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The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
Wellness Unmasked: Microplastics in Your Body: Hidden Health Risks and How to Fight Back
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Dr. Nicole Safire
Welcome to Wellness en masse. I'm Dr. Nicole Safire, and today we're going to talk about a new study that is just revealing again, how many microplastics we are exposed to every single day. Now, the conversation about microplastics, this is not a conspiracy theory. This isn't some crazy futuristic conversation like, oh, one day maybe we'll learn about microplastics. No, absolutely not. Our exposure to microplastics, it's a real problem. And I'll be honest, I'm a little bit disappointed because the updated MAHA report, they mentioned it and all they said was, you know what we're going to do? We're going to put a lot of money into studying microplastics. I don't need any more studies because I'm telling you it's a problem. I'll break down for you guys briefly some of the studies that I'm talking about. And you tell me, do you think we should spend millions of dollars to study it more, or should we spend millions of dollars to try and decrease how much we consume? So this study that just came out in the last week, now mind you, this isn't some groundbreaking study. It's not brand new, but it's a new study, and it's a study out of the uk and they decided to look at a whole bunch of different beverages and they tested them. They wanted to see at the bottom of the beverages. So after they were consumed, you know, if it's tea or if it's coffee and there's still some grinds or whatever's left at the bottom. They tested that little bit of fluid leftover. It was about 155 samples of various different beverages all throughout UK supermarkets and coffee shops. They found microplastics inside every single one. And the contamination or the amount of microplastics in each varied. And so it actually does make a difference in what you are consuming. When most people hear the term microplastics, they're thinking like soda bottles breaking down in the ocean or the garbage on the side of the road. And somehow these particles are getting into everything. But no, no, no. The reality is far more unsettling than that. These studies are showing that tiny plastic particles, tiny, tiny, tiny plastic particles are entering our bodies through what we eat, what we drink, and even the air we breathe. They're showing up in places that really, we should all be flabbergasted at how many microplastics are in what we're consuming. So this study out of Birmingham looked at just beverages, and what they found was the highest amount of microplastics were in hot tea. Now, if you watch me on Fox and Friends, you follow me on social media, this is not breaking news to you because I've already told you about it. Teabags are one of the biggest culprits when it comes to exposure to microplastics. They also think when a beverage is warm, this causes the microplastics to kind of break off from wherever they are and enter into the liquid. So hot tea, you have the tea bag and it's hot. The amount of microplastics are the highest than any other beverage. There's another study. It took place, I think, in, like, 2024. It found microplastics in nearly 89% of healthy adults. These are just from regular blood samples. They take someone's blood, they looked at it under a microscope, and lo and behold, there's plastic in our blood. In fact, about 4 particles per milliliter of blood. And maybe that doesn't sound like a lot, but you have a lot more than a milliliter in your body circulating. And it's not like you're just being exposed once or twice to microplastics. This is cumulative. They're going to continue to grow in number as you live. So, again, it may sound small, but research are discovering that people with the higher levels, they also had more inflammatory markers in their blood. They also had higher risk of blood clotting. So it's pretty obvious that if you have plastic circulating in your blood, your blood and your body are like, what is this foreign body? We're going to send our inflammatory markers, our inflammatory cells. It's going to trigger the clotting cascade, which happens with inflammation, and you're going to have systemic inflammation and maybe an increased risk of clotting disorders. I mean, that's a problem. Another study further quantified it. So when I just say microplastics are bad, people are really trying to look at exactly how bad it is or what the number is. I personally don't care about the numbers. Microplastics are bad. The average load in this One study showed 1.6 micrograms of plastic per milliliter of blood. And that's made up of plastics from water bottles, polyethylene from, like, packaging materials. In other words, the same plast that hold our food and hold all of these other things together. It's just circulating in our bloodstream. It's pretty Scary. They looked at a placenta in 2021, they looked at various placentas and they found microplastic fragments in the placenta. So if a pregnant woman has microplastics in their blood, of course it's going to go through the placenta to get to the baby because that's exactly how babies get their nutrition and their blood, straight from the mother. Why do you think that the microplastics in the mother's blood aren't going to actually get there? So is it surprising that the placenta have plastics? No. In fact, that essentially saying that babies are getting microplastics exposed to them before they even take their first breath. But it's even more than that. So we've talked about just checking someone's blood, we've checked placentas, by the way, we've also done autopsies. Now, mind you, there haven't been a ton of autopsies looking at microplastics, but there have been some and some studies have reported on it. One of them, they were looking at the lungs, found an average of three microplastics particles per sample. When some much more than that. Again, I'm not going to get stuck on the numbers because I don't think the numbers matter. I just want to hear are there microplastics there or they're not. One thing that they found was they found microplastics again in the lung, also in the liver and in the kidneys. Now I'm not really surprised that these particles are depositing in the lungs because if you're breathing in things, we know that pollution, toxins, cigarette smoke, everything, as you breathe it in, it gets stuck into the lungs. And so that's why you see those pictures of like gross black lungs from smokers. Because, yeah, those toxins get stuck there. So if you're breathing in plastics, they're getting stuck there too. Your kidney and your livers, they are meant to filter your bloodstream. And so it does, it makes sense to me that you're going to find plastics in the liver, plastics in the kidney, because they're trying to filter it all out. Here's the thing that I found a little bit concerning and by a little bit concerning, I'm like, oh my gosh, hold the phone, alarms are going off. This one post mortem research study, meaning again on cadavers, people are already dead. It revealed that micro and nanoplastics, or you know, just small pieces of plastic can actually reach the human brain. This is a big deal. The brain is supposed to be protected by the blood, brain barrier. And not everything is supposed to get there. But what they found was there were 7 to 30 times more microplastics and brain tissue than in the liver and the kidneys. That's a problem. Liver and kidneys supposed to be filtering it out. But what's happening? Microplastics getting to the brain, staying in the brain. And then they took it step further because I guess you can argue, well, what's the big deal? Microplastics are just in the brain. If it's not causing a problem, then what's the big deal? Why not have microplastics in the brain? Okay, I guess we can talk about that hypothetical. But guess what? What they decided to do was they looked at the postmortem patients who had the microplastics in the brain, and yep, you guessed it. The patients who had a history of dementia had more microplastics in their brain. So what does this mean? I don't know. Well, we don't really have definitive answers about health outcomes. And you hear again, like Maha and other people saying, well, we're just going to study it some more to figure out what it is. But here's what I'm telling you. I'm telling you that we already have studies that show patients with dementia have more microplastics in their brain. We have blood studies showing that patients who have microplastics in their blood, which, let's be honest, it's. Most of us at this point have inflammatory markers, clotting disorders, or clotting cascades been activated when our whole goal is to try and decrease our risk of chronic inflammation. If we are continuing to consume these microplastics, all we're doing is putting microplastics into our bloodstream. It's getting deposited into our various organs, and it's increasing our risk of chronic disease. I mean, inflammation in itself is linked to diabetes and cancers and autoimmune diseases. Obviously, we've been talking a lot about dementia, but maybe it's. Maybe there will be a link to certain brain cancers. I guess that is one reason to study it. But my biggest concern is we can't wait 10 to 20 years to continue to study. We have to start taking some action now to do everything we can to decrease our exposure to microplastics. I mean, I can't even begin to think about how awful it was, how long it took for people to finally say, huh, you know what? Cigarette smoking, that's probably not good for us because it went for a couple of decades of thinking it was fine. In fact, there were even some commercials back in the day where it was recommended to help open up your lungs. We're still dealing with the consequences of that because of how detrimental it was for our human health. I don't want microplastics to be there. We're already behind. If you think that you don't have microplastics in your blood, you do. I'm sorry to tell you that, but you do. It's probably in your brain too. The best we can do at this point is everything we can to decrease any more microplastics that we are exposed to now. The reality is, can we ever get to a zero exposure of microplastics? No. Unless you're going to go live in a bubble and it can't be a, it can't be a plastic bubble. It has to be a glass bubble. But unless you are going to just go and live in Antarctica by yourself and have your own water supply and whatnot, you will always have some low level exposure. We have just become a society where we are incredibly dependent on plastic products. But there are some key things that you can do to absolutely decrease the amount of microplastics that you and your family are exposed to. Again, I'm not sharing this to just scare you, but I want to empower you. Because if I'm trying to do stuff in my own home, I like to share it with you. So again, we can't eliminate this exposure entirely, but we can reduce it. Some of the biggest ways we can decrease our exposure to microplastics, first and foremost. I know, but let's stop using tea bags. This breaks my heart. I love hot tea. I love hot tea in the morning, I love hot tea at noon and I love hot tea at night. I love the various herbs. But you got to tell you, plastic tea bags. Terrible. Absolutely terrible. And by the way, iced tea still has microplastics in it, but less than hot tea. So try to go with loose leaf tea. I know that gets a little cumbersome. What I have started doing at work because I used to have tea every single afternoon. I am known to have turmeric and ginger tea in the afternoon. I love it. It's a great way to kind of kick off the afternoon. Turmeric is naturally anti inflammatory. But so instead of the tea bag, I actually am using liquid herbs. It's nice that I actually happen to make tinctures that are liquid herbs. I didn't actually, when I created them, it didn't occur to me that I would be using them in this way. But as I have continued to learn more about microplastics, it has become my favorite thing is to now take liquid herbs and put them in hot water. And that is my new way of consuming herbal tea. You can have herbs that decrease your inflammation, give you energy, help calm you down. Whatever it is, you can try it with liquid herbs or just natural herbs. You can get herbs from the grocery store or again, loose leaf tea. And that's only if you're, if you're a tea drinker, coffee drinkers try not to use plastic cups, plastic tops. If you're going to your coffee shops and all of that, you have to know that all of those to go cups, they're all lined with some sort of plastic inside. So if you're putting a hot beverage in it. Yes. That microplastic particles are going to come off, you're going to drink it, it's going to get into your blood, and then it's going to sit in all of your organs for who knows, however long and who knows what it is going to do. So maybe bring your own stainless steel or glass bottle. Trying not to use those disposable bottles. And plastic bottles are obviously a big no no, especially if they've been sitting out in the sun or if they've gotten warm. Because the, as you warm up the plastic, it tends to have the little microplastic particles go into the liquid. Another big thing, stop microwaving things in plastic containers. Let's do it. Let's stop. Exact same concept. The heat accelerates the breakdown. It gets into the food and then you consume it. So put it into a glass, try and warm it up on the stove top. And also, this sounds kind of funny as well, but consider washing your synthetic clothing less often now. I have three boys. I can't. I cannot have them rewear things. But in that whole athletic athleisure wear that everyone's into these days, there is actually chemicals in it that are plastics that are being shown to stay on our skin and absorb that way. The reality is the skin is, is your biggest organ. You absorb a lot from your skin. So while we think of microplastic consumption as something we eat or drink, we also have to think about what we're putting on our bodies. Because whether it's your, your clothing, whether it's lotions, whether it's, you know, an oil you put on your body is absorbing all of this. So just check the ingredients before you stuff, put stuff on again. I'm not telling you to avoid everything, but, but I'm just saying we could all probably do a little bit better in reducing our exposure. And a big thing is, and it's also just a good thing in general is keep your air clean. So make sure you're changing your H vac filters regularly. I have a couple of air purifiers in rooms of my house mainly because one of my kiddos has pretty significant seasonal allergies. But microplastics are in the air from the pollution from car exhausts. And another thing that I thought was very random, but I thought of recently as I was preparing for this episode. You know that feeling when you get into your car and it's been hot and as soon as you open the door and you sit down inside, it almost smells like a little chemically little synthetic Y something going on there. Well, if that sounds familiar, you are right because again, if you have closed your doors, close your windows and your car has heated up, you have a lot of plastic in your car. So you're aerosolizing a lot of that plastic. So one thing that you can do, if it's not raining out, you can crack your window to try and let some of that airflow. And as soon as you get in the car, you can also roll down your windows and just try and kind of let everything escape the car. So I guess here's the takeaway. I would love to say that the government or whomever is going to start focusing on microplastics and push for smarter policies to really curb the whole single use plastics and all of that. But the reality is I don't think it's very high on their priority. And let's be honest, these single use plastics and utensils, they're cheap and, and it's going to take a lot of fighting with the industry to get rid of it. So all I can say is we can do things on our own to decrease our exposure and hopefully decrease the inflammation and the disease that is probably going to ensue from it. I guess my takeaway is just basically this, the plastic problem. It's not just some pipe dream that we hear about about keeping the ocean clean. It's actually just everywhere. It's in our blood, it's in our lungs, it's even in our brains. And as we continue to see more people diagnosed with cancer and dementia, and now is the time to take every step we can to limit exposure both individually but also collectively. Teach your kids, teach your friends. If your friends make fun of you for carrying a glass water bottle. The joke's on them because when it comes to microplastics, the evidence is clear. They're already in us. The question is, what are we going to do about it? Thanks for listening to Wellness unmass on America's number one podcast network, I Heart Follow Wellness unmasked with Dr. Nicole Safire and start listening on the free iHeartRadio app. Wherever you get your podcasts and we'll catch you next time.
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