Concerns about microplastic particles making their way into the human food chain have been growing for years and now recent research done at China's Nanjing University reports that people suffering from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) - including ulcerative colitis and Crones disease - have 50% higher levels of microplastics in their stools than those without these conditions.
Microplastics come from a variety of sources, including from larger plastic debris that degrades into smaller and smaller pieces. In addition, microbeads, a type of microplastic, are very tiny pieces of manufactured polyethylene plastic that are added as exfoliants to health and beauty products, such as some cleansers and toothpastes. These tiny particles easily pass through water filtration systems and end up in the ocean and Great Lakes, posing a potential threat to aquatic life. From there they make their way into the human food and water supplies.
"Human ingestion of microplastics is inevitable due to the ubiquity of microplastics in various foods and drinking water," they study says. The Chinese study shows correlation and not direct causality. "Whether the ingestion of microplastics poses a substantial risk to human health is far from understood," say the study authors. But they estimate that on average humans ingest the equivalent of one credit card's worth of plastic every week.
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