The Guardian - Microplastics have been found almost everywhere: in blood, placentas, lungs – even the human brain. One study estimated our cerebral organs alone may contain 5g of the stuff, or roughly a teaspoon. If true, plastic isn’t just wrapped around our food or woven into our clothes: it is lodged deep inside us.
Now, researchers suspect these particles may also be meddling with our gut microbes. When Dr Christian Pacher-Deutsch at the University of Graz in Austria exposed gut bacteria from five healthy volunteers to five common microplastics, the bacterial populations shifted – along with the chemicals they produced. Some of these changes mirrored patterns linked to depression and colorectal cancer.
“While it’s too early to make definitive health claims, the microbiome plays a central role in many aspects of wellbeing, from digestion to mental health,” says Pacher-Deutsch, who presented his work at the recent United European Gastroenterology conference in Berlin. “Reducing microplastic exposure where possible is therefore a wise and important precaution.”
Such discoveries raise unsettling questions: how much plastic do we each carry, does it really matter and can we do anything about it?
Microplastics are shed from packaging, clothes, paints, cosmetics, car tyres and other items. Some are tiny enough to slip through the linings of our lungs and guts into our blood and internal organs – even into our cells. What happens next is still largely unknown.
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