From bottled water to tea bags, microplastics are everywhere and finding their way into our bodies. Here are the risks and how to cut down. During the past 10 years, the target="_blank">medical community has become progressively alarmed by the sheer ubiquity of micro and nanoplastics, tiny plastic particles which have been found in their thousands in food, bottled water and increasingly in our own bodies.
Recent medical studies have detected the presence of plastic in blood samples, breast milk, placenta tissue, and even people’s lungs. So when Raffaele Marfella, a surgeon and professor of internal medicine at the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli in Naples, and his colleagues conducted a study to examine plaque taken from the arteries of people with cardiovascular disease , they were not surprised to find that half of the samples contained miniature fragments of plastic. But a closer look at the data indicated a concerning trend – the patients who had accumulated plastic within their arteries all had much more advanced disease .
By monitoring them over the next three years, they found that these people were four and a half times more likely to have died or experienced a nonfatal stroke, compared with patients whose samples did not contain any plastic. Marfella believes that the presence of plastic could have actively accelerated their deteriorating health, through driving inflammation within the arteries. “I can say with reasonable certainty that contamination by.
