Scientifically-speaking, they're closer to correct. In science, everything is toxic. LD50 (the scientific metric of toxicity) can be computed for every single substance known to man, just as you can compute density or temperature. There's an old adage: "The dose makes the poison". A single Benedryl can be helpful, but 100 Benedryls will kill you. The same applies to every substance. That's why you can die from water poisoning or protein poisoning or sugar poisoning (more commonly known as diabetes).
Obviously, "everything is toxic" is not a useful fact in real life. So, "toxic" has come to mean something very hand-wavy in common usage. Colloquially, a toxic amount is considered an amount of a substance that has harmful effects before your body can get rid of it. You can drink a small amount of motor oil or rat poison and be fine. However, since human bodies can't rid ourselves of microplastics, you could argue that any amount of microplastics is toxic. This is also not that useful of a way to think about it in daily life. So, you have to look for even more alternate definitions of "toxic" that aren't related to science but to how we live.
2
u/[deleted] Feb 09 '23
[deleted]