Microplastics: The Health Effects & Risk. Get Rid of These Common Household Products Now!
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Plastic was hailed as a phenomenal revolution in material making. What's the story with microplastics? Like we are just starting to learn about how much of this stuff comes off and the things that you would think are in the equation would be very surprising. Cleaning products, carpeting, paint. Water evaporating off of the sea contains microplastics so that means it's in the rain. This is...

beyond far reaching. - What will dramatically increase the absorption of that BPA into your skin is... - Stop it! - But there are people that are interested to say, "Hey, what can I do today in my own life?" We can avoid these toxic compounds and still build things for a reduced price and not have to introduce these things to the population.

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Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. This is a special MBB report. Thanks for being with us. There is an enormous risk to your health.

that so many people don't know about that we're going to talk about today. It's something that's been normalized. Many people have ridiculed it. It is now moving from the fringes right to the mainstream. It has to do with what we eat. It has to do with what we wear. It has to do with how we cook. And it has to do with literally what we breathe and what gets into our bodies. It's incredibly pervasive.

Not thinking about it sets ourself up for a variety of problems. There have been links between this health risk and potential coronary disease, increased risk of certain cancers, and disruption to the endocrine system. What are we talking about? We're talking about microplastics and nanoplastics. We're talking about BPAs, and we're talking about PFAs. We're going to be talking to Dr. Roger Schwelt,

He is a quadruple certified physician. Dr. Schwelt is an associate clinical professor at University of California, Riverside School of Medicine. He is also an assistant clinical professor at the School of Medicine and Allied Health at Loma Linda University. He is quadruple board certified in internal medicine, pulmonary disease, critical care medicine, and sleep medicine. Dr. Schwelt is someone who's on the forefront of demystifying

medical misunderstandings. He's the co-founder and an instructor for MedCram, which is a medical education website for professionals who can get accreditation, but also for patients and lay people to learn about medical conditions and things that interest them. He also has a YouTube channel. We'll post all of that below. But we've brought Dr. Schwelt on to try and help us understand why

What microplastics are? Is this a real threat? What are the implications and what are the things that we can try and do about it to minimize the risk, if not eliminate it? We're going to go through every category that we discussed. We're going to go through plastic water bottles, cans. This is not an episode designed to scare you. It's designed to educate you. This is information that has existed that in many cases has been kept from us.

And we do not believe that talking about this information will lead to hysteria. We believe it will lead to empowerment and the ability for you to decide for yourself if you want to make changes, how you want to make those changes, and how those can significantly impact your health. Before we welcome Dr. Schwelt, I want to say that we do start off this episode with a little bit of lightness, a little bit of, gosh, what happens if we open this BPA can of worms? But we're going to

absolutely approach this with the seriousness that it deserves, which we hope that you will all appreciate. This is something Jonathan's been talking about for a long time, that I'm really grateful that we have Dr. Schwell to sort of break down so we can figure out what's true, what's association, what's correlation, and how concerned should we be? So without further ado, let's welcome Dr. Schwell. Break it down.

- We've brought you here today to talk about something that Jonathan has been having nightmares about for years. Here's a quote, "Plastics are probably one of the largest exposures we experience as humans. It's been ongoing most of our lives and our parents' lives.

Plastic was hailed as a phenomenal revolution in material making. Like people used to wear bras made of, I don't know, aluminum. I don't know. But, you know, plastic is one of these things like this was a great thing that we humans crafted. What's the story with microplastics?

Yeah. So if we, so plastic is a great substance, has great benefits. It also we're finding out has a lot of risks. So let's talk about the benefits and why it's become so popular. It's, it's light, it's strong, it's malleable. You can recycle it. It's beautiful, right? I mean, I mean, Tupperware, Hesh,

Hashtag Tupperware. Isn't there a quote in some movie? I can't remember. It was like plastic is the biggest. I can't remember the movie it is, but you probably remember. Yeah, no, plastic is great in that sense. And we've made a lot of it. If you go back to 1950, I think the total production in 1950 was like 2 million tons. And today it's over 400. This is per year.

Now, today, it's like over 400 million tons. So it's 2 million to over 400 is a huge amount. And every year, it's increasing because there's such a demand for it.

Think of plastic as the little plastic blocks that you played with when you were a kid. Remember those little blocks? They have the two-by-two and then the two-by-three blocks, right? And you put them together. So there's monomers. Those are like little pieces. And when you put those pieces together, you can make long pieces, but they're made up of individual parts, right? So that's what we call a polybar. And that's basically what plastic is. And the biggest ones that you'll see...

are polypropylene and polyethylene. So polypropylene, for those of you who went into organic chemistry, that's three carbons, right? Very good. And then polyethylene, those are the two carbon ones. And as you can imagine, the three carbon one is a little bit stronger. It's a little bit more solid. It's a little bit less flexible. And the polyethylene is a little bit more of the opposite. So it's more like the pouches, the plastic bags. That's basically it.

The problem is, is that these substances are, they can have water sort of penetrate into them. Sometimes they're not as durable, they can break down. And so if you take those plastic blocks that you use and imagine like putting crazy glue and sticking them together to make sure that they are durable, to make sure that things that can't get into them.

Those are the things that we often see as consumers, like, hey, what's in that plastic and BPA and all of these sort of things. So these chemicals that they're putting into the plastics are trying to make them either more durable, last longer, be less brittle, for instance, and then resist water and oil, not staining. So these are ways of making those

creations that we make out of these blocks last longer and be around for a longer period of time. So when we talk about microplastics, there's actually two aspects. There's the blocks themselves and what effect they may have on the human body. And then there's the glue that scientists have developed over time to put those blocks together. So I'm sure the discussion will be on sort of both of those topics.

What we're practically talking about is that, I mean, I'm going to go really, really meta here. We're all made of the same things, right? We're all made of carbon and nitrogen and hydrogen. It's like all these things, right? Everything, us, tables, sippy cups, right? We're all made of the same things in these different, you know, fantastic conglomerations. And certain conglomerations are more...

more susceptible to different things in the environment, right? Yeah. So what we've got is we manufactured plastic, we started manufacturing plastic, and then we kept trying to better it in ways that we thought would make a better product. However, we're now

that those things, they don't necessarily stay in the plastic. So can you talk a little bit about this word that nobody likes, leaching? Yes. So there was a study that was done in

published in one of the journals of the American Chemical Society, where they looked at microplastics. And they were actually able to look at the amount of microplastics by doing some sort of detection using a gold-plated filter.

Okay, so they could get down to the to that kind of a detailed look. And what they found and what we is what we now know is one of the major ways that we get microplastics and things into our body is they took something either a liquid or food, they put it into the microwave. And it's not just the microwave, it's any kind of heating actually. And they heated it up. And what this does is it breaks down

the plastic and those chemicals that are locked into the plastic and it released it into the food sample. So how much are we talking about? Well, in this particular study, they looked at different compounds. They looked at the polyethylene, which are the pouches. They looked at the polypropylene, which are the solid state containers.

And they looked at different types of substances, those that were acidic that you might see, for instance, in like tomato sauce or fruits, and those that were neutral that they use like distilled water for. So they did a wide range. And what they found was that anywhere from

This is per square centimeter now, per square centimeter of the surface. Anywhere from millions of nano and micro plastics all the way up to literally trillions were released in that type of situation. In that same study, they estimated based on what they were seeing and the amount of plastics and how they were able to detect it. They showed that we are on an annual basis

taking into our body probably about anywhere between 39 and 50,000 particles of microplastics a year. And it just goes up. If they include inhalation, that goes up. And then if they add, and this was the real kicker, this is the one that kind of floored me, people who drink tap water versus bottled water. That was a huge distinction because bottled water could add up to 90,000

particles, 90,000 particles versus just five for tap water. Like we are just starting to learn about how much of this stuff comes off and the things that you would think

are in the equation would be very surprising. Let me give you an example. For instance, when you get the receipt paper, you asked the question about receipt paper, it is coded with BPA so that when the thermal printing occurs, it's going to show up as ink on the page. It's not really ink. It's actually a reaction from the BPA. BPA stands for... I'm blanking. Biphenyl...

Biphosphosal phenol A, I believe it is. Bisphenol A, yeah. Bisphenol A, yeah. Yeah. So if you touch that receipt, it's probably not, you're not getting a lot through that skin. However, what will dramatically increase the absorption of that BPA into your skin is hand sanitizer. Stop it! Stop it! If you just hand sanitized and this alcohol-based thing, it will actually be able to- Yep.

absorb much more of it and it'll be able to pass through into your skin much more. This is what the science is showing. That's an oxygen and a hydrogen group just waiting to suck something in. Exactly. So that's the example. So how much of that is happening with the sucking on the toys and the paint and all of this? Back 20 years ago, what was the big drama? It was lead, right? Lead in the paint. Now,

Now we've figured that out and we're trying to make changes there. Now we're just moving on to something else that we've done and we're finding out the issues there. Okay, so I wanna ask the skeptical but scientifically based skeptical question. So humans process all sorts of things. We are organisms.

We are, you know, eukaryotes. We are animals. We're just like living in an environment where things are happening all the time that we have to process. We have to break things down. We have an entire organ of our body that processes toxins specifically. Like that's what it does. Like

You know, your gallbladder is really important. Your liver is important. These are, you know, highly adapted organs and systems. We have a very beautiful, sophisticated immune system, as do other animals, you know, but ours is very, I think, very special because there's very special challenges and obviously ways we can talk about it. So some people might say, OK, Dr. Schweltz,

You know all these things because of your fancy microscopes and you know all these things because of your, you know, fancy new ways of looking at things. And that's great for you. But the body is made to break shit down. And you've got all these big numbers with lots of zeros at the end and they're meant to scare me. But, you

you know, when you say like, oh, these things can cross the blood brain barrier, like so do a lot of things. And I filter them out all the time. I'm doing a great job, right? I am alive. So what do you say to people who might approach it that way and say like, okay, we just know more. We can wring our hands about it more. We can get all upset and make things more expensive and only the rich, you know, will have access to these things. But don't we have the ability to protect our bodies from these things?

We do. And you're absolutely right. And it's never a situation where both sides don't have evidence. There's always two sides to that scale. The question is, on which side is it balanced? And how does it go out throughout the population? And where are we going to see the end product of disease?

So we might see an increase in disease because of something else, right? Or because of one of these issues. So let's put it in actual practical terms. So let's talk about the glue. So whether we're talking about the BPA, BPF, BPS, these things have fairly short half-lives in the human body because the liver is designed to

to filter these things out. And if you look at the half-life of some of these substances, once it gets absorbed into the body, we're talking about five to six hours. So it does get filtered out. There's no question about it. In fact, there is an enzyme that's called a phase two detoxification enzymes, which take these things like BPAs and makes them more water soluble so you can excrete it out of the system. So you're absolutely right. That is a good thing.

The problem is, is that if you're being exposed to these things continuously all the time, then it's just basically like it's coming in on a conveyor belt and you're just trying to get rid of it. And it's constantly trying to get rid of it.

So BPA, BPF, BPS, we could talk about all of these chemicals that they just keep renaming slight variations of and keep putting it into the same products. And then they say it's BPA-free, but it's got something else in it that's trying to make it whatever it is. But the real problem is these forever chemicals. So BPA is not a forever chemical. It gets metabolized after five or six hours. What we're talking about now are the PFAS chemicals.

PFAS, which is the polyfluoroalkyl substances. So let's go back to chemistry. Let's go back to organic chemistry.

And you'll see why what we're talking about here has some real scientific basis to it. So if you remember the periodic table in the total top upper right-hand corner of that periodic table is not helium. Yes, it's helium. But the one that's actually right before those noble gases, the group seven, if you will, is fluoride and fluorine, right?

is one of the most electronegative atoms on the periodic table. That means it loves to suck electrons toward it. It's just the way it is because it's got seven electrons. It really wants to have eight and it's going to suck that electron in. So if you take carbon, which were all sort of carbon life forms, and instead of putting hydrogens on those carbons, you stick a bunch of fluorides on those. That

Bond between carbon and fluoride is the strongest bond known in organic chemistry. I'm excluding silicon fluoride and hydrogen and fluoride. Those are a little bit stronger. But in terms of life forms, carbon fluoride bonds are extremely electronegative. They actually have a little bit of an ionic character to it. So it's extremely hard to break CF bonds.

Now, imagine making sure that every single hydrogen on that carbon molecule is fluorinated with fluorides. What you've got there is, it's no surprise that they're called forever chemicals. These things have half-lives in the human body of not hours, not days, not weeks or months, but years. And these are the real issues that

that we have concerns about. They have been shown to have issues with disrupting endocrine systems. I know you have a PhD in neuroendocrinology, so you can certainly pick this up where I may leave it off here. But not only are these chemicals simulating some of the hormones, but they can also interact with the receptors for hormones. And so what we see in animal models, and we're starting to

have theories and hypotheses about in the humans is that it can disrupt fertility, it can disrupt all sorts of things when these things hang around for long periods of time. And just to be clear, these are substances that resist grease, they resist oil,

They resist water and they resist heat. Is that right? Like that's the sort of category that we're talking about. They were first used in the 1940s because, you know, that's when a lot of things started being invented. They are in the kind of thing, I'm just going to say where they are. They're in stain resistant fabrics. They're in water resistant fabrics, cleaning products, carpeting.

paint, firefighting foams, which it's obviously very important to have these things, but the question is the chemicals that are used to sort of make them. And they're authorized for limited use in cookware, food packaging, and food processing equipment. Probably because the FDA is like, we don't know what to do if we don't have these. Yeah.

Yeah. And people like Joseph Allen from the Harvard School of Public Health have been talking about this for years. He's actually the one that coined the term forever chemicals. We actually had him on our channel on MedCram. He was talking about the whack-a-mole type of thing that these industries do where they take one chemical out, replace it with another one. And everyone's like, oh, look, it's BPA free. Let's get that one. That's healthier. And it's probably not.

I feel like we're very calmly describing something and sort of tiptoeing around what I feel much more enraged about. He's Canadian, so that's what enraged looks like. Hey, well, I'm a fellow Canadian as well. When I'm hearing this, I'm like, well, I hear that we don't know exactly what is happening, but can you first describe...

some of the health implications that we're seeing in animal studies that we believe have correlation in humans. What are the impacts that we can see from having this constant exposure to this level of microplastics and forever chemicals without the ability to detox it? And what does it mean for our bodies to be in this constant detox process, having to handle this load just to get its head above water?

Yeah, well, let's start off with the probably the one that we have the most evidence for. There was a paper that was just published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine. Okay, so pretty, pretty good publication. And what they did was they looked at these atheromas, which are basically scars inside the coronary arteries of human beings.

when they get taken out and looked at, and they assess them for microplastics. And lo and behold, it wasn't in every one of them. It wasn't universal, but they certainly found them. And what they found was this, is that those patients that had microplastics in their body, so we're not talking about the glue anymore. We're not talking about the PFAS, the PFAS or the BPA. We're just talking about the actual plastic itself.

that there was an over fourfold increase association with coronary artery events. So again, that's not necessarily causative. It's an associative. Yeah. Do we have a mechanism? Because I love a good mechanism.

Yeah. I mean, it could very well be that these plastics are lodged in the coronary arteries and then we develop an immune response. We know that coronary artery disease is an inflammatory situation. So. Well, it's, so inflammation is one thing. I mean, the other thing I'm also thinking about transport proteins and, you know, the systems that are involved in transporting cholesterol, like all these things, those can be disrupted in

in many ways and are often regulated kind of from an endocrine level. - Yeah, exactly. And we know that there is endocrine dysfunction that is occurring at the level of, in these animal studies. So again, these are animal studies. We haven't done the human studies or if they are doing them, I'm not aware of them. They are looking at this though, obviously this is the hypothesis. - Well, you know, Dr. Schwald, I'm just gonna say it. The human study is the one that's being done.

By us being given all of these chemicals and lied to and not really told the entire truth about what it is that we're ingesting, holding and processing. That's the human study that they're doing. We're it.

Yeah. Explain to us a little bit more about what does it mean to have endocrine disruption? Basically, the way cells communicate, one of the ways that cells communicate with each other is with hormones. Cells create proteins. Those proteins go throughout the blood and they latch on to the receptor. And what those hormones do is largely based on what the cell receptor is going to do with that message.

So whether it's diabetes, whether it's for insulin, whether it's glucagon, whether we're talking about reproductive systems with FSH, LH, whether it's the cortisol from your adrenal gland with ACTH, these are all very, very important substances and processes that are going on in the human body. So TSH for the thyroid.

Growth hormone in children, these are all proteins that are secreted from the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland together and control basically many of these processes in the human body. So summarizing, pretty much every biological process in the human body can be disrupted through evolution.

having too much microplastics and these forever chemicals. Like I'm, I'm over simplifying it and asking for these explanations because, you know, it's a little insider baseball between the two of you. And, and I think it's important to really hit the nail on the head about, look, we're talking about a level of disruption and exposure to a substance that is new in the last decade.

60, 80 years. That hasn't happened before. And this is an experiment. But what I'm trying to sound the alarm on is that for people listening who are like, yeah, but

My cup of coffee is really great. When we know that 15 minutes of hot liquid in a cup of coffee is releasing however many trillions of microplastic units of microplastics into our bodies, we have to know what that is in order to make a conscious choice of am I going to bring my cup with me?

Am I going to get angry at my coffee shop for saying, no, I'm sorry, we can't fill that up for you, which is something that has happened to me where they try to put it in a plastic cup and I have to say, please do not do that. Then they look at me like I'm crazy and then they put it into a metal measuring cup and then put it into mine. But where I'm going is that I think we need to fundamentally rethink

Some of the assumptions we have, which is I don't leave my house and expect that every one of my needs is going to be catered to with disposable utensils and plastic plates and takeout containers, because there is a big trade off that we're not being told about.

Absolutely. Yeah. And this is not the only topic of discussion where we've seen in the last 50 years this type of a dramatic change. There are other fields that may be for another discussion. I would like to kind of build on that because, you know, I grew up in an era where we did not wear seatbelts.

We sat in the way way back, as Jim Rash describes in his movie by the same title. Yeah, we sat in the back. We had a 75 Datsun, for those of you who remember Datsuns, we had a 75 Datsun station wagon and we would frequently sit in the trunk with our arms on the back of the seat, peering at whoever was sitting in the middle row just 'cause it was fun to sit back there. Many of us grew up at a time when

People smoked in your face. Your parents smoked in your face with the windows rolled up in a car. You know, those things we thought, well, that's never going to change. Right. I mean, cigarettes were advertised to children.

Like Joe Camel, it was like, you know, we smoked candy cigarettes. We had those candy cigarettes. We thought we were so cool, right? Another thing, drunk driving. We were like, that's never going to change. We were. We were able to turn that around. Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation, he was told you will never get people off their phones. And indeed, we have a movement that has swept the globe of kids having to put their phones behind

by the door when they walk into classrooms, right? So there are things that we think we cannot turn around. I'd like to believe this is not impossible, but I think there's a lot of fear about either causing hysteria or

And hysterical reaction. So what Jonathan is talking about is this is beyond far reaching. It's ubiquitous. This is ubiquitous system that we're part of. Can you talk a little bit about what, what it would be like to, to turn something like that around? Just before we get into turning it around, I feel like we still need to list. Like, I think people are still not aware. Like I could do the list with you. We can, we can pass it back and forth, but like,

Cutting boards, cooking utensils. When Jonathan talks about coffee cups, he's talking about like the paper cups. Yeah. I mean, the bottled water needs its own category of conversation. But like that's blowing my mind. Cooking utensils, cutting boards, anything that's that kind of like hard, durable plastic, nonstick pans, anything.

Apparently canned goods, things that are canned. No, and that's important to know because those canned goods are lined with this plastic. I saw a YouTube video or some sort of short on YouTube. It's in my mind where they actually put the can into something that dissolved the metal. And you could see that was left behind was this plastic.

plastic pouch that lines the inside of all of these aluminum cans that we think, oh, it's metal. It's got no plastic. It's lined with plastic. Canned drinks, food storage containers, like for those of us who use stainless steel and glass and our children are like, my lunch bag is so heavy. That's why. Tea bags, coffee filters,

Plastic wrap, parchment paper that is lined with plastic. In addition, things like air fryers and toasters, things like that. The next level, like synthetic clothing.

We all have that cozy blanket that you're like, how did they make it so soft? Guess what? They're poisoning you with softness. It's in- Polyester. Polyester. It's a polyester. And this is something that is in, we're sleeping on it. We're spending whatever percentage of our life

And I was just going to add to that too while you're on the topic of sportswear. When you're sweating, these clothes that are designed to wick away the sweat. Underwear. You know how many times they've talked about wicking away moisture from my hoo-hoo? The whole industry. I don't know. A lot. It's an entire industry of wicking moisture away from ladies' hoo-hoos.

By the way, that came up in one of the studies is when they looked through the human body to see where the microplastics were showing up, obviously the GI tract, obviously the lungs, but the urogenital tract was another place very concerningly as well. This is something we've talked about here before, but I want to underline it for this conversation.

Beauty products. Absolutely. Like this is a real big one. This is a big one because you're literally putting it on your skin. In many cases, you're being told exfoliate first so that your skin can absorb it better so that you clean. I mean, it's it's a thing. This is literally I mean, it's it is.

It's got to be one of the largest earning markets, right? Is beauty products, which has now spread. It's not just for women, men too. A lot of our athletic wear, yoga pants. When did those get invented? Everybody wears them all the time. I've talked about this a lot. What is it, 20 years ago only that they didn't exist? And now what they're studying, they're finding that

Almost every single brand of yoga pant has forever chemicals lined in them and they're being slapped onto people's bodies directly against the skin in very porous areas and people are leeching in these chemicals. We've seen in animal studies that the immune system does have a response and goes to attack the plastic, but of course the plastic doesn't respond to that. Is that accurate?

Yeah. I mean, other than breaking down and releasing new particles, but yeah.

So the immune system is able to sort of break down the plastic into further microscopic particles. And then is it better to have clumps or is it better to disperse them? It's better to have clumps because you have less of a surface area to disperse the glue, if you will, and these chemicals that are leaching out. So what often happens in the human body, I can speak to things like silica. Silica is one of the most abundant substances on the planet, basically sand.

And we actually have a condition in the lung called silicosis, where you inhale particles of sand. The immune system will surround these particles of silica and nothing happens to the silica. They just form these clumps of hyperimmune cells and nothing gets broken down, unfortunately. And I'm pretty sure this is exactly what's happening in the human body to plastics.

because this is exactly what they saw in that New England Journal of Medicine article where they saw in these atheromas, in these lesions in the coronary arteries, they were actually able to see microplastics in there. What is the effect, and I know it needs to be studied more, but what is the effect of having the immune system activated when it's not an active disease threat?

Yeah, it's autoimmune conditions. You name it. We see this with a number of diseases. We see this with silicosis, as I mentioned, but we also see it with a number of other conditions. For instance, tuberculosis, coccidioides, these are fungal and mycobacterial infections.

where the immune system will wall off the infection and it will just keep it at bay. And the person will go throughout their entire life, perhaps without actual disease, but they are currently infected. Now at the end of their life, if they become immunocompromised, this infection can then become reactivated

But yeah, this often will cause a reaction and maybe even cause an autoimmune reaction where the antibodies and the immune response gets confused and where it feels like it's attacking the initial intruder, but it turns its energies and actually attacks the body itself. And this is the basis of most autoimmune conditions. Yeah.

You know, one of the biggies for women is thyroid. And the thyroid is like this sort of like gimme gimme gland that is sort of, you know, taking in processing. It's highly hormonally regulated, connected to so many incredibly important systems. And, you know, it's one of the things we first see kind of go in women. And as we've talked about here, which is not a popular thing to talk about,

you know, who's being sold chemicals to put in their nails, in their hair, in their eyes. And, you know, the inner linings of, you know, every mucus membrane is being, you know, you're inhaling something as a woman, you know, that is chemically beautiful.

Yeah. No, and just to speak to Jonathan's point even more in terms of how pervasive this is, it blew my mind. But water evaporating off of the sea contains microplastics. So that means it's in the rain. They've looked in the tundra. They found microplastics in the tundra. So there's really no way you can escape, too. This is in our oceans. If you look at salt, for instance, people consume salt.

There's a difference between the type of salt that you might consume in terms of the microplastics. So if you actually get sea salt,

There's going to be a high proportion of microplastics there. If you get salt that comes from rocks that obviously were formed well before the 1950s, there's going to be a relatively much less a level of microplastics in that type of salt. Sorry, I'm looking at Jonathan and his organic sea salt is flashing before his eyes. We're going Himalayan and nothing. It's like Himalayan salt or bust. The salt conversation is a whole other beast. Jonathan?

Up until the 90s, it was legal and considered reasonable to dispose of plastic in the ocean. We're now studying our fish supply, both small fish and large fish who are eating the small fish, to see the amount of microplastic happening in fish. So when we're encouraged to eat fish for our brain health, now we also know that we're getting an enormous amount of microplastic load. Can you talk about the brain...

I've heard that it potentially gravitates towards the brain because of how the body is coding it and processing these microplastics when they're going through the liver. There's microplastics and there's nanoplastics. Microplastics is anything from half a centimeter down to a micron, which is a thousandth of a millimeter. Then anything less than that, where

We're talking about nanoplastics, which are basically so small that they can go right through the blood brain barrier. They can go into the cells. They can do all sorts of harmful things, we believe. But yeah, no, that's...

These very small particles, these nanoparticles, and by the way, these are some of the particles that we saw in that study that were released when they did microwaving of food products in plastic containers. Those are the things that went off the charts. So if these things go into the brain, obviously the brain is extremely complex and there's all sorts of hormones. And these things can disrupt not only the neurons themselves, but also the supporting cells that...

allow these things, these processes in the brain to continue to work normally. And of course, if those are affected, then things aren't going to work. There's a neuro-glymph system, which allows lymphatics to drain from the brain. These are all possible ways of mitigating some of this microplastic aspect. But again, this needs to be studied. And it's difficult to do in human beings because obviously it's invasive. So-

I think more study needs to be done. Given that it's in the food supply, given that it's in the rain, given that it's in the ocean, it's not really about preventing exposure. It's about reducing exposure as my you're talking about load and how much we're being exposed to because while more we don't exactly know the impact, it can't be better for us. So, well, I mean, some, some could argue, and I guess this is a question.

Is it too late and this is just sort of the cost of being human right now? Is that how we should look at this? Like what's your personal take? I cannot accept that, by the way, just before you give that take. No, but I think it's an important point because that's really – this is a psychological point because there are people who feel like this is the cost of being a human and

In this revolution of the industrial age, this is the cost. This is what we've brought upon ourselves. I was talking to a friend of mine who's a devoted Buddhist who was like, I just would like to reduce suffering today. So I'm going to live my life today to the best of my ability. You know, it's more of a psychological decision or kind of approach, right?

Well, Mayim brings up a great point because here's the thing. We know that microplastics probably has risk that is adverse affecting. But the thing that we have to understand is that there's so many other things that can also affect us in risk. And particularly, I'm going to point out that people who are constantly in fear

for a particular thing and perseverate on it and actually become overwhelmed. And we see this sometimes, not just in terms of plastics, but in terms of other conditions. It can actually affect them and cripple them so much, it's actually worse.

than the actual thing that they're afraid of. So we have to realize that there's a balance that we have to take. And as it turns out, I believe, and we can talk about this as we go on, there are some pretty simple low hanging fruit things that we can do to substantially reduce our risk of getting these microplastics, realizing that we can't eliminate every single risk that we're exposed to. I'm into that. I want to hear it.

Okay. Yeah. All right. So I'm all for the reduction. Yeah. And realize here that I want to be clear that in no way do I believe that any of these things that I would suggest to do is simply trivializing the whole problem. No, these are things that will not prevent these things from getting into the environment. We obviously have to be good stewards of the environment and do what is responsible for

But there are people that are interested to say, hey, what can I do today in my own life that can potentially improve and reduce microplastics? And you guys probably know just as well as I do, but let's start talking about that. In general, anything that's getting hot...

is in theory more susceptible than something that's not getting hot. And it's funny, I know a lot of this from some of the laws of kashrut, of kosherness. A lot of our rules are based on what can leach into a product because you don't want to quote contaminated with dairy or meat. So

It's kind of interesting. So one of the things is about hot foods. So when we're talking about, you know, a hot beverage in a plastic cup or even in a paper cup that's lined with plastic, when we're talking about microwaving things, getting them hot, those are the times when we're going to see, in theory, more leaching, correct? Yeah.

Yes, absolutely. This is the laws of thermodynamics now that we're talking about when we're talking about molecules is heat allows things to degrade faster, reactions increase.

And that's just one of the things that is absolutely true in the study that we referenced before. Whether it's microwave, whether it's on the stove, whether you're heating it up, these are all things that will dramatically increase the amount of leaching and breaking down of the plastic into the product. Okay. So in this case, if you're going to heat something up, heating it in glass is a good idea. That's just like, at this point, glass is safe. Yeah.

Yeah. So remember though, when you're doing this, oftentimes when you're at work and you put things into a microwave, you've got to be, you know, you've got to be thinking about some of your colleagues and making sure that your food isn't splattering everywhere. So what do you put on top of the Pyrex that you're now doing? A piece of BPA. A plastic container. So you're like, okay, well, maybe you should put like a napkin because you could also put saran wrap, right? And again- You could also just watch it. Don't heat it till it splatters and no one needs to have an issue. Yeah.

See, and this is the thing. It's like everything you reach for, you start to realize it's got plastic in it. It's almost like the end of a horror movie. We are living in a horror movie, Dr. Schwell. That's exactly what this episode is. Yeah.

Okay. So, so heating things, putting a piece of, of a paper towel over it. I don't know. We haven't talked about paper towels yet, but hopefully they're okay. I don't own them, but okay. So, okay. So we, we dealt with heat. Let's go into water bottles. So the most ubiquitous thing, and especially as someone who works in the industry is like crates and crates and crates of plastic bottles. I grew up in a time when no one drank water. Does anyone else remember this time? Like you

No one drank water. You were always drinking like soda or juice or like, I don't even know what was happening. I never drank milk. I never drank water. And now everyone we were told drink water. It's so good for you. You're made of water. What do you do about plastic and water?

Yeah. So invest in either a glass container, which is well wrapped up and it's not going to break, Pyrex, or invest in an aluminum one that's not coated with a plastic and carry that around. And you'll see that we're actually making progress because when you go to the airports, when you go to these places, you'll actually see- You fill it up there. Exactly. Exactly. And as you were saying, Jonathan,

going to your favorite coffee place and asking them to do this. I've heard now that some of these coffee places will actually give a discount if you bring your own cup and allow them to fill it up. So I think we're turning a corner there. If enough people start to ask for it and hopefully listen to this podcast and we can start to make a revolution of change, then... Yeah, they're saving you the money that you'll need for your autoimmune condition that you're going to get anyway. Yeah.

And they don't need as many cups, right? Right. So this water that I'm putting in my bottle, instead of drinking a plastic bottle of water, that water, you want to have it filtered, right? Yeah. Do I ask you if I want fluoride in my water?

That's a great question. So, you know, there are a number of products on the market, depending on how much money you want to spend to take out these things. So if you want to spend...

a decent amount of money, but you're not willing to spend the whole bank on it. A carbon block filter can filter a lot of these things out, and especially if you get a casing that's aluminum. But the filter themselves have plastic, so you're trading off big things for smaller things and less. You're cutting it down. If you really want to spend the bank and you want to completely eliminate

microplastics. The way to do that would be with reverse osmosis systems. The problem, the drawback with that is that there are healthy minerals in the water. They also get removed as well. So you have to add those back in.

And remineralizing water has had some issues. Yeah. So there's a downside. And this is the thing that I was talking about before. You could become so focused on one issue that when you go to the – and we all know about diminishing marginal utility, right? The more – the first candy bar that you eat tastes the best. The second one, not as well. The third one, even less. The more money and time you put into eliminating plastics –

each dollar that you're spending is going to eliminate less and less and less and cause more problems. So it's a balance. Another simple thing that I think we should talk about is

If you haven't gotten rid of your Teflon or your whatever that makes nothing stick to it, I understand it's a real drag when things stick to your pan. I get it. I've lived it. There was a time that I ate eggs and had to cook them. And I totally get it. But that...

that that's like a big one because we're using that stuff all the time. There are a few very, very expensive options that don't have those chemicals. But, you know, the story is you you may become friends with a cast iron skillet that might be your new friend. But there's also issues with cast iron skillets. So finding a way to cook that doesn't involve

that non-stickness and you know also we were all raised with television showing us that the ideal is for that omelet to just slide off the pan like I know it and I remember as a child I'd be like I want that life I want to be that lady and it just but the fact is like this is the kind of sacrifice that we're sort of talking about is this is a level of convenience that we have all enjoyed and

It was great while it lasted, but it is time to find other solutions. You're not going to have that picture perfect omelet experience. That's just the truth. Exactly. And imagine again,

We just talked about heat. We're not talking about heating things up in a microwave. We're now talking about such extreme temperatures on the stove where you're cooking that you're really activating these things and they're leaching, no question about it. Yeah, it's time to get rid of it. I'm going to post, I have this one pan that's my latke pan because latkes, you really don't want them to stick. I'm ready to part with it. Okay.

I'm going to do it. I'll post a picture of it on the internet. What's interesting, what they found in the study is that when you were, they found that the most amount of microplastics was when you were cutting up vegetables. And I remember when I was, when I talked about this on our YouTube channel, someone called in and said, well, it's probably because, you know, you've really got to push down on that knife to cut those carrots. And that's when you're deforming that plastic,

cutting board the most. And it makes a lot of sense to me that that's exactly what's happening. And I will say, as someone who's been using wood and bamboo for years, they do wear out. I'll be honest, they do. You know, if you want to be that person who's like seasoning your cutting board with mineral oil, whatever, I'm sure there's a reason you shouldn't do that either. But yeah, this does mean that you may end up replacing them. But in this sort of toss up,

of environmental impact and biological and endocrine impact, there's going to be a trade-off. There's not a perfect solution here, but having a cutting board that you think is going to last forever, it's actually not going to last forever. And it's going to last forever in a special way inside of your endocrine system. Exactly. I mean, a bamboo wood, I'm sure has a half-life that's much shorter and it's probably not affecting your endocrine system. Yeah. Yeah.

Jonathan, any other categories? Oh, the other thing, this is, you know, having a reckoning with your beauty product is really, really a hard one. I don't even know how to touch that. It's, I mean, I've had to do it. Only you can touch that one. Right. I mean, I've had to do it. Yeah, I've had to do that myself because I have a system that let me know when things weren't working for it. And, you know, it's kind of interesting having an autoimmune system

situation where your body is that sensitive to the things that we're all sensitive to. It's just some bodies are going to show it sooner than others. Can you talk a little bit about the BPA fallacy? We all were taught or we're all sold this idea that these companies were really going to do a massive service for our health and take away the toxic chemicals. But it turns out that isn't the case.

Yeah. So actually, Joseph Allen from the Harvard School of Public Health came on our channel, talked about the whack-a-mole, and that's what this is. It's basically BPA. We didn't know a lot about it. And then the studies started to come out and show that, in fact, BPA was toxic. BPA was doing this. BPA was doing that. There was a huge consumer backlash about this. And anybody was now picking up things, looking at the ingredient list, looking at what was...

in the production and they saw BPA, they refused to buy it.

So what happened was the scientists, the evil scientists went back and they found other substances that wasn't called BPA. And they started to put that in place of it because it did the same thing. Remember, what's the purpose? Why would they want to put BPA into plastics? Not because they want to be evil. It's because they want the product to be stable. They want the product to not be brittle. They want it to last, durability. And that's what this product does.

Well, they found other products that did exactly the same thing and were probably as toxic. But again, we didn't have the study. So now they can say, hey, look.

there's no BPA in this product. It's now BPF or BPS or something else. And did we have actual studies on those particular substances? No, we didn't because they had just come out with it. And so that's what this, this toxic whack-a-mole is called. They now call it regrettable substitution, which is kind of a misnomer because it's almost like, Oh, I'm sorry. We slipped up and we, we substituted this, but it's, it's all very intentional and it's,

it's using this thing so they can be able to say, we don't have studies that show that these chemicals are toxic. But the thing that you have to understand is that the absence of evidence doesn't necessarily equal the evidence of absence. So we believe this. And so actually, in talking to

Dr. Allen, he was saying that they're actually putting together programs and they're actually showing that they can build systems and they can build things that where they say, we don't want to have any of these toxic chemicals, no matter what they are. And they're able to actually build things that don't have these toxic chemicals in it for the same price and that we don't need to do this. And so I think what they're trying to do is to show that

show the world of industry that we can avoid these toxic compounds and still build things for a reduced price, for a reasonable price, and not have to introduce these things to the population. So hopefully that gains traction. But you're absolutely right, Jonathan. These companies, this is exactly the strategy that they invoke.

The marketing effort wasn't now with BPF where we don't know what the impact was. The marketing was BPA free. We know that you are going to be safe or the implied assumption was you're going to be safe. Oh,

I totally, I mean, I remember when my first child was born, this was back in 2005, and we were trying to look and my wife's like, hey, I just saw a video on BPA. We cannot get anything with BPA. So we've got those things. We've got BPA free, whatever it is. I literally was intimidated by my 15-year-old because I thought he'd complained that his lunch was too heavy.

because I was sending him to school with glass containers. And I finally kind of had to get over it. And I was like, so this is the lunch container that you're going to have? And he's like, gosh, that's really heavy. Okay, that was it. End of story. And the conversation was like, this is how we're going to do this now. We've got a couple really precious glass containers. Do not leave them at school. Don't leave them at your dad's.

This is how we eat now. He won't use the bamboo fork. I can't get him to do that yet. He still is taking a plastic fork, but I figure like I do what I can. Speaking of things that need to be redesigned, which I'm very excited that there are teams working on that. Can you talk about black takeout containers and the evidence that has recently surfaced about the chemicals that we thought had been legislated out and are still in there?

That one I'm not too up on. You must be getting out to tell me about it. I'm interested to hear. The short version is that there's flame retardant in these black plastic takeout containers that are used by restaurants all over and that specifically black plastic utensils have been shown to have flame retardant in them at levels that were previously known to be harmful and that we had legislated the

end of and turns out that they were never actually removed from the system. Wow. So those little packages that we get of the spout and the fork combined and those things with the lids on them, those are flame retardant. Wow. Yeah. Bleaching flame retardant as well as the microplastics. It's just on CNN and other mainstream outlets. This is not underground information. Yeah.

So the interesting thing about that is I haven't done research on this, Jonathan, but I imagine that there's probably just a few places that manufacture those and they get distributed everywhere. So that's interesting.

Dr. Schwelt, please tell people where they can follow you. You have such an incredible amount of information about the flu, about COVID, about general health prevention, not just about microplastics and things that, as your wife said, will make people want to jump off a cliff. Please let people know where they can follow you and where they can learn all about your work.

Great. Yeah. So the first place is at YouTube, which is MedCram. So M-E-D-C-R-A-M. If you type that into YouTube, you'll get to our channel. And also for healthcare providers, for people that are interested in learning in school, and or for just people who want to know more about their medical condition or medical conditions in general, we have our website, MedCram.com, where we have continuing medical education, even lectures and courses for students at universities and things of that nature. Great.

Wonderful. Thank you so much. You made this very palatable and I'm only a little bit terrified. Thank you very much. It's my B.R.L.X. breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience Ph.D. or she was. And now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.

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