Threatening Health, Daily Foods Containing Microplastics

YOGYAKARTA Microplastic threats to human health lurk secretly. Unfortunately, not many people realize that the threat is getting bigger and has an impact on humans. This happens because not many people know what microplasticity is. In addition, eating foods that contain microplastics increases the threat. There are some daily foods that contain microplastics and their existence is sometimes not realized.

Please note first, microplastics are small pieces of plastic that are less than five millimeters in size, as quoted from AI Care.

Reporting from a book entitled Food Technology Innovation Towards Indonesia Gold: Collection of PATPI Member Thoughts published by IPB Press, the existence of microplastics is widely encountered in the waters. This condition is a problem because microplastics are able to contaminate biota.

Biota pollution due to microplastics causes food originating from water to be contaminated with microplastics. Some of the ingredients and foods that have great potential to contain microplastics are as follows.

Microplastics in marine biota make fish that become food ingredients contaminated by these substances. In an article entitled New Food Pollution Microplastics, microplastics are found in several types of fish such as tuna and lemuru.

Of the four types of fish originating from the waters of the Bali Strait, the microplastic content is found to be the most in lemuru fish followed by kembung fish, kite fish, and shear fish.

Another sample that was studied was a blood shell (Anadara granosa) taken from Tambak Lorok, Semarang. As a result, microplastic shells were found in at least 97 percent in the form of fiber microplastics, fragments and films.

Not only sea fish, but freshwater also has the potential to contain microplastics, one of which is mujair. In the fish, microplastics were found in the rice fields obtained from Kenanga Lake and Agathhis Lake, University of Indonesia, Depok.

Not only in living things, microplastics were also excited because they were found in salt. It was explained that the microplastic content in salt produced in the East Java area contained as many as 303 particles/kg.

Microplastics were also found in the storage pool for salt production areas with a content of 9667 particles/m3. The types of plastic particles identified in the pool are polyprophylene, LDPE (low density polyethylene), polyethylene, polystyrene, and HDPE (high density polyethylene).

Not only in the above foods, microplastics are also found in vegetables and fruits such as carrots, lettuce, apples, and urinary. This is known based on research conducted by researchers from Catania University, Italy.

Reporting from the Greenpeace site, apples contain the highest microplastics in fruit with an average number of 195,500 plastic particles per gram. Meanwhile, the content of pyropy is 189,500 particles per gram.

In broccoli and carrots, the most microplastic contamination found is among other vegetables. The average amount of plastic material is 100,000 particles per gram.

That's information related to daily foods that contain microplastics. Visit VOI.id to get other interesting information.