Microplastics are released from water bottles, tea bags & many other plastic items we all use on a daily basis. The intro states that the study focused on baby bottles due to high temp exposure & shaking common during formula prep #TeamFeed #infantfeedingscience (5/)
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To simulate formula prep, bottles were soaked in 95°C water for 5 min, dried, 70°C water added & the bottle shook for 1 min @ 180 rpm. Not exactly how most of us would prep formula; if you shook every bottle that fast for a min you’d have biceps like Michelle Obama's! (6/)pic.twitter.com/UXX0ypKmyq
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After they shook it way more vigorously than a polaroid picture (or indeed a normal bottle of formula), they filtered the water & counted the microplastics on a selected area of filter (not the whole filter, which is acknowledged in the suppl. material as a limitation) (7/)
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They also did a test in which they added formula to the bottle, shook it, promptly poured it all out & added tap water assuming the formula would remain on the bottle as a protective film. You be the judge of how likely that would be (8/)pic.twitter.com/t1Z8Rk3uCf
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In a surprise to nobody, there was no reduction in microplastics in bottles that had an Aptamil rinse vs water only bottles. So, sticking with water only analysis, they found a lot of microplastics in water from items that had gone through the simulated formula prep process (9/)
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The authors note the amount of microplastics in the samples were higher than amounts the WHO reported in drinking water, although they note that levels were similar in lunch boxes, noodle cups and kettles in their experiment
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It’s interesting that microplastics in the 3 bottles further tested increased at temps above 70°C, suggesting it was the hot sterilising that caused more release. A way to overcome this ‘in real life’ would be to cold sterilise https://www.feeduk.org/washing-and-sterilising … (11/)pic.twitter.com/684MYEJJEs
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To estimate babies microplastic exposure,
#breastfeeding rates, formula intakes & the market share of each of the items tested was used: Daily MP exposure = (1 – BF rate) x market share of product x avg MP released from the product in that region x est. daily milk intake (12/)1 reply 0 retweets 2 likesShow this thread -
To me this reads like the est. exposure is an average for all babies across a region which is a strange way to report the data to me. Surely either a baby will use that product or not? In that case would it not just be volume x amount of MP’s? But honestly, I’m not sure! (13/)
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We need a brain like
@GidMK to explain this equation! For the UK, ’daily microplastic exposure’ from the feeding items tested ranged between 80k – 3m per day. If you can shed some light on this please let us know!#infantfeedingscience (14/)2 replies 0 retweets 2 likesShow this thread
Well, the formula seems a bit silly to me, but honestly the best rule here is probably to apply the @BBCMoreOrLess question - is that a big number? It seems to me that the crude number of particles is a terrible metric for microplastic exposure, because they vary in size
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If a baby is exposed to 16,200,000 particles a day but they are all 0.00000000001mm in size, it might be less worrying than if they had 100,000 particles that were 0.001mm, for example. I think the question of whether that's a lot depends mostly on the total volume of MPs
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Replying to @GidMK @BBCMoreOrLess
Ahh great point! Hadn’t thought of that! Thanks for your insight
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