Study: Microplastics find way into your gut

In the next 60 seconds, people around the world will purchase 1 million plastic bottles and 2 million plastic bags. By the end of the year, we will produce enough Bubble Wrap to encircle the equator 10 times.

Though it will take more than 1,000 years for most of these items to degrade, many will soon break apart into tiny shards known as microplastics, trillions of which have been showing up in the oceans, fish, tap water and even table salt. Now, we can add one more microplastic repository to the list: the human gut.

In a pilot study with a small sample size, researchers looked for microplastics in stool samples of eight people from Finland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom and Austria. To their surprise, every single sample tested positive for the presence of a variety of microplastics.

“This is the first study of its kind, so we did a pilot trial to see if there are any microplastics detectable at all,” said Philipp Schwabl, a gastroenterologist at the Medical University of Vienna and lead author of the study. “The results were astonishing.”

There are no certain health implications for their findings, and they hope to complete a broader study with the methods they have developed.

Microplastics — defined as pieces less than .02 inches long, roughly the size of a grain of rice — have become a major concern for environmental researchers during the past decade. Several studies have found high levels of microplastics in marine life, and last year, microplastics were detected in 83 percent of tap water samples around the world.

Most microplastics are the unintended result of larger plastics breaking apart, and the United States, Canada and other countries have banned the use of tiny plastic beads in beauty products.

Researchers have long suspected microplastics would eventually be found in the human gut. One study estimated that people who regularly eat shellfish may be consuming as much as 11,000 plastic pieces per year.

The new paper, which was presented Monday at a gastroenterology conference in Vienna, could provide support for marine biologists who have long warned of the dangers posed by microplastics in oceans. But the paper suggests that microplastics are entering our bodies through other means, as well. Two of the eight participants also said they did not consume seafood.

To conduct the study, they selected volunteers from each country who kept food diaries for a week and provided stool samples. Schwabl and his colleagues analyzed the samples with a spectrometer.

Up to nine different kinds of plastics were detected, ranging in size from 0.002 inches to 0.02 inches. The most common plastics detected were polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate — both major components of plastic bottles and caps. Still, Schwabl cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the origins of the plastic.

“Most participants drank liquids from plastic bottles, but also fish and seafood ingestion was common,” he said. “It is highly likely that food is being contaminated with plastics during various steps of food processing or as a result of packaging.”

Whether microplastics pose a health risk to humans is largely unknown, though they have been found to cause some damage in fish and other animals. Nonetheless, Schwabl said the results were more than enough to investigate further.