Your brain is full of microplastics: are they harming you?

[Cattledog]

A sliver of human brain in a small vial starts to melt as lye is added to it. Over the next few days, the caustic chemical will break down the neurons and blood vessels within, leaving behind a grisly slurry containing thousands of tiny plastic particles.

Toxicologist Matthew Campen has been using this method to isolate and track the microplastics — and their smaller counterparts, nanoplastics — found in human kidneys, livers and especially brains. Campen, who is at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, estimates that he can isolate about 10 grams of plastics from a donated human brain; that’s about the weight of an unused crayon.

Microplastics have been found just about everywhere that scientists have looked: on remote islands, in fresh snow in Antarctica, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific, in food, in water and in the air that we breathe. And scientists such as Campen are finding them spread throughout the human body.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00405-8

[Rustynaerduwell]

1. After my daughter was born, I forbid plastic anything in my house (as possible).

This was in the nineties. People thought I was crazy or paranoid. I never trusted plastic in our environment, and here's why:
Evolution has prepared us, through millions of years, with the mechanisms necessary for our survival. The bacteria in your gut that helps you digest milk is there because of evolutionary pressures. Bacteria that shouldn't be there is removed by cells whose very existence is a result of the evolutionary battles of millennia. But plastic came along in an instant. It was suddenly ubiquitous. And evolution has given us no mechanism for removing it from our body. I believed this forty years ago and I believe it now. I'm not a scientist, but this seemed so obvious to me. Plastic does not go away and our body cannot' remove it from our system. It will be the tobacco and leaded gas of our time.