Your body has microplastics in many places, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Microplastics are formed from the breakdown of plastics in the environment, and they’ve now been found in many places in the human body, a new study reveals. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, says it’s surprising that they’re even found in the brain.

Nelson:   They're present in almost all of the foods no matter where they come from. The idea is that the microplastics can be acted on by a variety of different things, UV light other things and they can make smaller little particles that people call nanoplastics. The study looked at nanoplastic levels in the liver, kidney and brain at autopsy. They found them in all the organs that they looked at. They found the highest levels in the brain and they found even higher levels for instance brains that had dementia.   :33

Nelson says it makes sense that microplastics are impacting all sorts of health risks, including cancer. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.