While we’re indoors in greater numbers and for longer periods than ever before due to lockdowns, making the best of the space you have is more important than ever. Being indoors relying on digital means to conduct pretty much every affair of the world is a drain on your health—not the best deal during a time when you want more, not less, resilient immunity.
Much of the focus is around the physical, mental, and emotional changes and challenges mothers can expect, and the whole development of the baby to look forward to. Less attention is paid to the factors in our personal spaces that can help or impede the desires and goals we have for a healthy mother and child, as well as the sort of nurturing spaces we want to set up for optimal heallth.
This is the first study in a live mammal to show that the placenta does not block such particles.
The rat foetuses exposed to the particles put on significantly less weight towards the end of gestation. The 20 nanometre beads used were made of polystyrene, which is one of the top five plastics found in the environment.
Twenty four hours after exposure, the weight of the foetuses was an average of 7% lower than in control animals, and placental weights were 8% lower. Weight loss was also seen in other experiments using titanium dioxide particles. The rats were exposed to the plastic nanoparticles on day 19 of gestation, two days ahead of the usual time for birth and when the foetus is gaining the most weight.
The nanoparticles used in the research were a million times smaller than the microplastics found in human placentas, and therefore currently much more challenging to identify in human studies.
A separate experiment showed that the nanoparticles crossed the placenta about 90 minutes after the mothers were exposed. Researchers warn there is an urgent need to assess the issue, particularly for developing foetuses and babies, as plastics can carry chemicals that could cause long-term damage.
“We know nanoparticles have greater toxicity than the microparticles of the same chemical, as smaller particles get deeper into the lungs (…) We found the plastic nanoparticles everywhere we looked – in the maternal tissues, in the placenta and in the foetal tissues. We found them in the foetal heart, brain, lungs, liver and kidney.”
— Prof Phoebe Stapleton, at Rutgers University
See the details of the study: https://particleandfibretoxicology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12989-020-00385-9
Reseachers examined the effects of light at night (LAN) on body mass in male mice.
Mice exposed to a dim light at night gained 50 percent more weight over an eight-week period than mice that spent their nights in total darkness.
Mice housed in either bright or dim LAN have significantly increased body mass and reduced glucose tolerance compared with mice in a standard (LD) light/dark cycle, despite equivalent levels of caloric intake and total daily activity output.
This significant increase in body mass was seen from Week 1 and continued throughout the study. By Week 4, both groups of mice showed impaired glucose tolerance. The mice exposed to LAN failed to recover glucose levels as effectively as the LD group. As little as 5 lx of light exposure during the typical dark period was sufficient to evoke this result.
Mice exposed to light at night had higher levels of glucose intolerance, which is a marker for pre-diabetes, than the mice that had complete darkness.
The researchers then did a second experiment with a timed feeding schedule. Both groups of mice had either continuous access to food or had food access limited to a light or dark phase.
Mice that lived in the dim-light conditions ate 55 percent of their food during daylight, compared with the mice in the standard light-dark conditions that ate 36 percent of their food in daylight.
With feeding in the light phase, mice increased their food consumption during week one; however, with feeding in the dark phase, mice consumed more food in subsequent weeks.
Even though mice are nocturnal creatures and would normally eat at night anyway, this difference shows their eating schedules were disrupted by artificial light. Low levels of light at night disrupt the timing of food intake and other metabolic signals, leading to excess weight gain.
“In many ways, our society now functions on a 24-hour-a-day schedule. These results suggest that such a schedule may impact metabolic function.” — Laura Fonken, PhD
References
Our body’s master clock, or the SCN (suprachiasmatic nuclei), directly responds to light, and is the reason why we have sleep-wake cycles that are determined by light exposure. Artificial light disrupts this clock and its circadian rhythms, which may contribute to chronic insomnia, as well as other chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and cancer. Under the wrong light, your body is confused about what to do when and starts doing them at the wrong time.
When we embarked on our own renovations for a healthy home, the kitchen was a big priority. Fast forward to now — 2020 has put a big spotlight on being indoors at home. We’ve never done so much cooking and eating, hanging out and chores. It’s been a real “test” on how our kitchen choices are working for us and affecting our daily routines. I’m glad to finally share this chat and documentation here
