Posts Tagged ‘pollution’

Just when you thought the politics of health could not get any weirder, MAHA moms seem to be turning on Trump and RFK Jr. The apparent breaking point was an executive order this week declaring that the production of glyphosate – a weedkiller implicated in causing cancer – “is critical to the national defense.” Writing […]

One of the hottest scientific and legal debates that has long been simmering about a potential endocrine disrupting chemical is all about glyphosate. This herbicide is sold under the Roundup brand name. Last month, the journal of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology issued a scathing retraction notice for a landmark glyphosate paper that has played a […]

It seems that everywhere we turn, we hear another story about ubiquitous exposure to PFAS – a class of endocrine disrupting chemicals that shows up in water, food, drugs, cosmetics, clothing, and household items. It is part of “pollution’s hidden weight in the obesity epidemic.” This perspective comes from a recent comprehensive examination in Current […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]