Homeopathic levels of plastic are the latest environmental scaremongering fad (Nanoplastics! Microplastics!) dominating partisan corporate media when they are not suddenly simping for Trickle Down Economics, Vaccines, and Capitalism they distrusted just a short while ago.
Naturally, companies are rushing to keep you safe from plastic which can be detected in everything. If you want to detect it in your home and annoy your family talking about how much virtual cancer you want to avoid, A McGill team fired up the 3-D printer and made the hollow-laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (HoLDI-MS) test platform.
That’s right, a plastic detector made from…plastic.
But it’s basically saving the planet because they can do analysis with less elaborate setups for the low, low price of…well, whatever you are willing to spend. That’s the way these things work. Someone in academia senses there is a market and because they have real jobs there is no risk of failure.
Then they pay a corporate journal to publish it, like in this case, where it goes through ‘editorial’ review rather than legitimate peer review, and they have corporate media journalists told by SEO consultants to look for new shock and awe claims to write about ready to promote a way to prevent a health problem no one has, can have, or will have in their lives.
If they sell four tests, they make their money back and can just wait around for someone from a group like Non-GMO Project to call and offer to re-sell the service. That tactic rarely works but for every 99 failures there is one Resveratrol and the risk in trying is nothing.
As proof of concept, they detected PAH (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) in outdoor air and polyethylene and polydimethylsiloxanes in indoor air. Since Vani Hari, the self-styled “Food Babe” can’t pronounce any of those, they must be harmful.
Or not, in the homeopathic levels they are seeing. It is always smart business to sell a solution to a problem no one has, because you can never be wrong. The writers of the comedy cartoon “The Simpsons” made fun of it decades ago, when Lisa tried to explain to her father what specious reasoning was using the example of a rock that protects them from tigers. If he didn’t get eaten by a tiger, specious reasoning goes, then it’s because of the rock.
He wanted to buy that rock.
Activists sell a lot more rocks than most realize.
An activist group paid a results-for-hire lab to detect glyphosate in breast milk, because anti-science activists target women and especially mothers in their campaigns. Scientists debunked it immediately.
What got journalist and environmental lawyer promotion? The magic rock thinking. Now you can buy home “glyphosate detection” kits on Amazon, despite them being as useless as buying a Kirlian Photography machine to detect ghosts.
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We can literally detect anything in anything, not just today, but for the last 30 years. When the concept of ‘none’ was first established, it was less than 1 part per million. Then analyses made parts per billion detection possible, 1/1000th of what science had called nothing. Now it is parts per quadrillion. A chemical at harmless levels in the 1950s is now 1,000,000,000 times per more prevalent in humans.
That does not make it harmful. Nanoplastics and microplastics and PFAS and food coloring and seed oils are not harmful, they are just recent chemophobia crazes.
Chemists, like at McGill, know better. They have to know better, they have degrees. Which means they are instead just out to make a fast buck exploiting the public.
Each bad epidemiology claim, riddled with confounders and specious correlation, is only believed by people who are less scientifically literate than peasants in the 1600s, who easily understood that the dose makes the poison. Just because you can detect something that someone called a hazard does not mean you are at risk. Chemists know that. All of them.
The bad epidemiology of microplastics hysteria means government should ban beaches in the month of July because that is when the most shark attacks occur. Even in Iowa. They call that science.
Even organic food is safe to eat, despite that the curve of its increased marketing success and the increase in autism matches.
The McGill team is helping environmental predatorts do to trust in chemistry what Robert F. Kennedy did to trust in vaccines while he was at Natural Resources Defense Council and is doing now in the Trump administration now – create fear and doubt even though there are no cases of harm.
McGill is in Canada so they can’t be DOGE’ed, they may even get more funding with their new Prime Minister declaring himself an enemy of science in a way even California Governor Gavin Newsom thinks is reckless.
But if National Research Council Canada wants to be trusted by the public they should use more caution about throwing money at groups that want to terrify people and run Canadian industry into the ground.
Hank Campbell is the founder of Science 2.0 and the author of Science Left Behind. Follow Hank on X @HankCampbell
A version of this article was originally posted at Science 2.0 and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and the original article. Find Science 2.0 on X @science2_0
