Most microplastics are found in our brains

in Reflections8 days ago

Yesterday I decided not to buy water and milk in plastic bottles. I read that bottled water contains 50 times more microplastics than tap water.

On my walk I went into a store and didn't find any water in a glass bottle. Damn it, I thought, I won't buy water in a plastic bottle. So I bought cognac in a glass bottle.

I came home and started the fight against microplastics: I drank 3 glasses of cognac and threw out plastic bottles of milk and yogurt from the refrigerator.
Then I started searching on Google to find out where my main enemy is. It turned out that microplastic is everywhere. It is in the ocean and in fish, in rain and rivers, in vegetables and animal meat. Microplastic is in the human body, there is 10-30 times more of it in the brain than in the liver and kidneys.
The world will never be the same, I thought. We need to find another planet or build a time machine to get to a world without plastic. Humans have littered the world with their trash, and I have contributed to it.

I drank another glass of cognac and went to read scientific articles in the journal Nature Medicine https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1
The concentration of microplastics in human tissues increased by 1.5 times from 2016 to 2024!

While reading the medical article, I suddenly felt myself sobering up. I became scared. I collected all the plastic items in the house and tried to take them outside. It didn’t work the first time – there was too much plastic in the apartment.

Then I read that the concentration of plastic in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease is 3-5 times higher than in healthy people. And I wondered if microplastics in the brain were one of the causes of this disease.

It's morning. There's an almost empty bottle of cognac on the table and I'm writing this post. Today I'll go out into the street mindful.
I will consciously inhale the air by the road, knowing that some of the microplastics from this air will remain in me forever. I will drink water from a glass bottle, most likely from a depth of 1 km (I hope the microplastics have not reached there yet). I won't buy shrimp and mussels today, they say there's a huge amount of microplastic in them. I'll probably buy chicken and eggs. I read that there's almost no microplastic in chicken breast. This is probably due to the closed production cycle at the poultry farm.
Microplastics are abundant in root vegetables and few in cabbage and lettuce. So today I will combine lettuce leaves with chicken.

And I thought, it would be nice to make a greenhouse in the garden, find clean soil for boxes with plants. Pump clean water from a great depth and arrange a closed cycle of vegetable production. I wonder if in the future there will be consumer demand for clean products without microplastics.

I went for a walk, today my bags will be heavier than usual, glass and metal have weight.

Sort:  

We simply can't escape it. We crossed the Rubicon with technology. Expect life span to become shorter with time.

If only plastic... But there are also antibiotics, all sorts of fertilizers, background radiation and so on... I don't even want to think in this direction😪😭
!ALIVE
!MEME

I wonder if in the future there will be consumer demand for clean products without microplastics.

There is, but it's a hard one. If companies don't provide it, and we need the product, we buy anyway.

At a coffee shop in town, they took the brave move of no single use coffee cups. You had to bring a takeaway cup or drink in a mug there. Did they lose business? No. They're a roaring success.

If governments MANDATED against microplastics, companies would be force to take responsibility.

I just thought, what if some small country completely gave up plastic? Then tourists would go to that country with pleasure. It would be unusual for them to see the absence of plastic in stores and around.

Bali I know has massive problem. They're trying to ban any water bottle under 1l and single use plastics. It takes a long time.

That's why I only drink malt whisky from good old glass bottles... 🤪😂
!ALIVE
!BBH
!INDEED 👍

:)

Yeah, that's really concerning, read somewhere that also glass bottles have a lot of microplastics in the cap which contaminates even water that you drink from a glass bottle.

That's right. Many bottle caps are made of plastic and metal. But there are also purely metal ones.


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