HEALTHY COLORADO: Could an entire plastic spoon’s worth of microplastics be in your brain?

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) - Researchers at the University of New Mexico (UNM) have found an alarming amount of microplastics in human brains, some at much higher levels than other organs.

According to a release by UNM, it's suspected most microplastics found in a body get there from eating food; particularly meat.

Strangely, brain tissue from deceased people who had been diagnosed with dementia had sometimes 10 times the amount of plastic compared to other brains in the sample. But researchers say they can't yet confirm that microplastics in the brain definitively cause dementia.

According to a report from CNN, concentrations of microplastics in 45-50 year olds were studied. There, researchers found enough microplastic to equate to a standard plastic spoon.

“I have yet to encounter a single human being who says, ‘There’s a bunch of plastic in my brain and I’m totally cool with that,’” said Dr. Matthew Campen with UNM in a press release.