Ask Lemmy

Microplastics is the obvious one. High fructose corn syrup. Palm oil is used in so many things (even juices and biscuits/cookies). Billionaires. Politicians.

LLMs.

I'm sure the “AI” companies have plenty of studies proving they cause addiction, brain damage (probably irreversible), and psychosis, but they're keeping them to themselves, much like cigarette cartels did with studies proving their shit caused cancer.

PFAS

Oil extracted from the ground. That takes the trophy for the whole century.

Cars. I hope vroomers rots in hell

Microplastics.

Micro plastics

PFAS?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

• The American industrialized food chain
• Glyphosate
• Modern technology-centric lifestyles
• Dark patterns
• Most social media

Crude oil and fossil fuel?
They harm the environment.

Vape juice

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

3/4 of politicians will say porn. 1/4 will say marijuana. Gotta protect the children /s

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.

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. ☹️

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.

My likely candidates: Fossil fuels. Rising CO2 levels can lead to brain fog, right now indoor CO2 levels due to bad ventilation already lead to imaired cognivity. With rising atmospheric CO2 levels this will become more common. Nano particles, different materials are being used today with dimensions similar to those of asbestos particles, and it turns out they have the same effect. It's not the asbestos, it's how the body handles these particles. Think of stuff like mineral wool, carbon nanotubes, silica. Sitting. More and more people are sitting down (inside, so they also lack vitamin D) for long parts of the day, and it leads to all kinds of medical problems.