By Robin Abcarian, Los Angeles Times The Tribune Content Agency

When I was a kid growing up in the San Fernando Valley, regular smog alerts kept us off the playground and confined to our classrooms in the hottest months.

The air quality back then was famously terrible. Often, you could see an ugly brown stripe across the horizon. This made for colorful sunsets, but on bad smog days, if you inhaled sharply, your lungs would actually ache.

These days, thanks to strict regulations and technological advancements such as catalytic converters and the removal of lead from gasoline, much of the smog has disappeared from the skies above our city. But not all.

In the 1995 Todd Haynes film "Safe," Julianne Moore played a woman in suburban Los Angeles who believed she was being poisoned by everyday chemicals in her environment - car exhaust, household cleaning products, hair sprays, lawn fertilizers and pesticides, even perfumes. At the time, critics wrote about the movie as a metaphor for the scourge of AIDS, or perhaps about the toxicity of modern life.

Now, though, it feels like a literal portrayal.

I stand over my gas stove and wonder how many years I am taking off my life as I inhale nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and benzene while browning a piece of meat. Gardeners at the apartment house next door assure me that the pesticide they occasionally spray in the front garden is safe for my dog and me. Safe pesticide? Yeah, sure.

In January, our world was upended by hurricane force winds and unthinkably devastating fires. The toxins unleashed by that catastrophe will be felt by Angelenos for decades.

In the immediate aftermath, runoff from the Palisades fires, full of heavy metals and other debris, polluted the surf and probably still does. The sands of Venice Beach are littered with bits of what appear to be charred materials from the structures that burned in January. This summer, something - it's not clear what - has poisoned dogs in the Venice Canals.

And now, with increasing alarm, I've been reading up on the pervasiveness of microplastics, not just in our environment, but in our bodies. Microplastics and their even smaller cousin, nanoplastics, are ubiquitous. Every plastic object begins degrading as soon as it is made, and so, as our world has become dominated by plastic, it has also become polluted by it.

Last week, I learned - with horror - that researchers in New Mexico discovered through autopsies that humans have microplastics in every organ, and a full plastic spoon's worth of them in their brains. (Some say we inhale the equivalent of a credit card in microplastics each week. I'm not sure which image is less appealing.)

"Plastic is now threaded through the flesh of fish, where it is interfering with reproduction, and the stalks of plants, where it is interfering with photosynthesis, and in much else we place on our dinner plates and set about eating," wrote Benjamin Wallace-Wells in a New York Times piece with the chilling headline, "You Are Contaminated."

"There might be plastic in your saliva and almost certainly in your blood," he wrote. "And because plastic has been found in ovarian follicular fluid and testicular tissue and in a majority of sampled human sperm, it is already embedded in not just the yet to be born but also the yet to be conceived."

So, other than slowly morphing into much less attractive Barbie and Ken dolls, should we worry about all that plastic infiltrating our bodies?

Researchers don't have a firm grip yet on the harm that microplastics can wreak on the human body, but they are seeing correlations with a host of diseases and cancers, cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's, and premature birth and low birth weight. Even heart attacks.

"Everything you don't want to happen in your body at the cellular level is associated with microplastics," Stanford University epidemiologist and pediatrician Angelle Desiree Labeaud told the Stanford Daily in February. She was commenting on a study that found food from the university's dining halls contained worrisome high levels of plastics.

You can get all the vaccinations, drink all the raw milk, eat all the leafy greens, cut out red meat and exercise every day, but we have so much less control over our health than we'd like to believe.

Rubber shedding from car tires, it turns out, is a significant source of the dangerous particulates we unknowingly inhale every day. Parkinson's disease has been linked to environmental pollution, and research has found that people who live close to golf courses are more vulnerable to it, probably due to pesticides used on the greens, which also seep into the groundwater.

Last year, we were instructed to throw out any black plastic kitchen utensils because they are made from recycled electronic materials that contain harmful fire retardants. Before that, we were told to get rid of Teflon pans because they contain a "forever chemical" linked to a number of health issues, including high cholesterol, high blood pressure, low birth weights and higher risk of some cancers.

Meanwhile, new research shows that popular melamine sponges - like the Magic Eraser - shed trillions of microplastic fibers every month, potentially polluting our homes, our food and our waterways.

Much as we hate to admit it, our health is not so much about personal choice as it is about systems beyond our control.

Bluesky: @rabcarian

Threads: @rabcarian

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.

This story was originally published August 25, 2025 at 1:29 PM.