Your Daily Cup of Tea Could Be Exposing You to Thousands of Microplastics, Study Finds
· Vice
Sorry to add a bit of stress to your relaxing nightly cup of tea, but research published in npj Science of Food suggests a plastic tea bag could be filling your body with microplastics and chemicals that mess with your endocrine system.
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Researchers at Recep Tayyip Erdogan University in Türkiye tested 28 tea brands, dunking plastic, paper, and loose-leaf varieties into boiling water. Those fancy-looking mesh plastic teabags are apparently nothing more than an expensive microplastic delivery system, shedding anywhere from 555 to nearly 2500 microplastic particles into a single cup of tea.
Compared to loose-leaf tea, which takes about a pound of leaves to hit those same numbers.
Your Tea Bag Might Be Releasing Thousands of Plastic Particles Into Every Cup
Scientists also detected bisphenol A, aka the dreaded BPA, the very chemical every water bottle you bought for the past 10 years has made clear that it does not contain. It’s also got another potentially dangerous chemical called phthalates, both of which are infamous for throwing human hormones out of whack.
In just one cup, BPA levels reached up to 21.7 percent of the European Safety Authority’s daily safety limit. Single-cup toxicity is still relatively low, but the researchers did find that there was a specific type of chemical, DEHP, an additive used to make PVC plastics, that turned up in amounts that pose real long-term cancer risks for heavy tea drinkers.
On top of that bad news, the testing equipment only picked up plastic bits larger than 100 micrometers, meaning potentially millions of invisible nanoplastics likely went completely undetected. Those pyramid-shaped plastic teabags that make you feel like a millionaire are really just a fancy way to turn yourself into a living recycling bin.
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