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There is plastic in your poop. Or at least there is microplastic in the poop of some people. A presentation at a gastroenterology conference in Vienna this week reported preliminary findings from a pilot study involving faecal samples, which found nine different types of microplastics in the analyzed samples . The news has attracted a lot of media attention, but the study is so small that it is worth looking at with caution rather than drawing solid conclusions.
Concern about plastic in the human diet has been a hot topic for some time, tiny particles of broken plastics in foods, beverages and even air. If we take plastic at one end and we can not digest it, it makes sense and logic that we would see it at the other end as well. But the wait is not the same as the real evidence, and this study is the first to present evidence of these microplastics in the human gut.
Gastroenterologist Philipp Schwabl and his colleagues asked their participants to keep a food journal for a week before packing their shit in a plastic-free sample kit and sending it to Vienna. Then these samples were cleaned of all expected substances, such as proteins and undigested plant material, leaving the rest to be tested for 10 different types of microplastics.
The researchers found plastic in the eight samples, about 20 particles per 10 grams of poo. The size of these particles varied: the larger ones measured about half a millimeter and the smaller ones, about one-tenth of the size, about the size of a speck of dust. The most common type was polypropylene, the plastic contained in the caps, followed by polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the plastic contained in the bottles themselves. Both types of plastic appeared in the eight samples. Seven other types of plastic, from the types used in utensils and shopping bags to those used in auto parts and electronics, appeared at much lower frequencies in some of the eight people.
The search is far from over. Although conference presentations are generally reviewed before they are accepted, this is not the same depth of review as a scientific article before it is published in a journal. This means that some important details are not yet available, such as how the researchers tried to control the contamination throughout the process. The pilot study allowed researchers to determine the best methods for a much larger study that should test many more people, but there is not much data to go on.
One of the biggest questions left is how exactly plastic got there. Plastic in food comes from two possible sources: the food itself and its packaging. But it is also possible that at least a part of it comes from airborne plastic dust fibers. This highlights how difficult it is to avoid plastic contamination, which makes it difficult to say for sure that all the plastic they found in the poop was there because of what people ate, rather than arriving partly there then their shit to send it.
Another big question is what does this mean for human health? Plastic particles were found to be absorbed by the intestine into other organic systems in fish and mammals; in birds and fish, plastics in the intestine have caused liver stress and nutrient absorption problems. Chemicals carried by plastics could also be a concern. But we are just beginning to explore this in humans, which Schwabl pointed out in a public statement: "Now that we have the first evidence of microplastics in humans, we need additional research to understand what it means for human health. "
