Kimchi: The Secret Solution to Nanoplastics?
Written by Lola Clark
Edited by Justin Choi
How much would you have to be paid to eat your credit card every week? $100? $100,000? While this may sound disgusting and impossible, research published by Springer Nature suggests that the average person already does this. How? Through nanoplastics. A nanoplastic, defined as a piece of plastic measuring less than 1 micrometer, is a microscopic piece of plastic. They’re found everywhere in the environment, our food, water, and air. Due to their miniscule size and the increased use of plastic globally, exposure is increasingly difficult to avoid. Scientists and health experts agree that nanoplastics can severely damage our gastrointestinal tract and induce an array of disorders and dysfunctions when left to accumulate over time. From this conclusion, a new question arises: how can we clear the nanoplastics from our body? The answer may be closer than we realized.
Kimchi, a traditional Korean side dish traditionally made from fermented cabbage or radish, may be the solution. A team of researchers headed by Drs. Se Hee Lee and Tae Woong Whon found that the kimchi-derived bacterium Leuconostoc mesenteroides CBA3656 works as a microscopic magnet to help remove nanoplastics from the digestive tract. Leuconostoc mesenteroides CBA3656 is a lactic acid bacterium that naturally occurs during the fermentation process. It forms in particularly salty and low temperature environments, both of which occur during kimchi’s fermentation.
While various methods have been developed to remove nanoplastics, CBA3656 is particularly promising because of its performance in environments that resemble the human gut. The research team originally tested its efficiency under regular laboratory conditions and found that it had an absorption efficiency of 87%. While this is a considerable percentage, it's only 2% more than the reference strain, Latilactobacillus sakei CBA3608. CBA3608 is another bacterial strain that is produced during the fermentation of kimchi. It is used as the reference strain because of its structural resemblance to CBA3656 and high efficiency under standard conditions. Since CBA3608 has already been proven successful in laboratory conditions, the success of CBA3656 was encouraging but not groundbreaking.
In conditions that artificially mirror the human gut, CBA3656 had a 57% absorption efficiency rate while the rate of the reference strain dropped considerably to 3%. Because of its ability to retain success rates in a simulated gut environment, researchers moved onto testing the strain in mice. Male and female germ-free mice were given the CBA3656 strain, and it was found that mice who were given the strain had two times the amount of nanoplastics in their feces compared to those who did not. These results support the hypothesis that CBA3656 promotes the binding of nanoplastics to fecal waste, thereby removing plastic from the body.
While this research is promising, it's important to note that it has not yet been tested on humans. These findings are fairly new and need to be researched further to confirm the scientist’s hypothesis. Rats have historically been used to conduct benchmark research before testing on humans due to human’s extensive knowledge and research of rats' bodily systems. Because of the general similarities between the systems, they serve as a reasonably accurate prediction model to how humans will react.
It is also important to note that the research was funded by WiKim, the World Institute of Kimchi, which is a South Korean government-funded research institute. WiKim’s goal is to study and promote kimchi globally. Despite what may seem to be a conflict of interest, the research remains valid because it was published in Bioresource Technology, which is an accredited, peer-reviewed scientific journal. Additionally, the scientists have been transparent in the fact that their research has not been tested on humans and is preliminary.
The link between Kimchi and nanoplastics is exciting because the rapid increase in plastic use has begun to cause significant health issues globally. Finding a solution that is both effective and scalable is crucial to maintaining public health. While the efficiency of CBA3656 in removing nanoplastics through fecal waste in humans is not solidified, it has a promising start.
(Lola Clark is in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She can be reached lc2349@cornell.edu.)
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