Eat A Lot Of Seafood? You Also May Be Eating As Much As 11,000 Pieces Of Plastic A Year

Ocean pollution has gotten so out of hand, scientists are counting the amount of plastic that ends up in your seafood. A new study from researchers at the University of Ghent in Belgium has estimated that on average, people eat 11,000 pieces of plastic in their seafood every year. That's a lot of petroleum product.

But if you think to yourself, "hey, I don't remember eating any plastic with my fish filet...." These plastic pieces are usually microscopic, but they can be harmful. However, the human body does pass around 99 percent of these plastic pieces without problem. It's the one percent unknown that is a big question mark.

"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 study, told Sky News. "Are chemicals leaching out of these plastics and then causing toxicity? We don't know and actually we do need to know."

By the end of the century regular seafood eaters will be consuming 780,000 pieces of plastic every year, according to the study, which means that 4,000 will be absorbed into the bloodstreams of future lifeforms.