Honestly, it probably doesn't come as a very big shock to the mindful consumer that choosing to incorporate meat and dairy into your diet probably means that you are going to be ingesting some things that you might not necessarily have expected.
All kinds of bizarre additives, preservatives, fillers and binders go into a plethora of the food we eat, and we may not even know it.
While some people choose to deny that climate change is happening and that potentially harmful ingredients sometimes make their way into our food to cut production costs, a study by the University of Ghent in Belgium actually shows that extremely small plastic particles are often found in our seafood. In fact, those who do eat seafood could be ingesting up to 11,000 of these micro plastics every single year.
Yikes, ya'll.
If it provides you any solace, researchers did find that 99 percent of these microscopic plastic particles do usually pass through the body without causing any alarm. However, as Sky News points out, that leaves a pesky little 1 percent that sticks around, and we don't know what that 1 percent is capable of -- yet. What we do know is that the particles will build up in the body over time, and that could have harmful consequences.
"Now we've established that they do enter our body and can stay there for quite a while, we do need to know the fate of the plastics," Dr. Colin Janssen, who led the research, told Sky News.
"Where do they go? Are they encapsulated by tissue and forgotten about by the body, or are they causing inflammation or doing other things?
"Are chemicals leaching out of these plastics and then causing toxicity? We don't know and actually we do need to know," says Janssen.
So, ultimately, the responsibility to fix this mess falls down to -- you guessed it -- us. We need to do better, help clean up the world's oceans, and stop harming our earth and the creatures inside of it.
You can go check out Sky Ocean Rescue's campaign to help clean up our oceans here.