Three Surprising Ways Microplastics Can Enter Your Body

How many are you and your family subject to?

The wrong plasticity

We’ll not keep the three ways a mystery; they are:

• Inhalation: breathing in airborne microplastics from indoor and urban environments where particles are suspended in the air
• Ingestion: consuming plastics through food and drink, especially from packaging, bottled water, and contaminated seafood especially
• Absorption: absorbing tiny particles and associated chemicals through your skin from cosmetics, personal care products, and more

This is a problem, because nanoplastics are small enough to cross cell membranes and accumulate in tissues like your liver, brain, and lungs, where your immune system triggers inflammation but cannot fully remove them.

The futile immune response then becomes a problem of its own, as repeated immune responses mean chronic inflammation, which is a recipe for disaster in more ways than we have room to list here, but the gist is: your body will get cumulatively rundown over time.

Another way it causes harm is that many such plastics release endocrine-disrupting chemicals like BPA, phthalates, and PFAS, which are well-documented to affect hormones and metabolism in humans (spoiler: the effects are not good effects).

The science of microplastics is (for obvious reasons) young and ongoing, for example, there’s a lot that still unknown about such things as:

• direct disease causation: while it certainly appears that microplastics cause specific diseases like cancer, dementia, and diabetes in humans, the causality has not technically been proven yet.
• dose-response effects: scientists don’t yet know how much exposure (if any) is “safe” over a lifetime in humans
• organ-specific damage: plastics have been found in organs (including the brain), but the the full list exact health consequences of that accumulation are still being investigated. We know it is strongly associated with increased aggregation of tau proteins, amyloid-beta, alpha-synuclein, and so forth, though, amongst other things (see the “learn more” for more on this).
• relative importance of sources: it’s still uncertain which exposure sources (air vs food vs products) contribute most to long-term health risk.
• long-term human outcomes: the strongest current evidence comes from in vitro or non-human animal studies, while long-term human data is still limited and evolving (simply, mouse autopsies stack up more quickly than human ones).

For more on all of this, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

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Take care!