Is ingesting plastic actually fine for our health?

“Those fancy tea bags? Microplastics in them are macro offenders” (Guardian) says that excessively rich and/or pretentious people who drink tree from nylon bags are ingesting a lot of plastic (bonus: they’re also trashing the environment by consuming way more in energy and materials than folks who drink tea made from paper tea bags).

One local source for ingestible plastic is Tea Forté. Customers of this high-cost brand have been getting massive doses of plastic, far above what the turbine-powered helicopter moms fear kids might get from eating food cooked in a Teflon pan (example paranoia: “I do like to back up my points with scientific studies, but often it takes many years for a complete and acceptable study to make useful conclusions. With something like Teflon cookware, there are lots of vested interests so it could be a few more decades before valuable health information is known.” (i.e., we can predict Earth’s temperature 100 years from now, but 63 years of history with Teflon pans is not enough to say anything definitive; it is complicated by the fact that companies are getting insanely rich selling $10 pans at Target and using the profits to corrupt academic science)).

Have the drinkers of these fancy plastic-packaged teas done the required experiment for us? Their bodies might be half plastic by now and yet they aren’t dying off at an extraordinary rate.

7 thoughts on “Is ingesting plastic actually fine for our health?

  1. Wouldn’t a pretensions rich person drink loose tea brewed properly in a pot, no paper, no plastic?

    Happy thanksgiving!

  2. You can drink a vial of Teflon and it will just go straight through. It’s perfectly safe. *BUT* when it gets ruined on a pan through misuse it is a problem. Teflon emits toxic fumes when used with high heat, and the coating also gets ruined. You also have to use a soft spatula and not scratch up the surface.

    Once the pan surface is compromised the teflon flakes are definitely *not* something you want going through your gut.

    Why can’t people follow the simple instructions that teflon is for medium/low heat only, handwash only, and not to be abused with metal utensils? It is a mystery.

    Steel and aluminum cookware is actually probably a bigger health problem. Nickel and aluminum leaching into your food is a bad idea. I’ll lay money the teflon phobes are cooking acidic dishes in steel pans, and also using cast iron which similarly leaches metals into the food.

  3. I’m using Breville Tea Maker, which makes tea automatically. This is the best tea you can get, and without fussing. Also, a great Christmas gift. Leaves from Harney & Sons.

    If I need to make a tea in a cup, I put Harney & Sons leaves into the paper bag. You can buy them by a hundred. It produces much better taste than any pre-packaged leaves since lower quality leaves go into the pre-packaged bags.

    It’s time to upgrade your tea setup 😀

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