Funnily, I believe the glove mandates for food prep are actually anti-hygiene.
Unlike bare skin, you can't really feel when your gloves are contaminated. So you are less likely to replace gloves when you should. With bare hands, you can feel the raw chicken juices on you, so it's pretty natural to want to wash your hands right after handling the raw chicken.
Gloves are important in medicine, but that's with proper use where doctors and nurses put on new gloves for every patient. That doesn't always happen.
> So you are less likely to replace gloves when you should.
To the contrary. You take off and throw out your gloves every time you finish doing something with raw meat. It's procedure. It's habit.
You're never relying on "feel" to determine whether there are "raw chicken juices on you". Using "feel" is not reliable.
I don't know why you think food service workers aren't constantly putting on new gloves, but doctors and nurses are. Like, if you're cutting up chicken for an hour you're not, but if you're moving from chicken to veggies you absolutely are.
> I don't know why you think food service workers aren't constantly putting on new gloves, but doctors and nurses are. Like, if you're cutting up chicken for an hour you're not, but if you're moving from chicken to veggies you absolutely are.
I think that because I was a food service worker and it's impossible to change gloves during a rush. Nitrile gloves and sweaty hands simply do not mix. There are also many more forms of cross contamination than just raw meat to cooked food.
I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.
You can dry your hands on a towel in seconds. I don't know what you mean by "perfectly dry"...? Like, nobody needs to blow-dry their hands before putting gloves on or anything.
I do a medical procedure several times a week that requires gloves.
If you don't flap your hands around for 30+ seconds, any remaining moisture from handwashing (or sweat) makes them stick to your skin and you wind up fighting them (and about half the time, ripping a hole). A towel is not enough.
> To the contrary. You take off and throw out your gloves every time you finish doing something with raw meat. It's procedure. It's habit.
You are supposed to. I've seen plenty of fast food places where the gloves stay on between jobs.
I'm sure there are upscale places that are better on this point.
> You're never relying on "feel" to determine whether there are "raw chicken juices on you". Using "feel" is not reliable.
If you were just working with raw chicken, that slimy feeling on your skin is a pretty good motivator for most people to immediately wash their hands. It's more than just procedure or habit, your hands feel dirty and you want to wash that off.
> I don't know why you think food service workers aren't constantly putting on new gloves, but doctors and nurses are. Like, if you're cutting up chicken for an hour you're not, but if you're moving from chicken to veggies you absolutely are.
You absolutely are supposed to. But there's a gap in what you are supposed to do vs what actually happens in practice. Especially if you get a penny pinching boss that doesn't like wasting money on gloves.
That doesn't happen so much in medicine because the consequences are much higher. But for food? Not uncommon. There are more than a few restaurants with open kitchens that I've had to stop eating at because employees could be seen handling a bunch of things with the same set of gloves on.
It also does not help that food is often a mad rush.
> It's more than just procedure or habit, your hands feel dirty and you want to wash that off.
I'm not sure that's reliable across people. I'm definitely like that; whenever my hands feel the least bit dirty or oily or anything, I really want to wash them. But I've run into people who have commented on the fact that I do that, and I've learned that there are lots of people who just don't have that compulsion at all.
My point is that changing gloves is something that is even less reliable and needs to be drilled in through procedure and habit. Handwashing also needs the procedure and habit, but it has the added benefit that for a good number of people there's also a physical compulsion that goes along with that procedure and habit.
Food safety regulations in most states require that food workers replace gloves if they handle raw meat and switch to other foodstuffs.
But they don't generally require them to replace gloves between batches of (the same kind of) meat, or between different kinds of vegetables, or when switching from vegetables to meat, or between customers if they're on a service line. While it's recommended in those situations, I'm not sure any state mandates it.
I mean, they don't require gloves to be replaced in those situations because there isn't a good safety reason to. There's zero reason to replace your gloves when switching from dicing green peppers for a salad to picking up raw chicken. Or similarly between customers if you're just handling food, and not a cash register or anything. It's not like you're touching the customers...
People also don't develop good habits and constantly touch their face with gloves. I worked with surgeons in the hospital and they would point this out. Equally important in a cleanroom.
Yes but most people find it icky and would complain, especially if it's visible behind the counter. Customer is king... I can also imagine it helps with legal liability, "but we were so careful, we even mandated gloves!"
Sushi chefs spend years learning the correct feel of the fish - when it's warm enough, when it's slimy. Japanese are taken aback when they are forced to wear gloves for "safety", which at least in that case is entirely counter productive.
“ Stearates are salts, or soap-like particles. Manufacturers coat disposable gloves with stearates to make them easier to peel from the molds used to form them. But stearates are also chemically very similar to some microplastics, according to the researchers, and can lead to false positives when researchers are looking for microplastic pollution.”
Stearates aren’t microplastics. Maybe we need to be concerned with stearate pollution too.
Stearates are considered very safe chemical compounds. They are derived from stearic acid which is one of the most common fatty acids and metal ions such as sodium and magnesium. Sodium stearate is a common soap and magnesium stearate is one of the most common additives in pharmaceuticals. This means that they are practically everywhere and but also easily digested in small amounts.
It is true that there is not currently conclusive proof that micro plastics are a significant risk to human health. However, this is the same line the tobacco industry used for decades even though they knew different.
And indeed there is not currently conclusive proof that WiFi is a significant risk to human health. However, this is the same line the tobacco industry used for decades even though they knew different.
Because it’s an inverted claim of falsification it works for literally anything (I cannot prove that X will absolutely not hurt you), but you get pilloried if you put something in the blank that the herd happens to support.
We’ve reached the absurd point where all sides of the political spectrum have sacred cows, and an exceedingly poor understanding of scientific reasoning, and all sides also try to dunk on the others by claiming scientific authority.
Is there any specific evidence that they are a risk to human health?
I mean, I get the instinct that foreign-entity can't exactly be good for me, but the same instinct applied to GMOs, and as far as I know organic foods have never yielded any sort of statistically visible health impacts.
Plastics earn their keep in general by being non-reactive and 'durable', so it's not entirely shocking if they can pass through (or hang around inside) the body without engaging in a lot of biochemical activity.
I get your point that plastics are relatively inert and may not cause noticeable harm (depending on quantity?), but I think it'd be wise to be cautious. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic#Bisphenol_A_(BPA) .
I'd also consider plastic, and their additives, to be a lot bigger and longer lasting unknown than GMOs.
Yeah, they gum up cellular workings. Kind of like how macro plastics will gum up turtle stomaches.
I have seen zero evidence that they are bad in very small quantities, but the dose can make the poison and they are out there in increasingly alarming quantities.
Many negative health effects have been associated with microplastics and related chemicals. Not sure if there's yet anything causative, but I think it's probably a matter of time and there's lots of research to be done. I'd bet the health effect of microplastics (or anything that human body isn't used to) is more likely to be negative than not.
I think any time a new material starts to meaningfully accumulate in our bodies, our food sources, our oceans, etc, we should at least go with caution. The default stance should be caution, not fearlessness.
The problem isn't just the plastics themselves. Plastics are chemical "sponges" that will soak up pollutants over time from the environment (brominated fire retardants, bisphenols, PBCs, pesticides, phthalates, heavy metals, etc) and deliver them in a concentrated dose into the body.
Even if plastics of all sizes are 100% biologically inert, they're still a Trojan Horse for other toxins.
>Roughly 50% of indoor dust is composed of microplastics, so it's not like it's uncommon.
I highly doubt that. Soil, skin and pollen are usually the big ones. Hairs depending one how you count dust, but eliminating hair like fibres would also eliminate most of the sources of plastic, unless you allow really large particle sizes.
[edit] Checking research. The highest claim I found was 39% of fibres (in household dust, Japan). but that seemed to be per particle not by volume.
Synthetic fibers from clothes are microplastics, and clothes shed lots of fibers. Not to mention all the upholstered furniture, carpet, rugs, drapes, bags, etc.
These porous polymer powders consist entirely of microscopic little sponges where they soak up and/or leach out all kinds of chemicals more so than the plain polymer, and with different affinity too.
However, even when common waste plastic particles themselves are not microscopically porous, different plastics soak up different chemicals to different degrees depending on what type of contact they come into. For instance kilos of polyethylene nurdles floating in the water will actually become "soaked" with some hydrocarbon liquids that are also floating or dissolved in the water. Even physically softened. These are very solid pea-sized beads that are not micro-sized plastics at all. They would have to degrade a whole lot before they fall into the micro category. And they are not manufactured to intentionally have a nano-porous structure like the finer mesh porous polymer powders.
Chemicals and plastics just don't go away so safely every time.
The stearates aren't microplastics, they aren't polymers, but they have chemical/spectroscopic similarity that results in them confusing the microplastics assays.
The transparent disposable food-service gloves are usually polyethylene so I wouldn't think they would have the exact same false-positive result as the nitrile gloves. Microscopic particles of stearates are what's on these nitrile gloves, not actual polymer dust or excess abrasive losses.
Maybe a different false-positive particle type in significant amounts is on the polyethylene ones ?
Pure stearates in micro amounts would be expected to be related to mild food-grade soaps, which do end up dissolving in water or oil and do not remain solid like a relatively immobile polymer particle would do.
Funnily, I believe the glove mandates for food prep are actually anti-hygiene.
Unlike bare skin, you can't really feel when your gloves are contaminated. So you are less likely to replace gloves when you should. With bare hands, you can feel the raw chicken juices on you, so it's pretty natural to want to wash your hands right after handling the raw chicken.
Gloves are important in medicine, but that's with proper use where doctors and nurses put on new gloves for every patient. That doesn't always happen.
> So you are less likely to replace gloves when you should.
To the contrary. You take off and throw out your gloves every time you finish doing something with raw meat. It's procedure. It's habit.
You're never relying on "feel" to determine whether there are "raw chicken juices on you". Using "feel" is not reliable.
I don't know why you think food service workers aren't constantly putting on new gloves, but doctors and nurses are. Like, if you're cutting up chicken for an hour you're not, but if you're moving from chicken to veggies you absolutely are.
> I don't know why you think food service workers aren't constantly putting on new gloves, but doctors and nurses are. Like, if you're cutting up chicken for an hour you're not, but if you're moving from chicken to veggies you absolutely are.
I think that because I was a food service worker and it's impossible to change gloves during a rush. Nitrile gloves and sweaty hands simply do not mix. There are also many more forms of cross contamination than just raw meat to cooked food.
If you don't have time to change gloves how do you have time to wash your hands?
It's much quicker to wash your hands.
Gloves require your hands to be perfectly dry to put on effectively.
I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.
You can dry your hands on a towel in seconds. I don't know what you mean by "perfectly dry"...? Like, nobody needs to blow-dry their hands before putting gloves on or anything.
I do a medical procedure several times a week that requires gloves.
If you don't flap your hands around for 30+ seconds, any remaining moisture from handwashing (or sweat) makes them stick to your skin and you wind up fighting them (and about half the time, ripping a hole). A towel is not enough.
> I don't know why you think food service workers aren't constantly putting on new gloves...
I've seen enough absent-minded nose wipes on the back of gloves at Chipotle-style establishments to be pretty OK with this take.
And that's where people are watching.
Yeah, but then something tells me they wouldn't be washing their hands instead. Which is the comparison being made.
Many food service workers don't use gloves and don't wash their hands after going to the toilet, from what I have observed.
> To the contrary. You take off and throw out your gloves every time you finish doing something with raw meat. It's procedure. It's habit.
You are supposed to. I've seen plenty of fast food places where the gloves stay on between jobs.
I'm sure there are upscale places that are better on this point.
> You're never relying on "feel" to determine whether there are "raw chicken juices on you". Using "feel" is not reliable.
If you were just working with raw chicken, that slimy feeling on your skin is a pretty good motivator for most people to immediately wash their hands. It's more than just procedure or habit, your hands feel dirty and you want to wash that off.
> I don't know why you think food service workers aren't constantly putting on new gloves, but doctors and nurses are. Like, if you're cutting up chicken for an hour you're not, but if you're moving from chicken to veggies you absolutely are.
You absolutely are supposed to. But there's a gap in what you are supposed to do vs what actually happens in practice. Especially if you get a penny pinching boss that doesn't like wasting money on gloves.
That doesn't happen so much in medicine because the consequences are much higher. But for food? Not uncommon. There are more than a few restaurants with open kitchens that I've had to stop eating at because employees could be seen handling a bunch of things with the same set of gloves on.
It also does not help that food is often a mad rush.
> It's more than just procedure or habit, your hands feel dirty and you want to wash that off.
I'm not sure that's reliable across people. I'm definitely like that; whenever my hands feel the least bit dirty or oily or anything, I really want to wash them. But I've run into people who have commented on the fact that I do that, and I've learned that there are lots of people who just don't have that compulsion at all.
I agree that it's not reliable.
My point is that changing gloves is something that is even less reliable and needs to be drilled in through procedure and habit. Handwashing also needs the procedure and habit, but it has the added benefit that for a good number of people there's also a physical compulsion that goes along with that procedure and habit.
That's probably the places where people would never wash their hands either
Food safety regulations in most states require that food workers replace gloves if they handle raw meat and switch to other foodstuffs.
But they don't generally require them to replace gloves between batches of (the same kind of) meat, or between different kinds of vegetables, or when switching from vegetables to meat, or between customers if they're on a service line. While it's recommended in those situations, I'm not sure any state mandates it.
I mean, they don't require gloves to be replaced in those situations because there isn't a good safety reason to. There's zero reason to replace your gloves when switching from dicing green peppers for a salad to picking up raw chicken. Or similarly between customers if you're just handling food, and not a cash register or anything. It's not like you're touching the customers...
People also don't develop good habits and constantly touch their face with gloves. I worked with surgeons in the hospital and they would point this out. Equally important in a cleanroom.
Yes but most people find it icky and would complain, especially if it's visible behind the counter. Customer is king... I can also imagine it helps with legal liability, "but we were so careful, we even mandated gloves!"
Yeah, that's more the problem than anything else.
And it's true that you would get cleaner food prep if you used gloves properly. However, that requires a lot of gloves getting thrown away.
Uh yea. That’s why most places use washed hands not gloves.
I’ve never seen for example sushi portrayed with anything but bare hands
Sushi chefs spend years learning the correct feel of the fish - when it's warm enough, when it's slimy. Japanese are taken aback when they are forced to wear gloves for "safety", which at least in that case is entirely counter productive.
It says similar.
“ Stearates are salts, or soap-like particles. Manufacturers coat disposable gloves with stearates to make them easier to peel from the molds used to form them. But stearates are also chemically very similar to some microplastics, according to the researchers, and can lead to false positives when researchers are looking for microplastic pollution.”
Stearates aren’t microplastics. Maybe we need to be concerned with stearate pollution too.
Stearates are considered very safe chemical compounds. They are derived from stearic acid which is one of the most common fatty acids and metal ions such as sodium and magnesium. Sodium stearate is a common soap and magnesium stearate is one of the most common additives in pharmaceuticals. This means that they are practically everywhere and but also easily digested in small amounts.
I'm still not aware of any reason to worry about micro plastics. As far as I know they seem harmless?
It is true that there is not currently conclusive proof that micro plastics are a significant risk to human health. However, this is the same line the tobacco industry used for decades even though they knew different.
And indeed there is not currently conclusive proof that WiFi is a significant risk to human health. However, this is the same line the tobacco industry used for decades even though they knew different.
Because it’s an inverted claim of falsification it works for literally anything (I cannot prove that X will absolutely not hurt you), but you get pilloried if you put something in the blank that the herd happens to support.
We’ve reached the absurd point where all sides of the political spectrum have sacred cows, and an exceedingly poor understanding of scientific reasoning, and all sides also try to dunk on the others by claiming scientific authority.
Is there any specific evidence that they are a risk to human health?
I mean, I get the instinct that foreign-entity can't exactly be good for me, but the same instinct applied to GMOs, and as far as I know organic foods have never yielded any sort of statistically visible health impacts.
Plastics earn their keep in general by being non-reactive and 'durable', so it's not entirely shocking if they can pass through (or hang around inside) the body without engaging in a lot of biochemical activity.
I get your point that plastics are relatively inert and may not cause noticeable harm (depending on quantity?), but I think it'd be wise to be cautious. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic#Bisphenol_A_(BPA) .
I'd also consider plastic, and their additives, to be a lot bigger and longer lasting unknown than GMOs.
Yeah, they gum up cellular workings. Kind of like how macro plastics will gum up turtle stomaches.
I have seen zero evidence that they are bad in very small quantities, but the dose can make the poison and they are out there in increasingly alarming quantities.
Many negative health effects have been associated with microplastics and related chemicals. Not sure if there's yet anything causative, but I think it's probably a matter of time and there's lots of research to be done. I'd bet the health effect of microplastics (or anything that human body isn't used to) is more likely to be negative than not.
I think any time a new material starts to meaningfully accumulate in our bodies, our food sources, our oceans, etc, we should at least go with caution. The default stance should be caution, not fearlessness.
>fearlessness
More like flippancy, even hubris.
The approach you advocate is essentially the EU's precautionary principle. [1]
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/the-preca...
Totally aligned.
The problem isn't just the plastics themselves. Plastics are chemical "sponges" that will soak up pollutants over time from the environment (brominated fire retardants, bisphenols, PBCs, pesticides, phthalates, heavy metals, etc) and deliver them in a concentrated dose into the body.
Even if plastics of all sizes are 100% biologically inert, they're still a Trojan Horse for other toxins.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030438942...
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Verla-Wirnkor-2/publica...
Roughly 50% of indoor dust is composed of microplastics, so it's not like it's uncommon.
>Roughly 50% of indoor dust is composed of microplastics, so it's not like it's uncommon.
I highly doubt that. Soil, skin and pollen are usually the big ones. Hairs depending one how you count dust, but eliminating hair like fibres would also eliminate most of the sources of plastic, unless you allow really large particle sizes.
[edit] Checking research. The highest claim I found was 39% of fibres (in household dust, Japan). but that seemed to be per particle not by volume.
Synthetic fibers from clothes are microplastics, and clothes shed lots of fibers. Not to mention all the upholstered furniture, carpet, rugs, drapes, bags, etc.
That's why I said
>eliminating hair like fibres would also eliminate most of the sources of plastic
If you allow fibres they'd be 0.01% of fibres if you've got a dog anything like mine.
Dog, ha. Try a longhair cat. You'll be extracting balls of fur from most unexpected body cavities.
Instant corrective upvote.
One of the sources of intentionally manufactured microplastics are known as porous polymers in fine mesh sizes.
This is over a $1 billion market and growing.
One of the pharmaceutical uses is precisely as a medium to deliver oral medications in a time-release way.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/porouspolymer-bead-real-world...
These porous polymer powders consist entirely of microscopic little sponges where they soak up and/or leach out all kinds of chemicals more so than the plain polymer, and with different affinity too.
However, even when common waste plastic particles themselves are not microscopically porous, different plastics soak up different chemicals to different degrees depending on what type of contact they come into. For instance kilos of polyethylene nurdles floating in the water will actually become "soaked" with some hydrocarbon liquids that are also floating or dissolved in the water. Even physically softened. These are very solid pea-sized beads that are not micro-sized plastics at all. They would have to degrade a whole lot before they fall into the micro category. And they are not manufactured to intentionally have a nano-porous structure like the finer mesh porous polymer powders.
Chemicals and plastics just don't go away so safely every time.
> So basically the gloves that kitchen staff now must wear [..]
Genuine question: we used to simply wash our hands well before preparing food.
At what point did the wearing of disposable gloves become "better"?
It's not better, it's a lazy shortcut so they have to wash their hands less and don't feel gross touching raw meat.
The stearates aren't microplastics, they aren't polymers, but they have chemical/spectroscopic similarity that results in them confusing the microplastics assays.
In the article it explains that what they release are not microplastics
The transparent disposable food-service gloves are usually polyethylene so I wouldn't think they would have the exact same false-positive result as the nitrile gloves. Microscopic particles of stearates are what's on these nitrile gloves, not actual polymer dust or excess abrasive losses.
Maybe a different false-positive particle type in significant amounts is on the polyethylene ones ?
Pure stearates in micro amounts would be expected to be related to mild food-grade soaps, which do end up dissolving in water or oil and do not remain solid like a relatively immobile polymer particle would do.
How tricky the whole topic is
No: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47563392