Quote · Huberman Lab
The Effects of Microplastics on Your Health & How to Reduce Them
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Microplastics in Human Tissues; Pregnancy, Young Kids, BPA
At 15:04 · chapter starts 9:38
Postmortem studies show microplastics in every examined tissue. The brain contains ~0.5% plastic by weight [1] — Andrew Huberman "Wherever scientists have looked in human postmortem tissue, they find microplastics and nanoplastics — brain, lungs, liver, testes, follicl…" 09:48 . They cross the blood-brain, blood-testicular, and blood-follicular barriers [2] — Andrew Huberman "Nanoparticles of plastic are small enough to slip through biological barriers like the blood-brain barrier and blood-testicular barrier tha…" 40:00 . Found in placenta and newborn first stool.
Wherever scientists have looked in human postmortem tissue, they find microplastics and nanoplastics — brain, lungs, liver, testes, follicles, placenta, and newborn first stool. The brain alone contains roughly 0.5% of its total weight in plastic particles. No human tissue investigation has returned a negative result.
Postmortem analysis of adult human brains found microplastics and nanoplastics make up approximately 0.5% of total brain weight — roughly a teaspoon of salt's worth.
Postmortem analysis found microplastics and nanoplastics present in every single human testicle that was examined, raising serious concerns about male reproductive health.
Commercial plastics like polyethylene and polyurethane were essentially nonexistent before the 1940s; their explosion in manufacturing from the 1950s onward is why microplastics are now everywhere.
Microplastics and nanoplastics have been detected in meconium — the first stool of newborns — confirming that plastic particles cross from mother to fetus.
The FDA and European regulators banned BPA from sippy cups and food containers for young children after accumulating enough concern about BPA's endocrine-disrupting effects, particularly its correlation with microplastic exposure.
