Dylan Stoll | Health Editor
Featured Image: The plastic we use is now showing up in our food. | Courtesy of Pixabay
We’ve all seen the picture of the bird carcass filled with plastic garbage, or the video of the turtle with a straw up its nose, but what about the plastic that we can’t see?
Microplastics are plastic particles that range in diameter from five millimeters down to 100 nanometers. Due to their incredibly small size, microplastics are being found in the tissues of animals, and not just the digestive tissues.
Most of the scientists who analyze microplastic content in animals tend to focus on their digestive tracts, but a recent study has discovered microplastics in the liver of fish. This suggests that microplastics can invade tissues other than that of the digestive tract, which are the tissues that we eat.
As if by some twisted form of irony, what we have thrown away has returned to haunt us. Microplastics have been found in some of our most commonly eaten foods, such as canned fish, mussels, and chicken (the gizzard specifically). As if matters couldn’t get any worse, microplastics have been detected in honey, beer, and even sea salt.
But the worst of all is bottled water, which has one of the highest amounts of microplastics, as the container itself contributes to the microplastic contents. People also tend to reuse plastic bottles to reduce waste, which only furthers their exposure.
One of the more unsuspecting, and unfortunately unavoidable, source of microplastic contamination is from the air, or rather, the dust in the air. A recent study estimates that over 70,000 microplastics from dust settles onto our food annually.
You may be wondering, “If we are eating it, where is it going?” Similar to everything we eat, it goes in one end and comes out the other. Microplastics have been found in human stool samples, which supports the evidence that the human food chain has been entirely invaded by plastic.
Although found in a small study with only eight participants from Europe, every participant’s stool contained microplastic content. On average, about 20 particles of microplastic were found in every 10 kg of excreta. According to the authors of the study, they estimated that “more than 50% of the world population might have microplastics in their stools.”
But we aren’t the only ones in danger. Since humans are a relatively larger animal, microplastic exposure (although still dangerous) is less detrimental to us than it would be to a much smaller animal, such as fish larvae. National Geographic interviewed Jamison Gove, an oceanographer, and Jonathan Whitney, a fish biologist, on the subject of microplastics in marine environments.
On the topic of fish larvae, Gove stated: “They’ve beaten a lot of odds to get this far. They hatched, they found the slick, they’re feeding and growing. This is one-tenth of one percent that made it this far; they’re the lucky ones. And now plastics are coming in.” It really only takes one piece of microplastic to kill a fish larva.
As Whitney explained: “If they get a piece of plastic, that could be it. A single thread in the stomach of a larval fish is potentially a killer.”
So take care of what you throw away, and choose carefully where you throw it; what goes around comes around, and karma’s a—well, you know how it goes.
