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.
Probably do the same thing most of the junk humans dump into the environment. Reduce average lifespan, cause diseases and reduced fertility.
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.
Don't forget the nanoplastics! These are even more hazardous!
Boomers had/have microplastics and lead poisoning. This is not a conspiracy, it is just a fact.
Did someone say it was a conspiracy?
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.
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.
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Boomers also have them, or do you think they intentionally target millennials?
Luckily, for the younger generations, we'll probably just get cancer instead of becoming massive malleable assholes
Everyone has microplastics, even newborn babies, and we have no sign of decrease in its use.
We must become one with the plastic. It's the only way.
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
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
Don't forget about PFAS!
Yeah and also for Gen X, Gen Z, Gen Alpha. We all still alive and everybody gets microplastic in their balls and brains. Its for all ages
Right? Haha 😂 Oh did we suddenly clean up the entire Earth from free roaming microplastics?
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I wonder what our neurosises will be.
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.
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.
The sociopath part, I think, is likely because they grew up in the easiest time in history.
As an Elder Millenial/Xennial I was lucky enough to make it to adulthood just before it got complicated. Unfortunately we're talking months.
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Millennials? More like GenX. We’ve been eating out of microwaved tupperware since the sixties.
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Honestly I don't think we're socially responsible enough to end something like lead poisoning these days.
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."
If it was more in the zeitgeist, kids would be huffing it on tiktok.
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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Nah, because every future generation will have it too.
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