What do you mean by “better off”?

I guess it would have the same nutritional value, but that’s not really why you drink milk. Like, I could eat peanuts, grapes, and bread for a healthy meal, but I’d much rather have a PB&J (probably with a creamy glass of oat milk).

Not exactly the best example, since that’s not a typical behavior but a result of poor scientific practices. Mantises only take that action when extremely stressed, which is frankly a lesson we should be carefully considering.

Did you read the whole article? They followed up by exposing kidney cells to the extracted micro and nanoplastics and they caused significant amounts of cell death. There is definite evidence that something in these plastics is causing harm, and more study is definitely warranted.

Balanced encounters doesn’t mean every encounter is just as difficult, it means the GM knows how difficult the encounter is going to be. Any system with good encounter building has recommendations for the level of challenge.

They aren’t going to change you view on life, but most are pretty solid. I highly recommend pretty much any books in the High Republic era, particularly “Light of the Jedi”. It’s the first of the new era and it’s a great introduction to the setting. It’s all set a few hundred years before the movies, so the Authors were able to pretty much do whatever they wanted within the basic Star Wars universe.