Love using a cutting board to cut vegetables with ease? Beware, these boards, both plastic and wooden, are a potentially significant source of harmful microplastics in human food, warns a study including one by Indian-origin researchers. Ingested microplastics are known to cause many health problems, such as increased inflammation, impaired fasting glucose, insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
They can also cause cell damage, leading to inflammation and allergic reactions, as well as reproductive harm and obesity. Researchers at North Dakota State University report that cutting carrots on wooden and plastic cutting boards can generate hundreds of millions of microscopic particles a year.
However, a toxicity test showed no significant effect on mouse cell survival from the polyethylene or wood microparticles released during chopping. Most cutting boards are made of rubber, bamboo, wood, or plastic. Over time, these kitchen tools develop grooves and slash marks from mincing, slicing and chopping food.
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Recently, researchers have shown that some plastic board materials, including polypropylene and polyethylene, can shed nano- and micro-sized flakes when cut with a knife. In the new study, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, researchers collected and measured micro-sized particles emitted from cutting boards that were repeatedly struck with knives. In their tests, they compared the chopping patterns of five people and one person’s chopping on different ingredients, with and without carrots.
From the results, the team calculated that food preparation could produce between 14 and 71 million polyethylene microplastics and 79 million polypropylene microplastics from their respective boards each year. While annual estimates for wooden boards were not determined, the researchers reported that these items removed 4 to 22 times more microparticles than plastics in various tests.
But despite many microparticles being formed, the researchers found that polyethylene microplastics and wood microparticles did not significantly alter the viability of mouse cells in laboratory tests when carrots were shredded.