Babies may be ingesting far more microplastics than we could imagine.

 

 

As your baby starts baby led weaning, the first thing to consider is what are the right and safe gears for your little eaters.

Here’s what you need to know before weighing your options.

Study finds that babies are consuming tremendous levels of microplastics particles. The recommended high-temperature process for properly sterilizing plastic feeding products introduces millions of microplastics particles or even trillions of smaller nanoplastics particles.

When researchers sterilized the plastic baby bottles and exposed them to water at 70 degrees Celsius, about 16.2 millions of microplastic particles per liter were released. As the temperature increased up to 95 degrees Celsius, about 55 millions of microplastic particles were released into the water.

Meanwhile, at 25 degree Celsius, only about 600,000 plastics particles were found, but 25 degree Celsius is far too cool to pass the international guidelines for proper sterilization. The most surprising finding was that even you have room temperature water, if you shake it for a minute, you could still find the presence of hundreds and thousands of microplastics released into the water.

There is clearly a direct correlation between temperature of the water and the number of microplastics released, so the higher the temperature of the water, the more microplastics are released.

Though very little is currently known about the effect of microplastics on humans, if microplastics do indeed have negative impact on humans, children could be more at risk since they are exposed to far more microplastics than adults do.

“There is evidence that microplastics are linked to chemicals that have effects on hormones and metabolism, according to Dr.Leonardo Trasande, Director of the NYU Center for the Investigation of Environmental Hazard.”

Children are particularly vulnerable to these effects on a child’s development of brain or their metabolism, because their organs are just developing, and could result in a permanent and lifelong consequences.

The presence of high levels of microplastics found urges the need for more research into the effect of microplastics have on humans, particularly on infants.

Microplastics have contaminated every aspect of our lives, so while we will never get rid of them, we can at least reduce our baby’s risk and exposure by choosing the safe feeding gear is an important step to protect our baby from consuming microplastics particles.

Reference: 

Polypropylene baby bottles may release microplastics during formula preparation: study

Gravitas: Study finds babies are full of microplastics

Bottle-fed babies swallow millions of microplastics a day, study finds

 

 

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