People, the only proven way to reduce the amount of micro plastics in your blood, is to donate blood. As often as possible. You can do a good thing for selfish reasons.

[–] shish_mish@lemmy.world 27 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

So if we want to stay healthy,we need to go back to leeches and bloodletting. I hate this timeline.

[–] KryptonNerd@slrpnk.net 7 points 4 weeks ago

PFAS levels in the groundwater on Jersey have gotten so bad that they actually are recommending bloodletting there.

[–] Eagle0110@lemmy.world 4 points 4 weeks ago

Hey at least leeches can be pretty cool and fun pets to keep! :p

[–] ArcticDagger 10 points 4 weeks ago

Good point

I believe the original article is open access: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adr8243

In there, they show the following figure (figure 6):

Where the authors say that 12 μg/ml microplastics in the blood is representative for humans

[–] Lugh@futurology.today 17 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

While laboratory testing like this is important, I'm really keen to know what effect the microplastics in our everyday environment are actually having. It's one thing to inject laboratory mice and observe results. But we all know microplastics are absolutely everywhere, what are they doing to humans now ?

[–] kapulsa@feddit.org 3 points 4 weeks ago

It's a very interesting topic. But it's really hard to study in humans. Due to the abundance of microplastics everywhere, it's almost impossible to conduct controlled trials. It's rather unethical to inject humans with plastic and cutting them open to look inside is also frowned upon (rightfully so). We can compare with historical measurements, but then, of course, we can't isolate the effects of microplastics.