The Real Microplastics Problem Isn’t in Your Brain

In the realm of horror, it was hard to beat the headlines last February that you were carrying around the equivalent of a plastic spoon’s worth of microplastics in your brain. The findings, reported in Nature Medicine, generated lots of outrage on morning talk shows and were even repeated as fact by would-be surgeon general Casey Means.

A number of chemists were initially skeptical of the study, which was based on analyzing brains from a small sample of cadavers. In a rebuttal published last month in Nature, a group of chemists argued that the technique used couldn’t accurately distinguish fat particles that are a normal part of the brain from microplastics, and that the study didn’t include the necessary validation steps to ensure they weren’t simply seeing post-mortem contamination or otherwise misleading themselves.