Posts Tagged ‘pollution’

Polluting the Food Supply with PFAS

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 […]

What Do Microplastics in Our Brains Mean for Metabolic Health?

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 […]

ADA 2024: BPA Causes Insulin Resistance. Why Do We Drink It?

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 […]

Disease Burden from Exposure to the Chemicals of Plastics

January 24, 2024 — 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 […]

Should We Care That We’re Drinking Nanoplastics?

January 13, 2024 — A new study this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science tells us that every bottle of water we’re drinking has hundreds of thousands of nanoplastics. Should we care? A Blank Slate, Tough to Study This study is important simply because it fills a void in knowledge about how much these nanoplastics are […]

Life with Microplastics, Maybe Not Fantastic

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 […]

PFAS vs Diet for Weight Outcomes

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 […]

It’s Raining PFAS – Should We Worry?

August 5, 2022 — This news snippet definitely caught our eye. All over the world – even on the mountains of Tibet and Antarctica – it’s raining PFAS. In fact, there’s so much PFAS in rainwater all over the world that rainwater is no longer safe to drink. This news comes from an analysis published by the American Chemical […]

How Much Obesity Do Pesticides Cause?

April 25, 2022 — Why? This is the basic question that remains unanswered after four decades of rising obesity. Why do we see such a persistent rise in obesity prevalence – all over the world? Broadly, we can lump the suspects into four groups: food, stress, physical environment, and chemicals. Of course, the most common presumption is that it’s […]

Disparities in the Air We Breathe and in Obesity

May 4, 2021 — Patterns of disparities surround us so completely that we become immune to them. In fact, disparities even extend to the air we breathe. People of color have dirtier air to breathe and that contributes to disparities in health in countless ways. New research offers evidence that air pollution contributes to the risk of childhood obesity. […]