A Review on Microplastics: The Emerging Threat in Food Safety

Abstract

Microplastics (MPs), defined as polymer particles ranging from 0.1 to 5,000 μm in size, have emerged as pervasive environmental pollutants due to the massive global production of plastics and their widespread use. Significant research has been carried out all over the world in the last few years to evaluate the severity of MP pollution in the environment, to assess the human health hazards caused by MPs, and to establish novel detection techniques. However, there are very few review articles available that gives a comprehensive overview of this new age pollutant in food matrices.  This current review provides an overview of the severity of the MP contamination in foods, emphasizing the type of MPs, their possible routes of transmission, and possible disease mechanisms. The review also focuses on advancements in MP detection techniques in food matrices, with a particular focus on AI-assisted methods, regulatory measures/policies adopted by different countries, and recent research undertaken to mitigate MPs from the environment as well as foods. The data presented here is based on the results of a thorough literature search, which was conducted across multiple research databases for the period from 2013-2025. The search results revealed the presence of high levels of MPs in commercial food products, particularly salt and seafood, with common polymers including polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP). Ingestion led accumulation of MPs in the human body could be linked to serious health effects, such as neurological dysfunction, liver fibrosis, kidney damage, and impaired reproductive function. AI-assisted spectroscopic-based detection techniques were found to be extremely promising, achieving up to 99 - 100% accuracy in water and fish tissue samples. Despite these advancements in MP research, critical challenges remain in standardizing detection techniques and establishing effective mitigation strategies.