On September 3, according to foreign media reports, a study published in the medical journal "Internal Science Yearbook" by the Vienna Medical University in Austria confirmed that plastic has entered the human body.
The study invited eight healthy volunteers, aged 33 to 65, from Finland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Austria, and the United Kingdom.
Everyone has plastic in their feces, and every 10 grams of feces contains 20 pieces of micro-plastic (50 to 500 micron plastic), so it is estimated that each person eats about 73,000 pieces of micro-plastic every year.
These plastics include nine types. The most abundant micro-plastics are polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which are food and water packaging materials. PET plastic bottles are considered to be the largest plastics in the human body. source.
At present, the danger of microplastics entering the human body remains unclear, but researchers are concerned that it will lead to the accumulation of toxic chemicals or the entry of these particles into blood vessels.
Global plastic products have increased year by year since the 1950s and currently produce more than 350 million tons of plastic per year. Up to 5% of plastic products eventually enter the ocean, and a large number of microplastics have been found in animals such as tuna and lobster.
The limitation of this study was the small number of volunteers, who provided only one sample per person and did not study the source and destination of plastics in the gastrointestinal tract.
