Every generation alive has microplastics in them
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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Can someone tell me what microplastics do to the body? I’m almost too afraid to ask at this point.
Veritasium has a video about it on YouTube.
It’s very informative and may just give you the fix you’re looking for
That's the neat thing: nobody can. It's incredibly hard to devise a study that can show anything about it. There is no way to get a human without microplastics in them to get a control group, and by this point as far as I know there is no plausible theory to get a specific study.
Everyone kinda suspects that it can't be good for you, simultaneously there is zero actual evidence that something is ever happening. We don't know, and that's very frustrating.
It seems like they'd be fairly inert. Although that's certainly no guarantee that they're not really bad for you. Much like inert gas, the danger could well be them replacing or getting in the way of something else.
IIRC the one thing we are sure of is that they don't break down, nor do they get out. So you better hope they don't do anything bad on top of that
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Don't forget the nanoplastics! These are even more hazardous!
Bah. I dont care about lead, microplastics or even covid.
Chernobyl and mad cow-disease are my jam.
Except that microplastics have been a major problematic thing since basically plastic become a popular thing, we just didn't know it yet back then. It's not like millenials invented plastic or popularized its use.
The amount of it in our environment has been ever increasing though. There's more of it in the oceans, the soil, the rivers, the plants. The whole food chain and ecosystems are contaminated more than ever before.
At what point does it become macroplastic? kiloplastic for the Europeans.
Bold of you to think that the microplastic is going to go away after one generation...
Who said that? Lead poisoning is still rampant in some communities.
I think the question is, why are you bringing up millennials when the issue of microplastics did not start with them, nor will it end with them.
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Boomers had/have microplastics and lead poisoning. This is not a conspiracy, it is just a fact.
Did someone say it was a conspiracy?
The pipes in the US still contain plenty of lead. Also, Covid brain damage. Tons of it.
Most lead intoxication in boomers comes from leaded gasoline, lead in other presentations is less bio-available
Everyone has microplastics, even newborn babies, and we have no sign of decrease in its use.
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Luckily, for the younger generations, we'll probably just get cancer instead of becoming massive malleable assholes
Millennials? More like GenX. We’ve been eating out of microwaved tupperware since the sixties.
It looks like the cumulative total of plastics produced by the 80's was around 2-3 ~~trillion~~ billion tons, whereas now it's probably more like 20-30B.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/global-plastics-production.png
Honestly I don't think we're socially responsible enough to end something like lead poisoning these days.
You'd have people saying they like the lead and deliberately putting more of it in. Pussy-ass liberals trying to take their god given lead away...
Imagine trying to stop the hole in the ozone today. We'd have people spraying CFCs in the air just to spite the effort.
As someone just old enough to remember, we did have that with CFCs. Might not have been super mainstream, and nobody who would have done it out of spite really had the disposable income to actually do it.
I grew up in a Fundamentalist Christian "cult" and I remember the adults around me "joking" about it all the time. I remember a Missionary to northern Canada visiting our church (in rural America) to try to raise support talking about the temperatures and joking that it's so cold that he wanted to stand outside with an aerosol can in each hand to try to bring on some global warming, and that getting a laugh from the congregation. You might think that maybe it was a "harmless" joke that maybe as a child I didn't pick up on the sarcasm, but there were absolutely adults there who fully believed that there was nothing humans could do to damage the earth, because God takes care of it. "And how dare the government and these evolutionists try to tell us how to live."
for the past few months ive started to think we're like a couple years away from putting lead back in the gasoline
Leaded gas is still used in small airplanes with internal combustion engines. If you live near a General Aviation airport you are being showered in lead so some rich guy can play pilot.
Trump deregulating gas and paint to put lead back in both would be so unsurprising it won't even garner a reaction from me.
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Someone will call not wanting lead poisoning woke and that will be that.
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Boomers also have them, or do you think they intentionally target millennials?
Nah, because every future generation will have it too.
Don't forget about PFAS!
My dad's car ran on 4 star right up until the mid 90s. I was exposed to plenty lead in my formative years as well as micro plastics.
The ol twofer
I wonder what our neurosises will be.
Depression, I would say. Same as how boomers are labeled as uncaring and sociopathic because of lead.
The depression is a natural byproduct of civilization. We're not supposed to sit in concrete boxes and do meaningless tasks for survival. It makes us sad.
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I think it's more physiological. Since microplastics are ingested maybe it's related to the rise in oral and rectal cancers.
Yeah, but the nanoplastics get past the BBB (Blood Brain Barrier), what's it, a plastic spoon in every human brain? Enough for some psych effects I guess. Oh, there's 27 million tonnes of nanoplastics spread across just the top layer of the temperate to subtropical North Atlantic
Shit's pervasive and in your brain.
I still licked lead pain in the craddle, ate too many food preservatives and artificial colorants, ate too much red meat, too much fat, got micro plastics poisoning...
And all I have to tell is bad breath, flatulence that could strip paint off the walls and a stupid sense of humour.
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