As research linking plastic to health risks mounts, a new study finds that eating from plastic takeout containers may significantly increase the chance of congestive heart failure by causing inflammation, reports the Guardian.
The two-part, peer-reviewed study comes from a team of researchers at Ningxia Medical University in Yinchuan, northwestern China. They first looked into the frequency with which over 3,000 people in China ate from plastic takeout containers, and whether they had heart disease.
Then the researchers exposed rats to leachate – water boiled and poured into carryout containers to extract chemicals. Plastic can contain any of around 20,000 chemicals, and those chemicals often end up in our food and food packaging. Many of them, including BPA, phthalates and PFAS, have been linked to health risks ranging from cancer to reproductive harm.
The resulting data “revealed that high-frequency exposure to plastics is significantly associated with an increase of congestive heart failure,” the authors wrote. While the researchers did not name the specific chemicals that rats were exposed to through the leachate, they noted the link between common plastic compounds and heart disease, as well as previous research linking the gut biome and heart disease.
[See more: Ultra-processed food is even worse for you than you think]
The rat portion of the study involved putting boiling water in plastic takeout containers for 1, 5 and 15 minutes, as previous research shows that plastic chemicals leach at much higher rates when hot contents are placed in a container, as well as when containers are heated. Researchers fed the contaminated water to rats for three months, then checked the rats’ gut biome, metabolites (a substance created when the body breaks down food, drugs or chemicals) in their feces and their heart muscle tissue.
What the team found indicated that ingesting leachates “altered the intestinal microenvironment, affected gut microbiota composition, and modified gut microbiota metabolites, particularly those linked to inflammation and oxidative stress” and resulted in damage to the heart muscle tissue, as well as increased markers of myocardial injury, inflammation and oxidative stress. There was also no statistical difference between the rats given water that leached for 1 minute or 5 or 15, indicating that even minimal exposure poses a health risk.
The researchers closed by calling for more research to build on their findings, delving into the impacts of long-term exposure to plastic products and providing more detailed information on the accumulation and distribution of plastic particles in tissue and organs. This information could be used to “provide a theoretical foundation to develop appropriate safety measures in the future,” they said.
For now, they recommend people avoid using plastic containers for high-temperature foods and reduce use of plastic products overall, and call on governments to “implement timely plastic pollution control measures.”
