics and plastic related byproducts, like phtalates (which are connected with a decreased fertility in mammals)
I'm positive that the long term effects of these substances, that can be found in every link of the food chain nowadays, will be discussed a lot in the future
Automobiles. Especially in the USA they are causing a public health crisis, environmental crisis, qualify of life crisis. I grew up loving them and they have uses but I'm fully convinced in the future they should be a luxury used for specific tasks or trips rather than the only form of transportation available.
Plastic and sugar are good answers, but cars are right there in terms of harm and way more acceptable despite that.
Tiktok.
You said product, and I mean this legitimately. Not because of meme hate or hating on what is trendy, but because it is and has been a tool of the CCP. This isn't really in question, and it was one of the first large platforms to entirely erase the idea of a timeline and fully devote itself only to a algorithm feed. One that bytedance has put their finger on the scales of many times.
The effect this has is hard to quantify, but the postmortem on it is going to be incredible as we unpack exactly how much this influenced the trends and politics among zoomers, and to what extent.
Billionaires
Not only, but especially if you participate in a ride in their own-built water vehicles
Forever chemicals
PFAS, which are needed to produce teflon and other nonstick materials. It currently begins to attack attention, but wasn't really an issue a few years ago. It doesn't decay naturally so it will be forever in the environment. The EU is even planning to ban all PFAS.
Worth noting companies usually know it's dangerous way before the public does.
The chemicals used in Teflon manufacturing
Sugar, especially in the US where it's literally added into everything. What's worse is the alternative (substitutes like aspartame) might also be a candidate and we just don't know it yet because enough time hasn't passed to study the long term effects. I try to take stevia as much as possible because it's more "natural", but only a few sugar-free products use it over aspartame. I read recently the WHO still considers aspartame as a carcinogen, but only in excessive amounts, like several glasses of soda a day.
I don't understand why everything has to be so sickly sweet. Give me a soda with real sugar, but like 1/16 the amount
I like excessive sweetness in all of my beverages since I've been drinking excessively sweet beverages all my life. I got the taste buds of a toddler. Still, give me aspartame over sugar, even on the off chance that the meager amount I consume gives me cancer some day that's probably better than what too much sugar would do to me.
I love spicier ginger beers and sarsaparilla, they're so much less sweet and have a lot more flavor
Ive been buying no added sugar cranberry juice (5 cal/serving so low sugar even including the natural sugars) I pour it into a massive dispenser and water it down, basically 6 parts water to 1 part juice with the intent being it make slightly fruit flavored water - it still taste like juice! I can't imagine drinking it straight, we as a society are addicted to sweetness.
Isn't aspartame one of the most closely studied ingredients?
An analysis on a recent study puts it in the Group 2b category and you need to be consuming around 14 cans per day to exceed the recommended intake.
I stopped eating/drinking fake sugar because I felt like it desensitized my sense of taste. I felt like I was dulling my senses to what actually sugar was, thus making me eat more. Idk if that's actually true but it felt like it.
Vapes. The less regulated and underground production, which is easily finding its way to the high street, is building to be a repeat of the tobacco issues with cigarettes.
Surprised this isn't higher tbh.
My mom switched from chain smoking regular cigs to vaping. While I'm glad she's significantly reduced her lung cancer risk, who knows what it's really doing?
It's better than smoking but definitely still unhealthy, especially chain vaping like many do. You should talk to her, let her know you're worried about her health, and see if she might try reducing intake. I quit smoking cold turkey three years ago. It wasn't easy, I was extremely irritable for a month, but the cravings became bearable after that. An easy trade for higher quality of life and longer life expectancy with less wasted money.
While with tabbaco, as @fubo@lemmy.world said
the smoking/cancer connection was noticed long before peak cigarette smoking in the population. Prior to WWII, lung cancer was considered a rare disease. That changed with the mass marketing of cigarettes.
With vaping, lots of studies on pg/vg vaping was done and not much has been found. The UK gov supports it for years now. Most of the bad name of vaping caused by people who didn't bother to research or people who confused it with the EVALI cases,which bought their products illegally and contained vitamin E
Yeah, the 2019-2020 vaping lung illness outbreak had nothing whatsoever to do with nicotine vaping.
It was specifically caused by black-market THC vape cartridges containing vitamin E acetate as a filler. This chemical was marketed to black-market vape makers as "Honey Cut", intended to dilute or "cut" cannabis extracts while keeping the mixture thick so it looked good to customers.
Legit cannabis vapes don't include fillers; a typical California dispensary vape cartridge contains ~90% cannabinoids by weight. Nicotine vapes are water-based rather than oil-based, so vitamin E acetate would not mix with them.
Vitamin E acetate sounds like a healthy thing — it's a vitamin, right? — but it's not. When it's heated in a vape, it produces a variety of chemicals that would be entertaining to the organic chemist — but no good for your lungs. You don't need to be inhaling alkenes or ketenes, to say nothing of carcinogenic benzene.
(Hey stoners! Don't use black-market carts, just like you wouldn't smoke "synthetic cannabis" aka "spice". If you want to vape instead of smoking, and you're not in a place with good dispensaries with lab-tested vape products, use a dry-herb vape and plain ol' herb.)
I said this in the other comment, but vaping is the one thing that helped me successfully quit smoking.
Is it healthy? No, at the absolute best it would be neutral. You shouldn't be breathing anything other than clean air. However, I have little doubt that it is better than smoking. My lungs are in great shape now, and I feel just generally much better. If people want to continue to do research on longterm effects of vaping, great!
Are there issues about underage vaping? Sure, but that is a regulation/enforcement issue and shouldn't be used to punish adults with. I have friends that went back to smoking because of vaping being made illegal where they lived, and you cannot convince me that is better for their health.
A lot of the issues we have had about vaping are regulatory issues with stuff like the Vitamin E incident, not a problem with the underlying concept.
Literally came here to say plastic. That's the one.
Endocrine disrupters - mainly from plastics
Vaping fluid, hydrophobic coatings
Not sure why people keep saying microplastics. That's been known for a long time now.
I mean, idk about vaping. I think we all knew that was dangerous lol.
The way that it has been positioned by the smoking industry as being better/healthier than traditional smoking.
Wouldn't surprise me if it turns out to be worse.
The way that it has been positioned by the smoking industry as being better/healthier than traditional smoking.
Wouldn't surprise me if it turns out to be worse.
Marketing. We put a person on the moon because we were scared of the space race, and then we spent the next 50 years figuring out how to make rich people richer by manipulating human behavior and gamifying everything so you buy into the buy more stuff you don't need and click more stuff you don't care about. We've gotten so good at it, we only need a 10 second short to advertise stuff to you.
This affects everything we do down to its core and will likely be the cause of astronomical ADHD rates in the future.
you're grasping at something deeper here. humans have an underlying tendency to be gullible and easily manipulateable. we need to pour funds and funds into the education system and move more focus onto critical thinking, logical fallacies and self-esteem / self-image, as it plays a large role in calling out injustices and building an accurate world view
imo its the no. 1 reason the world is so fucked. we believe evrything we're told because it appeals to a sense of self-empowerment (our tribe over theirs). hunter gatherer tribes would sometimes literally slaughter each other to survive. it is in our instincts to be able to be convinced that other groups of people are our enemies, when really everyone thinking the exact opposite would be heaven on earth, except for the ultra greedy
So true. The only way that the human race is to survive and prosper into the far future is for us to move to a mindset of the whole world's population being one big tribe, as far as I am concerned. We will eventually destroy ourselves if we keep with the 'us vs them' mindset.
Star Trek was definitely on to something.
I thought the comments section would be filled with vapes.
Guys, i think vapes are a good candidate for something that hindsight will show us was dangerous, and i think images of teens smoking Juul will age as poorly as kids drinking beer.
Capitalism. Been around for all generations but feels like greed is at its worst now.
Aside from tobacco, all of those things were known to be dangerous but used commercially anyway because they were cheaper than alternatives. Today's equivalents are PFAS, plastics, and sweeteners of every kind. You will die with all of them in your body.
Social Media
Probably brake pads. Everyone's living in cities now, just breathing in brake pad and lead particles.
Oh and car tires. Just huffing those all day.
Plastic, PFAS, CO2 Pollution, Tire dust (leading problem is cause of Asthma), Leaded fueled small prop planes (still standard), Oil, Industrialized agriculture (destroys nutrients in soils so food does not have it, produces tons CO2), many more.
Please, please, please, don’t be caffeine! 🤞
Coffee has been around for thousands of years but I'm pretty sure %100 pure caffeine could kill if you ingested enough at once
It's not the purity, it's the dose, like any chemical the dose makes the poison.
The FDA recommends staying under 5 cups (400 mg) a day to avoid negative effects with an average person.
It says toxic effects can be observed with rapid consumption of 12 cups, or 0.15 tablespoons of pure caffeine.
https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/spilling-beans-how-much-caffeine-too-much
This mystery can be resolved by googling 'ld50 caffeine.' ~750mg is toxic and 10,000mg can kill people
The median lethal dose (LD50) of caffeine is estimated between 150 to 200 mg per kilogram but reports of lethal intoxications have been made with doses as low as 57 mg per kilogram. Personally, 300mg is pretty much as far as I want to go.
Same as cocaine
Yes, caffeine can kill. https://www.livescience.com/caffeine-overdose-200-cups-of-coffee
Caffeine isn't terrible for you in moderate amounts, and coffee is actually a decent source or antioxidants especially if you don't get them elsewhere in your diet, but this is independent of caffeine itself (decaf has antioxidants). Daily high doses of caffeine is definitely bad for your health, and can negatively impact other health issues you may have such as anxiety, depression, etc. Do your research, talk to your doctor, and consider decreasing your daily intake.
Sugar is this generation's nicotine.
"smart" devices aka Internet asbestos
Corn. It is a fact that the number of autoimmune diseases are rising. I read a NHS study comparing the data of the last 30 or so years and of right now 1 of 10 people in the UK will get an autoimmune disease at some point in their live such as diabetes, MS, Parkinson,... 30 years ago it was like 1 out of 50. And one common thing in countries with a higher autoimmune disease rate is a lot of corn products, like corn starch, corn sirup,... Right now the final proof is missing cause the studies just started. And maybe it is not corn and something completely different, but the stakes are high it is corn.
I feel like with what you've stated it is far too early to point to corn itself as the cause. Their are so many things that have grown in usage these past 30 years I'm not sure how they could confidently say it is corn itself doing it.
There's also the fact people have been eating corn as a staple for millennia.
Like for instance plastics.
Not only could it be almost anything that's increased in our general environment, but better means to identify specific diseases. Diagnostics and knowledge have advanced in the 30 or so years this study apparently covers, and can account for an "increase" in the prevalence of auto-immune diseases.
In theory, there's still some diseases that while well understood, HCPs still take excruciatingly long to diagnose and prefer to explore routes like mental health and exclusionary diagnoses first, which could suggest prevalence is higher still.
Nah, sugar and plastics.
Corn has a lot of sugar and is put into everything, so it's closely related - but I'm almost 100% it's just sugar in general
This is correlation. Corn (or high fructose corn syrup) is a common ingredient in ultra processed foods, which we already know are the cause of the obesity epidemic. Pre-Colombian societies ate plenty of corn.
It’s also not just about sugar as some other comments have suggested. Humans are built to eats carbs and some tribal people even today get a huge amount of calories from honey without any obesity.
The problem is the way sugar (and fat and other ingredients) are processed in industrial food production. Studies have shown that if you give people food that contains the exact same proportion of fats and sugars, in whole food and junk food form, people will eat more of the junk food. This is the problem. Whole foods are generally all fine.
It's wild to me how much stuff has corn in it. A few years ago SwiftonSecurity did a big thread on Twitter all about corn and its frightening.
https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2020/02/19/disturbing-corn-fact-everything-is-made-from-corn/
That sounds a lot like correlation not causation. Countries that use a lot of corn syrup also use a lot of every other food industry chemical, and somewhere in that chemical soup could be something real, but it's probably not the corn
If it's not known wether it's dangerous, how would anyone reply? With their guts?
This question can only get non proven answers and risks getting answered the top health infox of the moment.
It was only 13 years ago that the FDA changed its stance on BPA from "safe" to "some concern".
Disagree, we know alcohol is dangerous so it's not a surprise. Looking for things that are believed to be safe and normal but actually aren't
i.e. teflon
At least something where some new danger might be discovered in further study. We have enough studies to show alcohol destroys basically every aspect of the body in some way.
I think people are reading this prompt in two different ways. Some people are reading it as "what will be something we discover new dangers of" and others are reading it as "what unhealthy thing might he less socially acceptable in the future"
People off most cultures drink, not just westerners. See Japan.
Also people have drank for thousands of years and I’ve not seen any studies showing there’s more drinking now not that that hypothetical increased drinking has increased cancer rate.
Yes it’s obviously bad and causes cancer.
I know, it's the hill, but I'm on mobile and don't feel like getting a better source. We're not drinking more than ever, but we are drinking more, and it is becoming more normalized again. Also doing it for thousands of years isn't much of an argument since we only recently even discovered cancer
Same with artificial sweeteners
Social media. All forms. Including this one.
Absolutely. As a parent I feel like the time is coming when our kids will basically tell us that unfettered access to technology has left them traumatized. Snapchat connects them to all their friends and also connects to their insecurities and loneliness. It’s a poison that you can’t avoid. An addiction that you can’t overcome because it holds all of your joy and pain at once.
Personally, I feel like I have a balance in my 40’s but I feel really bad for kids right now. They are fucked.
I hope someday they stop listening to their parents, overthrow the corporations and billionaires in power and get rid of all the phony fucks in politics. We have not prepared a good world for them. We failed them.
This, this and this. Remember this? That's what we'll look like to future generations when they look back at our Metagram Tweet Toks
*I think it's about to be the weather
Getting really speculative, but maybe Infinite Scrolling and similar UX design patterns. I think we learned it was dangerous pretty early in, but I have a feeling there isn't currently a widespread understanding of just how badly things like infinite scrolling shortcircuit parts of the brain and cause issues with attention and time regulation in large populations.
If I was more researched on it, I might include infinite short-form content feeds of almost any type to be honest, which may just be another way of saying social media.
Plastics
Microplastics and PFAS
No, seriously, these two will kill Earth, and us
By your definition we don't know yet. Ask again in 10 years.
Except the sad fact is in every one of those examples, they did know. It's just nobody cared because it would hurt the bottom line.
Or they didn’t care because they succumbed to the arguments made by the people who were protecting their own bottom line.
Technicallythetruth
Yes we do. It's silica sand.
Don't forget teflon...
Artificial sweeteners
High Fructose Corn Syrup
ToS for digital products
I would probably say either alcohol or microplastics. Both are carcinogenic. At least alcohol is avoidable, but microplastics pretty much saturate all of our environments. It reminds me of when they were doing experiments to figure out the impact of lead, they couldn't even open the door to the lab, because the airborne concentration of lead would throw off the readings. We might not ever know what real health is like without walking around with grams of microplastics inside us.
I am confused as what the prompt is supposed to be, by your answer. Alcohol is well known to be awful, it's one of the most destructive things you can put in your body. It's a literal poison that can kill you by acute excessive consumption, and destroys almost literally every part of your body over time with excessive consumption... which is easy to do, because it's also highly addictive. In fact it's so addictive, it's one of the few things that you can actually die from withdrawing from. What else is there to learn?
They probably mean that young people now is drinking less that previous generations. Sure, we have known for a while that alcohol is bad, but only recently it has been seen as "why would you drink it?", And it's falling out as social engager.
Saying that, I still drink, I know it's not great for my health, but I usually have a good time with it, and it helps with my introvert Ness.
Probably digital screen exposure. The impact of the digital age on mental health, especially due to increased screen time, is an area of active study. Some early research suggests potential risks, including impacts on sleep, attention, and mental well-being.
Artificial sweeteners. Everyone is so obsessed with whether or not they cause cancer that their other potential effects get much less attention. There's a major industry push to keep them on the shelves, and we still have only recently discovered the gut microbiome.
Fossil fuels.
Things have slowly drifted from "we might wanna consider doing something before this becomes a problem" to "we need an immediate and concrete plan" to "anything short of immediate and drastic action is killing and will continue to kill people" over the course of the last decade or two.
Trans fats. Every processed food was full of the things until the mid 2000s, when it was discovered they were a leading cause of heart disease.
Gas cooking ranges
Edit to clarify: they're way too normal for how toxic they are.
Gas cooking ranges
I Love my gas stove-top (the oven is electric), 3 physical buttons with immediate response <3 !
Are there any dangers except the obvious burning your hand you have in mind? It's heavily regulated where I live so the danger of everything blowing up is quite small.
I don't understand why gas is still used in some countries. It's 1800s tech and induction stoves are superior in every way. For heating geothermal + electric or pellets is also better.
In Belgium residential electricity costs 0.35 €/kWh, gas costs .08 €/kWh.
You need a very, very good heat pump to overcome this enormous price difference. "Geothermal" gets thrown around as a magic catch-all, but industry experts disagree; I was just discussing this with an engineer this weekend, and in Belgium which is very seismically inactive, drilling several hundred meters deep will only yield maybe a 50 °C temperature gradient, which makes it unsustainable (except in some cases like an old mineshafts which can be more readily reconverted to heat an apartment complex, but obviously that is highly situational).
And that doesn't even get into the "holy shit we need to retrofit everything" part of the deal. Virtually every house uses high-temp radiators, which work great with gas/diesel stoves, but terribly with heat pumps. For good efficiency you need to rip all the radiators out and replace them with low-temps radiators or an HVAC system (which aren't cheap to route through 40cm+ thick brick walls).
Pellets aren't magic, they are becoming more common but this is likely to get them banned sometimes soon in big cities like Brussels because while cleaner, they still emit way more fine particulates than a condensation boiler AFAIK.
Of course in my house I've switched to an induction stove for cooking because the price difference doesn't matter as much, and induction is superior in every other way, but it's not hard to see why, with a gas pipe RIGHT THERE for heating anyway, most existing housing has used gas stoves as a default. It's only in the last 15 years or so that induction became good and cheap enough to be worthwhile, because everyone who has used a resistive electric stove will KNOW just how terrible it is to cook with one of those (and people who have had a bad experience with a resistive stove are usually hard to convince that an induction stove is totally different, so that's slowing down their adoption as well).
I live in the Philippines where gas is still primarily used for cooking. I think the problem here is a mix of a lack of government support thanks to gas company lobbying and the lack of affordable electric heating.
Personally I hate induction, or more the implementation I have been exposed to of it, no physical buttons and 1 drop of water will zero out everything :-/
Problem with geothermal is that it costs like 20k EUR all-in to get it installed. Regular air to air heat pumps are better for your average person because they're way cheaper, work most of the time, and also work as air conditioning.
Either way it's better than gas though. But power grids in many countries haven't been built to handle it, so the change from gas to heat pumps needs to be gradual (though I do wish it was faster).
I hate it and have it. The smell is gross, each time i need to cook food
I love my gas stove, we just upgraded the hood, the old one barely covered the range top and was so loud nobody wanted to be in the kitchen when it was running. As unofficial family safety officer and fun dampener I'm always turning it on but that basically made conversations impossible and multitasking difficult.
I grew up with electric ranges and then my young adulthood saw a series of lowest possible price stoves included in apartments, I could not wait to get away from them.
Our extremely crappy coil based electric range burned out and at the time I researched it a pretty nice gas stove was half of what a comparable induction stove was. Now I understand there are more options and it seems obvious to go induction for the next one.
That being said I think I will miss the gas stove, it feels very intuitive the way the flame reacts to the knob and the speed that the pans heat. The coil stoves I have used have all had hot spots, it isnhard to tell when they have reached full temperature and different cookware heats up very differently.
I have & hate gas ranges. The smell of gas when first igniting is gross, each time I need to cook food.
E-cigarettes
It is advertised as a safer option, but it is not.
Teflon.
Teflon isn't really the problem, it is incredibly inert by itself. It is the nasty chemicals needed to process it and bond it to things that are polluting the environment and eventually getting into our bodies because they don't break down.
It's so stable that it probably doesn't even do anything even if it gets into your body.
Cars
TikTok
Pretty sure we're gonna regret the micro plastics.
My guess is future generations will look back in horror how people used stirring devices in plastic bowls, tearing down the inner layer right into their food. I imagine a monochrome flashback scene in a documentary.
It's already inside all of us.
It's been way more than one dangerous product per generation. So people should feel free to choose multiple current ones.
We've known lead is bad for you for thousands of years.
vapes
Literally everything to do with modern life.
I'm not saying that we should all pull a BSG and give it all up to be cavemen again.
But our bodies most certainly didn't evolve in order to sit at desks, stare at screens, communicate without physical contact, and avoid sunshine like the plague.
We evolved to be active, but developed the technology that allows most of us to be sedentary 99% of the time, and then we wonder why obesity and chronic back pain are pandemics.
Sugar
Complete shot in the dark but my brain can't let it be (also fuck it, thats the point of this topic):
Surfactants, specifically modern soap and soap products. I strongly suspect that petroleum based soaps cause damage and issues.
When you wash your glasses in a dishwasher, pour some water in after it is dried. Look at how many bubbles are formed on the surface. Pour it out and do it again - usually there will be less bubbles. That means you are ingesting leftover detergent that wasn't rinsed off. Can't be great for you.
It feels like the WHO - or more realistically - the media is/was trying hard to make aspartame this by claiming it causes cancer. They're certainly annoying the soft drinks vendors using them.
Great avatar btw.
Most Vegetable and seed oils. They are a silent killer and they are in everything now including French fries to replace beef tallow.
There's hardly a processed food that does not contain them and they are terrible for cardiovascular health.
Along with the fake sugars and sugar substitutes they will be among the things we will look back on and ask why.
Perhaps microplastic? I know it already kills by choking turtles or so but no answer yet if it can cause some health effects.
Edit: Just saw the comments now, microplastic seem to be the most common comment. So here is another go, The chemical they used in cars I think it's VOC/ also known as new car smell currently it can make some people sea sick. Right now there is lack of study that it is actually toxic.
PFAS, microplastics, intrusive advertising
The toxic substance put in nearly all the plastics made in China. If it smells sickeningly sweet or fumey, it's toxic.
Acrylates?
SOCIAL MEDIA
The internet
Some that haven’t been mentioned:
Prolonged Sitting Prolonged Loud Headphone Use Off-Label Drug Use (e.g., Ozempic, Wegovy) Sun/Heat/Poor Air Exposure Thiamine/B1 Deficiency via Alcohol Consumption
We know they’re all dangerous (to wildly varying extents), but I don’t think we’ve had enough moments-of-reckoning, like with emphysema and lung cancer following long term smoking.
cell phones/screens
Coffee, I think. People think coffee help you stay awake and boost your productivity.
But I think, coffee put you into unnecessary stress (stress while sitting still ? Is it natural ?), Disruption sleep pattern,...
Will cause lot of issues if you keep consume few cup daily
Coffee (and more specifically caffeine) is one of the most-tested food substances on the planet. Funnily enough, every time they test it, they find some new way that caffeine is actually good for you. It has all sorts of surprising benefits.
Obviously you shouldn't be drinking a galloon of it a day, but in moderation, coffee is a very healthy drink. Served black it's zero-calorie, zero-sugar, fights diabetes, lowers your weight, fights depression, prevents liver disease, and of course tastes good.
Coffee is amazing.
Coffee is a prime example of too much of a good thing might not be good anymore.
Coffee might be fine here and there but when people use it to replace good sleep habits or to general energy to a point of reliance it might not longer be fine.
I think the better point here is that a lot of things have the potential to be dangerous if used too much.
A cheeseburger on its own is perfectly fine, five of them a week is a problem. Eight ounces of coffee a day is fine, more than twenty can be a problem. Eight ounces of soda is okay on its own but just because it's served in huge bottles does not mean you're supposed to drink it as your main source of liquid.
In the US, we have nutritional facts on most things but most people ignore them. If you care to, you can choose to limit your intake of substances to one serving.
Coffee's been around for hundreds of years. You think there's really going to be an about face on it after all this time?
Wow! So many downvotes on true statement, but even that with disclaimer "I think".
Come on people, coffee is not good for you. Nor is alcohol, nor sugar.
I do use them all, but I am not lying myself that those are not bad for my health.
Please don't be it Wifi or cellular.
Plastic
Pfas
Plastics in general.
I’m reading this list and thinking we’re screwed
I think people are a little overly dramatic, tbh.
The internet. I'm sorry.....
Smartphones and Internet usage. We know it, but no one cares.
That whole thing turned out to be a nothingburger. The report said that if you drink like 9 cans of diet soda it could possibly cause cancer. If you're drinking 9 cans of diet soda a day aspartame is the least of your problems.
It was more like 26 cans I believe. Stupidly high.
My wife has been telling me for years that research was still ongoing about aspartame being potentially carcinogenic, so I should be careful with my at most one diet soda a day. When the news first came up that the WHO was about to classify it as such, I was like “oh shit, it’s happening?”
And then the details came a few days later, and I couldn’t stop laughing about it. 😆
The state your kidneys would be in
*possibly
Javascript
Blue light.
how is that harmful? ambient light is blue most of the day
It's one of the markers that your brain uses to control its circadian rhythms. During half of your 24 hour cycle its fine. Our devices push that balance too far though, contributing to stress and insomnia by disrupting that regulatory mechanism.
Wouldn't be too different from living in the artic circle during the summertime, except without blackout shades and we're doing it to ourselves with tvs, computers and mobile devices.
Is coffee dangerous because drinking it at 11pm each night keeps you awake too? I think that's overstating your case, although I think there is a minor benefit to limiting blue light.
personally, I have all the lights set to turn red an hour after sunset and it has had a much larger effect than limiting screen time at bedtime, which is what most people seem to focus on.
Depends how sensitive you are to caffeine. I strongly suspect sensitivity to blue light is similarly varied between individuals. I am not a doctor, however, and I honestly don't give enough fucks to try to convince you.
Only when you're trying to get to sleep
Not exclusively, the body's systems are far more complex and interconnected than that. It's really just the need to have some kind of nighttime for your overall well-being. It's what we evolved around.
Artificial sweeteners?
Coal.
progestin-based contraceptive implants
Why specifically the implants do you think? I appreciate more studies especially looking at extended usage are definitely needed. At least so far there's no evidence of increase in certain kinds of cancers or reduction of bone density (unlike depo). Still, I've just realised I've been using nexplanon for 15 years and I have no way to know what impact it's actually had on me.
Just the length of time present, really. I suppose the hormonal IUD would be included in this. But it's idle speculation more than anything - I have given a longer reply to another comment.
Wait what's wrong with them? I've had one for 4 years now and haven't had any problems
I think they need to be dosed for the individual, which means a lot of women are receiving a much higher dose than necessary. Whether that be due to bodyweight, or enzyme polymorphisms causing different people to metabolise them at different rates. So for lots of people there's no problem at all. But for many women there's massive weight gain and destroyed libido, altered sexual functioning, etc.
It's also just something I've wondered about - they're physiologically disruptive by definition, and women might stay on them for thirty or more years; that's a hell of a long time for a cumulative effect to take place.
Again, the whole purpose of the post is speculation, so I'm just putting this out there. I don't mean to be conspiratorial at all, it just wouldn't surprise me if we found out there were certain consequences from their use. And so many people use them, it would be a massive scandal like the other things mentioned.
AI. We've seen the movies. We know it's coming - the one robot that doesn't follow the rules and then becomes the leader of the rest.
singularity
Silica Sand. And just like asbestos it's in quite a few products, many of which you will find in your home.
Meat and any other animal product. They come from needless power abuse and demand forced work, murdering, torture and rape.
Actions lead to reactions/consequences. Our reality is worse/more chaotic because of this.
Resentment
antipsychotics
Meat and animal products in general.
Linked to quite a lot of health problems, kills the climate and billons of innocent individuals are dying needlessly in the process.
You saw the new emplemon video 😃
Sorry, i can't look in the future.
There is an ongoing study showing that artificial sweeteners (Aspartamein particular) cause cancer.
All those people trying to stay healthy to drinking diet things... are giving themselves cancer instead.
Everything causes cancer.
5G
Just kidding... :D
mRNA
Animal products. Animal agriculture.
[e] Your downvotes make me horny.
You can put another check in your daily tally of being annoying and out of tune with the tone of a conversation in the name of your cause. Veganism is officially something I agree with but will avoid because I'm lazy and also because of how every thread on social media has to contain a tone-deaf post with veganism as the answer to the question. Becoming a stereotype is one way to get you all caps message out. Please combine it with annoying people into changing. Veganism is essentially synonymous with loudly interjecting yourself into every remotely related subject. At this point I am not sure if there are real vegans online or just trolls trying to make them look annoying. Yall are right, but your delivery needs work.
cry more
raised vegan by my folks, in the 80s, against my will. nothing wrong with choosing a diet but forcing it on someone is what turns off many from veganism
Is Tobacco dangerous? I thought it was mostly the ridiculous amount of chemicals they soaked and resoaked it in when making cigarettes that made it especially bad.
Could be smart watches. Don't quote me on this, but wearing a watch 24/7 that emits light to constantly track your heart rate cannot exactly be good for your health (unless you truly need it)
Conversely, if smart watches with accurate health monitoring become cheap and commonplace it might drastically improve health outcomes by motivating people to see doctor's when needed for subtle heart issues that would otherwise go unchecked.
The internet.
That's a naive generalization.
More precisely algorithmic gaze harvesting and targeted advertising.
Vaccines
Gender affirming hormone therapy
I know this is a bait comment, but I'll entertain it a bit.
Extra estrogen actually does increase your risk of certain medical conditions like endometrial cancer (cancer of the uterus) and blood clots (potentially leading to things like a stroke or heart attack).
However, cisgender people still do need to have hormone supplementation at times for various reasons and doctors are generally able to mitigate the risks fine/the risks are not overly high. So I can't see this causing some sort of major health incident.
What an insane comment. Something that pertains to 0.1 of .01% of the population is the equivalent of the magnitude of tobacco on the world, lead, or asbestos
Plastic. Its in your blood ffs
This may be true but I hate the practice of referring to "plastic" as if it's a single substance. It's a bunch of different materials that don't really have that much in common with each other, especially from a health/toxicity standpoint.
For example, people treat it as common sense that "you shouldn't burn plastic" because the smoke is "toxic". For PVC this is totally true, it makes very nasty stuff like dioxin that will poison you. But on the other hand you can burn polyethylene (think milk jug) and it's no more toxic than burning a candle. Definitely way healthier to breath than wood campfire smoke, for example.
There's also such a silly pattern where people learn some chemical might have some effect on the body and suddenly everyone is up in arms about it. For example Bisphenol A in many applications was replaced by the very similar Bisphenol S just so things could be labeled "BPA Free". BPS probably has similar estrogenic effects to BPA.
I'd say the moral of the story is be wary of received wisdom about chemical toxicity from people who aren't chemists.
Now I just want an accurate infographic of "safe" combustible plastics.
Have you heard of Dihydrogen monoxide? It literally kills hundreds of thousands of people every single year all over the world, including young children.
You don't hear about it in the news though do you....
Not only BPAs but many chemicals like BPAs can cause birth defects because our bodies think they are estrogen.
If this worries you, read the books It Starts With the Egg and Grain Brain.
They both suggest that not only what you eat, but how it's prepared can affect the health of a child.
For instance it's a big no-no, according to It Starts With the Egg, to heat most plastics in the microwave. The heat breaks the plastic down, it can get in your blood, your body will think it's estrogen, and they don't even know the full effects of this yet.
So think about
These chemicals are not just in food:
Are microplastics similarly diverse in their effects on the human body?
So what you're saying is instead of having a bonfire I should be have a milk jug fire?
Also be wary of people that say they are chemists on the internet when oil, plastics, and guns have mostly only been researched by their manufacturers. All totally safe.