Microplastics: Just one way the world is trying to kill you

These fragments and other toxins have invaded every corner of our lives, including our brains, wreaking havoc on our health

- ROBIN ABCARIAN COLUMNIST

HUMANS reportedly inhale about 5 grams of plastic a week, roughly the weight of a credit card.

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.