I know a lot of people say they don’t but based on what iv seen we consume LOTS of micro plastics iv even seen a study that says we eat a credit cards worth a week if that’s true then there must be some way for our body to remove them since otherwise we’d have too much plastic in us I also heard that there is plastic in our livers and testicles . How does our body remove all of that and how much would donating blood help?
In: Biology
Everything smaller than 5mm is “microplastic” by some definitions, in others it’s anything below 1mm. Anything that big will just get pooped out.
To pass through the walls of the digestive tract they have to be much smaller. The bits found in blood were 0.0007mm. So even if we ate a credit card a week (which we don’t) most won’t ever make it into the body (digestive tract counts as “outside”).
Anything odd that doesn’t belong into a tissue will be snatched up by macrophages (a type of white blood cell) which will try to digest it, and drag bits and pieces to the next nymph node where they show it to other types of white blood cells to see whether they recognize it as something the immune system needs to fight. Plastics aren’t interesting in that regard. So the debris just sits there in the lymph node doing nothing.
Macrophages can also throw garbage out the next best airlock, into lung mucus or out the gut or into breast milk. Or they just stay where they found stuff, shrink up and become a tidy, tiny garbage bag within the organ. Usually they’re meant to do that with debris from infections or “normal” dust, plastic is new. The macrophages in testicles don’t move f.ex. but they have a job in the whole sperm-production process and when they’re all used as garbage bins, they can’t do that job anymore. Not so good for fertility.
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