July 14, 2025 — Inundated. We are inundated with 16,235 chemicals present in the plastics filling our environment, says a new report in Nature. This meticulous inventory tells us that a subset of those, more than 4,200 of them, are chemicals of concern. The concern springs from one or more of the following properties. They migrate out of the […]
May 23, 2025 — The new MAHA (Making America Healthy Again) report on the health of American children is out and, in a word, things are terrible. In the words of the report, “it presents the stark reality of American children’s declining health.” We have a whole generation at risk because of toxic chemicals, ultra-processed food, unnecessary medical treatments, […]
April 10, 2025 — It’s a fact. We are eating, drinking, and breathing microplastics. They are accumulating in our bodies – even in our brains. It took painstaking work to figure that out, but even more challenging is the task of nailing down the health effects of all those microplastics. Researchers are doing their best to figure this out. […]
March 4, 2025 — It is about time. The world is waking up to the realization that rising global obesity is not a problem of personal failures. Rather, it is the product of systems with the unintended effect of promoting obesity while denying people care for this chronic disease. At the heart of World Obesity Day 2025 is the […]
February 6, 2025 — From the category of stuff that can’t be good. a study in Nature Medicine this week documents a spoonful of microplastics accumulating in an typical human brain. Alexander Nihart and colleagues used diverse methods to detect microplastics in various tissues (kidney, liver, and brain) of deceased individuals from 2016 and 2024. They found these particles […]
August 25, 2024 — When neuroscientists coined the phrase brain plasticity, they were certainly not thinking about microplastics accumulating in our brains. But unfortunately, it seems this is a phenomenon with implications we need to study. New NIH-funded research, published as a preprint, suggests these tiny particles are building up at an alarming rate. But it does not tell […]
November 7, 2023 — A lifetime of exposure to endocrine disruptors can begin before a person is even born, and may put that person on a path to obesity and health complications. This is the implication of a new study in Environmental Health Perspectives. First author Parisa Montazeri explains: “Our findings underscore the potential impact of early-life chemical exposures […]
July 18, 2023 — Barbie Girl (the song) told us life in plastic is fantastic, but the knowledge that we’re swimming in microplastics gives us reason for second thoughts. These tiny particles of plastic are accumulating in the oceans (even the Arctic), in the air, in the soil, in our food, and even in our bodies. This is an emerging […]
April 21, 2023 — Could it be that exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals such as PFAS has more of an effect on body weight and adiposity than diet? Philippe Grandjean and colleagues this week published a new study in Obesity that points to this possibility. Grandjean tells us: “We’ve previously shown that children with increased PFAS concentrations tend to […]
October 27, 2022 — Most of us who think about food systems have a vague sense that our diet has a meaningful impact on the health of the planet. Beef is typically thought to be a bad actor. Eating more plant based foods should help. But an ambitious new study in Nature Sustainability aims to assign specific numbers to […]
