And that by chewing it you are ingesting a bunch of microplastics? Please confirm if this is true. I don’t want to believe.

Side question: what alternative means is there for sustained, minty fresh breath that does not involve ingesting microplastics? (Mints don’t work that great imo, the freshness wears off too fast. Gum was my go-to. Now what is left?)

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[–] [S] 1 point 19 hours ago (5 children)

If you’re out hiking and forage for spruce/pine resin directly from the source: it’s still plastic.

There's such a thing as naturally occurring plastic? I'm sure that's not as bad for you though, right?

As far as an alternative goes for minty breath: nothing stops you from cutting out the middleman and chewing on mint leaves directly.

That's an interesting idea.

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  • [–] 9 points 18 hours ago (1 child)

    To my understanding (though admittedly I'm not like a materials scientist or anything so take this with a grain of salt), "plastic" is a somewhat fuzzy term, the things it generally refers to are artificial polymers, but there are also a lot of naturally occurring polymers used in biology, and it's not like chemicals care if they're made by humans or not. One could call naturally occurring polymer materials plastic, but if you did that, you would have to say that, for example, things like wood and insect shells are made of plastic, which isn't really how people generally use that word. Naturally occurring ones are probably less likely to create "microplastic" type issues though because there has generally been enough time for stuff to evolve to break those materials down, whereas purely artificial ones are too recent for that.

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  • [–] 16 points 18 hours ago (1 child)

    There’s such a thing as naturally occurring plastic? I’m sure that’s not as bad for you though, right?

    Cyanide is "natural". Not everything natural is "good" and not everything artificial is "bad".

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 14 hours ago

    Yes, I don't disagree, but one of the main reasons why plastics are bad for you is that they don't break down, but natural materials seem to break down just fine generally speaking

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