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Do you keep a mental list of all microplastics sources that find your way into your daily life? You may have to take another guilty into account: It is chewing gum, according to a new pilot study, in which it was found that only a piece of hundreds to thousands of microplastics can release them into saliva.
The study is currently being checked by experts and will be presented on Tuesday at the semi -annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Diego. As soon as the review has been completed, the authors hope that the report will be published later this year in the Journal of Hazardous Materials Letters.
“Our goal is not to worry someone,” said Dr. Sanjay Mohany, Associate Professor at the Samueli School of Engineering at the University of California in Los Angeles. “Scientists do not know whether microplastics are unsure for us or not. There are no human exams. But we know that we are exposed to plastics in everyday life, and we wanted to examine that here.”
A new study quantifies the amount of microplastics in chewing gum. – Delmaine Donson/E+/Getty Images
Microplastics are fragments of polymers, which are less than 0.2 inches (5 millimeters) to 1/25,000. Customs (1 micrometer). Plastic smaller than this are considered nanoplasty that are measured in billion stars of a measuring device.
Polymers are chemical compounds with long chains of large and repeating molecular units that are known as monomers and which are known for durability and flexibility. Most plastics are synthetic polymers, while natural polymers cellulose from plants include. Chewing gum typically contains synthetic or natural polymers for a better texture, elasticity and taste retention, the authors said.
According to earlier examinations, microplastics enter into the body by taking and inhalation, and scientists have discovered their presence in different parts of the body or liquids such as blood, lungs, placenta, brain and testicles. Therefore, the authors said that they wanted to identify other possible sources of microplastic intake and their concentrations.
“Chewing gum is one of the foods we have selected because it is the only food in which plastic polymer is used as an ingredient,” Mohanty told CNN via e -mail. “Other foods are contaminated with microplastics because they are processed and packed.”
According to the authors’ knowledge, her study is the first “examined or compared the microplasty in chewing gum in the trade,” added Mohany.
Isolate microplastics from gums
The team’s results are based on 10 gums that are popular in the USA. Half of the samples were synthetic and the other half was made with natural ingredients.
Most, if not all, do not indicate chewing gum product names and websites, which contains their gums or how they are processed. With this lack of transparency, researchers are also not able to know where and how microplastics came into the gums that we tested, “said Mohany – and for consumers the full composition of the gums they buy cannot know.
A human participant would chew a chewing gum for four minutes; During this period, a researcher collected the secreted saliva every 30 seconds in a centrifugal tube.
The participant then flushed his mouth three to five times with high-cleaned water, and the researchers mixed the sample sample with the saliva sample to ensure that all microplastics were recorded in the mouth. This entire process was repeated seven times for every chewing gum.
Some gums were chewed for a total of 20 minutes, with the saliva being collected every two minutes, so that the team was able to determine how the number of microplasty scales depended on the chewing time.
In order to identify the types and quantities of the microplastics in the gums, the authors used various filtration and chemical analyzes such as microscopy. The research team also subtracted microplastics in a first rinse sample of those in the chewing gum pancreatic samples in order to precisely estimate the number of microplastic released from the chewing gum.
The analysis showed that only 1 gram of chewing gum published an average of about 100 microplastics with 1 gram of rubber with up to 637 microplastics. A typical gumstick can weigh according to different reports from 1 gram to several grams.
In addition, 94% of the microplastics were published within the first eight minutes of chewing.
The authors were surprised that the chewing natural gums made no difference. The average number of microplastics in 1 gram of synthetic chewing gum was 104 and in natural chewing gum 96.
Both types are also released primarily of four types of synthetic polymers: polyolefins, polyterephthalates (or polyethylene -Ththalat), polyacrylamides and polystyrenen. These are some of the same plastics used in everyday plastic consumer products, Dr. Tasha Stoiber, senior scientist from the environmental work group, a non -profit environmental health organization, by e -mail. Stoiber was not involved in research.
“This microplasty was not unexpected,” said Dr. David Jones, a teaching scholarship at the School of the Environment and Life Sciences at the University of Portsmouth in England, by e -mail. Jones was not involved in the study.
“If we expose a kind of plastic in stress, be it warmth, friction, sunlight, sea water or in this case intensive, we know that microplastics are released from the plastic material,” added Jones, also founder and CEO of the Marine Conservation Charity, just one ocean. “We inhale, take and drink and drink about 250,000 plastic particles a year without trying … but at least we now have some robust data and it is a good starting point for further research.”
“Gum must be enjoyed as it has been for more than 100 years,” said the National Confectioners Association via e -mail. The trading group has member companies that manufacture and sell chewing gum. “Food security is the top priority for US sweetware companies, and our member companies only use ingredients with ingredients.”
What is unknown about rubber microplasty
The average size of the gum microplasty was 82.6 micrometers – think of the thickness of the paper or the diameter of some human hair. The chemical analysis tools used in the study cannot identify particles that are less than 20 micrometers, said Mohanty.
This restriction means that the results have missed smaller microplastics and nanoplasty and therefore possibly underestimation of the underestimation of Dr. Leonardo Trasande, Director of the New York University Center for the examination of environmental dangers via e -mail. Trasande was not involved in the study.
It is also questionable why synthetic polymers were also found in the natural gums. However, polyolefins are often used for packaging in the food industry, so this could be a reason why the authors said.
The unexpected finding can also occur if manufacturers use polymers if this is not the case if there was a laboratory damage or if there was a measurement error, said Dr. Oliver Jones, Professor of Chemistry at the RMIT University in Australia, in a statement published by the Science Media Center. Jones was not involved in the study.
“Since the producers rarely report on the composition of the gums, it is difficult to determine the source of microplastics in natural chewing gum,” they added.
Some of the polymers – such as in water bottles, which are often contained in the synthetic gums polyterephthalates, are not known that they are generally present, Dr. David Jones from the University of Portsmouth.
Some supervisory authorities have taken the attitude that no concern about microplastics in food and water is required, since there is no evidence that they are harmful, he said.
“This is completely the wrong approach. We should pursue the pension approach and assume that they will do so,” he added. “We have to invest in research to understand how this will now affect our health so that we can begin to alleviate the consequences.”
Even if potential effects on the human body are unknown, the study can put into perspective in a different way in which chewing gums can contribute to environmental pollution if they are inappropriately rejected, experts said.
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