KYLE DOMINY: It’s all in your head: A plastics problem

By Kyle Dominy

Modern science has done it again. We can now estimate how much plastic is in our brains. Scientists can’t tell you how it got there or prescribe any method to get rid of it, they can just tell you that it’s there, and that it’s most likely bad for you.

What an age to be alive.

Of all the things to happen over the past five years, I’d never expect finding plastic on the human brain to make the list. I’m sure there are several people who would accuse me of having a plastic brain, but never plastic on the brain.

A recently released study from the University of New Mexico found that the average brain contained about 7 grams of microplastics. That’s enough to make a standard disposable plastic fork. Talk about recycling. Some brains had more, others less. Dementia patients had the most.

Microplastics have long been the worry of medical scientists and health nuts. These nanoparticles are the left-behind bits of decomposing plastic goods, and are apparently everywhere, from the depths of the oceans to the meaty bits inside our bodies. How they find their way to our vital organs is still a mystery, but researchers suggest it is by eating, drinking and breathing.

So by the essentials of daily living. Even if you somehow led a plastic-free life, it’s in the air and the water. You can’t run and you can’t hide from the plastic apocalypse. I suppose that garbage island is still floating around somewhere in the Pacific making matters worse, distributing more and more microbits into the environment.

I try not to worry about such things, but as a parent it’s difficult not to. I don’t want my children to grow up in a world where a fork’s worth of plastic in the brain is a common thing, but that cat is out of the bag. I guess in a few years I’ll have two forks’ worth and won’t remember what’s going on anyway.

Even Consumer Reports, the customer advocacy group, suggests ditching most things plastic to combat the spread of these microscopic fearsome flecks. Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but it sounds like a ploy by big dish soap to force us to wash more dishes. Life’s too short for dishpan hands. Back off, Palmolive. Toss your plastic, and you’d soon find you own very little.

But you don’t have to look far to find something to worry about, and I’ll take our plastic age to, say, any time during the medieval period, or the 1970s. Disco? I don’t think so.

Things are faring well in my portion of this seemingly chaotic world. I’ll try not to let my plastic-infused head organ dwell on things out of my control. Worry only robs you of time that could be better spent and further clogs up the brain. So scientists, quit telling me how much plastic is floating around my skull and get back to me when you know how to get it out.