It is destroying your body. A takeaway meal = hundreds of billions of plastic particles. Each person consumes 5g of "microplastics" per week!

Bottled water, takeaway containers, pre-packaged food... no one can escape the siege of plastic.

As plastics gradually "take over" the earth, scientists are also paying more and more attention to "plastics and their products". Will this material enter the human body? What impact will it have on health?

Each person eats 5g of microplastics per week, which is equivalent to a bank card

Microplastics refer to plastic fragments and particles with a diameter of less than 5 mm, which are released during the use of plastic products, especially plastic products used for food. Nanoplastics are the smallest known microplastics, with a size of less than 1 μm, which are small enough to pass through cell membranes.

Although no one will eat plastic directly, food packaging - plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic boxes, etc., will directly send a large amount of microplastics into people's mouths. The impact of microplastics on people is often like boiling a frog in warm water, which is easy to be ignored, but the harm to health is long-term.

On April 20 this year, a new study conducted by Christopher Zangmeister, a chemist from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), used products made of food-grade nylon bags and low-density polyethylene (LDPE) as samples to explore the source and release of microplastics. In fact, plastic products mainly composed of these two ingredients are very common in daily life, such as baking pads and the lining plastic film of disposable take-out coffee cups.

The results showed that after placing a cup of 100℃ water in an ordinary take-out coffee cup and letting it stand for 20 minutes, researchers were able to detect trillions of plastic nanoparticles per liter of water. That is to say, when you enjoy a 500ml cup of hot coffee or hot milk tea, 500 billion plastic nanoparticles will enter your body!

DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.1c06768

Not only that, but people have actually started ingesting microplastics as early as infancy. According to a study published in Nature Food, Microplastic release from the degradation of polypropylene feeding bottles during infant formula preparation, infants may ingest up to 16 million microplastic particles per liter of infant formula prepared using polypropylene plastic bottles.

In the study, the researchers sterilized polypropylene baby bottles, air-dried them, and then poured water heated to 70°C in accordance with the World Health Organization's standards for preparing infant formula. After shaking the bottles for one minute, they filtered the liquid and analyzed it under a microscope, finding millions of microplastic particles. The detection of microplastics in just one minute after bottling confirmed the immediacy of microplastic production.

In addition, the researchers also found that the water temperature used to make milk powder greatly affects the number of polluted particles released. When the water temperature rises from 25°C to 95°C, the number of microplastic particles released per liter increases from 600,000 to 55 million. In other words, the higher the water temperature, the more microplastic particles will be released.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-020-00171-y

As people continue to eat takeout, drink coffee, and consume tons of bottled drinks, microplastics are naturally constantly ingested into the human body.

Professor Kieran D. Cox of Canada and his team estimated that each person consumes 50,000 microplastic particles per year based on the American diet, the types of food consumed, and the amount of microplastics contained in different types of food. If microplastics floating in the air and inhaled are included, the number of microplastic particles consumed by each person per year is between 74,000 and 121,000. Calculated by weight, each person consumes about 5g of microplastics per week, which is equivalent to the weight of a bank card.

It is true that you will eat plastic until you die. If we calculate 5g of plastic particles per week, a person will probably eat a Lego toy in his lifetime. It is a bit exciting to think about it.

Microplastics found in human blood for the first time!

In 2019, a study published online in Annals of Internal Medicine showed that microplastics were detected in fecal samples of healthy volunteers. The researchers found that all fecal samples tested positive for microplastics, with an average of 20 microplastic particles per 10 grams of human feces.

If it were just a simple "eat it, poop it out" relationship, microplastics wouldn't be worth worrying about. However, this is not actually the case. With the development of a large number of studies, scientists have found microplastics in human colon specimens and even placental tissue.

What is even more worrying is that scientists from the Free University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands discovered the presence of microplastics in human blood for the first time in March this year. This suggests that microplastics may flow through the body with blood and affect various organs!

DOI: 10.1016/j.envint.2022.107199

The researchers detected the five most common plastic components in the venous blood of 22 healthy volunteers: PET, PS, PE, PMMA and PP.

The 5 most common plastic ingredients and where they come from (Mace Homemade)

After strictly controlling possible plastic contamination during sampling, sample preparation and analysis, the researchers detected the presence of microplastics in the blood of nearly 80% of the volunteers (77%, 17/22). On average, each volunteer had 1.6 ug of microplastics per milliliter of blood sample.

The substance with the highest measured proportion was PET, which was detected in the blood of 50% of the volunteers, with the highest blood concentration being 2.4ug/ml, indicating that most people have microplastics released by bottled water in their bodies.

Next are: PS (36%) and PE (23%), with the highest blood concentrations of 4.8ug/ml and 7.1ug/ml respectively. These two types of plastics are mainly used in plastic wrap, disposable foam lunch boxes, plastic cups, etc., indicating that microplastics from food packaging will also enter the human blood circulation, and the amount entering cannot be underestimated.

Finally, PMMA was found in the blood of only 5% of the volunteers, while PP was not detected in the blood of any volunteers.

This study is the first to find the presence of microplastics in human blood. Considering that blood circulates throughout the body, supplying oxygen and nutrients to various organs and removing metabolic waste, it is not difficult to imagine that microplastics also flow through the body with the blood. The fact that "microplastics were found in blood samples" also shows that the body's speed of clearing microplastics is lower than the speed of ingesting them from the outside.

Microplastics that enter the blood may be excreted through kidney filtration or bile excretion, or they may be deposited in organs such as the liver and spleen through porous capillaries. In other words, microplastics have long been omnipresent and even spread throughout the body.

The feces of patients with intestinal diseases contain 1.5 times more microplastic particles than healthy people

What kind of harm do microplastics cause to health? This is the topic that people are more concerned about.

Animal experiments have previously shown that microplastics can disrupt the endocrine system, cause birth defects, reduce sperm production, trigger insulin resistance, and impair learning and memory. In addition, scientists have observed signs of physical damage, such as inflammation, caused by microparticles piercing and rubbing against organ walls.

DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0281

To further explore the impact of microplastics on humans, scientists from Harvard University and Rutgers University in the United States also constructed an in vitro system that simulates the digestive tract to explore whether microplastic particles would interfere with the digestion and absorption of nutrients.

The results showed that the presence of microplastics would have a negative impact on fat absorption. That is, when fat is ingested together with microplastic particles, the bioavailability of fat increases, causing more fat to enter the blood (this may be one of the reasons why people gain weight the more they eat takeout). In addition, the study also showed that microplastics can affect the absorption of micronutrients, increase small intestinal permeability, and promote the growth of certain bacteria.

At this stage, there are limited tests on the impact of microplastics on human health, but some clues have been found. In December 2021, an academic study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters showed that patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) (including Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis) had more microplastics in their feces than healthy controls, indicating that these microplastics may be related to the development of the disease.

The research team obtained stool samples from 50 healthy people and 52 IBD patients in different regions. The analysis results showed that the feces of IBD patients contained 1.5 times more microplastic particles than the feces of healthy subjects. The higher the microplastic content in the patient's body, the more obvious the disease-related diarrhea, rectal bleeding and abdominal cramps.

The specific results are:

①The concentration of microplastics in the feces of IBD patients and healthy people was 41.8 and 28.0 pieces/g dm, respectively. The number of microplastic particles per gram in the feces of IBD patients was about 1.5 times that of healthy people.

②The study detected a total of 15 types of microplastics, mainly PET (used in bottles and food containers) and PA (polyamide; used in food packaging and textiles), with the main forms being flakes and fibers respectively.

③Through questionnaires, researchers found that patients who drank bottled water, ate takeout food, and were frequently exposed to dust had more microplastics in their feces.

This study showed for the first time that the concentration of microplastics (MPs) in the feces of IBD patients was significantly different from that of healthy people, and the level of microplastics in the feces of IBD patients was significantly higher than that of healthy people. This result reminds people that the damage of microplastics to human health may not be underestimated.

However, there are still huge unknowns as to whether "microplastics" pose a significant risk to human health, and more research in related academic fields is urgently needed to address its unknown risks.

As we all know, plastics degrade very slowly, usually lasting hundreds or even thousands of years, which increases the possibility of microplastics being ingested and accumulated in many organisms and tissues. In order to prevent human internal organs from becoming "plastic products", the simplest way is to try to reduce the use of plastic products in life and promptly control plastic pollution, so as not to regret it after the earth is "conquered" by plastics.

References:

[1]Zangmeister CD, Radney JG, Benkstein KD, Kalanyan B. Common Single-Use Consumer Plastic Products Release Trillions of Sub-100 nm Nanoparticles per Liter into Water during Normal Use. Environ Sci Technol. 2022 May 3;56(9):5448-5455. doi: 10.1021/acs.est.1c06768. Epub 2022 Apr 20. PMID: 35441513.

[2]Li, D., Shi, Y., Yang, L. et al. Microplastic release from the degradation of polypropylene feeding bottles during infant formula preparation. Nat Food 1, 746–754 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-020-00171-y

[3]HA Leslie, MJM van Velzen, SH Brandsma, D. Vethaak, JJ Garcia-Vallejo, MH Lamoree, Discovery and quantification of plastic particle pollution in human blood, Environment International (2022), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2022.107199

[4] Talsness CE, Andrade A, Kuriyama SN, et al. Components of plastic: experimental studies in animals and relevance for human health[J]. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 2009, 364(1526):2079-2096.

[5]Yan, Zehua, Yafei Liu, Ting Zhang, Faming Zhang, Hongqiang Ren, and Yan Zhang. "Analysis of Microplastics in Human Feces Reveals a Correlation between Fecal Microplastics and Inflammatory Bowel Disease Status." Environmental Science & Technology Letters(2021).(DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.1c03924)

[6].APhilipp Schwabl et al. Detection of Various Microplastics in Human Stool: A Prospective Case Series.Annals of Internal Medicine.DOI: 10.7326/M19-0618