We're literally eating Plastic.

Okay, so we know that plastics are literally everywhere! We use them in almost all of our everyday products. It is like they are inescapable. You can find them in our clothes, at the grocery stores, on the shelves at your nearest supermarket, in your cosmetics, your toothpaste, lying on the beaches, floating in the oceans, lying on the roadside, flying with the wind in the form of fibres, even in the device that you're using to read this article. Most of this plastic ends up being carelessly disposed of without any recycling and then the problem begins where a majority chunk of it ends up floating in our oceans thereby harming our marine species and forming massive patches of plastic debris covering areas that could be larger than the area covered by a few small nations. Heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?

Plastics are majorly produced from the by-products of crude oil processing and therefore they are literally made from the waste of some other processing facility which makes the raw material and in turn the plastic cheaper than anything. This is the foremost reason that we have incorporated plastics into every part of our life. However, this mindless production and consumerism of plastics comes with a price tag, and No! not the actual price tag but an ecological price tag.

All this plastic that we carelessly throw away, ends up breaking down into tiny microscopic particles due to photo and thermo-oxidation or even physical and biological degradation and ends up reaching our oceans and terrestrial soils as microplastics. These tiny particles have been increasingly posing threat to our marine organisms and even plants in some cases. However, it is not just the other organisms that are at risk. As the research is evolving, more and more studies are reporting the presence of microplastics in products that we humans consume directly. Microplastics have been widely reported to accumulate in the bodies of marine organisms including fishes, shrimps, mussels, oysters, etc that make up a huge chunk of our sea-food supply. They have also been found to be present in numerous packaged drinking water samples from across the globe including both plastic and glass bottles. They have even been found in commercially available North American beer samples and even tetra-packed milk samples. Quite a few studies from different parts of the world including Mexico, Turkey, Spain, etc also report the presence of microplastics in commercially available samples of our common table salt. Also, recent studies from Mexico show the bio-accumulation and bio-magnification of microplastics in the terrestrial food chains that include chickens. Through this pathway, they get accumulated inside the body of the chickens that we ultimately consume.

Therefore we can see that microplastics are already entering our diets through different pathways whether that is our sea-food or our poultry or even our drinking water. Quite a few estimates of the number of microplastic particles consumed by a single person annually, run into several thousand. Laboratory studies even confirm the presence of microplastics in human stool samples.

All this research pushes us to think that with all the microplastic entering our body, do we need to worry? Actually yes. Firstly microplastics have been shown to affect the health of various organisms adversely by causing metabolic disruptions, immunotoxic responses and even cancer in some fishes. Although there is a lack of direct studies relating microplastics to human health, still these reports do sound an alarm for us. Secondly, a lot of these microplastics could be carrying some chemicals that are used in their production and could be toxic for us. These chemicals constitute its inherent load. On top of that microplastics might adsorb other harmful chemicals like pesticides, heavy metals and antibiotics onto their surfaces and act as vectors. So, yes we do have some reasons to worry about this.

This information gap can only be bridged by carrying out more primary research to generate data in this regard and analysis of this data to establish relationships between microplastics in our food and their effects. It is time that the scientific community takes up this issue seriously before it is too late. Until then be aware of what you're eating ;)