Study: Plastic Baby Bottles Shed Microplastics When Heated. Should You Be Worried?

Microplastics are tiny fragments of plastic, often too small for the eye to see. They're created as plastic degrades.

And they're everywhere.

They're in oceans, thanks to plastic garbage. They're in fish. They find their way into the water we drink in various ways, from surface runoff and wastewater effluent to particles deposited from the atmosphere.

And they're released in huge quantities from plastic baby bottles when they're used to prepare formula according to standard guidelines, a new study in the journal Nature Food finds.

The study suggests that bottle-fed infants around the world may be consuming more than 1.5 million particles of microplastics per day on average. But the researchers caution that parents should not be alarmed by the findings.