Summary
A new study estimates that childhood exposure to leaded gasoline caused 151 million excess mental health disorders in the U.S. from 1940 to 2015.
Generations, especially those born between 1966 and 1986, experienced higher rates of anxiety, depression, and impulsivity, with Generation X most affected.
The research builds on prior studies linking lead exposure to cognitive and behavioral harm, underscoring the lasting impact of environmental toxins.
Though lead was banned from gasoline in 1996, it persists in paint, water lines, and soil.
The problem is that you can’t rule anything out. Microplastics are always accumulating in your body and each generation has more than the previous. We pass our plastic onto the newborns. Newborns whose parents had less microplastics in them when they were born. No one can really tell you the effect of this because we are living in it. There is no control sample for comparison. We can make wild guesses and have conspiracy theories that might end up true.
People are having more trouble conceiving children and look to IVF. Could microplastics somehow hinder the reproductive process?
More people are being diagnosed with mental health problems. Are microplastics causing problems with our mental development?
Modern humans absorb less nutrients from their diet. Is it just because our food has less nutrients than it used to, or because we can’t absorb as efficiently with microplastics?
I mean no one can point to a source and no one will be able to because plastics are everywhere and we can’t compare humans with to humans without. Clearly microplastics do something. At the very least they are taking up space that could be used by a more healthy chemical, nutrient, or other bodily process. The microplastics would be the roadblocks slowing signals and making traffic worse.
I guess you could run lab experiments to see if mice in a plastic free environment live longer and happier than ones chewing plastic things all day long. At least, that should reveal any acute symptoms. Who knows what happens after decades of exposure. Studying those types of questions is very difficult, but in recent years there have been more and more studies indicating potential carcinogenic effects in various chemicals.
As far as I now, humans have been exposed to wood particles for thousands of years, and they could have similar effects as far as the physical particles are concerned. Obviously they leach off very different compounds, so that part of the net effect won’t be comparable at all. If the presence of tiny particles in the bloodsream or elsewhere in the body is harmful, we would probably already know about it. What if the effect could also be so subtle, that you won’t notice anything out of the ordinary in a society where people rarely live past their 40s.