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    Good News: You Probably Don’t Have a Spoon’s Worth of Plastic in Your Brain After All
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    Good News: You Probably Don’t Have a Spoon’s Worth of Plastic in Your Brain After All


    Good News: You Probably Don’t Have a Spoon’s Worth of Plastic in Your Brain After All

    https://slate.com/technology/2026/01/microplastics-brain-research-not-bad.html?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_content=microplastics_shannon&utm_campaign=&tpcc=reddit-social–microplastics_shannon

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    10 Comments

    1. Slate on

      Remember hearing that you have a spoon’s worth of plastic in your brain? That’s what a study published last February in Nature Medicine [suggested](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1). Researchers at the University of New Mexico analyzed samples of brain tissue from dead people, and found they contained a truly alarming amount of teeny tiny shards and flakes of polyethylene, and other polymers. While the negative effects of such microplastics and nanoplastics on the body were unclear—and the researchers admitted that point—it was still an incredibly jarring discovery. “I certainly don’t feel comfortable with this much plastic in my brain,” [said](https://hscnews.unm.edu/news/hsc-newsroom-post-microplastics-human-brains) Matthew Campen, a toxicologist who led the study. Plastic made up nearly 0.5 percent of the brain tissue of “normal individuals” that the team examined, an amount that Campen, aware of the size of the brain, characterized to the media as [the equivalent of a spoon](https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/03/health/plastics-inside-human-brain-wellness). Yikes!

      Well—now, double yikes. In the weeks after the paper was published, someone spotted that it contained a couple of [duplicated images](https://www.thetransmitter.org/publishing/spoonful-of-plastics-in-your-brain-paper-has-duplicated-images/). That itself might have just been a sloppy clerical error. But over the summer a group of scientists [wrote](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-04045-3.epdf?sharing_token=67_cuBUO0UL1AeNVCgDqE9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0PS5QtSs_irU94U55JE4Ar4Z5UOMBpR3_t_yCh0UzMgGKL-GztU5e15cffbRpDb67AMozIXlp82gM9YW2QGk63C5OxsW_ncVxqYJfdR7JAeVCZI4Lm6SNe2MQ8ERqGifs1OgQsP5qE_G-FoRGaatnnKUVXs-mVt2rnDNZCH-KhkeAl8JJ6iMM5a0HkEMmh7iEykGmqbwM7HNfyR0WQXdXyZjtqXmTquWmAFsHArsSnvC1hKOX7TDMRP-eAQchOqQQM%3D&tracking_referrer=www.theguardian.com) to the journal where the study had appeared, highlighting “methodological limitations” in the study, namely that it may have failed to properly root out any “contamination introduced during sampling, sample preparation or detection.”

      That is: did the proverbial plastic spoon come from the brain tissue itself, or did some of it come from other sources, like labware or even the air? We just can’t tell. At any rate, as one of the scientists critical of the study put it to the Guardian [in a report published Tuesday](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/13/microplastics-human-body-doubt): “The brain microplastic paper is a joke.”

      Slate’s Shannon Palus breaks it all down here: [https://slate.com/technology/2026/01/microplastics-brain-research-not-bad.html?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_content=microplastics_shannon&utm_campaign=&tpcc=reddit-social–microplastics_shannon](https://slate.com/technology/2026/01/microplastics-brain-research-not-bad.html?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_content=microplastics_shannon&utm_campaign=&tpcc=reddit-social–microplastics_shannon)

    3. mistertickertape on

      I was more worried about a credit cards worth in of microplastic my testicles but thanks for this.

    4. Spare-Locksmith-2162 on

      Yeah, I’m not convinced that these folks are right. Do they have ties to the fossil fuel industry?

    6. iwatchppldie on

      I don’t smoke and I ride a motorcycle a lot. I find every so often I will come back from a ride with black gunk in my nose. At this point given this only coincides with interstate rides I’m pretty sure it’s tire dust. I would probably be happy to find it’s only a spoon of plastic in my brain.

    8. truehd24 on

      I hope this doesn’t become like the constant waves of climate change denial dressed up as “it’s not *that* bad…” Microplastics (and nanoplastics) *are* a growing concern among scientists and criticizing a hand full of the most sensationalist papers on the subject doesn’t invalidate that.