The Liz Moody Podcast - How Bad Are Microplastics For Our Health? + Easy Ways To Protect Yourself TODAY

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

In this informative episode of the Liz Moody podcast, Dr. Tracey Woodruff, a renowned researcher and professor at UCSF, joins to discuss the issues of microplastics. Dr. Woodruff explains what microplastics are and how they infiltrate our daily lives through food, water, air, and consumer products. The conversation delves into the potential health impacts of microplastics, including reproductive issues, respiratory problems, cancer risks, and metabolic disorders. Dr. Woodruff discusses recent studies on microplastics in the human body and the regulatory challenges surrounding plastic use. She ends by sharing hopeful and practical steps we can all take to reduce exposure to microplastics as well as provides insight into legal and environmental actions needed to mitigate this growing concern. 00:17 Introducing Dr. Tracey Woodruff 00:53 Understanding Microplastics 05:22 Health Impacts of Microplastics 13:10 Microplastics in Our Environment 22:35 Microplastics in Food and Clothing 25:02 Choosing Safer Food Options 25:42 Understanding Plastic Contamination 26:33 Microplastics in Water 29:12 Heating Plastics: The Hidden Dangers 31:19 Everyday Items and Microplastic Concerns 35:30 Reducing Microplastic Exposure 38:34 Government Actions and Media Coverage 42:36 Final Thoughts and Recommendations Visit Tracey’s Toxic Matters | Program on Reproductive Health website with tips on what you can do to prevent exposure for yourself, your family, and your community. You can also check out This Microplastics Study Tracey worked on. Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s new book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody, or subscribe to her newsletter by visiting www.lizmoody.com. This episode is sponsored by: AG1: visit drinkag1.com/lizmoody and get your FREE year supply of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs today. ZocDoc: go to ZocDoc.com/LizMoody and download the Zocdoc app for FREE and book a top-rated doctor today. Puori: head to puori.com/LIZMOODY and use promo code LIZMOODY for 20% sitewide. Shopify: sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at shopify.com/lizm. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. Formerly the Healthier Together Podcast.  This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 266. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome to the Liz Moody podcast, where every week we're sharing real science, real stories, and realistic tools that actually level up every part of your life. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a best-selling author and longtime journalist. Let's dive in. I am so excited to welcome Dr. Tracy Woodruff to the podcast today. Dr. Woodruff is one of the world's leading researchers in the field of microplastics. She has published well over 100 articles and research studies. studies. She's received nearly 30 different awards and honors for her work. And she's a professor at

UCSF and the director of the UCFS program on reproductive health and the environment. Dr. Tracy Woodruff, welcome to the podcast. Well, thank you for having me. I'm so excited to have you here. I'm a little bit nervous about your answers for everything we're going to get into, but hopefully you can make us feel a lot better about a scary subject. Just start off by, can you define what microplastics are? Yes. They're pretty much in their name. They're little tiny pieces of plastic. They can be primary, like they can be manufactured. In California, we used to have microbeads, for example, in cosmetics, or probably the bulk of

them are really degraded plastics. So things like your plastic bottles break down, and then they turn into little plastics because the plastics don't actually go away. They actually just get smaller and smaller and smaller. A lot of microplastics come from clothes. That's like one of the biggest sources of microplastics. and another one is also cars, tires, you know, they rub on the road and then they generate microplastics. But a lot of it comes from single-use plastics or industrial plastics too.

And we're going to get into all of the ways that microplastics are sneaking their ways into our lives. But is it safe to say that anything that is plastic will someday become a microplastic as it breaks down? As it breaks down. Yes. Ideally, the plastic goes into a place where it can't escape, like a garbage, though, of course, eventually maybe over time, that would break down and then get out. And you can't really recycle it. What do you mean by you can't really recycle it? A lot of plastics are not recyclable.

So therefore, they have to go into a landfill or they just get out and about and then they can degrade and turn into microplastics. That's like a plastic water bottle. But things like clothes, like we don't think of that as a plastic material, but it's made with plastic materials. And so when you're washing your clothes in the washing machine, microplastics are coming off of it. Or fleece. It's a material that keeps you very warm and it's made from recycled plastic water bottles. But fleece has a lot of microplastics on it and a lot of clothes have microplastics

on it from the construction. So when you wash them in a washing machine, the microplastics come off and they get into the water. So people don't normally think about it like that, but that's another source. That's so interesting. Can you tell me the difference between microplastics and nanoplastics? People hear microplastics and they think, okay, tiny little plastic. But then, when you're looking at health effects or where we're very interested in is how do we put together policies to reduce the threat of exposures to microplastics. How do you define them? What's the size cut off and then what constitutes a microplastic? Their definition encompasses any type of plastic that would be in a very small range. So it's less than 5,000 microns. That's a microplastic. And then

a thousand times less is a nanoplastic. So nanometer size. And I've heard that some of the concern with nanoplastics is that they can actually penetrate yourselves and microplastics maybe cannot. Can you explain that? Well, the size can influence where they can go on the body, but once they get down to a small enough size, it doesn't really matter essentially whether it's nano or micro. They've been measured in every part of the body now. I like to think of microplastics a little bit like something that we know a lot about, which is particulate matter air pollution.

We know a lot about air pollution levels in the United States and how they adversely impact health. And one of the most important pollutants that is regulated by the federal government and the state is called particulate matter air pollution. And those are also particles that are very fine that are in the air. And the regulatory focus is primarily on particles that are less than two and a half microns. And that's because they're from combustion sources, so like cars and fossil fuel burning and things like that. that they are also of concern because they also get in the body and travel around and cause a number of different types of adverse health effects. Small microns, nanometers, they're probably distributed of health concern. And I also imagine once something gets into your body, your body will

break it down even further. So even if something enters your body as a microplastic, it could become a nanoplastic in your body. Is that true? It makes sense that there could be some degradation. The other thing that we get a lot of questions about is, well, what is it? Is it? the particle itself, is it the chemicals on the particle, it's probably everything that's going on with that. But we do know that there are chemicals that are used in these plastics that can come off of the plastics that we know have toxic properties. So, for example, plastics are made with a chemical called phthalates, which we know are toxic to reproduction and can increase the risk of cancer. So even if the microplastics don't become nanoplastics before you excrete them, there's

certainly chemicals that could be coming off of the plastics that could be of health concern. Let's talk about the health concerns to the human body. What do we know for sure now in the research are the impacts of these microplastics on our body? We did a rigorous evaluation of the scientific information related to the health effects of microplastics, focus on three different types of health outcomes. One was reproductive health outcomes, the other was cancer, and the other was respiratory health outcomes. There's very few human studies.

So most of the studies have been done in animals, which actually for understanding how environmental chemicals or chemicals impact health is very relevant. It's translatable to what we would see as human health effects. There were studies finding that exposures to microplastics can affect sperm quality. They can also cause biological changes that we know can increase the risk of cancer, and they can also lead to respiratory-related effects. Most of the studies at the time have been done in China, and they were reasonably high-quality studies, but it's not the breadth of studies we'd like to see to move it up and to say, oh, we for sure no. On the other hand, it's still concerning that we're seeing these links to these adverse health effects. And what we conclude, because of the limited

evidentiary base, is that we anticipate that the evidence will likely increase in terms of what we know about the adverse health effects of these microplastics. So when we see studies in the media, like we found microplastics in the brain and we're eating a credit card worth of Microplastics a week, are those not based on what you would consider robust data? Those are considered on robust data. So your question was, what are the health effects we know about? We for sure know that exposures are happening. We know that people are exposed to microplastics all the time. They've not only defined it in the brain, it's been measured in blood, it's been measured in breast milk, it's been measured in stools, it's been measured in placenta. I mean, it makes sense because plastics are increasing in their production.

they're contaminating all the oceans and the fish. It's, of course, logical that we are also being contaminated with microplastics. So that is true. There's a number of different studies, estimating how much we're being exposed to a week. And a credit card worth of plastic a week is a pretty solid kind of middle estimate of what we see in the range of microplastic exposures. Okay. So you said our respiratory health, cancer risk, and our sperm quality.

When you say cancer risk, do we want to be? mean all types of cancer? Was it linked to specific types of cancer? Well, there hasn't been any studies to date to look at exposures either in humans or animals that follow all the way to look at, like, oh, we're going to open up the animal and look and see if they have cancer in different organs. What we did was look at studies that looked at these mechanisms. So, for example, does it damage DNA? Does it affect the immune system? Does it affect inflammation? We know that those are pathways, that if you perturb those pathways, that can increase the risk of cancer. And this is based on work that's done by the International Agency on research on carcinogens.

They've classified these different pathways as mechanisms that if you perturb these mechanisms, it can increase the risk of cancer. So we looked at those mechanisms because there haven't been any studies to look at the final endpoint, but given that we know these mechanisms are linked to cancer, we can say that that is of concern for a cancer risk. Okay, that's super interesting because I've been wondering what is the specific mechanism of action by which microplastics are impacting our body. And it sounds like there's this degradation of the plastic in your body, which is releasing the

chemicals that make the plastic. And then those chemicals are causing things like inflammation and other systemic disruptions. Definitely the carous chemicals coming out of these microplastics. But probably also those substances are probably also aggravating the body, also responding to a foreign substance. Both things could be happening. We know from other studies in chemical exposures that, exposures to a particular type of chemical that's used to make plastics can exert its effect through

multiple mechanistic pathways. So it would be likely that that's going on with microplastics also. If it is the chemicals in the plastics, just changing the formulation of the plastics to have different chemicals help in any way in your opinion, like BPA-free plastics and become a really big thing, do you think that's helpful? Here's the thing about chemicals that are used in plastics. So many, manufacturers, whether it's plastics or cosmetics or your furniture or whatever, can use chemicals. The way that the laws are set up in the United States is that chemicals that were in use in 1974 when the primary law was passed that governs manufactured chemicals in the United States.

Anything that was on the market at that time, which was tens of thousands of chemicals, can be used by the industry without any real requirements to know what are their health effects and where are they being used? And a lot of what we know about some of these chemicals like BPA or thallates happen because entrepreneurial scientists discover this sometimes by accident that these chemicals are actually causing, for example, reproductive health problems. So that means that a lot of chemicals are being used in plastic. We don't know what their health effects are. And we don't even know what the chemicals are that they're using in plastic because the manufacturers don't even have to tell the government or us or what's being used. So it's just really a very,

grand experiment that's going on. As a consumer, do you derive any sense of safety from seeing something is BPA-free, or do you think that's almost a marketing buzzword at this point? The thing about BPA-free is, that's great. They're not using BPA. But we know from studies that they're switching to other chemicals that have the same functional property. So B-P-F or BPS. And unfortunately, those chemicals don't have the negative connotation that BPA has. We've seen in our own work with collaborators, at UCSF that they can have the same or more toxic properties than BPA. So I think the challenge is that something that comes from a plastic-related material, we don't know, and could be just as problematic as a BPA or less until the government

requires manufacturers to identify that. Can you talk to me about the reproductive impacts of microplastics that we know about? So the studies that we've evaluated show that microplastics appear to affect the sperm quality either count, amount, or quality of sperm in animals. There has been a few studies on do we see relationships to microplastics and effects on the ovarian functioning in female animals. And there's a lot less studies, so a little less uncertain. The male reproductive health effects are definitely of concern.

I would also note that, again, just thinking about the chemicals that are used in these plastics, so something like phthalates, we know phthalates are a male reproducts. They're known by the state of California to damage male reproductive capacity as well as has been identified by the National Academy of Sciences. So some of these chemicals that are used in the plastics, we know have an effect on sperm quality. I'm surprised that's not enough to get governments to act right now because there's so many men in charge and you just tell them like, oh, your sperm's being damaged. They're like, well, stop the presses. We're going to fix it. Maybe they're like, it's not my sperm. It's another guy's sperm.

Yeah. You would think that too. Well, then they got the other people who are making the plastics. When you're in the government, you may be hearing, maybe, from your constituents about their concerns about fertility. But you're definitely hearing from the people who have a financial stake in the outcome about what they think about the science. A hundred percent. Okay, and then talk to me about the respiratory effects. This was a huge thing that I did not know about, and I found out about when I was researching

microplastics that we are inhaling so many microplastics. I thought it was just some things that we were eating and drinking and maybe touching our bodies, although we'll get into how these things are entering your body in a second. But inhalation is one of the major ways that we are being exposed to microplastics. Can you speak to that and then speak to the respiratory effects of that? Just going back to the sources of microplastics, let's just talk about tire wear. tire wear is a good way to think about it because you got these tires running on the ground, they're wearing out, and that is emitting microplastics up into the air, and that could be a

source of where people are getting exposed to microplastics. You say that so casually. I had never thought about that in my life. I walk next to cars all the time. I walk down the street all the time, and I'm never sitting there thinking, oh, these tires are spinning, they're degrading, which is why we have to change our tires at all, because they are degrading, and it's like, where's that plastic going? It's going somewhere.

It's going in the air. I'm inhaling it. I had never thought about that in my life. Yeah. When I first started this project on microplastics, I'm like, oh, it's plastic water bottles. And it was like, close. Close was one of the second or third biggest sources for degraded microplastics. And then tires was pretty far up there too. And then it was really when we were working on this project that someone was like, what about particulate matter air pollution? Particular matter air pollution, again, something that the government knows is toxic, is really has a component of it that's made up of microplastics. And then when you think about tire wear and all the ways that, you know, especially as the size of these microplastics,

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then they're licking them. So I'm protecting them too. Brand basics is now available at Target.com, Amazon and branchbasics.com. So it's easier than ever to make the switch. And if you want to grab their premium starter kit, you can use code Liz Moody for 15% off at branchbasics.com. That's code Liz Moody for 15% off the premium starter kit at branchbasics.com. And when they ask you where you heard about us, please make sure to mention the show. That is branch basics.com and use code Liz Moody. So what are the respiratory effects that you guys are seeing in the research? We looked at these mechanisms. So do you have these inflammatory responses in your lungs from, in the animal studies from exposures to these microplastics and seeing those same types of

inflammatory responses that you might see with particular matter air pollution. And then also those kinds of inflammatory responses are essentially an upstream marker or mechanistic marker for later downstream. You could have wheeze, cough, exacerbated asthma. And I just want to say one more thing too. My work was really focused on three different health outcomes. But in the time that we've been working on this, there was a study that came out about the potential cardiovascular effects, which was in a human study where they measured the microplastics in people's bodies and then looked at different types of cardiovascular markers. That is, I think, a good example of where it's not an obvious health outcome that we would think of right away, but clearly that was another health

outcome that could be related to this. What was the outcome of that for anybody who's not familiar with that study? In a human study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and researchers in Italy looked at microplastic exposures in about 300 people, and they found that higher levels of microplastics were associated with higher risk of essentially heart attack, stroke, and even in some cases, death. So that is concerning. Yeah, that is concerning. And then one other health point that I want to touch on before we start getting into the actions that we can take and the positive steps that we can make in our life. But an NIH study found that human exposure to microplastics may be linked to an increased risk for obesity by affecting metabolism and promoting

the growth of fat cells. Can you speak to the impact of microplastics on obesity? They've done a review of some of the literature about microplastics and exposures to non-microplastics, but also to the chemicals can be in microplastics. Some of the studies were done in human cell lines. So they basically take cells and then they expose them to the chemicals and then they look and see what kind of effects can happen from that. Mechanisms that are linked to metabolic disorders. obesity being one of those metabolic disorders was one of the health effects that they identified. That again reinforces the point that there's these chemicals being used in plastics that we know can adversely influence health effects. And a lot of them, for example, in this case,

they looked at metabolic disorders, which is linked to also chemicals that can adversely influence hormone levels, which we usually call them endocrine disrupting chemicals. We call them hormonal, disruptive chemicals, but they're basically chemicals that can alter the levels of hormones in your bodies, whether it's estrogens, androgens, testosterone. That's one of the mechanisms that phthalates can exert their influence on male fertility and then thyroid hormones. But hormones also can influence your metabolic status, so like diabetes and obesity. I'm going to ask you to do something that I know that scientists hate doing, which is speculating. Yeah.

Well, you can have a speculation with a lot of caveats. Okay. You can give me as many caveats as you like, but based on what you have seen in the research, based on what you know right now, and based on the fact that we're really in the nascent phases of this research, what do you predict we're going to be seeing come down the line? What health effects do you think we're going to find in micropastics in the future? Oh, I don't mind speculating about this. With microplastics, we can look to other chemicals that we've been studying in the literature and see what happens. happens with the trajectory of the health effects. Lead is a great example. We know it affects your brain. It affects your cardiovascular system. Very early studies found these health effects and was kind of emerging, but what we saw over time that as more studies came online, they just put a

finer point on what they had seen originally. And the levels of concern that the government said were of concern for lead dropped over time as more studies came out. I think with microplastics, given that we already know there's small particles like particulate matter air pollution, and we know particulate matter air pollution causes adverse health effects, and they include all these chemicals we know can adversely impact health. And we know plastic production is growing. I think it's inevitable that we'll just find many health effects that the strength of the evidence will increase on their relationships to microplastics and adverse health outcomes.

So what we're seeing with sperm, I anticipate that. We'll find more studies in that area, the cardiovascular effects, or just reproductive health effects in general, and likely a lot of these have similar mechanisms, so probably we'll see also cancer. I want to talk for a second about how these microplastics actually enter your body. You've said a few times that microplastics are in our clothing. Is that a concern for the environment, or is that a concern for our bodies? Are we getting microplastics in our bodies somehow by wearing this clothing? We know that microplastics are in food, and we know microplastics are in.

water and we know we can breathe microplastics. I haven't seen any studies about dermal absorption of microplastics. They probably have to be pretty small to be dermally absorbed, but thinking about the chemicals that are in the plastics, and I'll just go back to thallates because we know a lot about that. We know that thallates can be absorbed dermally. Does it get out from your clothes and into your skin? I haven't seen any studies on it. The thing is I always say, oh, I don't know, that doesn't seem likely then a study comes out and says that's likely. So I'm not going to bet on that one. Again, I'm going to ask you to speculate a little bit, but would you be more careful with clothing that's touching areas with more mucus membranes? Like, would you be prioritizing

plastic-free underwear? That's a good one. So we did a study once led by Amizota, who's at Columbia, and we looked at some national data to look at thallate exposures among different groups of women. And women who were using douchmore had higher levels of thalates. You think about it, well, really the vagina is. a permeable membrane like your mouth. Would you deuce your mouth? No, I don't think so, but it has probably a very similar effect. Okay, so that's clothing. But when people talk about microplastics being in clothing primarily at this moment, the concern amongst scientists is that the microplastics are coming off your clothing in the washer and in the dryer

and they're entering the environment. The concern about clothing is that you can have microplastics on your clothing. When you wash it, it comes out in the wash. It also can get degrade off. And then a lot of chemicals and microplastics are found in dust. Chemicals are, love to hang around in dust in your house. Dust, you can inhale, it can get on your food, get on your hands, and then your hands go on your mouth. That is so fascinating. So when we're talking about our concern around clothing, obviously we have these concerns about the environment at large, but also we're talking about the microplastics from our clothing turning into dust and then we are actually inhaling that dust or eating that dust and then the microplastics from

our clothing are potentially entering our body that way. That's so crazy because I only think thought about it transdermally. I was only like, oh, well, are we wearing the clothing? It's entering that way. But you're like, no, it is entering your body via a totally different pathway than you would think. Yeah, we talked to somebody who's a researcher who was looking at clothing. And a lot of plastic is bound because it's woven into the cloth. But there can also be, depending on, did they cut it and just sew it up? There can be like little leftover pieces of microplastic on the cloth. You can have more microplastics on your clothes depending on how the clothes are treated, which I never even thought about.

And then somebody asked me, as we're doing this research about fleece, and again, fleece is supposed to be insulating. So there's a lot of nooks and crannies in it, which can also be another source of microplastics because it's made to be not smooth. And then let's talk about the food that we eat. What food sources are the top culprits for microplastics? In general, one source that we know can be a higher source of exposures to chemicals and plastics is processed food. So processed food, food prepared outside the home. It's already been

lots of studies showing that do the processing and the handling with plastics that you can get exposures to plastic-related chemicals. Probably a source of microplastics too. Chemicals also higher on the food chain, more fatty, that can also be a more important source of microplastics. So by that do you mean eating beef. Like animal fat. Yeah. Eating animals higher on the food chain, you can get a higher exposure to chemicals that are biomagnified at the food chain.

And then microplastics could be one of those. So the idea is those animals could be eating something that contain microplastics and then you're eating what they're eating essentially. And then with the ultra-process or the processed food, is that because the machines that are used for the processing are inserting plastics or what's going on there? This is a very active area of research. One study found that when they were looking at thallites, which is a chemical in plastics, that there were higher levels in milk compared to other food sources.

And they speculated that it came from when they're milking the cow, they connect the udder to a plastic tubing. And then as the milk was going through the plastic tubing, they were absorbing the thalates. So it could come from different places and going from the animal to where you consume it. It could be the tubing that's used. It could be the plastic material that is wrapped around the product that could be emitting microplastics.

It could be in the conveyor belts or some people have even speculated the gloves that people are using to handle the food. I think there's a lot to learn still about that. And then there's a lot of conversation about seafood because we know that our ocean is unfortunately very full of micropastics at this point. What do you know about seafood and how should we be approaching seafood consumption? What we recommend in general, because seafood can be a source of other types of chemical pollutants, mercury, PCBs, bigger fish, just are going to have more of whatever the chemical pollutant is

compared to smaller fish. But we also know fish is a good source of omega-3s and omega-6s. It's high in protein. So our general recommendation is go for the little things like anchovies and sardines. Do you look for anything when you buy food? Like, would you buy food in a plastic container? Do you try to avoid that? Yes.

The first recommendation, I'm not going to say I'm perfect at this for sure. But try and prepare more foods inside the home. So food that we make at home is just going to have less contaminants. And try and shop at the farmer's market if that's available. It's hard to avoid things that don't come in plastic. I can't even really honestly say that I do that because how do you do that? Like, I buy bread and it comes in a plastic. bag. So if you do the best you can, the way that everything's set up is the burden is on us to

deal with this and not the people who are making the plastic problem. A hundred percent. But I think for us understanding the levels of risk at every level, that makes us the most informed that we can be as consumers. So we can do the most to protect our own health. Right. And we do know from evidence-based reviews that we have done that if you eat food that you prepare inside your home, more fresh fruits and vegetables, less plastic containers, or like cans with BPA and those types of things, you can decrease your levels of exposures to the chemicals that are found in plastics. We know that is true. Will you get rid of it completely? No, that is very difficult because there's so many sources and many of them we don't have control of,

but you can reduce your levels of exposures to these chemicals. And then let's talk about water. Plastic water bottles are probably the most famous source of microcontracts. at this point. Can you explain how microplastics from plastic bottles are getting into our bodies and how concerned we should be about that? The water bottles degrade and so microplastics can get into the water bottles. So there's a lot of research going on in this, or you see a lot of being published in this area. People have looked at, well, there's more microplastics in there than we had originally estimated with new measurement technologies. Heating it can increase the degradation of the microplastics into water. So like if you leave it in your car, that could be a problem.

Or in transit. I think about all the time, like by the time it gets to me, it's had a whole journey that I don't even know about. That is true. It is a whole journey. Okay. And then that's getting into the water and then we are drinking that. Right. And then we can drink the water. I mean, you can get it from the plastic water bottles, but microplastics could also be in the drinking water. And the state of California is a very active area of investigation for them is to look at the microplastics that are found in the drinking water and should they regulate it? What should they do about it? Is the research robust enough at this point around microplastics in the drinking water that you would recommend if people can, they should get a water filter? I just don't know if it takes out all the microplastics. I think the best thing to do with water is to try to use storage containers that are not plastic water bottles at this point. If you are out and you were thirsty, would you

rather drink the water from the plastic bottle or not drink any water at all. We're like, okay, I'm drinking a bunch of plastic. Is this even good for me? But I'm thirsty and I'm out. So should I buy the bottle? Should I not buy the bottle? Of course, because everyone goes out and they don't always remember, I don't always remember bringing my drinking water. And then I buy the plastic water because you also have to stay hydrated. I mean, these are tradeoffs everyone makes. If that was just the one time, it probably doesn't make that big a difference for you as a healthy person. Because myself as a scientist and thinking about this from a policy perspective is you have people who are more susceptible because preexisting conditions or they're younger or older or they live in

communities where there's already other sources of pollution. The one time use is not going to be a huge concern. It's really just like anything long-term use over time can have an effect or can have a greater effect and if you happen to be more susceptible for various reasons. So don't drink from a plastic water bottle every single day. You should try not to... Well, sure. It's like this tradeoff, right? It's like, well, I shouldn't do that. You should try and make a better choice.

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Freaks me out so much. Tons of people still do it. can you speak to why it's not a great idea? Well, just from the science side, you know, all those little molecules there are like hanging out in a tight community. And then when you heat them, they get all excited and many of them jump out. So that's what's going on. You're like heating them up.

There's chemicals coming out of that material. There's studies showing microplastics and nanoplastics come off with material. You don't have to put that thing in the microwave. You can put it in a porcelain plate and stick it in. But you would say the research is pretty compelling at this point. We don't want to be heating plastics, especially that which is touching our food. Right. It's very frustrating because the thing says microwave safe.

Well, everyone thinks the government is like super over-regulatory, but here's an area where they're not. That microwave safe is not really thoroughly vetted. FDA regulates that and they don't do a very good job on it. And there's all these chemicals in there. We don't know anything. We don't even know what chemicals are using in those materials. So it may be microwave, meaning it won't have a nuclear meltdown in the microwave, but that doesn't mean it's safe for chemicals migrating into your food.

How would you feel about storing food in plastic containers in the fridge or in the freezer? Is it just heating that we have to be worried about, or is that degradation going to happen no matter what, just maybe over a slower period of time? What we've seen in the research is you will still get some degradation. The recommendations in general are to, if you use a plastic container, don't put them in the dishwasher because dishwasher gets very hot, so you wash them by hand. So that's one recommendation. You can get degradation even if it's in the refrigerator or in the freezer.

But it's really hard to avoid all the plastic containers. I've like slowly switched out a lot over time, but people have to do what they need to do. Less is better. And there are tons of great glass container options available these days. Yes, there is. And some of them are old peanut butter jars. That's a great source. Okay, I want to play a fun little game called How Worried Do I Need to Be about Microplastics in?

And you can speak to the level of concern that you would have and whether that's for our health or for the environment. Okay. Okay. The whole theme of this episode is like, how worried should we be? Okay, so plastic water bottles. I would avoid this if I could. Tea bags and coffee filters. Ooh, these are haul.

I have seen that there's research that there is microplastics in tea bags. I would say a little bit concerned. What about plastics that we put in our mouth over a long period of time, like retainers or invisaline? I would say moderately concerned. Can you give us any info on that? The thing about something like an invisible line, which is totally made a plastic in your mouth, chemicals will degrade off of that. How much chemicals? It's unclear to me. You probably don't want to be. wearing it for the rest of your life. I understand if people have to wear it over a short period of time. These are tradeoffs. Maybe eat more fruits and vegetables and high grain diet in the meantime. We're going to talk about ways that we can maybe start to flush some of these micropastics from

our body and support our body health. The retainer-invisaline thing is so tricky for me because I really want to get inviseline. But once you get it, you have to wear it in your mouth forever. Forever? Yeah, to keep your teeth from moving. How about braces? Then you have to wear retainer forever. There's no way to straighten your teeth, and I need to do it for actual functional reasons, for airway reasons, but there's no way to straighten your teeth where you don't end up with plastic in your mouth forever. And it's something I've wondered about forever. Is that something that is the juice worth the squeeze there? They are plastic and you are wearing it in your mouth. And your mouth it's not like your skin. Your skin is a little bit more or less permeable, but your mouth and

and your vagina are designed to be much more permeable. So if you have something like a retainer and visaline, if you have plastic in your mouth all the time, not only might you be having exposure to your body via these permeable tissues in your mouth, but also you're chewing and swallowing it, and then you'd have exposure via your digestive tract. Yeah, probably that's true too, yeah. Okay. Plastic cutting boards. It could be a source of microplastics. I think it's easily replaceable. Is it like the biggest concern? Probably not. But because you can switch it out, I give that a high mark. Okay. A big area of concern that I have that I did not know there microplastics in is cosmetics and personal care products. I've heard about the microbeads.

Right. But they're in much more than that. Is that true? They're in sunscreens. I'm not familiar with the other cosmetic sources of that. What I would recommend is in the Safer Cosmetics website and you can go and look up your products and they give you a good ranking on all the things that are of health concerned. So that's what I would do for that. How concerned should we be about our furniture? We talked about our clothing, but our furniture is probably made of the same plastic-type fabrics. Furniture and rug. I would be low, medium concern, but it's really hard to replace that. So I give that a lower ranking because it's hard to replace it.

But if you're going to buy something, I would choose something that's not plastic. And how do we do that? What are we looking for as a buzzword for plastic? Because I don't think I knew that my couch was plastic. The other way to think about is looking for natural materials, wool, cotton, linen, those types of things. Another way, there's like carpet treatments and things like that. Look at treatments that are not using chemicals. Condoms?

What does the research tell us about microplastics and condoms? I have not seen any of the research on microplastics condoms, but it's made from rubber, so probably stuff degrades from there. What, in your opinion, are the top sources of microplastics in our lives? If we're looking at most people's daily consumption, what would you say are the three to five sources that that is coming from? We have all these microplastics in our brain. They're impacting our heart. We have a credit card of microplastics in our body. Where is that coming from?

I think in general, when we look at toxic chemicals, the primary source tends to be food. So I would say probably food is first, then probably water. And then I think this general area of dust exposure. What do you do in your day-to-day life as an expert in microplastics to mitigate your exposure? So the things that I do are I don't microwave in plastic. Never ever. I also use water containers that are stainless steel or glass. I eat a diet that is try to focus on foods, fresh fruits and vegetables, make food at home. So try and eat most of my meals at home. If I've been trying some personal care products that don't use plastics, I like the shampoo and the conditioner, like the soap barsoom, store things in glass containers and not use plastic.

And I vote. That's the other thing I do. Make sure I vote. And then let my representative know what I think about how the rules are set up that allow all these plastics to be used and contaminating our environment. Is there anything that we can do to mitigate the effects of microplastics on our body or to flush out the microplastics that might be in there? There's research that indicates that factors can create resiliency to exposures to environmental

chemicals. And I'm just going to go back to the diet again because a diet is really all purpose, right? You eat a healthier diet that can increase your resiliency. Fresh fruits and vegetables, super important or frozen. That's good too. But really can increase your resiliency to a multitude of diseases or to these effects from these environmental chemical exposures. Exercise is also good for increasing your resiliency, and there's all upside exercise and no downside. And then in terms of this idea about how do I get rid of it from my body, some of these chemicals, a lot of the chemicals that are in the plastics,

they don't stay in your body very long. If you get exposed to them, they get into your body, and they're flushed out in hours. But because we're exposed to them constantly, that's why we measure them, like thallites. They're measured to everybody in the United States. So the way really to get rid of them is to not be exposed to them. So the more you do to reduce your exposures to these plastics or these other chemicals that are found in plastics and cosmetics is another

source that will, by decreasing your exposures, your body will naturally flush out those chemicals. Okay. That's actually very hopeful. Mm-hmm. Like if you can flush these out in a matter of hours, every step you take to reduce your exposure today will impact you later today or tomorrow. Exactly. And I also want to say that we know from studies that have been done when the government passes a lot to ban some of these chemicals so they're not in the products, so we're not exposed to them. The levels of those chemicals go down in the population.

The individual level is not using the product with the chemicals, but at a population level, not having the chemicals in the products results in people having less. exposures to those chemicals. So it is actually possible to reduce our exposure to these chemicals through either individual or government or consumer-led actions. Are there government actions happening right now that you're at all hopeful about? The government has been very appropriately aggressive on some of the chemical additives that are used in plastics. So these perflourinated chemicals, which are, they are a persistent chemical. Actually, they hang around in the environment. and there can be used in plastics.

And the government's been very aggressive about setting standards to lower those levels in drinking water, as well as looking at how they've been contaminating waste sites across the United States. The government has a plan that they've announced for how there's a plastics treaty that's being negotiated internationally. The United States has not been super aggressive on this front, but we think more focus on getting them to be proactive on the plastics, would be important. The amount of plastics in use has doubled since 2008. So sometimes people say, oh, we don't have plastics while die. Well, that's not true because everyone was just fine in 2008. It's not that long ago. And now we have twice as much and we're not as healthy. The other thing about

that is that not only is it doubled, but there's a projected increase in plastic production that's going to be happening over the next 20 to 30 years as there's a lot of facilities are going in the United States like around fracking and they're seeing plastics as a very big moneymaker. We don't need to increase plastic production. And one of the things that's going on around in this that's happening in terms of the global treaty is discussions around having a cap in plastic production. The U.S. government's not quite there. So that's where we want to encourage them to go there. Would that be something that we could ask our representatives for directly? Like we want this treaty to be signed on the behalf of the U.S. government? Or what would you say we should be asking our representatives for?

Asking them to see what the government is doing to cap and reduce the amount of plastics that are produced in the United States. What do you think that the media gets wrong about microplastics? There's been sort of a frenzy of coverage recently, and it's very scary, and it makes people feel scared and paralyzed. What do you think they're getting right, and what do you think they're getting wrong? It is right to be covering these microplastics are being found in all these different places. That is a concern because plastic production has been increasing, and it's projected to increase, we're only going to be finding more microplastics unless we bend the curve on on that. So I think it is a concern that the media should be focusing on. And in fact, I don't think

the media actually focus enough on the role of plastics and environmental chemicals on concerning trends in adverse health outcomes in the United States. I think what they get wrong is they downplay the scientific evidence showing the links between these plastic-related chemicals and adverse health effects that we see in people. So you think they're not being scary enough? I like to think about it like smoking. There is a book published on the history of the Surgeon General's report in 1964 about smoking, which was the first report to say that smoking causes lung cancer. And what was really interesting at the time is that tobacco was the third biggest component of the GDP, your biggest tax revenue in the United States. Majority of Americans smoked. Tobacco was indeed. Tobacco was

embedded in the fabric of the U.S. So if you'd say at that time, oh, smoking, should we be scared? People would be like, oh, I don't know, should I be scared? Because if I say that, everyone smokes, who makes so much money off of this. But you know what? We should have been scared about smoking because it was killing a lot of people. The Surgeon General's report, I mean, the whole that it came out, and it was controversial at the time. The tobacco industry attacked it. Now we know the tobacco industry is a big bunch of liars. But at the time, if you were a scientist, the tobacco industry was paying doctors to talk about how great it was to smoke. So fast forward to plastics.

Is plastics like smoking? I feel like the increase in chemical production in plastics is a really important component of health. And we should be worried about how much that it is contributing and how little we're working on it. All right. We like to end this podcast by giving people one homework assignment, something that they can do as soon as they stop listening to make a real difference in their lives to make some change based on the information that we've just learned.

So if you are going to give people one action step that would make the biggest difference to reduce their microplastic exposure, what would you say? Don't microwave in plastic. Okay. That would be my number one. Okay. Take the dinner out of the plastic thing

and put it on a plate. My second one would be to walk to the grocery store, buy fresh lettuce, and whatever you like to eat, and then go home and prepare it and eat it. Versus? Versus buying a packaged dinner. Okay. Or takeout.

Okay. You've studied the reproductive impacts of microplastics a lot. If somebody's listening and they're pregnant and we've seen that microplastics can transfer to fetuses in utero, if they're pregnant and they want to prevent that from happening or protect their future child as much as possible, what advice would you give them? We have a website with recommendations called Toxic Matters at the Programming Reproductive Health and the Environment, which has all these tips laid out. So it's really easy for people to find tips that work for them that also don't cost any money

or very low cost. So that's the first thing I want to say about that. And the second thing is all the recommendations I give for the average person work especially well during pregnancy. So don't microwave in plastic, eat fresh fruits and vegetables. Your doctor's going to tell or your health care provider is going to tell you. this anyway for the maximal healthy pregnancy, which is to eat really lower on the food chain. Organic, it's not necessarily about microplastics, but you can reduce your exposure to pesticides

by eating organic and then preparing the food in your home. Is there anything about microplastics that we've missed in this conversation that you wish that people knew that you want to draw more attention to? I can't think of anything that we haven't covered. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciated this conversation. You're welcome. That is all for this episode of the Liz Moody podcast. If you are new to the podcast, welcome. I am so glad that you're here. Make sure that you are following the podcast on whatever platform that you like to listen on. I know that 50% of you listening to this episode, do not follow the podcast. What is up with that? You're making your life harder by not following. Not only is it the best way to support the podcast, but it also makes sure. that episodes show up right in your feed. You don't have to search for them anywhere. And trust me, you do not want to miss what we have coming up soon. I will be delivering some incredible science,

interviews and advice every single Monday and every single Wednesday for you. Okay, I love you, and I will see you for the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast. Oh, just one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, a psychotherapist, or any other qualified professional.