Posts Tagged ‘plastics’

In good conscience, it is hard to ignore the steady stream of scientific publications that tell us we are putting our children at risk by filling the world with plastics. And yet it seems that the convenience and ubiquity of plastics make it hard to resist. A sweeping new review in Lancet Child and Adolescent […]

A perverse economic environment is, arguably, propelling us toward an overwhelming health problem with obesity that is becoming a wealth issue. Nick Triggle reports in depth for the BBC and makes a strong case for the idea that advanced obesity medicines are turning obesity into a wealth issue. People with the least wealth have the […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

Scientific publications keep sending us signals that all of the plastic we are heaping into our lives may be eating away at our health. Just this month alone, two new publications have us thinking about the disease burden that may result from exposure to the chemicals of plastics. One, in the Journal of the Endocrine […]