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Food chain microplastics contamination and impact on human health: a review
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This review synthesizes evidence on microplastic transfer through the food chain—spanning seafood, food additives, packaging, and agricultural products—and documents human health impacts including cancer, organ damage, and reproductive impairment. Microplastics are nearly impossible to excrete once absorbed into the circulatory system, making dietary exposure a critical and underappreciated public health concern.
Microplastics have been recently detected in many environmental media and living organisms, yet their transfer and toxicity to humans are poorly known. Here, we review microplastic transfer in the food chain with focus on microplastic pollution sources, methods to analyze microplastics in food, health impact of food-related microplastic exposure, and remediation of microplastic pollution. Microplastic pollution sources include seafood, food additives, packaging materials, and agricultural and industrial products. Remediation techniques comprise the use of microbial enzymes and biofilms. Microplastic detection methods in food rely on separation and quantification by optical detection, scanning electron micrography, and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy. Human health impact following microplastic ingestion include cancers, organ and respiration damage, and reproductive impairments. Overall, microplastic toxicity is mainly due to their ability to enter the metabolism, adsorption into the circulatory system for translocation, and difficulty, if not impossibility, of excretion.
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Human Exposure to Dietary Microplastics and Health Risk: A Comprehensive Review
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This comprehensive review examines human dietary exposure to microplastics through bottled water, seafood, packaged foods, and crops grown in plastic-mulched soils, cataloging toxicity mechanisms including immune disruption, gastrointestinal damage, and developmental cytotoxicity, with MPs shown to transfer via placenta and breast milk. The multi-pathway exposure evidence reviewed here highlights that microplastic ingestion is a universal human experience beginning before birth, with plausible health consequences that demand urgent investment in mechanistic in vivo research.
Routes of human exposure to Micro- and Nanoplastics through the food chain: what do literature reviews say?
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Researchers conducted an umbrella review of 59 published reviews on microplastics in food chains and found that plastic particles contaminate marine, freshwater, and terrestrial food sources across a vast size range (0.02–16,400 µm), noting that the number of reviews now exceeds primary studies, signaling a need for more standardized research.
Microplastics: An Unsafe Pathway from Aquatic Environment to Health—A Review
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Researchers reviewed how microplastics travel from aquatic environments into the human body, tracing pathways through contaminated water, seafood, and aquatic food chains, and highlighting gaps in our understanding of the resulting health risks across multiple organ systems.
Impact of Microplastics in Human Health
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Researchers reviewed how microplastics — the tiny fragments that form as plastics break down — are accumulating in human tissues and triggering inflammation, hormonal disruption, and other health effects. Because plastics are inescapable in modern life, understanding these pathways is critical for setting safe exposure limits and informing policy.
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Researchers examined how the global proliferation of plastic products has led to pervasive microplastic pollution through slow degradation of discarded materials, with direct consequences for human health. The paper traces the pathway from plastic convenience to microscale contamination and the biological impacts on the human body.
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When a large batch of papers lands in the Atlas, we read through it and send a short write-up of what stood out.