When a CBS News medical correspondent claimed recently that we’re accumulating a plastic spoon’s worth of plastic in our brains, her colleagues looked horrified, and for good reason. Surely, that much plastic would gunk up our cognitive machinery.
You probably don’t have quite that much of the stuff in your brain, but the idea of any plastic piling up there is still unnerving.
The correspondent was referring to a new study of the amount of plastic our bodies absorb. Researchers from the University of New Mexico and other institutions examined organs collected from autopsies of 91 people who died over the last quarter century. The scientists tested small samples from different organs, including the brain, liver and kidneys, to measure the amount of plastic present. The results, published in the journal Nature Medicine last month, concluded that plastic is lodged primarily in our brains.
