The average brain weighs 1300-1400 grams. If 0.5% of that is plastic by weight, your brain contains 6.5 - 7 grams of plastic. The average plastic credit card weighs 5 grams.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/21/microplastics-brain-pollution-health
Jesus christ. I really thought that headline was exaggerated, but no, the brain samples they tested actually ended up being 0.5% plastic by weight. That’s seriously disturbing, I really would have thought the blood-brain barrier would do a better job of keeping plastics out.
For every kilometer you drive, your tires shed 1 trillion plastic particles. 78% of microplastics in the ocean are from tires.
What are you suggesting? That I stop peeling out of every parking lot and doing sick doughnuts!?
What I’m saying is that we need to figure out to make tires out of some unholy bamboo/cheese composite.
What if the roads were rubber and the tires were asphalt?
This was in a cartoon with the Flintstones once!
Or just go back to unvulcanized rubber
But the oil products! We gotta make the oil billionaires more billions!
10-4, rolling coal instead to impress potential sexual partners.
Maybe switching most of the transportation to steel tires on steel roads would help with this.
Rail is the dream
Yeah
Neuroplasticity makes so much more sense to me now.
0.5% of our brains being plastic is pretty shocking.
Agreed. Nevermind all the other places they’ve found plastic pollution in our bodies.
OK but what’s the limit on that card
Mine was declined and won’t come out of the ATM.
Here’s a blurb of an article that references the study - https://e360.yale.edu/digest/microplastics-human-brains
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11100893/
and the study referenced there
Now that you have told me something kinda useless tell me how much longer is my shlong due to mycroplastic 🤔😏
It’s likely causing your erectile disfunction, even if it tripled it’s size.
If your erection lasts longer then 4 hours… Nice.
“I’m a Barbie girl in a Barbie world”….
A plastic existence.
PUSHING LITTLE CHILDREN
With your fully automatics!
Don’t give Elon Musk any more ideas please
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I’m saying the weight is, and it’s not just my skull, it’s everyone’s skull. It’s likely we’re all experiencing those issues. It’s also not up there in a single slab, but embedded throughout, which hopefully mitigates that issue.
A study under peer review claims those with dementia are more likely to have more plastic in their brains than the average person.
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You’re good, just wanted to be clear.
The bigger question is, how do these microplastics pass the blood/brain barrier?
I don’t think this is true
What information did I present that was untrue? I guess technically there’s more plastic in your brain than required to make a plastic credit card.
Here’s additional supporting research.
From my understanding of the study they used an unverified method on a small part of the brain to get the amount of plastic in the entire brain. Which can be misleading because if you only look at the parts of the brain that are microplastics, the brain is 100% plastic. There hasn’t been widespread replication of the results yet either nor has the paper been peer reviewed.
I’m sceptical especially with the microplastic doomer narrative going around. As far as I know the danger of microplastics on the human body is yet to be determined. But it’s definitely alarming I just don’t think it’s responsible to be saying there’s a credit card in your brain.
That first paragraph is fair enough.
I’d disagree that the microplastic doomer narrative is incorrect, the plastic in the brain is just the newest tidbit. It’s already in our kldneys, testicles, placentas, blood, semen, livers and lungs. Even if this study is wrong (which I don’t think it is, because its on trend with plastic contamination growth in the rest of our bodies) about how much plastic there is specifically in brains, there’s still easily a credit cards worth in our bodies.
Microplastics are killing worms, it is contaminating soil, it is hurting crops, it is killing fish, and studied effects of plastic on other mammals are bad, to the point it seems pointless to confirm it hurts humans in specific ways before doing something about it.
Do you lack reading comprehension, or are you just in denial?
I gave the study a read. It’s in preprint, it’s yet to be peer reviewed and the method they used is atypical. Yeah I think disbelief is a pretty reasonable response since it’s hard to imagine that much plastic wouldn’t be making noticeable changes in behavior/physiology. But it’s possible and the research seems rigorous
That’s a pretty reasonable take 👍
