Linda Carroll is a Peabody Award-winning journalist who is a contributing health and medicine writer for NBC News and TODAY.
The link between a diet high in ultraprocessed foods and poor mental health, as well as cognitive decline, has been well-documented — and a new paper published Tuesday offers a theory about why they are connected.
Previous research from February 2025 based on an examination of cadavers found that human brains are speckled with tiny bits of plastic that can amount to a spoon's worth. The same researchers also found that people with dementia after death had higher amounts of plastic in their brains than those with healthy organs. The new analysis published in the journal Brain Medicine suggests that microplastics in the brain from ultraprocessed foods could play a role in adverse health outcomes related to the brain, like dementia and depression. “Highly processed foods, like chicken nuggets, contained 30 times more micro plastics per gram than chicken breasts, highlighting the impact of industrial processing, which often uses plastics at some point,” the authors note in the text. “There is a known link between ultra-processed foods and adverse mental health,” Dr. Nicholas Fabiano, psychiatry resident at the University of Ottawa and co-author of the new article, told TODAY.com in an email. “Given the high amount of micro plastics in ultra-processed foods, micro plastics may mediate this link. However more research is required.” The “evidence is only associative and not causative,” he added. Microplastics' effect on the brain While microplastics have been found throughout the human body, more plastic collects in the brain than any other organ, and the reason could be that “the brain has a high lipid content and receives high blood flow,” Fabiano said. “Thus, it may be easier for micro plastics, which have an affinity for lipids, to enter and stay in the brain.” There also might be more plastic in the brains of people with dementia because they 'are known to have leaky blood brain barriers which could predispose them to having higher microplastic content in their brain,' Fabiano explained. The new analysis also raises concerns about the effect of microplastics on developing brains, as kids consume a high amount of ultraprocessed foods, Dr. Julio Licinio, editor of Brain Medicine, said in an email. Most of the research on plastic in brains has, by necessity, been in older people. “Kids ingest a disproportionately higher amount of micro plastics and have smaller brains; therefore, the micro plastic concentrations in the child/adolescent brain may potentially be even higher than in adult brains,' Licinio said. “What are these micro plastics doing to the developing human brain?” he added. “Again, this can’t be good.” An 'addiction to plastic materials' There’s limited information regarding the potential long term health consequences of microplastics, Fabiano said. Current evidence is limited to animal studies, which show a range of negative outcomes, from inflammation to immune dysfunction, abnormal organ development, changes to metabolism and the potential for cancer. Studies have also connected plastics with prematurity and cardiovascular mortality, Dr. Leo Trasande, director of the Langone Center for the Investigation of Environmental Hazards at NYU Langone Health in New York City, tells TODAY.com. “These studies reinforce our need to address our addiction to plastic materials. We need to take steps to reduce the amount of plastic in our lives.” Dr. Dylan Wint, medical director of Cleveland Clinic Nevada, suspects the publication of these papers will spark more research. “All good science starts not with answers but with questions,” Wint tells TODAY.com. “It’s going to take some time to unravel what’s involved.” “These papers rightly raise important questions about ongoing serious consequences,” Trasande agrees. “I want to emphasize here that the concern about plastic’s impact on human health is very real.” Dr. Jo Ellen Wilson, an Alzheimer’s researcher and an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, was a bit more cautious about the conclusions readers should take from the studies. Dementia can have a lot of causes, and while it may be that the plastic in people’s brains led to the disease, it’s also possible that changes in their brains made it easier for the plastic to get in, she tells TODAY.com. Still, the new report “showed some really intriguing results,' she adds. When it comes to preventing dementia, “eating whole foods instead of processed ones and exercising” can help reduce risk, Wilson says. As far as avoiding microplastics, 'the steps you can take don’t require a Ph.D. in chemistry and you don’t need to break the bank to implement them,” Trasande says. “You don’t need non-stick pans and you don’t need to buy water in a plastic bottle, which in many cases just tap water, so you are just paying for the plastic bottle.”
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