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Comment by dp-hackernews | Hacker News Reader

Forgive my ignorance, but how the hell does a compound like plastic get biologically absorbed by the body without being broken down to a point where it is actually no longer a plastic compound?

I mean, we can eat triglycerides, but the process of digestion breaks them down in order for them to be absorbed, they are then reconstituted as needed on the other side.

What am I missing with regards "plastic" in the context of the article?

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It enters the body physically, then spreads around the body physically, unaffected by chemical processes. The small pieces are small enough to enter the bloodstream, and from there the brain.

So does that include all particles of a similar size, like any sort of not digestible dust for example stone dust or sand dust etc?

If that's true, then I'm even more confused regarding how we assimilate and absorb nutrients into the body. I thought these broken down nutrients were microscopic and selectively absorbed, which suggests that our bodies naturally contain all sorts of potential contaminates that are not chemically broken down like nutrients are.

Does it concentrate in the brain specifically, or is it distributed throughout our bodies? The brain is about 2% of the mass of our body. Is there 50 spoon's worth of plastic in our body?

I'm feeling a little skeptical.

There are many potential explanations for this.

The brain "uses" a big part of all the blood in the body. Over 10 percent from what I remember. Could also be that for some reason the plastic can only traverse the blood brain barrier in one direction and so it accumulates in the brain.

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