Not to burst your perfectly blown bubble, but it turns out that chewing gum may be flooding your mouth with microplastics. As detailed in a pilot study which is awaiting peer-review, a team of researchers found that chomping down on just one stick of the rubbery candy releases up to thousands of microplastic shards into your saliva.

And if you redecorate your home and sand down the old paintwork, the plastic binders in the paint can release microplastics into the air, which you might then inhale. You could swallow them when you drink from single-use plastic water bottles. Now another source of microplastics in the body has been discovered: chewing gum.

A new study found that both natural and synthetic gum shed microplastics, with each piece of gum producing about 100 pieces of microplastics.