A new study led by researchers in Switzerland has suggested that opening a bottle or unwrapping a piece of deli meat could be adding tiny plastic particles to your food. Results of the study are published in ‘NPJ Science of Food’.

Microplastics and nanoplastics can enter food during packaging, processing and even normal use, like twisting a bottle cap or tearing off a plastic wrapper.

“This is the first systematic evidence of how normal and intended use of foodstuffs packaged in plastics can be contaminated with micro- and nanoplastics,” said lead author Lisa Zimmermann, a scientific communication officer at the Food Packaging Forum in Zu rich, Switzerland.

Researchers reviewed more than 100 studies and found plastic particles in common foods such as rice, canned fish, sodas, bottled water and takeout containers, reported the ‘Newsmaxhealth’.

For example, one study found an average of 240,000 plastic particles in a single liter of bottled water. Microplastics are very small pieces of plastic, often less than five millimeters wide — about the size of a sesame seed. Nanoplastics are even smaller and measured in billionths of a meter.