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Discovery and solution for microplastics: New risk carriers in food

Food Chemistry 2025 13 citations

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This review summarizes the current state of microplastic contamination in food, covering which foods are affected, how to detect microplastics, and how to break them down. Microplastics accumulate through the food chain and have been confirmed in many everyday foods, posing serious health risks. The authors call for standardized detection methods and national policies to monitor and reduce microplastic contamination in the food supply.

Microplastics (MPs), as a kind of plastic particles with an equal volume size of less than 5 mm, similar to PM2.5 in the air, are causing severe contamination issues in food. Along with the food chain accumulation, they have been confirmed to appear in daily foods and cause serious health risks to the organisms. However, there were no unifying national and local policies on separating, extracting, and detecting MPs in food, which is an essential and imperative early-warning strategy. This review carefully and comprehensively summarized the validated contaminated food, physical and chemical characteristics, extraction methods, traditional and rapid detection techniques, as well as degradation methods of MPs. We thoroughly analyzed the differences among these traditional strategies, and innovatively generalized the existing rapid detection techniques for MPs. Finally, the shortcomings of existing research were discussed, and the possibility of novel rapid and intelligent detection techniques for MPs in food was proposed.

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