Scientists issue dire warning: Microplastic accumulation in human brains escalating
Scientists have made a disturbing discovery: human brains contain microplastics, and at higher concentrations than other organs. Worse, brain levels have jumped 50% in just eight years.
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A relative bright spot amidst a sea of bad news:
"Bottled water alone can expose people to nearly as many microplastic particles annually as all ingested and inhaled sources combined,” said Brandon Luu, an Internal Medicine Resident at the University of Toronto. “Switching to tap water could reduce this exposure by almost 90%, making it one of the simplest ways to cut down on microplastic intake.”
Dunno if anyone reading this is still drinking bottled water, but, uh, now you have another reason to not do that.
They won't think it was suicide if I keep drinking bottled water.
This would mean any liquid in plastic is a large source. Bottled water has other options, not so much the rest. I mean they could have different packaging and some do, but cost is a reason plastic is primarily used.
glass bottled soda > canned soda > plastic contained soda or fountain drinks
... maybe we will end up with a bottlecap psuedo currency after all.
Aluminum cans have a plastic liner in them to protect the metal from the acidic soda, but I'm not sure if it leaches in the same way as plastic bottles.
Especially things with carbonic or citric acid are probably even worse here
Edit: and we need to keep in mind, the aluminium cans also have a plastic liner inside. So those probably aren't better either...
Shit thing, that glass is so heavy to move around.
And pretty much everything is stored in large plastic containers during production, until it's filled into whatever.
Not sure how we can actually get around this.
The best thing we can do, is probably just reducing the plastic intake, by avoiding plastic bottles, as they are much more prone to decay due to UV light and long term storage.
But well, I guess, we're fucked here as well
I got a soda stream with glass bottles. You can make soda from fruit (lemons and oranges are especially delicious - plus I can control whatever sweetener I use). Also, if you really want cola, then you can get concentrated syrup so there's less plastic and liquid transport overall.
I wish it were easier to find name-brand cola syrup in larger sizes than those 14.8 fl oz Sodastream ones. Seems like bag-in-box syrups are only sold to actual business owners, not the general public.
Yeah, having the same thing at home
But I still like beer, fruit juices (and not just syrups) and so on
But the soda stream is quite in use by my wife
I have one of those fancy vacuum bottles. As far as I'm aware the only plastic is a small ring for the seal, which isn't in contact with the water. What do you think? Is my brain double plastic?
Plastic sealed brain is better protected?
Brain has plasticity (changes). Just my little joke.
I was curious about this since a plastic bottle that held water for years doesn't show any wear on the inside and found out it's not the bottle that's the likely source but the filters they use prior to bottling, which have a plastic mesh system. The bottle can stills leech BPA and is best avoided.
The thing is that most of our piping is plastic. So how is tap water so much better?
On average, disposable plastic bottles shed microplastics much more prolifically than plastic water piping.
That would seem to be the explanation on the face of it. Piping is made from heavier duty plastic. But I've heard that PVC can start leaking some nasty chemicals over the decades. Is that better or worse than microplastics?
PVC fell out of use in the 2000s, most buildings use PEX now; but I don't know how that compares.
you mean, they don't use PVC in any new buildings anymore, but older buildings sti have them, right?
I believe I've heard that PEX actually breaks down and starts leeching chemicals into the water faster than PVC. It's also a cheaper material. Most of the houses I'm familiar with are still installing PVC.
You have to remember that plastic containers aren't washed before they are filled with product. That's often where much of the micro/nano plastics come from.
Do you have a source on that? I find it hard to believe we put water into unsanitized bottles.
It’s been no secret for years now that nanoplastics are lurking in bottled water and in products packaged or wrapped in other kinds of plastic. But new research has called attention to just how big an issue these particles may be.
A study published in January 2024 used new methods to analyze just how many nanoplastic particles really are floating around in the average plastic bottle of water. They found that a liter of bottled water can contain as many as 240,000 tiny plastic fragments. That number is 10 to 100 times more than previous estimates.
That's interesting and sounds about right. Do you have any links on this subject?
Imma help my brain and switch to a soda fountain at home then. I could just drink water but let's not get too ahead of ourselves
If you can find a way to do an at home soda making process that doesn't involve the soda flavor packets being ... in plastic... than that would be ideal, I think.
Similarly, time to go back to beans + grinder or grounds that come in a non plastic package for coffee... stop using keurigs and pods... thats all plastic.
...
I just stopped drinking soda regularly and switched over to 99% water a long time ago.
I treat soda as a dessert, like ice cream or a brownie, only have a few a week, or month.
...
Soda and bottled water also have absurdly high margins, absurdly high costs to buy per what it cost the company to make.
A fountain soda at a fast food place in America has about a 1125% markup / margin.
If you paid 2 dollars for the soda, the actual soda cost 0.18 cents.
Not 18 cents.
0.18 cents.
A fifth of a penny.
Bottled water is around 900% to 1000% markup / profit margin.
It takes time but making fermented drinks that are carbonated like ginger beer is actually pretty easy. There's plenty of resources online. Just make sure you use pressure safe bottles for second fermentation.
Espresso pods are usually aluminum, and recyclable. Amazon and other cheap brands do make plastic ones now that the patent ran out, but the better brands are not plastic.
Huh, all the pods I ever found at grocery stores were plastic, back when I had a ... pod-based coffee machine.
I've been drinking exclusively from a water bottle with a filter for a few years at this point and it feels less and less paranoid.
I started putting aluminum foil, folded a few times to the size of a typical card, in my wallet, in each flap... a year or two after credit and debit cards started getting RFID chips (the things that let you tap as oppose to swipe), and thus could be scanned and cloned by a guy walking around with a device in their backpack... and one of my cards was cloned this way.
Everyone called me paranoid.
Faraday cages block radio signals... RFID works via radio signals.
Then, that form of cloning cards became more popular, and now, most wallets just feature a bit of metallic weave or layer in them somewhere to prevent that, or the ekster and ridge wallets that just are metal.
Would my plastic water bottle (reusable) be a problem?
Yes but to a much lesser extent. The act of merely breaking the seal on the cap injects a lot of plastic into the liquid, so skipping that has to count for something
Honestly, I'm not saying that you're lying but that's very hard to accept as truth. Would you have a good source for learning about all this?
You're right, I misremembered It's not just about breaking the seal on the cap, the mere friction of the cap on the bottle adds the bulk of microplastics found within
I was thinking of an article from years ago where they were talking about macro plastics nearly visible to the eye getting into the liquid from breaking the seal. Can't seem to find it now though
Thanks that's very useful and good to know.
And what about plastic bottles. Like, not the packaging type but just plastic reusable waterbottles?
They are bad.
Get a ceramic mug, or canteen/water bottle with an aluminum or stainless steel internal lining, drink your tap water out of that, filter it if your tap quality sucks.
is aluminum a good idea? I remember reading that lots of years ago the use of aluminum cutlery contributed to developing dementia
Does anyone knows of those brita filters that’s pretty much a plastic jar would leak as much microplastics as a regular bottle of water?
I assume soda and other bottled drinks are included in this warning, as well as any other container lined with plastic, and I think some canned drinks and food are….which, uh, sucks.
Yep, even metal-canned sodas have a plastic liner on the inside of them.
Unless it says BPA free or something. WF in brand cans removed it.
Unless you live in one of the many countries without potable drinking water...also do you think the micro plastics are filtered out? I'm actually asking if they're filtered out
As far as I know, off the top if my head, there are not any affordable, attach to the tap in your sink type filters that actually filter out microplastics.
I may be out of date on that, been about 2 years since I last looked at filters... but yeah, afaik, we have no idea how to effectively filter out microplastics from water at an end user standpoint, as we do for other, older, mkre commonly worried about water pollutants.
... I guess if you fully boiled all your water to the point it is all steam, and then condenses back ti water, in a glass or metal recepticle, that might do something for reducing microplastics, but that is insanely energy and time intensive.
Regular boiling is pretty good! The micrplastics end up sticking to the calcium deposits left behind. Never been so happy for that stupid white buildup in my kettle!
"As reported in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology Letters, boiling and filtering calcium-containing tap water could help remove nearly 90% of the nano- and microplastics present."
Fuck, that's good news.
Kinda funny that the tried and true 'works good enough' method of boiling water to cleanse it also works for micro plastics.
I think the implication is that they come from the plastic bottle.
I hope you're right ..but also how much water/soda do we drink out of plastic without even thinking about it?