So, you know those fancy, white, pyramid-shaped, silken tea-bags you always thought were a bad idea? Well, it turns out that they are in fact ... a bad idea. Although possibly not for the reasons you might have thought.
I always assumed that they were actually made out of silk, or some similar kind of material, and I always thought how wasteful and unnecessary that was. Call me naïve, but I'm sure I wasn't the only person surprised to find out recently that they are made of plastic (PET or nylon).
And the reason this has all come to light is because a recent study at McGill University has shown that, when you make a cup of tea with them, a whole host of microplastics (and even smaller nanoplastic) slough off them, into your tea, and thence down your throat. And not just thousands of them, but BILLIONS of them in each cup of tea, more than in most other sources of microplastics in foods.
Now, thus far, there is no compelling evidence that ingesting this level (or any level) of microplastics is actually bad for human health, although my intuition is that a link to health problems WILL eventually surface. The same study looked at the behaviours of water fleas in that level of plastic contamination, and the water fleas started to swim more slowly and erratically, and physically started to balloon up. So something bad is happening there, and more research is called for. What we do know is that they do eventually end up in the environment, ultimately in
the oceans, and we already nknow that that IS an issue
Anyway, fancy silken tea-bags - bad idea.
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