Science Vs - Microplastics: How Worried Should You Be?

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

Microplastics have been turning up in our blood, our lungs, and even our balls! But exactly what are they doing to us? And what about all the chemicals in plastics — can they mess with our hormones? We talk to reproductive biologists Prof. Patricia Hunt and Prof. Fred vom Saal, and pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Anne-Simone Parent.   Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsMicroplastics Chapters:  In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Pat’s mice (06:26) Our plastic world (08:03) What do microplastics actually do in our bodies? (11:53) Plastics contain endocrine disrupting chemicals (15:06) Endocrine disruptors and…obesity?! (20:38) Are they funking up our junk? (29:23) Are we really eating that much microplastic? (32:50) What should we do? This episode was produced by Rose Rimler, with help from Wendy Zukerman, along with Meryl Horn, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, and Michelle Dang. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Sam Bair. Music written by Bobby Lord, Bumi Hidaka, and Peter Leonard. Thanks to all the researchers we spoke with for this episode, including Dr. Meiru Wang, Dr. Roger Kuhlman, Dr. Christopher Tubbs, Dr. Giusseppe Paolisso, Prof. Jerry Heindel, Dr. Laura Geer, Dr. Mohan Qin, Dr. Haoran Wei, Dr. Thaddeus Schug, Dr. Thava Palanisami, and Dr. Xiaozhong Yu. Special thanks to Miah Foster and Diana Kenney.  Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. I'm here with senior producer Rose Rimla. Hello. Hi, Wendy. You have a story to tell me. Yes, we're going to start off with a bit of a mystery story today. I heard it from Professor Patricia Hunt. So it's like we were on the trail of something we thought was going to be really big, and then we tripped and fell into something that

was huge. Ooh, I'm in. It all started back in the late 90s. Pat was running a lab where she was researching egg cells, which one thing you got to know about Pat is that she loves egg cells, loves them. You know how some people are into like very niche things? Yes. To other people, they seem niche to you. They seem extremely important. So for me, it would be gelatinous marine invertebrates. Yes. You do love jellyfish. For Pat, it's the egg cell the moment it's released and is like ready to meet a sperm. Well, it's beautiful for one thing. And it's absolutely fascinating because the more we study it, the more complex we realize the whole process is. So to help her understand this complex process, she had mice in her lab. She had healthy mice, but one day she

took some of their eggs and looked at them under a microscope, and she saw that something weird was going on with their chromosomes. They should just line up like, you know, horses ready to start a horse race. And what we saw was they were splattered all over the place like they were completely disorganized horses. You don't want disorganized horses hanging around in your eggs. You don't. And it was especially weird because these mice had had totally normal eggs before. Literally one week we ran the experiment. It was fine. The next week, glamour. Okay, something's going on. This has got to be something that's crept into my animal facility. So we started looking. There was a bunch of construction going on in the hospital. You know, maybe somebody's spraying for insects or something.

Maybe somebody switched something. She checked the air coming into the animal facility. That was fine. Nobody had changed the food the mice were eating. It was just like this total head scratcher. Yeah. And so I talked to the woman who was running the place a lot about this. She knew what was going on. She knew why we were upset. And one day I walked in and I said, Cheryl, you know, what's going on with these cages? They look horrible now. She goes, I know, I don't know. The cages? The cages the mice were in. They were basically these plastic tubs,

kind of like where you might keep your hamster, you know? And they also were drinking out of plastic water bottles. And all of that stuff was looking really weird. The plastic was getting cloudy and starting to crack. Almost like they were melting, kind of bubbly and kind of really weird. The plastic was getting cloudy and starting to crack. Almost like they were melting, kind of bubbly and kind of really nasty. And, you know, yipes. Then we knew we really had a problem. And then we traced it back and figured out what had happened.

So what had happened was that someone had used the wrong detergent on the plastic. And it had started degrading, which meant that there was something leaching out of the plastics and getting into the mice's bodies that was messing with their hormones, and that was causing their eggs to get all screwed up. And that's when I went, oh, my gosh. You know, we were in uncharted territory.

Back then, this was a pretty groundbreaking discovery because hardly anyone was at that time worrying about plastics or the stuff in plastics. They seemed totally safe, like inert. But then you fast forward to today, right, where we're talking like 30 years later. And oh my God, everyone is worried about plastics. Yeah, now we're hearing stuff like we're like Pat's mice. Exactly. And that's what this episode is gonna be about. This idea that we're exposed to all this stuff. Yes. And specifically tiny plastics called microplastics that are screwing with us, screwing with our hormones, affecting all kinds of stuff about our health, our fertility.

There's just so many headlines about this. Doctors say these plastics are omnipotent and potentially harmful. The tiny plastic particles were found deep in the lungs of some surgical patients and in the blood of anonymous donors. And for any blokes watching, you might want to put down that plastic drink bottle. Microplastics have now been discovered in human testicles as well. You heard that right. Yes, I remember the testicles.

I mean, I don't know. I guess I just, you know how I love a headline with balls in it. You pay close attention. And these types of headlines have spurred this cottage industry or like a cottage advice industry online of how to avoid microplastics and how to be more afraid of everything in your home. So like all this stuff that seems totally innocuous, we're told that we should probably give it up like plastic toothbrushes, plastic contact lenses, our tea bags. And in particular, there seems to be an all-out war against plastic cutting boards. When you cut like this on a plastic cutting board, small pieces of plastic from the cutting board are going to end up in your food.

Your plastic cutting board is definitely messing with your hormones. We ingest up to 50 grams of microplastics every year from our cutting boards alone. It's like eating two AA batteries worth of plastics every year. Rose, I am very ready for this episode. You just hear all these headlines. It feels like we are part human, part plastic. Yeah. I want to know what are these plastics doing in our body? I want to know if it's really that scary. Do I need to throw out my cutting board and half the stuff in my house? How bad is this? Wendy, I looked into those questions. We're going to get into it after the break.

Yes. Y'all afraid of ghosts? How about ghost peppers? We'll be right back. sauce made from ghost peppers and on-show chilies. If that doesn't send a chill of anticipation down your spine, nothing will. Get your ghost pepper sandwich today at Popeyes before it ghosts you for another year. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no.

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We got a lot of questions about them. Let's jump in. Okay. So, Wendy, there are 8 billion tons of plastic on Earth today. Sounds like a lot. I mean, that's a lot. We've only been mass producing it since basically the 1950s. So to think like, wow, we've already got 8 billion tons is like, we just love this stuff so much.

And we keep making more and more of it. Right. And it doesn't really break down, right? Right. Yeah. I mean, which like plastic doesn't decompose which like i think everybody knows but yeah you know intuitively but it's interesting to think about for a second why that is because you think about you know a tree or a person dying and then their body rots the reason that that stuff decomposes is because there are bacteria fungi and other microorganisms that are around to eat it, essentially, turn it into soil.

Yes. For plastics, they're so new to the planet, bacteria hadn't really evolved to do that. Yeah, right. So it's just staying around. Just sticking around. Just persisting or breaking into smaller and smaller pieces of itself, which are what we call microplastics or nanoplastics, which are really, really small pieces of plastic, even tidier. And these little bits of plastic have been found everywhere in our food, in our bodies, the water that we drink, and even in the air. So then the question becomes, it doesn't sound great,

but what do we know about what are these microplastics actually doing to us? Yeah, so, well, there's this study that just came out, which is kind of a big deal because it's pretty much the only one, the first one, to really give us some concrete answers. So scientists in Italy, they recruited 257 people who had to go to the hospital to get a procedure done to clear out some of the plaque in their arteries. And plaque is mostly immune cells that have died and that stuff can gather in our blood vessels and that can cause like blockages. Yeah.

It looks like thick custard, kind of, when you look at it. Kind of like snotty custard. Anyway, okay, so there's all these patients. What are they doing at the hospital? So people were there to get some of it scraped out. Oh, they got the plaque removed. So after they got the plaque scraped out, the scientists took it and looked for microplastics in there. And they reported that they found that more than half of the people in the study had evidence of microplastics.

In their plaques. Yeah. But that's not all. Yeah. So this is what makes the study special. Because the scientists, they followed these people after they had this procedure done for almost three years, actually, and look to see what happened to them. And it turned out that the people who had the most microplastics in their plaque had the highest chance of having a heart attack, a stroke, or dying in those three years. Oh, wow.

Even though they scraped out the plaque, they did the surgery. Yeah, and they still were more likely to have heart attacks or stroke. Do we know how the bits of plastic might cause a heart attack? So we don't know for sure that they were causing the heart attack, right? It's an association, so we can't say it was causal. Right. But the researchers do think it's an association so you can't say it was causal right but the researchers do think it's plausible that they were and they point out that you know but back when they first

took the plaque they also took some of it and looked at it under a microscope and what they saw when they did that was what they believed to be little pieces of microplastics inside immune cells. Oh. Like the immune cells had been going around like slurping them up, the microplastics. I mean, that does make sense because the whole function of some immune cells is to take foreign objects inside your body, bacteria, viruses, right? And to gobble them up and get rid of them and so they're seeing microplastics as a foreign object which they are and trying to get rid of them right so what might be happening is that the microplastics were triggering people's immune cells to come out

and in other words that like that's inflammation essentially and we know from other studies done in animals and in cells that exposure to microplastics or nanoplastics can really kick up inflammation. So that kind of makes sense. Mm-hmm. Okay, so here's what we know so far. These tiny microplastics that are getting into our body. Yeah. You know, our immune system is trying to get rid of them and maybe does successfully in some cases.

But as a result of that process, it can increase inflammation in our body, which can then possibly increase our risk of heart disease. Yeah, it's this heart attack association. This has only been shown in one study, not even 300 people. You know, time will tell if other studies agree, find the same thing. Yes. But that's kind of what we know right now in terms of the dangers of the little physical pieces of plastic getting into human bodies. But the thing you also hear about is the chemicals on the plastic.

There's this idea that plastics are ferrying in nasty chemicals into our body. So please tell me we have more research on this. Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of chemicals put into plastics to make them behave a certain way, like be bendier or shinier or water-resistant. And a lot of those chemicals are what's known as endocrine disruptors. Yes, okay, so this is something you see a lot of people worrying about. as endocrine disruptors. Yes. Okay.

So this is something you see a lot of people worrying about. Yeah. This idea that these chemicals on in plastics are messing with our hormones. Yeah. Take me through the science. Firstly, how would they mess with our hormones? Yeah, they're tricksters. So they bust in and they take over this important role from our actual hormones.

So hormones are all about binding to receptors on cells in order to send messages throughout the body. And, you know, they're involved in so much. They do a lot day to day, but also they help these like key developmental things happen over the course of our whole lives. So if these chemicals are messing with that, that could be pretty bad. So here's what Pat Hunt told me. She's the scientist we heard from at the top of the show. I think of it kind of as radiostatic. You know, your hormones control everything, your growth, your metabolism, your sleep, your reproduction. And it's all by these finely tuned signals. And here's the static in the system. So these endocrine disruptors are the static. They're interfering with the hormones by binding to the receptors that hormones are supposed to bind to.

And that can mess up these signals. And we know that these chemicals are in our environment? We know for sure they're in my body right now? Yeah, probably. I mean, we know that just about everybody is exposed to them. Okay, so then how bad is this? Yeah, that's what I want to know. Right? What does it mean?

So I talked about this with Anne-Simon Paran. She's a pediatric endocrinologist and a researcher who's at the University of Liège in Belgium. I mean, if we're all exposed to endocrine disruptors, does that mean we're all a little bit endocrine disrupted? Oh, we are. Yeah, I think we are. That's a fair statement? That's a fair statement. Yes, absolutely. Some people are more sensitive than others, but we are all a little bit disrupted. So what do I make, like, what does that

mean for like me or for you? Like if you're a little bit endocrine disrupted, how would you be different if you weren't endocrine disrupted? I would be so much smarter. Would I be able to pull off bangs if I wasn't endocrine disrupted? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Keep trying to wear bangs and it never works. Okay, but Rose, what the hell are they doing to us? What are they doing?

Okay, so they have been linked to a bunch of potential health problems. So the first one I want to tell you about is something I find very intriguing and very interesting. I talked about it with Fred Vomsal. He's a professor emeritus at the University of Missouri. Hi, Fred. Hi, Dan Rose. And he is one of many scientists who think the obesity epidemic that we've heard so much about our whole lives might be caused, at least in part, by these chemicals.

Yeah, wow. Which sounds totally weird, but the evidence is kind of compelling. So just to put it in perspective, like, plastic production started ramping up in the 50s, 60s? Mm-hmm, yes. In 1962 in the U.S., 13% of American adults were considered obese. These days it's over 40%. That's a big jump, right? Obesity has tripled in the past 50 years. Yes, but I'm not necessarily jumping to blaming plastics for this. I feel like every week

on Instagram, you see a new correlation. Look, the number of Marvel movies has also jumped along with the rise in obesity. Yeah, yeah. This is just the beginning. I'm just getting you set up. Okay. This is not the extent of the evidence. Okay. So like to go on. So to many of our listeners, they might think like the reason this is happening is just obvious, you know, that obesity is happening more often because people are not moving as much and that they're eating more. But lots of scientific and medical societies have come out and said that it's not that simple and something more mysterious is happening. So for one thing, animals too are getting fatter right alongside people. Scientists have showed that primates and rodents in research labs, like lab animals, they're fatter today than they were decades ago.

Even though they're eating the exact same chow or whatever. Yeah, they should be and like living the same lifestyle. Oh, that is weird. So yeah, that suggests that there's something going on other than people's behavior changing en masse. It isn't just that people are stuffing themselves and sitting on the couch. Something's going on in the environment doing this. And so why does Fred suspect these endocrine disrupting chemicals? Well, a number of studies have found that fatter people have a higher chemical burden

in their bodies than thinner people. So like this one big meta-analysis of these kinds of studies found that in people who had the most exposure to this stuff, their likelihood of obesity was 50% higher than people with the lowest exposure. Huh. So they took, they took a bunch of people obese, not obese. Yeah. Measured their chemicals. And ultimately that's, and then put a bunch of people, obese, not obese, measured their chemicals. And then put a bunch of those studies together and ultimately that's what they found. Which of course doesn't prove that these chemicals cause the obesity. Because it could be that people are eating more processed food, which is often wrapped in plastic. And maybe it's the food that's causing the obesity and not the plastics around it. It's a society observation.

Right. That's definitely been argued as a possibility. Okay. But Fred told me, and this is true, that there's a lot of evidence in the lab that this could be causal. Like, we have a pretty good idea of what the mechanism could be. They've shown that when you put stem cells, which could turn into muscle or bone or fat, in a dish and then spike

the dish with these kinds of chemicals... What you do is you activate the fat pathway at the expense of muscle and bone. And what does that tell the body to do as it develops? Get fat. So those stem cells in the dish make more fat cells, and the fat cells that they make are bigger. Oh, wow. Right. And we do see that animals exposed to these chemicals while in the womb or still developing

are fatter than control animals. Huh. And the best evidence is from other endocrine disruptors, but scientists think that the plastic endocrine disruptors are probably doing the same thing. So what do you make of this, Rose? Do you really think that plastic and these endocrine disruptors might be like a big piece in the obesity puzzle?

Yeah, I think it makes sense that this could be one thing that explains some of what we're seeing. It's just wild from the perspective of this. I mean, if it does pan out with further research, it really has been this huge medical mystery. What is causing this rise in obesity for so long? And if it's the plastics, if that ends up being the culprit. Wow. So what's next? We're going to talk about spermageddon. You know, sperm numbers have been on the decline. Yes. Are these chemicals in plastic to blame? And we're also going to break down this idea of whether or not we really eat a credit card's worth of plastic a week. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress.

Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals, be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware and stay safe. Welcome back. We've just learned that endocrine-disrupting chemicals, including the kinds that are found in our plastics, may be partly to blame for the rise in obesity. My mind is still grappling with this. Reeling.

Reeling, in a way, yes. Yeah, well, get ready because there's a couple other very interesting potential effects from these chemicals. So one of the major areas where scientists are looking for the effects, potentially, of endocrine-disrupting chemicals is in stuff that has to do with our reproductive health. This is like a big field. Right. And so I looked into that, and a couple of things stood out to me as being interesting and having some really intriguing evidence. In particular, infertility and early puberty. So just quickly, let's talk about early puberty.

So we know that girls really are starting puberty earlier than they used to. And I asked Aunt Simone about this. She's the scientist I talked to before about how I can't pull off bangs. Well, more importantly, she is a pediatric endocrinologist. You see this in patients that come to you? I do. I do. And they come to my consultation because they start puberty too early. So a study that came out pretty recently looked at dozens of papers from around the world that included tens of thousands of kids the age at which they started puberty and they found that in 2013 girls on average were starting to grow breasts almost a year earlier than they had in 1977 so the average age for that went from

almost 11 to around 10 wow i just remember when I grew, when I started growing breasts, it was so traumatic for me. I actually taped them. Oh, I couldn't imagine if it had actually, I would tape them down with duct tape. Yeah. It can be hard on girls psychologically, but also earlier puberty is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer later in life. And so the reason that some scientists blame these chemicals is that we know that a lot of them mimic estrogen. And so that makes a lot of sense that they could screw with puberty. Right. Right. Estrogen plays a pretty big role in that. Yes. And then they also sometimes, not always, but they have found more of these chemicals in the bodies of girls that start puberty earlier

compared with girls that haven't started puberty as early. You know, and there are other explanations out there about what might be happening with puberty. Like why we might be seeing girls going through puberty earlier. But it doesn't quite cover everything. Like a lot of people blame obesity in children, and that does make sense, but we've also seen this happening in thin kids too. So it's not just obesity. And from her work, Aunt Simone thinks that there's a link here. Yes, it's been related to endocrine disruptors. Same for fertility.

Right. So what's happening with fertility? Yes. So we definitely have evidence that there's something going on with fertility. Like we definitely see that sperm counts are going down. And so some studies have found that people with more plastic chemicals in their pee, just usually how they measure it, they see things like worse sperm quality and having a lower sperm count. And so it's not just sperm. When it comes to eggs, we think that there's some potential for

these chemicals to be kind of wreaking some havoc. So for example... You know, you can compare couples who had issues having kids, for instance, compared to couples who have normal fertility. And you can show that the ones who had fertility problems had more of some types of endocrine disruptors. Wait, so couples who are finding it harder to conceive, when scientists measure how many of these chemicals, these endocrine disruptors they have in their system, they tend to have more of these chemicals compared to couples who got pregnant easily.

Yeah, some studies have shown that people doing IVF, if they have more of these chemicals in their bodies, they tend to get a lower egg yield and are less likely to get pregnant successfully than people with less of these chemicals. Wow. So it seems like endocrine disruptors might be messing with some people's eggs,

which we've shown in animal studies too. Oh, like in Pat's mice? Yeah, that's what that's you got. You got me that after exposed. I was going to say, we know that when you expose rats or mice to these chemicals, they often have reproductive issues like their eggs getting messed up. The horses, their horses were all were all disorganized. Yeah.

And they have other kinds of issues with their eggs. And so going back to Pat's mice and their disorganized horse chromosomes, she did figure out exactly what it was in the plastic that was causing this issue. Oh. It was BPA. Oh. So you probably heard of BPA. It's the stuff that people freaked out about being in baby bottles and water bottles a while back.

Of course, of course. And it's also been used in the lining of canned food. And it's another of these chemicals that acts like estrogen in the body. And so there might be listeners that are like, why are you talking about BPA? That is old news and it's not around anymore. Yes, my cans, my chick, I eat a lot of chickpeas. The cans say no BPA. Yeah, well, I asked Pat about that.

BPA is out of our water bottles and all of our baby bottles and our plastics, right? So problem solved? We're completely safe now. No, we're not completely safe now. I don't like sarcasm in my scientists. I find it confusing. Well, you really want that to be true. Like, yes, problem solved.

Hands washed. Yes. No, the problem is, well, for one, we're still producing and using lots of BPA in the world. But also, even the products that are BPA-free, like your can of chickpeas, it's likely that the manufacturer just put in a very similar, slightly different chemical that probably has the same effect or very similar effects. It's another endocrine disruptor. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I'm not surprised about, you know, when you see these, my chickpea cats, or you see all these lotions with like no BPA, that I'm never thinking this product is safer. This is a company that cares about my health. Yeah. Of course, they've just slotted in something similar. Yeah. I'm sorry to say, I think you were right. I mean, there was a review paper recently that said BPA replacement compounds exhibit various toxicity effects that are comparable to BPA. Fabulous. Great. chemicals found in plastics can affect our fertility and maybe even be causing early puberty is that we sometimes find that people who are going through early puberty and those

who are having trouble with their sperm or with getting pregnant, they tend to have more of these chemicals in their body versus people who aren't having those issues, right? Some studies have found that. Not every single study that has looked for that has found it. Okay. The signal isn't always there. Okay, okay. But we find it sometimes.

And then we also know from animal studies that there's like a mechanism at play. Yeah. We know these chemicals can affect how hormones like estrogen work in our body. And so you put two and two together and it makes sense they could be having some role here. Yeah, that's right. So even though the evidence isn't crystal clear, it's compelling enough that a lot of scientists are pretty nervous about this stuff. And actually, there was a big review put out by the Endocrine Society earlier this year, and they concluded that there is mounting evidence that endocrine-disrupting chemicals pose, quote, global health threats.

So that's threats, plural. Here's Pat. You know, I think that we need to be very worried. It's not a nice message to send. I mean, a lot of us are very, very concerned about global warming. And you think, okay, well, like this is less important than global warming, right? But really, when you think about it, our reproduction, our health, if it's affecting our metabolism and causing obesity and, you know, all of these kinds of things, that's very serious. I mean, it's funny because on this show, what tends to happen, Rose, is we have some scary headlines at the start of the show.

I don't know if you've been listening. And then we say, no, you don't need to worry about this. It's been overblown. But in this case, Rose, this is all very, this is very scary. I am more freaked out about microplastics than I was before we started chatting. Are you more freaked out about microplastics? I'm fairly worried about endocrine disrupting chemicals, which can be in plastics, but I'm less worried about how many of these microplastics are getting into our bodies. And I think that a lot of the headlines we're hearing about how much we're eating are totally

overblown. So yeah, I'm fulfilling your expectation of the show. Tell, thank goodness. The headlines are like, tell me why they're overblown. Yeah. Okay. So these are the headlines that are like, you eat a credit card's worth of plastics every day. Yeah. That stuff. I think a lot of that is hype.

I think a lot of that is hype and panic. For a few reasons. Okay. Walk me through that. So like, okay. The credit card a week. I think a lot of us have heard that. And if you haven't, it's like this idea that went around like,

you're eating so much microplastics are in food that you are eating without knowing it. The equivalent of a credit card of plastic a week. Right. That did come from an actual study, but that study has been criticized for its methods. And there's a newer study that is a lot more trustworthy and people in the field respect it a lot more that came out and did this similar estimate. How much microplastics are we eating? And they got a much smaller, much, much smaller number. And so like using their numbers, it would take 23,497 years to get a credit card's worth of microplastics.

Oh, wow. Okay. All right. And then when it comes to our cutting boards. Yeah. The war on plastic cutting boards. Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm biased. I have a plastic cutting board and I'm like, I don't want to buy a new cutting board. But I'm also like, I think we should all take a minute to be skeptical of this claim of how much plastic might be coming off these cutting boards. So, like, we played some audio from a person on TikTok who claimed that we eat two AA batteries worth of plastic from our cutting boards a year. So she probably got that from this paper. It's a real paper that estimated how many bits of plastic came off a cutting board from chopping stuff, like one or two chopping sessions, and then

extrapolated from there. And so the author said, like, at max, we might be getting 50 grams of plastics off our cutting boards a year, which could be about two AA batteries, like the TikToker said. But like 50 grams of plastic a year from our cutting boards, that is a lot. That is noticeable. So like my cutting board, I probably have for five years. If I was whittling off and eating 50 grams of plastic a year, that means the cutting board would be half a pound lighter than when I first bought it. I just feel like I would notice that. I think you would. Without going deep into these authors' methodology, I think it's reasonable to be skeptical of that. Yes. Yes. Okay. Good points, good news all around. We're not eating a credit card's worth of plastic a week.

And, I mean, the question is still, do you need to get rid of your plastic cutting board? Or more broadly, what should we be doing here? Because even though we're still learning so much about these microplastics and the chemicals on them, it seems prudent that you would want to, that less would be better. Having less of them in your system would be better. So, yeah.

How do we do that? Because obviously I'm not eating plastic in my food. But yet everything, you should really remove the saran wrap before you bite into the sandwich. I've been meaning to tell you this for years. No, but seriously, studies have found that if you stop using products that are known to contain certain disruptors, the levels of those disruptors in your body will probably go down. Okay. Okay. So. Okay.

Yeah. So that's good news. Yeah. And I asked a bunch of researchers in this space, like what they do personally. And they all said that they do try to use less plastic, especially around their food and their personal care products like lotion and shampoo because stuff can migrate in from the plastic bottle. But all lotions and shampoos come in plastic bottles.

You could get like shampoo bars or a couple products to get around this. But essentially what people told me is they just try to keep it to a minimum. Okay. No one I spoke to has a 10-step skincare routine, right? That makes sense. And they don't put plastic Tupperware in the dishwasher or the microwave because the heat could cause some of those chemicals to pop off and then get in your food. Mm-hmm. And then one thing that they told me over and over again, they try to avoid canned food.

That's because of the plastic in the cans lining. Oh, man. Do you know how many cans of chickpeas? Downstairs right now is a box full of canned chickpeas. And you tell me now. But here's the thing. What, am I supposed to soak them? I'm supposed to, I'm going to become a soaker now.

That's what they would say, yeah. But, like, I don't know. The thing is, like, the thing is with this topic, it's so frustrating. I still, even though I've been working on this for a couple months and I've had these conversations with scientists who are like, oh, I don't buy canned food if I can help it. Every time I go to the grocery store, I stock up on my canned beans. I can't quit it. And it's like, I think the problem is like, without more specific information about how bad is it? What is my risk? I'm not able to weigh the risks of the plastics getting into my canned beans against

the benefits of canned beans. I know the benefits. They're cheap, healthy, easy. I like them. Yes. Yes. So right now, I'm assuming the benefits outweigh the risks for me. Uh-huh. I guess I would say like, if I was pregnant or trying to get pregnant, I would probably be more careful, not just because of the fertility stuff, but because a lot of our research on this suggests that the most vulnerable time to be exposed to these kinds of chemicals is when you're in utero. I know that's kind of annoying, but like, because, you know, pregnant women are told so many things that they can't do or whatever. They're going to hate you, Rose. They're going to hate you. I know.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry i'm sorry that's just like i just think that's where the science is at right now so that's kind of where i gotta land right okay so science versus microplastics it looks like i don't know while some of the claims are overblown. You are not half human, half plastic. Yeah. It is worth your time and energy trying to avoid this stuff. Yeah. Without making yourself crazy. Right.

This world, Rose. It's exhausting. This world. Exhausting to be alive. A hundred percent. Oh, my God. Thanks, Rose. All right. Thanks, Wendy.

And Rose, how many citations are in this week's episode? This week there are 84. 84 citations. And if people want to see them in all their glory, where should they go? They're all in the transcript for the episode, which they can access by clicking on the link in our show notes. And if people want to let us know what you thought of this episode, what are you going to do to change your plastic consuming habits, if anything? We'd love to hear it. You can find us on Instagram. We're at science underscore

VS and I'm on TikTok at Wendy Zuckerman. Thanks so much, Rose. Thanks, Wendy. This episode was produced by me, Rose Rimler, with help from Wendy Zuckerman, along with Meryl Horn, Aketi Foster-Keys, and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Erica Akiko Howard.

Mix and sound design by Sam Baer. Music written by Bobby Lord, Bumi Hidaka, and Peter Leonard. Thanks to all the researchers we spoke with for this episode, including Dr. Mei-Ru Wong, Dr. Roger Kuhlman, Thank you. Dr. Thaddeus Shug, Dr. Thaba Palanisamy, and Dr. Zhang Yu. And special thanks to Mia Foster and Diana Kenney. Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original.

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