I recall growing up, before doom scrolling on phones and tablets was a thing, there would be a new commercial that would show up every month or so about some miracle pill to stop some new health problem. “Bananas are radioactive! They cause cancer! Here is BigBossPill5000 to cure it!” At this point in our lives to say that doom scrolling has made the problem worse would simply be as effective as beating a dead horse to get it to run faster.

“Researchers have found those who sleep negative-three hours a night are gonna die.”

You run your thumb up on the screen, sending you to the next ad. They work because they prey on our fear, of course. Or somebody’s fear at least. Advertisements like that, I believe, have caused a real problem with people being able to trust anything that medical professionals say. “Oh yeah? What does that doctor know? I just heard the opposite on YouTube.” Or, " I can fix it by simply taking this pill and getting 1.99876 more hours of sleep."

Example: the " Liver King”, Brian Johnson, who took a massive amount of steroids (Eleven Thousand Dollars a month) to get his physique, but promised his audience it was from eating raw liver and his “supplements," which they could buy.

The real causality of snake-oil-salesman being more prolific than ever (via doom-scrolling content and instant click-to-purchase) is the ever-increasing amount of apathy present in the general population when actual health crises arise, things that should make people fear and demand of themselves a change to their lifestyle.

I am referring to a study done by the University of New Mexico, in which the researchers found that there was, “a spoon’s worth of plastic in our brain." When I first read it I thought,

"Oh, dang, a spoonful, huh?"

No, turns out it’s a whole plastic spoon’s worth of plastic in our brains, on average. The professor who led the study, Mathew Campen, said that the current amount of plastic found spread out through our brain is fifty– percent higher than was discovered in the same study done in 2016. They also found that in people diagnosed with dementia, the amount of plastic found in their brains could be up to ten times that of the rest of us.

As per the University of New Mexico’s research, there is no causation link discovered between Dementia and plastic, however funny that in Nature magazine a study was reported that the volume of semen a man produces dropped by half from 1940 to 1990, and that currently there is three times the amount of plastics in human testes than found in canines (the study again as per The University of New Mexico).

I will not claim any vocational background that will allow me to expound on exactly what that all means, so I will defer to the professor of the study, Professor John Yu who is quoted about this topic, “Have you considered why there is a decline in reproductive Potential recently? There must be something new” and, “the impact on younger generations might be more concerning.”

So, from what I can gather: we adults have a whole plastic spoon’s worth of plastic in our brains, and that amount is increasing. Sperm count has taken a jump off the proverbial cliff over the last fifty years and microplastics are there in force, too.

These reasons alone are why I go to Hy-Vee. When I'm at the checkout and the cashier asks me, “paper or plastic?” I say, "paper," and internally, “because I care about men's health."

We should move back to glass, or a new novel storage system, as glass is the safest and most inert, non-contaminating container that humans have readily available.

Even if you are not of the same gender as men, or you are particularly angry with us, or you believe there are too many humans on the planet; whatever host of reasons would bring someone to not care about plummeting fertility in men, the plastic in your brain is accumulating more and more, and I would dare posit that likewise falling IQ levels might, like dementia, go hand-in-hand with our new ‘stores’ of brain-plastic.

Austin Petak is an aspiring novelist and freelance journalist who loves seeking stories and the quiet passions of the soul. If you are interested in reaching out to him to cover a story, you may find him at austinpetak@gmail.com.

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