Microplastics: What They Are, Why They are Dangerous, and How to Protect Yourself

Mark Hyman
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And again, the young forever cookbook comes out on Tuesday, June 4. Pre order yours today. Coming up on this episode of the. Doctor's Pharmacy, a new study found that a liter of water from plastic water bottles contained and this is scary 240,000 detectable plastic fragments. I'm gonna say that again.

A liter of water from a plastic water bottle contains 240,000 detectable plastic fragments. And that's about ten to 100 times more than previous estimates. And about 90% of these fragments were nanoplastics. Mount microplastics. Hey everyone.

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Welcome to the Doctor's pharmacy and another edition of Health Bites. Hi, I'm Doctor Mark Hyman on today's special in this special episode, we discuss a topic thats quite literally everywhere, but mostly invisible microplastics. Now you might have seen the headlines about the threat lurking in our oceans, our soil, our air, and, yes, even in our own bodies. According to the new estimates, we ingest up to a whole credit card's worth of plastic every week without realizing it. Microplastics are also linked to hormonal imbalances, to weight gain, cancer.

New studies also found microplastic chunks in the plaque of individuals with coronary artery disease. And now, we all know plastic is here to stay. But the burning question remains, what can we do about it? How can we reduce our exposure? And how can we detoxify our bodies from these insidious particles?

That's exactly what we're going to talk about today. And we'll start with, what exactly are microplastics? Well, microplastics are tiny little plastic particles less than 5 mm in size. Now, they can be as small as a grain of sand, or even smaller, invisible to the naked eye. Microplastics can be broken down even further into minuscule sized plastic particles called nanoparticles.

Now, nanoplastics are less than 100 nm in size, and for reference, a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. So, not very big and are much, much more difficult to detect versus microplastics. So why are these so bad? They're pervasive in our environment. They're ubiquitous and have become a significant environmental concern due to their widespread bread pervasiveness in the water, in our soil, and our air.

And it can take anywhere between 25 hundred years for plastic waste to decompose. Even then, it never really fully disappears. It just gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Examples of how microplastics show up in our environment are everywhere. Now, because of their small size, microplastics infiltrate ecosystems from the bottom of the ocean to the tops of glaciers.

I mean, the great Pacific garbage pad is a microplastic island the size of Texas. It spans from the west coast of North America to Japan. 70% of that debris sinks to the bottom of the ocean. 14 million tons of microplastics exist on the ocean floor. And microplastics have been identified in the core of ice caps in Iceland, where I just came back from.

Pretty frightening, because it's very remote. Microplastics are easily ingested by wildlife, and then they bioaccumulate up the food chain, which then, of course, negatively impacts wildlife and human health, because we're at the top of the food chain. So what impacts do microplastics have on human health? Well, in the CDC's national report on human exposure to environmental chemicals, scientists analyzed urine samples from 2517 individuals, a six and above for BPA. And they found almost every participant contained bpA.

That's bisphenol a. Now, exposure from the time we're in utero is also going on. It's not just what we get when we're alive outside the womb, it's inside the womb. A recent study published in Toxicological Sciences analyzed 62 placenta samples. And microplastics were present in all of them with polyethylene what plastic bags and water bottles and food containers are actually made of.

These account for most of the nano and microplastics also, these microplastics affect our immune system. They drive inflammation. Now, when they're inhaled or ingested in our food, they often will cause what we call dysbiosis or imbalances in the gut flora. They'll cause oxidative stress and inflammation, which just drives further inflammation. And chronic systemic inflammation is associated with every known chronic disease.

In fact, a new study in mice found that microplastics have been shown to penetrate the gut barrier, causing a leaky gut, which then creates more issues. Right. We get more inflammation and the food particles and bacterial particles then migrate into the bloodstream. And the inflammation there affects every organ, such as our liver, kidneys, brain, and they also affect our metabolic health, causing insulin resistance and worse. So this just screws up your whole liver gut axis and increases the risk of prediabetes and diabetes and insulin resistance.

So they affect every aspect of our biology. They also disrupt hormones. These are also called endocrine disruptors. And many plastics contain chemical additives like phthalates or bisphenol A or BPA, and bromlated flame retardants, which are just a few of the main ones. So let's look at BPA.

BPA is structurally similar to estrogen and actually mimics estrogen in the body, which is why it's known as a xeno or foreign estrogen. It binds to the estrogen receptors and then it alters hormone signaling, which is not a good thing. BPA causes epigenetic changes. So it literally changes the way your genes are expressed by something called DNA methylation. And then that causes all kinds of other issues, reproductive issues, cancer, metabolic issues, weight gain.

It also affects reproductive system function. So when you have exposure to these microplastics and chemicals, it impacts your ability to reproduce. And BPA, for example, impacts the female reproductive system and fertility by affects the maturation of eggs in the beginning of your menstrual cycle. And BPA is also associated with PCOS or polycystic ovarian syndrome and endometriosis, which, by the way, is an autoimmune disease. BPA doesn't just affect women, it also affects men, and it screws up spermatogenesis, meaning the making of new sperm.

It's also associated with lower testosterone levels and reduced sperm count, reduced sperm motility, and increased sperm DNA damage. Not what you want to have if you're having a baby. We call these changes epigenetic changes. They're imprinting on your epigenome, which then has transgenerational effects. So what happens to, let's say, the grandparent can happen to the grandchild because of the insult that happened to the grandparent.

This affects the fertility of progeny of many future generations, which is very scary. And we're seeing all kinds of weird stuff in animals, even in humans. General abnormalities influence on brain sex development. And BPA also has bad effects for men. Right.

They're anti androgenic. Androgens are male hormones. They're responsible for the maintenance of male sex traits like, you know, hair on the body and muscle mass and all the things. We like men. But BPA affects the brain sex development in fetuses and alters gene expression.

So it literally changes the reproductive system of the developing fetus, which is really terrifying to me. Now, we're also seeing a lot of linkages to these environmental chemicals and plastics with obesity. They're called obesogens. Carcinogens. But obesogens and human studies have shown a positive correlation between urinary levels of BPA and your BMI or your weight, according to the NHANES data.

This is the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data, which is tens of thousands of Americans over decades and decades, those with the highest levels of BPA exposure were more likely to be obese. Now, why? Could it be just because the people who were studied who had a high BPA also didn't pay much attention to their health for other reasons? That's called the unhealthy user bias. Or maybe it's because they're eating more processed foods and eating drinking for more plastic stuff.

Maybe there's a reason there. But the mechanism is that it has estrogenic activity and it promotes fat cell division and accumulation. So basically, BPA causes insulin resistance, it causes more fat cell accumulation. It inhibits the release of an important hormone called adiponectin, which is an anti inflammatory, insulin sensitizing hormone. And it actually also helps regulate blood sugar and burning of fat.

And it's are created by fat cells. But when you have high levels of these toxins, you don't get adrenectin and you don't get all the benefits. BPA is also linked to abnormal cholesterol and dysbiosis, which is imbalanced in the gut flora. Endotoxemia, meaning toxins getting in body from the gut that are caused by damaged gut lining. They're also linked to oxidative stress, to insulin resistance, high levels of fasting insulin, and also inhibits fat breakdown and leads to weight gain.

So these are really nasty and they're everywhere, and it's allowed in our food supply. What else does BPA do? Well, I mean, you probably don't want any of this in your system. And it's, by the way, everywhere you really have to pay attention to cans and packaging and credit card receipts and ATM receipts. All these have BPA in them.

So you just want to. You don't want to touch them. I never get the receipts. Also, BPA causes cancer. It binds to estrogen receptors, the ones we call alpha and beta, and it activates the same signaling pathways in these estrogen sensitive tissues that you would from estrogen, and that leads to breast cancer, ovarian cancer, uterus can even affect prostate health.

This increases all kinds of bad things like cell proliferation, cancerous cell formation, cancerous tumors. And depending on the genetics and your environment and level of exposure, your risk is going to be higher. Now, there are other mechanisms that BPA can cause a damage with, and those include what we call cytotoxicity, which just means it's a poison. So it's just directly poisons the cell, it creates oxidative stress and it damages our DNA, which has tumor effects. So there's just many, many pathways that this is bad for you.

What else if there wasn't something else? Well, there's another thing, right? Heart disease. Long term adult exposure to BPA is associated with all sorts of things like heart disease, hypertension, atherosclerosis, plaque development, heart attacks. As we saw that, the data is just pretty scary about this.

And the research shows, for example, a ten year study in the UK done by Meltzer and others found that higher BP exposure correlates with an increased incidence of coronary heart disease, more heart attacks. Another observational study, and this is observational, but it was pretty scary, actually, in the New England Journal of Medicine, and it looked at the presence of micro and nanoplastics in the plaque of 304 asymptomatic people who underwent carotid endarterectomy. That's cleaning out the blockages and then the arteries in the neck, and that can help prevent strokes. And they looked at the microplastics in that plaque and they tried to track it, how it correlated with heart attack, strokes and death from all causes about 34 months later. And what was really frightening was that polyethylene, one of these microplastics, was detected in the carotid artery plaque of 58.4% of patients.

And pvc from pvc pipes, polyvinyl chloride from vinyl flooring, credit cards, medical devices, furniture, was detected in 12% of patients. Now, when they looked through a special kind of microscope called an electron microscope, looks at very small, small things, it showed visible, jagged edged micro and nanoplastic particles in the plaque, significantly increasing the risk for primary endpoint events, meaning heart attacks and strokes by 453%. Meaning if, if you had higher amounts of micro anandaplastics in your carotid artery, you had a much, much higher risk of having a major cardiac event or a stroke than those who didn't have those microplastics in their arteries. Now, other studies have shown that people with high blood pressure and low heart rate variability tend to have higher total urinary BPA. So that's concerning.

So it can cause high blood pressure. And heart rate variability is a very important measure of your overall cardiovascular fitness. So what are the top sources of microplastic exposure? You want to know now that it's causing all these bad things? Well, ultra processed food and packaging, just don't eat crap.

You're going to feel like crap. It's not good for you. There's no reason to eat it. It's not actually food. You should never, never put that past your lips.

And I've done many podcasts, you can go back and listen on what ultra processed foods are and what they do, but it's, it's pretty frightening. So where are you going to find also these microplastics? Well, cans, BPA lined cans, coffee cups, lids. We drink in all these coffees. I mean, bring your own cup, right?

Bring your own can. Salt, even salt has it. Table salt, which is, you know, ultra processed food also has a lot, but sometimes that has microplastics. Tea bags, you know, tea bags are fine coffee filters, but they're not. Polypropylene is a type of plastic that's used to seal tea bags and it's kept, keeps them kind of together in hot water, but not good, cause that plastic can leach into your tea.

A single plastic tea bag at the brewing temperature can release, get this, 11.6 billion microplastics and 3.1 billion nanoplastics. That's scary. This is from Environmental Science and Technology journal Keurig. Coffee machines, those plastic tubing and the plastic little things that they do. I mean, I don't, I don't think we should be using that plastic water bottles, soda bottles, any beverage container, which is BPA line, plastic containers, cups, bags, shrink wrap, tupperware, often cutting boards.

You have to be really careful and just try to use natural products, personal care products. Also another big source of these microplastics, face wash, has these micro beads, exfoliants, phthalates and lotions, creams, toothpaste. Use skin deep, which is a database from the environmental working group that gives you a guide on what to eat, use and eat on your body and what to clean your house with that doesn't have all these crappy things in them. And watch out for your makeup. As I said, you know, skincare products are full of these microplastics.

What about your clothes? Well, clothes also are an issue. Polyester and synthetic fibers also are a big issue because when you wash them, those microplastics drain into our water supply. And a friend of mine has an appliance company, is the CEO of Europe called Archilek, and has developed a microplastic filter, and he's open sourced it to all manufacturers of appliances. I don't know if they're using them, but they should.

Now, what about kids? Well, toys, plastic toys, especially those made from polyethylene, which can lead to direct exposure to these chemicals when they're chewed or sucked on by kids. Kids stick everything in their mouth. So all these plastic toys for babies and kids are terrible. Also, there's a bunch of other places I mentioned, receipts, you know, credit card receipts, ATM receipts, gas station receipts, medical equipment like I tubing, iv bags, disposable gloves, and all that gets to us over time.

They enter the body through food and water, through inhalation, through skin exposure. That's kind of bad news. A little depressing, right? We are all inundated with these microplastics and these environmental toxins. But there is good news.

You can detoxify from these things. You can actually get rid of them from your body. You have to do a little work, but you can. BPA has a rapid clearance rate, so it doesn't really last that long in the body. Only about five or 6 hours means about takes five or 6 hours for your body to kind of metabolize and get rid of half of the BPA in your body.

The bad news, we're exposed all the time, so it's hard for the body to get to net zero. And we're going to actually measure this in function health panels soon. We're going to measure BPA levels so you can even test them. You go to functionhealth.com forward slash mark. We're not quite up there yet with that test, but we'll get there soon.

We'll also look at pfas for every chemical, so we'll be able to start testing these things and you can see your exposures. So the first step is really to reduce your exposure. How do you do that? Air filters and water filters. So water filters are great.

You can use aquatru, a LinkedIn show notes. Also just a reverse osmosis filter. Other types are fine. Swap out plastic food containers with glass ones. Don't eat ultra processed food, right?

So you're gonna reduce your exposure to microplastics and phthalates and pfas from processing and packaging. Swap out your plastic cups. For glass cups, use rock salt like Redmond's real salt. That's my favorite. Never heat food or drinks in plastic, ever, in the microwave or anywhere else.

Stay away from the instant meals that you cook in plastic, like a cup of noodles, soup, rice. Just don't do that. Avoid drinking from plastic water bottles, which is hard to do, but we should definitely be doing that, both to not pollute the planet with plastic, but also to not pollute ourselves. A new study found that a liter of water from plastic water bottles contained, and this is scary. 240,000 detectable plastic fragments.

I'm gonna say that again. A liter of water from a plastic water bottle contains 240,000 detectable plastic fragments. And that's about ten to 100 times more than previous estimates. And about 90% of these fragments were nanoplastics, not microplastics. Also, you can use a steel water bottle, a stainless steel water bottle.

I would encourage you do that. Have one. Avoid commercial to go coffee cups, like from a coffee shop. They're usually aligned with BPA. Ask to fill a stainless steel travel mug or transfer the hot contents to a safe container, especially right after you get it, because I don't want to leave it in there.

Avoid cans, especially acidic food and drinks like soda. Tomatoes leach out unless it's a BPA free can. There's companies that do make those BPA concentrations up to 40 times higher in canned food from sterilization pasteurization. Don't try to have canned foods unless you know they're BPA. Free cans.

Don't take the receipt. You know, you can. These, most of these have a BPA coating. You can email it or text it or something, but don't, don't, don't touch it. Don't use plastic tea bag.

I use tea bags that are organic, unbleached, 100% plastic free, toxic free cotton. Coffee filters are fine. Don't use keurig or plastic tubing for coffee. You can use a stainless steel french press. Pour over coffee.

And again, as I said, say no to receipts. Bad idea. You got an air filter? HepA filter is great. I like air doctor.

I'll put a link in the show notes. Watch out for also something called BPS because as soon as they find a chemical is bad and go, oh, BPA is bad, they come up with something else which may not be better. Right? And BPS is used as a replacement for BPA, but it can actually be more toxic. That's how you reduce your exposure.

That's the first step is get rid of the source.

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How do you actually detoxify your body from the microplastics? Well, your body has a built in detoxification system, so you have to support those pathways. And it works better than any crash diet or juice cleanse. So you have to support it by eating the right food. Foods actually have components in them that help your body detoxify.

So what are they? Well, antioxidants in general help scavenge free radicals. They protect against DNA damage, oxidative stress. Vitamin C is great because it's a great antioxidant. And you can get that from citrus fruit, oranges, kiwis, veggies, vitamin e, and other great antioxidant from wheat germ oil, nuts, some veggies.

Vitamin A, which is grass fed. Beef liver, chicken liver, grass fed meats often have vitamin a. Animal food is the main source. Plant foods don't have actually preformed vitamin a. Melatonin, which you can get even in your diet, actually from meat, fish, eggs, pistachios.

Lots of antioxidants you can take in terms of herbs like quercetin, curcumin, quercetin, onions, garlic and apples. Carotenoids are like, you know, they sound like where they're from, like carrots and yellow vegetables, flavonoids like berries, ellagic acid and pomegranate eg cg, which is a green tea, astaxanthin from algae and salmon, krill, curcumin, milk thistle. All these are great to use to help your body detoxify. These herbs have been well studied, and they've been shown to actually upregulate many of your body's own built in detox pathways. One of the powerhouses here, and I have these almost every day, are what we call cruciferous veggies.

Now, these are things like broccoli, collards, kale, brussels sprouts and so forth, bok choy. But a lot of other things are great too, like dandelion leaves, rosemary and so forth. So all these can really help your body to upregulate these detox pathways. Your body also has a lot of its own antioxidant enzymes. So you can upregulate those enzymes by having the right cofactors, like copper and zinc, for something called sod catalase, another important antioxidant enzyme your body makes.

It needs iron and manganese, glutathione, really, really important. It needs selenium and cysteine and a number of other amino acids. A grass fed whey is a great way to boost glutathione, which is high in cysteine. I use regeneratively raised goat whey, like mount capra. Sulfur rich foods, also great for boosting detox pathways.

So what are those? All the broccoli family, right? The broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, brussels sprouts, watercress protein. Also amino acids are critical for upregulating your detox pathway. So you want to make sure you have at least a gram per pound of ideal body weight.

And you have to really need that. Otherwise, if you're detoxing and you don't have the amino acids to support your liver detox pathways, you're gonna be in trouble. Also, you need to have the right b vitamins, particularly the b vitamins. B six, b twelve, and folate to support methylation. Really important.

And you can get those from grass fed meat, from pest raised eggs, poultry. Certain enzymes are really important. Hydration, also really important. You know, the solution to pollution is dilution. That's what we learned in medical school.

Make sure you drink half your weight in ounces of water per day. A water filter, as I mentioned, reverse osmosis. Make sure you hydrate to get rid of the toxins. So you want to have plenty of urine, clear urine. If it's yellow, you probably don't have enough water.

Fiber, really important. It's like a sponge that binds the toxins and prevents you from reabsorbing them. So try to eat 25 to 30 grams, even up to 50 a day. You can actually take fiber supplements like soluble or insoluble fibers. And insoluble fibers, for example, are non digestible ones that pass through the GI tract.

They add bulk to the school, but you want soluble fiber, fruits and veggies, which has kind of like a gel like substance in the intestines and really helps all areas of health that reduces inflammation. It feeds your good gut bugs. It aids your blood sugar control. Also binds to the cholesterol and bile acids, helps their excretion. And many of these microplastics are fat soluble, so they're bound to cholesterol.

For example, we saw in the study on heart disease that the microplastics were detected in the plaque of arteries, right? Remember that? So you want to eat more fiber, especially the soluble fiber that helps BPA exit the bile through your poop. Now, there are different types and sources of soluble fiber. One of the best types is beta glucans, which are found in oats.

But you want glyphosate, gluten free, whole steel cut oats, pectins, which are in apples, oranges, pears and nuts. Certain mucilages, which are like kind of. If you put in water, you'll gum it up pretty quick. But that's great. Like flax seeds, chia seeds, psyllium seeds, inulin, chicory root.

These are all prebiotic foods. Drew some artichokes, onions, garlic, asparagus and sweat. Also, you don't want to worry about sweating. Sweating is really important. It's how your body gets rid of a lot of toxins.

So in 2012, there was a study of human excretion of BPA in blood, urine and sweat. And they found that BPA concentrations were higher in sweat than in urine. And out of 20 participants, 16 had detectable BPA concentrations in the sweat. But only two had detectable levels in their blood. So basically, they're fat soluble.

So when you sweat, you actually have one of the main mechanisms to get rid of these environmental toxins. That's why I love saunas. The results of the study suggest that sweat testing can be a cool tool for checking BPA. Monitoring and inducing sweating is a clinically useful tool to facilitate the release of BPA through the skin. It's not routine for doctors to test BPA, but.

But it can be tested in urine or blood, even in sweat. As I mentioned, function health is going to be offering that test. Go to functionhealth.com mark to learn more. But, yeah, I really want to sweat, right? You really want to sweat to get it out.

Certain supplements can be very helpful. Coq ten has been studied by researchers at Harvard, and it shows that it reduces reduce free radicals caused by BPA in worms, which is, I guess, good. Chlorella also can help support detoxification. Probiotics also helpful. They bind to BPA.

Phthalates, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons like lactobacillus, bifidobacterium, saccharomyces boyarde all help your gut health, help improve liver function, prevent all kinds of stuff from going wrong in your body. They have great effects on your endocrine system. Also, you can take other supplements like NSA, cysteine. I take that every day to boost glutathione. I also take lipoic acid, which is an antioxidant.

It helps boost glutathione. And you can take some fiber supplements like psyllium, or just take flaxseeds or even chia seeds every day. All right, so that was a lot, right? That was a lot. BPA, microplastics, nanoplastics, they're everywhere.

The best we can do is to reduce our exposure. We can stop using this stuff in the environment and industrial production, which is probably not gonna happen anytime soon. But we should protect ourselves in all the ways we talked about, and we should help our bodies to detoxify. We know actually how to upregulate that through food, through fiber, through even exercise, sweating, the right supplements. All of that can help us detoxify.

We'll put links to all this in the show notes. Don't worry. So you have to remember everything. Even though our world is riddled with plastics, it doesn't mean we have to subject ourselves to their harm. There are many things we can do to protect our health and the health of future generations by basically reducing our exposures and getting rid of the plastics in our bodies.

In the meantime, you can do your best to detox your home from the plastics, your skincare products, and replace them with plastic free alternatives and just basically get rid of that stuff from your life. So don't fret. You know, we can actually detoxify. We can get ourselves to a healthier place, we can reduce our exposures, and it's one of the fundamental principles of functional medicine, which is how do we understand the role of toxins in our health and how do we help our bodies detoxify. So I hope you learned a lot from today's health bite and we'll see you next time.

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Microplastics: What They Are, Why They are Dangerous, and How to Protect Yourself

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1: Introduction

2: Health Impacts

3: Reducing Exposure

4: Detoxification Strategies

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