This is sort of a shower thought because this morning I was using some shaving cream and I thought, if it turns out in 5 years this was giving me cancer, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Comes out a goo, ejected from a can with force, immediately becomes a foam?
Do you have anything you use that you think might be too good to be true?
Toothbrush. In one hand it scrubs food and gunk away and helps distribute fluoride toothpaste around. On the other it’s made of tiny plastic bristles that are probably disintegrating when in your mouth and growing a fun ecosystem when out of it.
Ever since I heard of microplastic, this has been on my mind quite a bit. Although it might not be “ingested” if they are micro enough, it can probably still get absorbed every time you brush. Multiple that by every day of your life and, boom, now there’s plastic in my balls and I’m 3D printing on my girl’s face.
the number of things growing on your toothbrush is definitely non zero but being frequently scrubbed in sodium fluoride probably inhibits a good portion of it\
related though, electronic toothbrushes are way, way better in terms of tooth care, and my understanding the last time I read through marketing bullshit a few years ago was that the rotational/mechanical ones were better than the ones that just vibrate i.e. Oral B vs Sonicare, but the fucking Oral B toothbrush heads have fucking exposed bits of the mechanism, like, there’s these holes in it, so like, guess what? mold grows in there
I don’t understand how that isn’t like, you know, a massive design flaw that should be changed immediately, but I guess they want people to swap toothbrushes more often than mold would grow, idk
I bought a uv tooth brush sterilizer. Not sure if it’s doing anything useful but it’s a colourful addition to the bathroom.
I work in hazardous materials handling and safety, and I studied chemistry. I’ve done a lot of soil remediation and I’m pretty up to date on how we (Europeans) handle the safety of our air, food and water.
So, good news: your air hasn’t been cleaner since basically we started burning coal. Your drinking water hasn’t been this safe since, oh, pre-agrarian times. Your food is probably less nutritious per gram thanks to faster growing food, but your diet is (potentially) better than any human has ever had (depending on your personal choices).
That said, there are some things I avoid like the plague:
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Swimming in open water. It’s (potentially) full of parasites, toxic algae, human and cattle feces and chemical runoff. Probably not all at once, but still. YMMV if you don’t live near the sea, mountain streams are much cleaner then those at the river delta.
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Home grown food from urban gardens. Your soil is probably completely untested, and the idea of “maybe I shouldn’t just pour chemical waste out of the window” is barely 4 decades old. And that’s counting the dubious quality of planter soil that is basically unregulated, and what people use as decoration. (Do NOT use wooden railroad ties or tires as planters for food). And of course what people use as pesticides isn’t exactly closely monitored either.
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Drinking water from wells, springs etc. see all the above.
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Ordering anything with wish/aliexpress that comes in contact with food. You know that stuff is completely unregulated, why the hell would you lick it? Nobody knows what it’s made of.
And there’s one thing I don’t avoid, but it’s super unhealthy: wood fires. Yeah, a hearth or a campfire is awesome, but the smoke is super fucking bad for you. The carcinogens are stronger and last longer than in cigarettes, and its a hell of a lot more of them. I lie to myself and say it’s worth it though, and that I don’t do it every day, and other bad excuses.
Wood fires are bad? Does this have to do with the wood? What about charcoal? No more bbqs then?
Charcoal isn’t as bad as wood, it creates less smoke and the most complex chemicals are already gone. Gas is better, since it burns much cleaner, and electric obviously doesn’t create any gasses at all.
On the other hand, grilling and smoking red meat means dripping fat, which means smoke, meaning you create a whole new set of PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), which you breathe in and get stuck to the meat and those are carcinogens. On top of that, red meat is already not too great for you. Eating burned food (charring) is also really unhealthy.
But assuming you don’t spend every day breathing mostly bbq-smoke and gasses, I wouldn’t worry about this too much. If your main diet is home grilled beef over self-made charcoal, you definitely need to reevaluate your lifestyle choices though.
Home grown food from urban gardens. Your soil is probably completely untested, and the idea of “maybe I shouldn’t just pour chemical waste out of the window” is barely 4 decades old.
And let’s not forget that any soil near a road had a ton of lead released nearby throughout much of the last century, and that just stays there. As well as lead paint chips from buildings.
Plastic food containers. I mean, we already know it’s pretty bad, but I would not be surprised if it ends up being way worse than we think. That, and most aerosols. Febreze, hairspray, spray tans, things of that nature
I just saw an article the other day that black plastic utensils are toxic. I’m right there with you.
A couple places near me still use styrofoam. I can’t get past it.
Because of those articles, I just got rid of my black plastic utensils, but I’ve been using them over a decade so if they were contaminated, it’s probably too late
I stopped microwaving plastic containers like 15-20 years ago. Hopefully that’s enough.
I think you’re confusing volatile organic compounds like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and HFCFs with general aerosols. CFCs destroy the ozone layer, and are banned worldwide.
Aerosola are just droplets in a gas. Clouds are aerosols. They’re perfectly safe to use in general, assuming the droplets and the gas are safe.
Clean air act banned cfcs, not aerosols. Aerosols are just pressurized gases.
Not really “secretly” bad for you, but all the plastic in our lives. I wonder how we’ll ever replace it cause everything you buy at the supermarket (in developed countries) is wrapped in plastic.
Everything you touch and use involves plastics and petrochemicals. Even stuff you wouldn’t think of like the coatings that allow street signs to reflect better and have massively improved safety. Lightbulbs? No more efficiency for you, most LEDs are on a plastic substrate. We will never get away from plastic, not at this point. You could make it so that food isn’t wrapped in plastic and that wouldn’t make a dent in our plastic use.
Our phones are probably doing something to us
I read somewhere that the existence of the internet massively stifles our ability to reason. For every question I have, spending a few minutes to ponder what the most plausible answer is provides a small workout for my brain. If everything I’m curious about is answered within seconds, I don’t get those mental workouts.
I think that comes down to your desire to learn. One person might just repeat a google answer but another person might spend some time thinking about why it’s the right answer.
Google is how people get degrees after all, it’s the modern day version of hunting down books in libraries
I think there are many questions where it’s very easy to convince yourself the solution is obvious after you’ve been shown it, but it’s less obvious for someone who is taking the time to try to figure it out on their own.
I teach college math courses (usually around calculus-level), and for every exam I give I will write a practice exam to post online a week before, and I’ll devote the lecture prior to the exam to reviewing those problems. I try to make every problem that appears on the exam very similar to one that was on the practice. The students who attempt the problems before the review session, even the students who get incorrect solutions in the process, will bulldoze their exams and will say it was essentially identical to the practice, while the students who just watch me give the solutions and copy down what I’m writing will tell me the practice was easy but this was barely similar at all.
When you see an obvious solution immediately, you completely bypass seeing potential stumbling blocks which might have tripped you up.
