World’s biggest study finds array of harms from common plastics

This is yet another foray in the war against BPA etc. It appears to be based on a "report" that accepts as proven the harms alleged, depite the repeated failures of the central correlations to reach significant levels in research. See the originating article below:

https://annalsofglobalhealth.org/articles/10.5334/aogh.4056

The world’s first major scientific review into the effects of plastics and microplastics chemicals on human health has found that the chemicals in many common products are associated with a wide range of health risks, including poor birth outcomes and miscarriage, infertility, metabolic disease and endocrine dysfunction.

Australian researchers who carried out the study say it “categorically proves” that none of the chemicals examined, including BPA, flame retardants, PFAS and an array of other common chemicals found in plastics that infiltrate people’s bodies in small quantities every day, can be considered safe.

“This is a red flag for the world,” said Sarah Dunlop, head of plastics and human health at the Minderoo Foundation. “We must minimise our exposure to these plastic chemicals, as well as the many that haven’t yet been assessed for human health outcomes but are known to be toxic.”

The peer-reviewed study published in the Annals of Global Health by Australian doctors and academics associated with the Perth-based Minderoo Foundation was an umbrella review – considered the highest level of scientific synthesis – of almost 800 published studies and 52 systematic reviews into the effects of plastics chemicals.

“To our knowledge, this study is first to investigate the complete, high-level, evidence for human health effects of plastics and plastic-associated chemicals across a broad range of plastic chemical groups,” the authors of the study said.

It follows a Florey Institute study earlier this month that for the first time established a biological ­pathway between the plastic chemical bisphenol A (BPA) and autism spectrum disorder.

The umbrella review investigated five classes of chemicals including bisphenols and phthalates, PBDE, PCBs and PFAS, known as a ‘forever chemical’ used at defence bases that has been found in several crucial water supply plants. Also included were plasticisers and flame retardants – two classes of functional additive with the highest concentration ranges in plastic.

The study found that none of the investigated classes of chemicals are safe with statistically significant harmful impacts found for fertility in men and women, birth weight in babies, children’s neurodevelopment, and the development of Type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease and asthma.

Bisphenol A (BPA) – commonly found in food packaging, water bottles and cosmetics – was found to be associated with genital changes in infants, type 2 diabetes in adults, insulin resistance in children and adults, polycystic ovary syndrome, obesity and hypertension in children and adults and cardiovascular disease.

Phthalates plasticisers – found in a wide array of plastic products including nail polish, children’s toys, cosmetics and medical products – were associated with spontaneous pregnancy loss, genital changes in boys, and insulin resistance in children and adults.

There were additional associations between certain phthalates and decreased birth weight, type 2 diabetes in adults, precocious puberty in girls, reduced sperm quality, endometriosis, adverse cognitive development and intelligence quotient (IQ) loss, adverse fine motor and psychomotor development and elevated blood pressure in children and asthma in children and adults.

Other types of chemicals were similarly associated with pregnancy loss, decreased birth weight, endometriosis, bronchitis in infants, obesity, and the cancers Hodgkin’s lymphoma and breast cancer.

It is next to impossible for an individual to limit completely their exposure to harmful plastics chemicals, although experts advise reducing consumption of water in plastic bottles, reducing consumption of packaged food, and not heating plastic containers in the microwave.

Regulation of production and plastics chemicals in products is the only way to protect human health. But there is very little regulation of plastic chemicals in Australia or most other countries.

A Global Plastics Treaty is currently being negotiated that advocates of reform hope will set the stage for recognition of the substances’ harmful health effects and increase pressure on governments to regulate.

Professor Dunlop said there was now no doubt that plastics chemicals were harmful to human health.

“Plastic is not the safe, inert material we thought it was,” she said. “It’s made of 16,000 chemicals or so. We are exposed. We’re exposed across our lifespan, and there are health impacts across our lifespan.

“We’ve got to pull together and act fast, because plastic production is soaring. We need to really get the cause of the problem and reduce or cap plastic production.

“The second thing is to take a really good, hard look at the chemicals, because at the moment, unlike pharmaceuticals, which are highly regulated, industrial chemicals are being produced at a rate that is from this just outstripping our ability to identify what’s being produced and outstripping our ability to find out whether or not it’s harmful.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/health/worlds-biggest-study-finds-array-of-harms-from-common-plastics/news-story/09d9382f70c7db3b4edc199946bc0bb9

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Eating just two slices of ham per day could raise diabetes risk

Rubbish! Another meta-analysis! You can prove anything you want by a meta-analysis. What you include and exclude is the key. And the "finding" here is totally predictable -- being a confirmation of a popular belief

Journal article here:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(24)00179-7/fulltext

Note that the finding was observed "in North America and in the European and Western Pacific regions" only. And note that the only confounders allowed for appear to have been age, sex, and BMI


Eating a ham sandwich a day could increase the risk of type 2 diabetes by 15 per cent, a study has found.

The team, from the University of Cambridge, found that processed meat and unprocessed red meat significantly increased the risk of developing type 2 diabetes in the next decade.

The researchers found that just 50 grams of processed meat per day - equivalent to two slices of ham - increased the risk by 15 per cent. Consuming red meat every day had a similar effect: those who had just 100 grams, the equivalent of a small steak, had a 10 per cent higher risk of diabetes in the next ten years.

The team also tested whether the consumption of poultry had the same effect, but found that this was minimal when controlling for factors such as age, gender and health-related behaviours, including smoking and drinking alcohol.

Professor Nita Forouhi of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge, a senior author on the paper, said: “Our research provides the most comprehensive evidence to date of an association between eating processed meat and unprocessed red meat and a higher future risk of type 2 diabetes.

“It supports recommendations to limit the consumption of processed meat and unprocessed red meat to reduce type 2 diabetes cases.”

The research, published in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, used data from 31 different previous studies. Figures came from the InterConnect Project, which meant that researchers could analyse the data of the individual and not the results of the previous research as a whole. Data came from about two million participants across 20 different countries.

Professor Naveed Sattar, from the University of Glasgow, said: “The data suggest cutting red and processed meats from diets may not only protect people from heart disease and stroke but also from type 2 diabetes, a disease on the rise worldwide.

“Furthermore, a considerable part of the latter link may be weight gain but other mechanisms may be possible. Food systems should be adapted accordingly for the benefit of planetary and public health.”

Previous research, published last year, has also found that eating red meat only twice a week significantly increased the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

The research, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that those who ate at least two portions of meat each day - such as bacon for breakfast then a ham sandwich for lunch - were 62 per cent more likely to get diabetes than those who limited themselves to two servings of red meat a week.

Diabetes occurs when a person’s blood sugar becomes chronically high as the body stops producing or responding to insulin. Most cases are type 2 which can be linked to poor diet and obesity. Cases have doubled over the past two decades and last year 4.3 million people in Britain were living with a formal diagnosis, while about one million adults are living with undiagnosed type 2 diabetes.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/the-times/eating-just-two-slices-of-ham-per-day-could-raise-diabetes-risk/news-story/c801826c52cb0913fa88f521119ac0de

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BPA plastic chemicals in the womb have been found to be linked with higher levels of autism

Another vastly over-hyped headline in pursuit of the jihad against BPA. The article itself (below) is moderately sane, with large reservations expressed. e.g.:

“I do want to stress it’s not the cause of autism,”

"if the BPA-autism link was causal in nature"

"may be consistent with autism spectrum disorder,”

And in the journal article we read that effects were observed

"only in males with low aromatase genetic pathway activity scores"

So there is NO evidence that BPA is generally harmful in humans

The journal article is:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48897-8

Boys with lower levels of a key brain enzyme who are born to mothers with higher levels of plastic chemicals in their wombs are six times more likely to develop autism by the time they are a teenager, a world-first Australian study has found.

A decade-long study by the Florey Institute has for the first time established a biological ­pathway between the plastic chemical bisphenol A (BPA), which is found in food and drink containers, cosmetics and ­packaging, and autism spectrum disorder.

“BPA can disrupt hormone-controlled male fetal brain development in several ways, including silencing this key enzyme, aromatase, that controls neurohormones and is especially important in fetal male brain development,” study co-author Anne-Louise Ponsonby said. “This appears to be part of the autism puzzle.”

BPA is ?a chemical that is added to plastics to make them more malleable and durable. It is virtually impossible to avoid in daily life.

Several previous studies have posited a link between it and autism, but the Florey study is the first long-term research incorporate human studies to examine the interplay between prenatal BPA, aromatase function and the development of autism in a large cohort of mothers and babies.

Florey researchers have found evidence of higher levels of the plastic chemical bisphenol A (BPA) in pregnant mothers who gave birth to sons with autism. Research published in Nature Communications, led by Florey scientists Dr Wah Chin Boon and…
The peer-reviewed Florey research, published in Nature Communcations, found that the link between BPA in mothers and ­autism in children was particularly evident in the top quarter of boys in the cohort with an ­inherent vulnerability to the endocrine-disrupting properties of BPA plastics – those with lower levels of the enzyme aromatase.

The researchers studied 1770 children over 10 years from two cohorts of mothers and children in the Barwon Infant Study in Australia and the Columbia Centre for Children’s Health and Environment in the US, finding that boys in this group who were born to mothers with higher urinary BPA levels in late pregnancy were 3½ times more likely to have autism symptoms by the age of two, and six times more likely to have a verified ­autism diagnosis by age 11.

“I do want to stress it’s not the cause of autism,” Professor Ponsonby said. “Autism is a multi-factorial disease, and it’s going to have a range of genetic and other drivers. So this is a contributing factor in some cases.”

In the two large birth cohorts studied, it was established that higher BPA levels in pregnant mothers were associated with epigenetic changes, or gene switching which suppressed the aromatase enzyme. As well as ­establishing the link in humans, Florey scientist and co-author Wah Chin Boon was also able to establish for the first time the biochemical pathway in which BPA suppressed aromatase in laboratory mice studies.

“We found that BPA suppresses the aromatase enzyme and is associated with anatomical, neurological and behavioural changes in the male mice that may be consistent with autism spectrum disorder,” Dr Boon said.

“This is the first time a biological pathway has been identified that might help explain the ­connection between autism and BPA.”

Autism affects between 1 and 2 per cent of all children in Western countries and the prevalence is on the rise.

Professor Ponsonby said that the findings indicated that among boys in the general population with a greater inherent vulnerability to the effects of endocrine disruptors, about 10 per cent of autism diagnoses may potentially be able to be prevented by BPA avoidance if the BPA -autism link was causal in nature.

Aromatase has been described as “a master controller of steroid hormone-directed brain development” and is responsible in the brain for converting the hormone testosterone to neuroeostrogen.

“Aromatase is more important in male brain development,” ­Professor Ponsonby said. “These finding may explain some of the male excess observed in ­autism.”

In lab studies, the Florey has also for the first time identified a possible “antitode” to this process – a type of fatty acid that when ­injected in mice was found to ­reverse the disruption of aromatase.

The scientists posited that the fatty substance, which is a major lipid component of the royal jelly of honeybees, may be able to correct a deficiency in aromatase-dependent estrogen signalling in the brain. They say this potential antidote warrants further study.

BPA is a chemical used in the lining of some food and beverage packaging to protect food from contamination and extend shelf life. Small amounts of BPA can migrate into food and beverages from containers. Tiny amounts of the chemical can enter the skin via clothes and cosmetics, and it can also be inhaled in things like paint fumes.

In 2010, the Australian government announced a voluntary phase-out of BPA use in polycarbonate baby bottles.

Food Standards Australia New Zealand recent said that when food safety authorities around the world reviewed BPA “they have generally concluded there are no safety concerns at the levels people are exposed to”.

However, last year the European Food Safety Authority published a re-evaluation of the risks to public health from the presence of BPA in food.

It concluded the tolerable daily intake for BPA should be substantially reduced from the temporary value it had previously established in 2015.

Australia’s regulator says it has “considered EFSA’s re-evaluation of BPA and has reservations about the approach taken”.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/science/bpa-plastic-chemicals-in-the-womb-have-been-found-to-be-linked-with-higher-levels-of-autism/news-story/5f9ac75fa810cdbfcd447e51c017e224

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Drinking from plastic bottles can raise blood pressure due to microplastics entering the bloodstream, study suggests

"Suggests" is the word. The study was based on the responses of only EIGHT people and there was NO measurement of microplastic intake at any point. So no evidence that microplastics caused the differences observed. And the results were highly variable with men mostly not affected. What a heap of steaming manure! The journal article is

https://www.mdpi.com/2673-8929/3/3/26

Drinking from plastic bottles can raise blood pressure as a result of microplastics entering the bloodstream, a study suggests.

Microplastics have also been found in fluids in glass bottles, according to other research, and experts say the associated higher blood pressure can lead to an increased risk of heart disease.

The latest study found blood pressure went down after participants stopped all fluid intake, including water, from plastic and glass bottles, and drank only tap water for two weeks.

Researchers in the department of medicine at Danube Private University in Austra said: 'We concluded, after extensive research, that beverages packaged in plastic bottles should be avoided.

'Remarkable trends were observed. The results of the study suggest, for the first time, that a reduction in plastic use could potentially lower blood pressure, probably due to the reduced vol-ume of plastic particles in the bloodstream.

'The changes we observed in blood pressure suggest that reducing the intake of plastic particles could lower cardiovascular risk.'

Research shows that microplastics – microscopic fragments that are the result of plastic degradation triggered by UV radiation or the result of a bottle being knocked about – are ubiquitous.

Microplastics have been found in saliva, heart tissue, the liver, kidneys and placenta. Several studies have found high concentrations in water in plastic bottles.

In the new study, reported in the journal Microplastics, the researchers had eight men and women get their daily fluid intake from tap water and told them to abstain from drinks stored in plastic or glass bottles.

Several blood pressure measurements were taken at the start and during the study. The results showed a statistically significant decline in diastolic blood pressure – the pressure in the arteries when the heart rests between beats – after two weeks.

The researchers said: 'Based on the findings, indicating a reduction in blood pressure with decreased plastic consumption, we hypothesize that plastic particles present in the bloodstream might contribute to elevated blood pressure.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13706389/Drinking-plastic-bottles-raise-blood-pressure-microplastics-entering-bloodstream-study-suggests.html

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