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Wake up and smell the coffee — your favorite breakfast foods may be riddled with plastic.
Microplastics are ubiquitous in modern life, with evidence showing they’ve infiltrated everything from the beauty products we use to the clothes we wear and the air we breathe.
Food is a major culprit, largely because of all the plastic it comes into contact with before landing on your dining room table.
That’s why it’s probably not surprising that ultra-processed foods like instant ramen are notable sources of microplastic shedding. But what about the foods that come from nature?
A new scientific review suggests that even whole foods like eggs and honey aren’t spared from the onslaught of microplastics.
That’s plastic that builds up inside us and causes toxicity, research suggests — from damaging the heart, blood vessels and bones to suppressing our immune systems and messing with our hormones.
Before you settle in with your morning tea and frittata, here’s what researchers found about two breakfast favorites.
Plastic in your eggs
The average American consumes more than 270 eggs a year, or one egg about every day and a half. A majority of US adults prefer to eat them on their own (like a fried egg), in omelets or in egg sandwiches.
There are probably microplastics in them, the new review reports, pointing to a study from 2022.
For that study, researchers opened uncooked eggs straight from the grocery and found about 12 particles of microplastics in the yolk and egg white.
Most foods are getting contaminated with tiny bits of plastic because of the packaging and handling they go through on their way to you. What’s interesting is that these microplastics were found inside the most natural container in the world.
Researchers propose that the bits got there because the chicken feed or water was contaminated, consumed by the laying hen and transferred to the egg. This has not been established, so it’s just a theory for now, the authors emphasize.
Cooking didn’t get rid of the microplastics, researchers observed. The microplastics were mostly polyethylene, the most common plastic in the world. It’s frequently seen in single-use plastics like shopping bags and bottles.
The study was done in China, so it’s unclear exactly how applicable the findings are to US eggs.
Plastic in your honey
Americans love honey, too — they eat about 2 pounds per person a year.
The review highlighted four honey studies, with dramatically different findings. At most, researchers found 698 microplastics per kilogram, or about 15 particles per tablespoon of honey, in a 2013 study.
Two other studies suggested that microplastic contamination was coming from flowers, while the most recent of the four studies reported a much lower concentration of microplastics.
One of the studies determined that most detected particles in honey are not plastic, finding little evidence of contamination.
The conflicting research raises the question of how many of the particles in the other studies — particularly the 2013 one — were actually plastic. The authors of the new review say microscopes alone, as used in that study, aren’t enough to differentiate microplastics from other debris.
Still, the review’s authors say eggs and honey are just some of the many animal-based foods that haven’t received enough attention in the microplastic conversation.
A lot of previous research has focused on seafood. But other staples, like dairy products and sausage, are showing evidence of microplastic contamination, too.
The authors propose that these recent findings support a need for better ways to assess microplastic prevalence in food and more “harmonized” standards for acceptable tolerances.
