How processed food is loading your body with microplastics

Eating mostly unprocessed food is an effective way to limit the amount of micro- and nano-plastic that enters the body.

That's the advice from Dr Rosa Busquets, an environmental chemist who spoke to CapeTalk's Clarence Ford.

A key member of the United Nations Environment Protection (UNEP) Environmental Effects Assessment Panel, she explained that a report found we are currently underestimating the amount of microplastics in the body because they are so difficult to detect.

A microplastic can be as big as a grain of rice and as small as a red blood cell. Nanoplastics are even smaller than a red blood cell.

"And the smaller particles are the ones that penetrate our organs, and these may be the toxic ones," said Busquets.

"Sometimes they get stuck in our stomachs. And we see this in animals that have plastic in their stomach; they tend to be underdeveloped because they don't eat that much."

There aren't many studies linking disease with microplastic exposure. "We know what they may be doing, but we don't have the evidence for that because we cannot do studies with humans."

However, she said, when a microplastic enters a cell, there is overall consensus that it causes inflammation, and when the body is inflamed, it's more prone to getting other diseases.

"It's like stress in your body, when you have stress, then maybe you will have other diseases.

"When we are analysing microplastics in food, we not only find the microplastics of the lid or the bottle, we find fibres that may be from the clothing of the workers who have been processing the food. We find pieces of plastic from the machines that may have been used to produce the food. So processed food will have more microplastics compared to if you are eating a tomato or a lettuce, for instance."

She said we should be lobbying manufacturers and supermarkets to use less plastic in packaging. And that big plastics should be intercepted.

"It stays for many years around us, and when it becomes plastic particles, it's very difficult to control."