After leaching from bottles, containers and wrappers, minute grains of plastic can end up in the human body.
There they are carried through the bloodstream, often ending up in the brain or genitalia, or even passing from mother to baby in the womb.
And while plastic use has been cut in recent years in some countries, with single-use items such as forks being phased out in Europe and recycling deposits charged on bottled drinks, pollution levels mean that risks posed by so-called nanoplastics will remain for decades to come.
Going by tests carried out on fish by Chinese scientists, one way to offset the effects of nanoplastics is to get the lungs pumping regularly, be that by cycling, running, aerobics or circuit training.
Researchers at Wenzhou University and the University of Hong Kong said that aerobic exercise can be “an exposure modifier” following ingestion of nanoplastics.
The team’s paper, published by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (Faseb), showed how absorbing nanoplastics led to a “significant” accumulation of particle-like structures in the ovaries and disrupted reproductive hormones.
The affected fish were more likely to exhibit “anxiety- and depression-like behaviours” and “elevated stress hormone levels”.
Aerobic exertion “lessened these effects” and reversed microbial imbalances to the gut caused by having bits of plastic pollution in the digestive system, the team found. – dpa
