alt Hacker NewsA plastic pellet is typically 3-5mm in diameter. I think I'd notice that in my food. Even if I did enjoy swallowing fish guts whole, a plastic pellet is just going to pass straight through my digestive system.
Additives can leach out of plastics and enter the food chain, but pellets lost at sea are a completely insignificant factor because the total volume of waste produced by this route is so small. The majority of marine plastic is either post-consumer waste dumped in rivers in developing countries, or fishing gear that is lost at sea. If you're really worried about this, then you really need to take it up with the government of the Philippines and the global fishing industry.
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"I think I'd notice that in my food"
That isn't how food processing works.
There are many steps of grinding, pulverizing, mixing, re-forming, de-forming, extruding, heating, cooling.
The 3mm plastic pellet becomes a thousand smaller bits.
Also, you'd be surprised how many bugs are in your creamed corn, and you don't notice those either.
>> a plastic pellet is just going to pass straight through my digestive system
Through the mechanical grinding action of weather and tides (the same mechanisms that make sand out of rock and coral), these chunks can become much much smaller, small enough to cross the intestine into the bloodstream and small enough to cross the blood brain barrier or pass up your nose, lodging in your brain.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10141840/
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...