October 6, 2025 — 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 […]
September 30, 2025 — 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 […]
August 11, 2025 — Here’s something to ponder. Floating in the North Atlantic, there are more metric tons of nanoplastics than the combined mass of all mammals living on dry land. That’s a lot. This observation comes from a recent study in the journal Nature. Unfortunately, we cannot be certain of the impact of this ubiquitous pollution on human […]
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. […]
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 […]
September 3, 2024 — For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency has promoted the use of sludge from sewage treatment plants as fertilizer. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The sludge – known as biosolids in the fertilizer industry – is rich in nutrients that crops need. Plus, using biosolids for this purpose kept them out of […]
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 […]
June 23, 2024 — A new study presented at the American Diabetes Association Scientific Sessions this weekend shows us quite clearly that bisphenol A (BPA) causes insulin resistance. So we scratch our heads and wonder. Why do we keep on drinking it? This is no trivial observational study of correlations that would be easy to dismiss. Rather, it is […]
