Yes, it’s a rhetorical question because plastics aren’t supposed to be in your blood, much less your brain. But research is revealing disturbing facts about the extent of plastic pollution and its far-reaching consequences.

According to research, microplastics can cross the placenta and enter breast milk, where infants can then consume them. The use of plastic feeding bottles and teething toys raises the risk. What about smoothie shakers made of plastic? Do they also provide another dose of microplastics with the drink?

Ecologists have discovered that microplastics frequently get into foods like salt, honey, and sugar, and some research indicates that people consume more than 100,000 microplastic particles annually. It was no surprise when one scientist estimated that there are 24.4 trillion microplastics in the world’s upper oceans.

Microplastics can be absorbed through the skin through personal care items like exfoliating skincare gels, in addition to being inhaled or consumed. These minute particles contaminate human bodies and are found almost everywhere in the natural environment.

Plastics play such an ingrained role in our lives that eliminating them is almost unthinkable or nonexistent in our current world. What would we do without plastic? Converting from supermarket bags to bringing our own to carry groceries is worthy of a comic’s routine in a club. It’s less than an itch on the belly of a flea in terms of the billions of pieces of microplastic pollution circulating our planet, much less the incalculable tons floating in our oceans and polluting our shorelines.

These microparticles are in our food, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and even in places we have no idea they might exist, like hospital tubing, medical supplies, etc. Plastics have overtaken our world, and not in a good way at all. If they clog our waterways, what do you think they do to us internally in our circulatory system and our brain?

Our brains require a constant, surging flow of blood-filled nutrients and oxygen to work effectively. If those nutrients also help carry microplastics to our brain that somehow worm their way through the blood-brain barrier and into that delicate tissue, what might be the result? Researchers are asking that question, too.

Can we protect ourselves from the invasion of microplastics into our bodies? It seems we can’t. The most common microplastic particles in our environment originate from car tire dust, artificial grass, and washing of clothes made of artificial fibers. Humans are exposed to microplastics mainly through nutrition and air, and although this exposure is known to happen on a daily basis, the health effects of microplastics remain largely unknown.

What about our brains? There is another study that addresses this danger. We now demonstrate that nanoplastics can be deposited in the brain via nasal inhalation, triggering neuron toxicity and altering…behavior.

The researchers also suggested that the presence of microplastics could contribute to neurological impairments in fetuses and children. Studies have shown that the presence of nanoplastic particles in the brain reduced vital brain enzymes that were found to malfunction in the brains of patients with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

The long-term effects of microplastic exposure on human health require further study. In the interim, plastics production is at ever-increasing levels, meaning the risk for all of us and future generations is reaching extremely dangerous levels. It is not a medication, a vaccine, or a lifestyle issue, but an environmental one, and this one is external and internal.

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If you’re not up to speed on the common ingredient Glyphosate, a systemic weed killer used for decades and the basic active component of Roundup, this enlightening hour-long documentary from Aljazeera entitled The Price of Progress: How safe is European food production? will give you all the relevant context you need.

This article isn’t about whether Roundup or Glyphosate is safe or not. While this is clearly a question that needs to be urgently addressed, as the compound ends up in most of the food we eat and is used across the globe as our primary weed killer, there is a clear and growing consensus that there is in fact trouble in paradise and that the world’s favorite weed killer may not just be killings weeds.

The inflexible scientist

To understand how science can get things wrong, let’s turn to more current events and a disclaimer before we start. Science, good science, is critical to our survival. Without it, we’d be pottering around in the dark still, hitching horses to sleds with no wheels. Science is however a tool, and its one that is subject to our human tendency to assume we know everything, even when science tells us exactly the opposite. It’s this human tendency for certainty that causes problems. That and our proclivity for harnessing good for bad.

Take the SARS-CoV2 virus. The WHO categorically stated in March of 2020 that the virus could not become aerosolized or airborne. Six foot was all you needed and a face covering. Droplets. Not fine particles. For nearly a year, American-based scientists argued with the WHO, telling them they were making a massive mistake. They had proof that the virus could in fact “float about” for extended periods in the air, just like the measles and TB virus.

After a year of vocal and very public outrage by a growing number of scientists, the WHO capitulated. They agreed that the virus was in fact airborne and that the only real protection was a proper, well-sealed N95 grade mask and proper ventilation. They had been wrong, spectacularly so and the evidence and the science they’d been shown was ignored. Why? Their inability to question accepted scientific dogma in the face of new research cost lives.

You cannot argue this, it is fact. The advice the WHO issued led to many of the policies that engaged close-quarter lockdowns for many across the globe. Had the world been put on notice earlier, we may have been able to avert many deaths. It didn’t happen and not because science was wrong, but because WHO scientists and experts had become fixated in their beliefs, inflexible, and unwilling to listen without prejudice to new research. 

The WHO based their advice on data that was over 80 years old and they wilfully ignored new data, new research, and new information.

You can read more about this particular story here in a fantastic piece on Wired. It’s a fascinating indictment of our scientific regulatory systems and the people that decide our fates. It also exposes exactly how certain mechanisms employed by groups like the WHO and EU regulatory bodies can compromise, discount, and dismiss out of hand, honest and open scientific exploration. 

There is a maximum in science that institutionalized scientists choose to willfully and arrogantly ignore. Never say never.

The influence of the mighty dollar

To what extent is grift involved in this process, the direct or indirect enrichment of individuals, projects, and organizations by the very companies that regulators are asked to police? Hugely so, it’s an open secret, widely known and largely glossed over as the part of the game politics, science and big corporations engage in. Again, the public is the inevitable victim of the gatekeeper’s complicity.

Companies like Monsanto budget hundreds of millions of dollars annually for lobbyists. Individuals who operate in the shadows, quietly influencing political policy, legislation, and the passing of corporate-friendly bills. In the halls of political power in Brussels, these lobbyists have become permanent fixtures, as have their colleagues across the water in Washington, filling the coffers of politicians and influential individuals from a bottomless pit of wealth.

It’s not just companies like Monsanto who pursue this practice. Big Pharma, energy companies like Shell and Enron, and almost every sector of big business is accounted for. Grift is how you oil the wheels of progress and science ends up on the losing end. We end up on the losing end. It’s a simple question of logic. Any act or business dealing that requires financial lubrication to enable its deployment, is by its very nature questionable. If you see a lobbyist, it’s a sure bet a potential crime or cover-up is afoot.

The losers are you and I, our children, our environment, and most importantly, our health. It is, without doubt, the one single mechanism that contributes most to the growing list of ailments Americans and their global counterparts suffer from. Mothers, who now question the wiseness of being able to breastfeed their children, as their breastmilk is contaminated with dangerous toxins, antibiotic-resistant super bacteria, and skyrocketing levels of cancers, obesity, diabetes, and conditions like autism. We are being systematically poisoned and our scientists and governments are complicit.

They achieve this by circumventing processes put in place to protect us and the practice of good science leads this list. We establish risk and identify dangers with science, data science, and unimpeded, transparent research. Lobbyists seek to undermine all these processes or, ideally, bypass them completely.

It happens with companies like Shell promoting and exploiting fossils fuels at the cost of the environment, with pharma pushing the envelope of what is legally licensable and suppressing that which it cannot profit from, chemical companies polluting our rivers and water tables and in instances like Monsanto, questionable products are whitewashed and rubber stamped. There are, quite literally billions to be made, and everyone demands a slice of the pie.

Hens Teeth and independent researchers

They’re a dying breed, the independent researcher, a rare beast that hasn’t been corrupted by the ever-present influence of corporate reach. Research isn’t cheap and the best paying jobs don’t reside in academia. Most researchers cut their teeth in laboratories funded or directly owned by Monsanto or their peers. Universities are the feral breeding ground of conscription, where generous donations ensure a constant feed of new young minds, grist for the mills of profit-based research.

While this shouldn’t appear to be a major problem on the surface, after all, individuals are entitled to go where their purse strings draw them, when it comes to appointing or recruiting staff for regulatory bodies, conflicts of interest abound. To try and find, for instance, a scientist to work on agricultural pesticides, who hasn’t at some point in their career, been indentured to either Monsanto or one of their competitors, becomes challenging, to say the least.

The end result is far from ideal, with the opportunity for past relationships, friendships, loyalties, and a host of other factors to impinge on open and transparent research. To sway opinion and research. In some instances, as suggested by the documentary above, companies like Monsanto enjoy such close relationships with regulators they forward their own prepared documents for simple rubber-stamping by the regulators, who then issue the statements as their own.

Clearly, a problem exists and one that isn’t going to simply resolve itself. There are also serious questions that require addressing when it comes to the mindset displayed by supposed science-based institutions like the CDC and WHO, where scientists have arguably exchanged their white mantles of science for the darker cloaks of politics and profit. 

When these individuals are no longer able to question their own beliefs and firmly held opinions in the face of incontrovertible evidence, then science is the loser, humanity suffers and our health becomes forfeit. Accountability matters, transparency matters. The pursuit of truth and real science cannot and must not be impeded by anything as mundane as profit or politics. To allow this to continue is to doom the very society we seek to protect.

The post Monsanto, Roundup, and Glyphosate. Whose Side is Science on and Why it Matters to Us? appeared first on Medika Life.

All 50 samples of breast milk contained per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) at levels nearly 2,000 times the amount considered safe for drinking water. According to the study authors;

This is the first study in the last 15 years to analyze per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in breast milk collected from mothers (n = 50) in the United States, and our findings indicate that both legacy and current-use PFAS now contaminate breast milk, exposing nursing infants.

Erika Schreder is the science director at Toxic-Free Future and a co-author of the study, which was published Thursday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. In a statement following the paper’s publication, she stated;

“We now know that babies, along with nature’s perfect food, are getting toxic PFAS that can affect their immune systems and metabolism. We shouldn’t be finding any PFAS in breast milk and our findings make it clear that broader phaseouts are needed to protect babies and young children during the most vulnerable stages of life. Moms work hard to protect their babies, but big corporations are putting these, and other toxic chemicals that can contaminate breast milk, in products when safer options are available.”

What are safe levels? On April 27, 2021, EPA Administrator Regan called for the creation of a new “EPA Council on PFAS” that is charged with building on the agency’s ongoing work to better understand and ultimately reduce the potential risks caused by these chemicals. According to the EPA website’s statement on safe levels of PFOA and PFOS

To provide Americans, including the most sensitive populations, with a margin of protection from a lifetime of exposure to PFOA and PFOS from drinking water, EPA has established the health advisory levels at 70 parts per trillion.

Concentrations of PFAS discovered in the breast milk sampled were up to 2000 times higher than these levels.

What are PFAS, where do they come from, and how do they affect us?

According to the EPA, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a group of man-made chemicals that includes PFOA, PFOS, GenX, and many other chemicals. PFAS are found in a wide range of consumer products that people use every day such as cookware, pizza boxes, and stain repellants. Most people have been exposed to PFAS. Certain PFAS can accumulate and stay in the human body for long periods of time. 

There is evidence that exposure to PFAS can lead to adverse health outcomes in humans. The most studied PFAS chemicals are PFOA and PFOS. Studies indicate that PFOA and PFOS can cause reproductive and developmental, liver and kidney, and immunological effects in laboratory animals. Both chemicals have caused tumors in animals. The most consistent findings are increased cholesterol levels among exposed populations, with more limited findings related to:

• low infant birth weights,
• effects on the immune system,
• cancer (for PFOA), and
• thyroid hormone disruption (for PFOS).

PFAS can be found in:

• Food packaged in PFAS-containing materials, processed with equipment that used PFAS, or grown in PFAS-contaminated soil or water.
• Commercial household products, including stain- and water-repellent fabrics, nonstick products (e.g., Teflon), polishes, waxes, paints, cleaning products, and fire-fighting foams (a major source of groundwater contamination at airports and military bases where firefighting training occurs).
• Workplace, including production facilities or industries (e.g., chrome plating, electronics manufacturing or oil recovery) that use PFAS.
• Drinking water, typically localized and associated with a specific facility (e.g., manufacturer, landfill, wastewater treatment plant, firefighter training facility).
• Living organisms, including fish, animals and humans, where PFAS have the ability to build up and persist over time.

For more detailed information on PFAS and how the EPA is addressing them, visit the EPA’s page on Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances

A final word from Laurie Valeriano, executive director of Toxic-Free Future.

“If a harmful chemical can end up in breast milk due to its persistence or ability to bioaccumulate, it should be prohibited in everyday products we are constantly exposed to. It’s time for more states and the federal government to follow the lead of Washington state and ban PFAS and other equally dangerous classes of chemicals in products, especially when safer alternatives are found. Prevention-based policies are critical to ending this harmful and unnecessary contamination of our most precious resources — from breast milk to drinking water.”

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