Well, they literally tried to (partially) deregulate asbestos, as fucking obviously asinine and corrupt of a move as that would be, so...asbestos might end up being your answer. How fucked is that?
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
58 points (96.8% liked)
Ask Lemmy
38847 readers
1694 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Crude oil and fossil fuel?
They harm the environment.
Micro plastics
Got to say the obvious: sugar.
Industry sugar is just very bad for us for multiple reasons but it's used everywhere because of addictive properties.
Go research the sugar cartel and the sugar Vs fat thing which brought the US to fat free stuff which massively raised obesity.
Honestly? Oil usage. Everyone knows it's bad, and the only people really in a position to do anything about have a vested interest in leaving things as is.
This sounds exactly like Asbestos.
What oil?
You mean fossil fuelfuel or like sunflower and olive?
To be fair, asbestos is still all over the place. They did this fun thing where they just reclassified different asbestos structures into different categories and banned some of them.
My guess for another substance that isn't asbestos will be either PFAS or we'll finally find out what all these micro/nanoplastics are doing to us.
Microplastics.
In everything from clothes to blankets to tires. Everything including chewing gum.
There's no replacing plastic like we could do with asbestos. We're screwed
There are bioplastics that are actually compostable and biodegradable, and I'm sure with enough research we could develop others with better properties.
But why would we research a way to make the world a better place when we can just pull oil out of the ground and burn it and make forever chemicals out of it instead?
I think so too. We don't really have conclusive studies yet on what microplastics do to our health, but we do know we have quite a lot of them inside our bodies. At the same time certain types of cancers are getting ever more common, and amongst younger people as well. Might not be connected, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised.
Every year microplastic pieces get smaller and more numerous. The health effects of microplastics likely worsen over time
Aren't at least some of those cancers thought to be from processed food and low fibre diets?
If you're referring to the study blaming colon cancer on processed meats, it's a major reach.
It was an epidemiological study, which are notorious for poor controlling of variables. If the effect has a relative risk increase greater than 100% (i.e. doubles risk or more), then you can use the results of an epidemiologal study, but results less than that should be treated with a lot of skepticism. This particular study was only 18%, well within the error bounds of this type of study.
For contrast, the epidemiological studies used to establish a causal link between smoking and lung cancer had a risk increase in the ballpark of 10,000%
You’re totally on the money with your core thesis about epidemiological studies here, and I agree processed meats as a standalone variable are likely a massively overplayed factor in CRC research.
When it comes to the more general claims in the GP comment though, re: processed food and low fiber, there are literally hundreds of independent studies at different levels all pointing in similar directions. It’s pretty incontrovertible at this point.
See any recent review on CRC etiology for reference, e.g.: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Elroy-Weledji/publication/377724506_Clinics_in_Oncology_The_Etiology_and_Pathogenesis_of_Colorectal_Cancer_OPEN_ACCESS/links/65b3f83e79007454973be66e/Clinics-in-Oncology-The-Etiology-and-Pathogenesis-of-Colorectal-Cancer-OPEN-ACCESS.pdf
Thanks for an interesting source!
load more comments
(5 replies)
PFAS?
Don't know much about them.
Here's a Veritasium deep dive (54min) on PFAS and their history. I thought I knew about PFAS, then this video taught me more:
Thank you!
For all the panicky people:
Microplastics are bad, but they're not remotely close to asbestos bad. Nobody is dying horribly from emphysema because they accidentally contacted microplastics two decades ago. The effects absolutely exist, but they're quite subtle and do not involve suffocating while you cough your lungs out in small pieces.
Gylphosate is bad, but it's mostly bad for the people working directly with it and ignoring every safety precaution (the Venn diagram of those two groups is pretty much a circle). Eating food that was once treated with gylphosate will not be remotely bad for you on any measurable scale.
Source: am chemist, work as a safety professional (independent, no large company is paying me for anything but an occasional audit that is mostly unrelated to chemistry)
But, I'll happily add something that's bad, but not on the level of asbestos. Indoor cooking on fire and/or with poor ventilation. It creates combustion products, releases particulate and smoke and many complex volatiles that are just drifting around in your house for pretty much the entire evening.
Edit: and growing your own food on local soil in a city. That dirt has been collecting pollution for a century, and the odds are pretty decent that it might actually qualify for remediation if you live near anywhere industrial or a big road that's been there for a while. Get your soil tested, or use raised beds if you're growing food.
Microplastics get smaller and likely more dangerous every year. We don't know how much present day cancer can be attributed to microplastics, there is no control group.
Nobody is dying horribly from emphysema because they accidentally contacted microplastics two decades ago.
Aren't the vast majority of people suffering cancer from asbestos exposure the people that worked with asbestos for years? From what I understand, you're very unlikely to suffer from a single exposure.
That being said, asbestos is fucking everywhere. Veritasium recently did a video on it, and a lot of the soil around Las Vegas just naturally contains it, and gets kicked up by vehicles, construction, wind, etc.
Aren’t the vast majority of people suffering cancer from asbestos exposure the people that worked with asbestos for years?
Sorta kinda. It was much easier to get prolonged asbestos exposure than repeated glyphosate exposure. We used it in everything, including carpets and roofs. The asbestos fibers in those roofs are fine, but the glue holding them together isn't. It's been falling on the ground since forever, but it's accelerating more and more.
Meanwhile, the only people working unsafely with glyphosate are basically a subset of farmers. Now, I've basically NEVER seen a farmer handle chemicals according to the instructions, so within that group unsafe exposure is basically 100%, but it's a much smaller fraction of the population.
the natural stuff is in clumps that your not able to breathe, and yeah asbestos is natural and almost everywhere there's rocks. it's usually in long fiber like strings. even when it's broken up, it's not particle size and airborne. it's usually bonded together.
it's that stuff that was industrialized and refined. that stuff that can become airborne and inhaled. One particle that gets absorbed might stay with you forever but it's usually the build up of many exposures that causes the problem.
so many older houses have it in the attic and siding. it's not going anywhere
load more comments
(4 replies)
If you want a more literal, chemist answer: carbon fiber. Carbon fiber's chemical structure is surprisingly similar to Asbestos. Even though we barely use it for anything due to the difficulty in producing it, it's most likely just as harmful to us as asbestos.
Interesting, I never knew that.
How do you inhale carbon fiber? Are there friable forms?
Most carbon fiber you might see in the world is sealed with resin. But under that resin, it's just sheets of woven or non-carbon fiber fabric. And those fibers are just nanometers thick and can easily puncture cell walls the same way as asbestos.
Every resin-based material is friable after the resin decays. That's one of the major problems with asbestos roofs, the resin holding the asbestos is breaking down after decades of sunlight.
load more comments
(2 replies)
- The American industrialized food chain
- Glyphosate
- Modern technology-centric lifestyles
- Dark patterns
- Most social media
3/4 of politicians will say porn. 1/4 will say marijuana. Gotta protect the children /s
load more comments
(1 replies)
Look at the silicosis litigation that has started. Everyone wanted granite and quartz countertops, 30 years later, people cutting all that now have lung disease
I do workplace safety, and it's incredibly hard to work with (manufactured) stone in a safe way. The dust gets everywhere, and you basically have to take the same safety precautions as with asbestos remediation.
load more comments
(3 replies)
You know that stinky smell on the streets and roads just after it starts raining? Yeah, that's a combination of asphalt, tire rubber dust, and asbestos brake pad dust.. What a lovely smell!
Asbestos never disappeared, it's still used in most brake pads to this day, though there is at least some recent motivation for vehicle manufacturers to switch to other materials.
A day late and a dollar short if you ask me, cuz I bet that unless you live under a rock, you've inhaled asbestos before. ☹️
load more comments
(4 replies)
Hottest take and speculative: Covid.
And it kind of depends on how you think about the scale of impacts. Aspestos is horribly damaging for a few people directly exposed. The rate of exposure to covid is orders of magnitude higher.
I think we've really only begun to see the long term impacts, and we know already of many of the long term issues related to decline in cognitive abilities, heart issues, all kinds of other stuff. But we right now, only know the small "near tail" behavior of those issues. It will take decades to find the "long tail" behavior of the disease.
So if asbestos exposure is 100x as damaging as covid exposure, say.. but 10,000x as many are exposed to covid... its overall impact is 100x that of asbestos.
load more comments
(4 replies)
view more: next ›