We eat #microplastics every day. Microplastics are actively harming human health to an extent. Microplastics and humans have a complex and toxic relationship. The link between microplastics and human health is still being widely researched. Estimates suggest that we are ingesting 5 grams of microplastics every week! Plastic pollution has already entered our human bodies and microplastic consumption has harmful human health impacts. Plastics have played a major role in food and water storage but that is one of the direct causes of our high plastic ingestion. Most microplastics we ingest are generated from the breaking of plastics we use in our daily activities and the breakdown of plastics polluting our environment by weathering and photo-degradation. Microplastics are found everywhere in the human body including the human placenta and microplastics in human cells are a common observation too.

List of 50 references used in this video – https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i5RuiIUp9sz6pC0uv7-Dv-xgTqpKq_bec0bTKIX-Aqs/edit?usp=sharing />
Basically, if you eat or drink directly from plastic containers, bottles, or packaging – which most us do – you are undoubtedly ingesting microplastics. Microplastics are a complex and diverse set of pollutants instead of simply smaller plastics. They are a group of various types of environmental pollutants much like pesticides or heavy metals are a vast array of pollutants. Studies have reported microplastics and #nanoplastics passing through our circulatory and lymphatic systems after ingestion and inhalation. The general potential impacts of microplastics on human health are related to oxidative stress, tissue inflammation, and increased uptake or translocation. Translocation means that microplastics transport to other organs and enter our living cells. They can transport to and accumulate in the tissues of the liver, kidneys, lungs, and spleen.

So eating plastics is detrimental to health but more studies are needed for human health effects and determining optimal thresholds of exposure and toxicity. There has never been a better time to reduce our consumption of plastics and advocate for better alternatives and reduction of single use plastics. So lets work on this together because we need to improve planetary health and that of future generations. Let’s tackle #plasticpollution together.

Video chapters:
00:00 – 0:50 – How much microplastics do we consume?
0:51 – 1:50 – Global microplastic contamination
1:50 – 3:44 – How plastic production is increasing
3:45 – 4:33 – Pathways to microplastic ingestion
4:33 – 7:18 – Health impacts of microplastics and nanoplastics
7:19 – 9:49 – Practical tips to reduce plastic consumption

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