I Guess I Do Have the Spoons for That
..and a fork, as it turns out.
“I don’t have the spoons for that,” some declare when energy is low. Well, according to Smithsonian Magazine, maybe the spoon is the problem:
The human brain may contain up to a spoon’s worth of tiny plastic shards—not a spoonful, but the same weight (about seven grams) as a plastic spoon, according to new findings published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine.
Researchers detected these “almost unbelievable” levels of microplastics and nanoplastics in the brains of human cadavers, says study co-author Andrew West, a neuroscientist at Duke University, to Science News’ Laura Sanders. “In fact, I didn’t believe it until I saw all the data.”
Based on their analysis, the amount of microplastics in the human brain appears to be increasing over time: Concentrations rose by roughly 50 percent between 2016 and 2024.
The researchers also found much higher levels of microplastics in brain tissue than in liver and kidney tissue. And microplastic concentrations were also higher in the brains of deceased patients who had been diagnosed with dementia compared to the brains of deceased individuals without dementia.
I seldom, if ever, buy plastic cutlery, but I do keep the bagged utensils and napkins when I order from a fast-food place, because… I’m not sure why. But there’s a bunch of them in a container in my kitchen, waiting to be used someday.
I opened a package and weighed a spoon—it was only 4 grams. (Please don’t ask why I have a super-sensitive scale with calibration weights.) After adding a fork with one tine broken off, I had 7 grams of plastic on the scale. A spoon plus a mangled fork is a lot of volume.
The money quote from the article:
“I have yet to encounter a single human being who says, ‘There’s a bunch of plastic in my brain and I’m totally cool with that,’” says study co-author Matthew Campen, a toxicologist at the University of New Mexico, in a statement.
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