Why are microplastics bad for our body?
In: Biology
Plastic is bad for your body. It can stay in your body if it gets stuck and can interrupt bodily functions.
Very simply: microplastics have no biological function, and the body doesn’t have any real way to get rid of them. So they have a tendency to simply accumulate, in your body, in places they shouldn’t be, which can affect your body in untold ways.
It’s similar to things like asbestos. You breathe it in, it doesn’t leave. It can cause cancer.
Will plastics cause cancer? Quite probably, yes.
But it’s also not just “us” … Plastics don’t decompose, they just break up into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic, and are everywhere. Animals, plants, bacteria… everything is getting poisoned by plastic.
Imagine a sand timer/hourglass. If you turn it over, the sand will slowly pool to the bottom. Now imagine tossing a bead in there. It might flow fine but be slower since the sand has to filter over it. If you kept adding more beads, the hole will eventually become blocked, and the sand won’t flow through properly.
This is what happens when microplastics get into places they shouldn’t. Maybe it will be fine for the first time or two, but eventually, they will block up something important and, depending on where it happens, it could cause irreversible danger. I.e. if you get microplastics in your bloodstream and that causes a clot, you could wind up with a stroke or a heart attack if it gets to your heart or brain.
Microplastics are like tiny, uninvited guests at a party in your body. They don’t bring anything good, just disrupt the fun, and can even harm the host (that’s you).
Microplastics are like tiny invaders that our body doesn’t know how to fight, disrupting our system and potentially causing harm.
We don’t know the full extent of what microplastics do to people yet, but we should generally be concerned whenever something that is not supposed to be in our bodies is getting into our bodies.
If it doesn’t have a purpose, it will tend to build up in our bloodstreams if our bodies don’t have a good way of getting rid of it, just like trash tends to build up in city streets if the city doesn’t have good waste disposal. This is what happens with microplastics because they are too big for our bodies to get rid of them easily and our bodies can’t digest them to break them down like food. Stuff building up in your bloodstream is bad because it can eventually block bloodflow to parts of your body and cause them to die due to lack of oxygen.
Officially we have no proven research yet on the specific effects of micro plastics on humans. The phenomenon is too new and the typical effect such small materials cause is hard to study (cancer)
It will only be in future decades when the effects become apparent to the general population to what extent micro plastics contributed to public health.
Currently we don’t actually know if they are bad. Its likely they have some sort of effect, but currently there is no published credible research on microplastics in the human body yet.
It’s comparable to asbestos, which is microscopic fiberglass. At first it seemed like a good idea to use it as a flame retardant insulation in buildings, but when people inhaled it, it damaged the cells in their lungs. And constant damage followed by repair increases cancer risk. And now there are buildings with asbestos in the walls which are dangerous for people to live in. So we remove it or go work in another building.
So, if we extrapolate, microplastics are the asbestos, tiny things that can damage cells, constantly damaging and repairing cells can cause cancer. And the building is actually the entire world. We can’t just move to another world, so while there is no hard research, people are saying let’s cut back before we have an asbestos filled building that we can’t move out of.
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