This is an opinionated piece by Megha Satyanarayana, now chief opinion editor at Scientific American and former scientist, Knight-Wallace Fellow, a cohort member of Poynter’s Leadership Academy for Women in Digital Media and a Maynard 200 Fellow.
This is the problem with the slew of research finding microscopic shards of plastic in our arteries, kidneys and livers, the findings that our oceans, food, soil and air are teeming with tiny bits of Tupperware. Scientists still don’t know what this plastic is doing to us. And because research takes time, while scientists are trying to answer question, we just keep inhaling, eating and drinking tiny pieces of plastic.
…
Everything that goes into our bodies gets filtered through our livers and kidneys, so maybe it’s not a big surprise that bits of plastic find their way into those organs. Same with our hearts; microplastics end up in our blood and can get stuck in our clogged arteries. But our brains are designed to keep things out, through something called the blood-brain barrier. The researchers behind the brain plastics study think the tiny shards of plastic hitch a ride on fat molecules to get inside brain cells. And what’s worse is how much microplastics the researchers think might be in a whole human brain: 10 grams. Imagine 2.5 teaspoons of sugar. Now sub in plastic. Gross.
…
Recently, a group of Italian researchers followed 257 people who had plaque in their carotid arteries. They found that 20 percent of the people in their study who had microplastic-laden plaque had had a heart attack, stroke or had died after almost three years, compared to 7.5 percent of the people who didn’t. In studies of cells, those with microplastics in them also tended to show biochemical signatures of inflammation. And those people who had microplastics in their carotid arteries also tended to show some of those same signatures more often than the people who didn’t.
…
I see pictures all the time of beaches covered in plastic pebbles, landfills overflowing with water bottles, and giant dumps of technology products with their sad beige plastic shells. Chemistry is a beautiful thing. When it comes to plastic, when are we going to hold the petrochemical industry accountable for this ugliness?
You must log in or register to comment.
Why am I not losing my mind over this?
Climate change. Humanity is in deeper trouble than having plastic in my head that I have no way of getting out.
Why would I panic about this? If we beat climate change and fascism, then we can worry about head plastic.
What if my Fibromyalgia is just nanoplastics fucking up my mitochondria? :(
Because unrestrained capitalism will not slow its demand for metastasis at any human cost.
Capitalism is literally sacrificing humanity’s existence in the coming decades in the name of the next quarter’s metastasis expectations.
Don’t worry, the owner class’ service staff buys exclusively Whole Foods equivalent organic, non-gmo, plastic free food sold in artisinal, hand blown glass made from exploited third world poories. They’ll be healthy as long as there’s still a stable climate zone to scurry off to, and even then they have luxury bunkers for their families where they’ll spend their final decades sipping expensive whiskeys and wines muttering about how it was the poor people’s faults for not working hard enough that made the surface a deathtrap for modern humans.
The first Earth Day was back in the 1970s. People had been talking about pollution for decades before that.
Because if we admit that plastic is in our brains and it’s a problem then we will need to drastically shift our way of life and production of basically every item in our lives, and that would be bad for the economy…
We don’t even really understand what effects plastic has in our system to begin with. It could range from something as big as cancer, to finding out it’s completely inert and doesn’t affect us to begin with.
A plastic existence
