Plastic in our brains + ways to reduce it
It's not JUST about saving turtles 🐢 anymore—it’s about protecting our hearts, lungs, brains, and fertility. No one is immune, and the stakes are especially high for 🤰👶
Plastic back in the limelight
A study just published last month in Nature Medicine showed that plastic is in our brains - and at increasing amounts in the past 8 years 😫.1
Researchers analyzed post-mortem brain tissue from 47 individuals, along with liver and kidney samples, collected in 2016 and 2024. These samples came from decedents in New Mexico, meticulously examined under strict forensic pathology protocols to eliminate contamination.
What They Found
🔬 Microplastics were detected in every single brain sample. 🤯
🔬 The most common plastic found was polyethylene (PE)—the same plastic used in food packaging, grocery bags, and disposable containers. 🥩🥛🥤
🔬 Dementia patients had significantly higher concentrations of plastic in their brains compared to individuals without dementia.
This does not mean that plastic causes dementia, but the association is concerning.
The research already suggests that plastics trigger inflammation in other parts of the body (see below), so the possibility of a causal link remains open—but we need more research.
Another scary statistic? 🔬 Between 2016 and 2024, plastic levels in human brains increased by nearly 50%.
This means that over the past eight years, our exposure to microplastics has skyrocketed—and worse, our bodies are absorbing and retaining more plastic than ever before.
Plastic Accumulation Over Time: A Disturbing Trend
To understand if this is a new problem or something that had been happening for decades, the researchers compared their results to older brain samples (1997–2013) from repositories on the U.S. East Coast.
📉 What they found was alarming—the older samples contained significantly lower levels of microplastics.
This confirms that human exposure to plastic has dramatically increased in recent decades, making it a crisis we cannot afford to ignore.
🚨Here are my top plastic swaps to make in the kitchen🚨
Why This Matters for Brain Health
One of the most troubling findings from this study is that dementia patients had much higher levels of microplastics in their brains.
So, could plastic exposure impair our cognition and contribute to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s?