Plastic is everywhere. We all know that. And we’ve all heard about the danger that plastic can pose to our health when specks of it from, say, soda bottles or take-out food containers wind up ingested.
For instance, there was a highly publicized study of cadaver brains in February 2025, using a new technique for finding plastic particles in the body, that concluded that in the most extreme cases, plastic shards made up 0.48 percent of the brain—enough to make a plastic spoon. Other studies, using the same technique, came to the same conclusion, leading to lots of shocking headlines and scary quotes from scientists. Matthew Campen, co-author of the plastic spoon study, even implied that plastic lodged in the brain might cause dementia.
Fast-forward to November, when another group of researchers published commentary in the journal Nature showing that the technique used to find all this plastic couldn’t distinguish the stuff from ordinary fat molecules. The Guardian, which had run some of the most alarmist headlines (“Microscopic Plastics Could Raise Risk of Stroke and Heart Attack, Study Says”) suddenly reversed course. Last week, it published a lengthy article slamming the research, with critics calling the original 2025 brain study a “joke.”
