Your Brain Is 0.5% Plastic (Here’s How to Flush It) : 1426

Summary

The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance

Episode 1426: Your Brain Is 0.5% Plastic (Here’s How to Flush It)
Host: Dave Asprey
Guest: Josephine Musco, Founder of Elixir T Strips
Date: March 5, 2026

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Main Theme

This episode dives deep into the pervasive problem of microplastics in the human body, especially their infiltration into the brain and their role in cognitive decline, weight gain, and overall health. Featuring guest Josephine Musco, the founder of Elixir T Strips, Dave and Josephine explore the science behind microplastic contamination, their sources (with a particular focus on common household items like tea bags), and proven strategies for minimizing exposure and accelerating detoxification.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Microplastics: Ubiquity and Health Impacts

• Invisible Threat:

  • Microplastics (5mm to 1 micron) and nanoplastics (below 1 micron) are everywhere and impossible to see with the naked eye.
  • "People cannot see them. ...They are not really associating the health symptoms that they are having with microplastics..."
    — Josephine Musco [05:36]

• Accumulation in Human Tissue:

  • Studies find microplastics in organs, blood, reproductive tissues, and brain tissue — up to 0.5% of brain mass may be microplastics.
  • “Like half a percent of your brain could be made out of microplastics right now.”
    — Dave Asprey [00:16], reiterated several times [06:56], [07:01]
  • Microplastics accumulate toxins from the environment and embed them in human tissue, causing chronic inflammation and risk for Alzheimer's, dementia, hormonal disruption, and reproductive issues [07:23].

• Plastics and Chronic Disease:

  • Microplastics and the chemicals within (like BPA, BPS) act as endocrine disruptors, increasing risk for obesity, cognitive decline, infertility, and heart disease.
  • “They found that these subjects that had the microplastics in the plaque of their carotid arteries had 4.5 more likelihood of having a cardiac event.”
    — Josephine Musco [06:36]

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2. Sources of Microplastics

• Everyday Consumables:

  • Tea bags: Steeping one bag releases ~11.6B microplastics and 3.1B nanoplastics into your cup [00:00], [11:07].
  • Coffee cups, plastic kitchenware, canned foods, water bottles, sea salt, seafood, even fitness and yoga apparel.
  • “240,000 particles of plastic per liter in water bottles. ...That's a crime, really.”
    — Josephine Musco [14:31]

• Manufacturing and Packaging:

  • Plastics in food and beverage packaging, personal care containers, clothing (esp. polyester/yoga wear), home goods, and kitchen utensils.
  • Even “BPA-free” alternatives may contain equally harmful substitutes [09:34].

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3. Weight Gain & Endocrine Disruption

• Plastics and Fat Storage:
  • Microplastics and associated chemicals (BPA/BPS) act like estrogen, disrupting hormonal balance and promoting fat storage.
  • They often are stored in fat tissue, making it harder to lose weight:
    “So microplastics are hormone disruptors. ...our body is so smart. So when we get the microplastics in our body, ...it stores it in the fat tissue.”
    — Josephine Musco [12:43], [12:52]

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4. Environmental Considerations & Solutions

• Insufficient Current Solutions:

  • Some mushrooms, bacteria, and other organisms digest microplastics but not at scalable levels yet [13:41].
  • Calls for policy measures (taxation on plastic packaging) and manufacturing innovation in sustainable packaging [14:17].

• Entrepreneurial Approach:

  • Josephine’s Elixir T Strips: Dissolvable tea strips made from tea powder and plant fiber, offering an alternative to plastic-laced tea bags [11:07], [12:12].

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5. How to Reduce Exposure

• Practical Substitutions:

  • Use glass/metal containers wherever possible.
  • Avoid heating/consuming food and drinks in plastics, especially with hot liquids.
  • Prefer natural materials for clothing, bedding, and home textiles (avoid polyester, “vegan” plastics in fashion).
  • For kitchen: Switch to wood or bamboo cutting boards, avoid non-stick and black plastic utensils.

• Water and Food:

  • Choose bottled water in glass over plastic and avoid canned foods lined with plastics [08:39].
  • Beware “eco” branded products — check for hidden plastics in sealing or coatings [18:24].

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6. Removing Microplastics from the Body (Detox Strategies)

• Dietary Approaches:

  • Increase intake of soluble fiber (inulin, mucilages, acacia gum) to bind microplastics and support their excretion [24:36], [25:00].
  • Probiotic-rich foods: Lactobacillus (yogurt) and specific strains (e.g., L. reuteri in kimchi) can reduce microplastics in blood up to 82% [25:00].
  • Polyphenol-rich herbs and foods (olive leaf, spices, teas, coffee, chocolate): serve as antioxidants and prebiotics, supporting gut flora and chelating toxins [28:19].
  • Chlorella, spirulina for additional chelation support [27:38].

• Physical Approaches:

  • Activate lymphatic/glymphatic systems:
    • Rebounding (mini-trampoline) or whole body vibration for 10 minutes morning/evening [27:03].
    • Sauna (hot or infrared) for sweating out fat-stored toxins — see tailored caution advice below [41:13], [42:32].
    • Lymphatic massage/drainage, hydration, post-meal walks [27:20].

• Notable Quote:

  • “You don't need to stress about it. You just want to take action to move yourself in the right direction and at the same time become stronger, more vibrant, better at detoxing.”
    — Dave Asprey [00:49]; closing remarks [61:01]

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7. Special Topics

• Fertility and Generational Impact:

  • Microplastics impact both male and female fertility, affecting hormonal development — particularly critical for boys during pregnancy and puberty [56:51], [57:20].
  • Advice: At least 3-6 months of detox and microplastic avoidance before conception for both parents [56:35].

• Skincare:

  • Avoid creams/serums in plastic containers, as microplastics absorb best in fats and can be absorbed transdermally [40:17].
  • Prefer minimal skincare, opt for oils in glass containers, and avoid fragrance and dyes [41:19].

• Fashion & Textiles:

  • Avoid synthetic fibers (“vegan furs,” polyester yoga/fitness clothes), especially in heated environments (hot yoga, etc.) [53:00].
  • Prefer natural leather, cotton, wool, or silk — these are less polluting overall and last longer [54:42].

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Microplastics in the Brain:

  • “They were even found in the brain, in postmortem brain tissue. ...0.5% of the brain tissue is made from microplastics.”
    — Josephine Musco [00:00], [06:45], [07:00]

• On BPA/BPS:

  • “Beware when you see BPA free. That doesn't mean it doesn't have some type of hormone disruptor.”
    — Josephine Musco [09:34]
  • “They're all petroleum byproducts. But BPA is a chemical that gets impregnated into the microplastics so they kind of ride together.”
    — Dave Asprey [09:13]

• On Detox & Sauna:

  • “If you're dumping that much fat, all the toxins have to go through your lymphatic system, your liver, your kidneys. And if you don't handle that, go into your brain.”
    — Dave Asprey [45:54]
  • “Drink the elixir lymphatic, and then do your sauna.”
    — Dave Asprey [47:03]

• On Tea Bag Industry Responsibility:

  • “Microplastics will be the next asbestos. ...It’s time to in your R&D department say, well, what would happen if we went back to maybe paper tea bags the way we used to?”
    — Dave Asprey [17:28]

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Important Timestamps

• [00:00-01:06] — Opening: Microplastic stats from tea bags; Introduction to topic
• [03:32-05:27] — Dave’s overview on plastics and body systems
• [05:36-07:23] — Josephine explains microplastic and nanoplastic sizes; health links
• [08:03-09:03] — Sources: Heating plastics, canned foods, effect on BPA in urine
• [11:07-12:22] — Josephine’s Elixir T Strips as a microplastic-free tea alternative
• [13:20-14:52] — Microplastics, weight, and potential environmental solutions
• [18:24-19:09] — Why paper tea bags are also often problematic
• [24:36-27:38] — How to detox microplastics: fiber, probiotics, specific herbs, and lifestyle
• [33:30-34:49] — Olive leaf, patent process, history, and antioxidant content
• [41:13-42:32] — Sauna, individual protocols, detox caution
• [45:38-47:08] — How toxins stored in fat are released during rapid weight loss and sauna
• [48:27-50:08] — Practical household hacks: Water bottle, glass vs. plastic, rugs, bedding
• [53:00-54:29] — Synthetic yoga clothes in hot environments; alternatives in organic workout wear
• [56:35-57:20] — Microplastic impact on fertility, especially in boys and during pregnancy

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Actionable Tips to Minimize Microplastic Harm

• Use glass or stainless steel for food and drinks—avoid plastic where possible, especially with heat
• Choose organic/natural fibers for clothes, sheets, and rugs
• Avoid canned foods, plastic-wrapped water/foods, nonstick cookware, and plastic kitchen utensils/cutting boards
• Increase fiber (especially acacia gum) and probiotic intake
• Support lymphatic/glymphatic movement: rebound, sauna, hydration, lymphatic teas, whole body vibration, massage
• For fertility or preconception, both parents should minimize exposure for several months prior

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Conclusion

This episode offers a thorough look at the hidden threat of microplastics to human health and presents both urgent and practical ways to reduce exposure and support detoxification. The conversation combines research, environmental activism, and entrepreneurial solutions — all delivered in Dave Asprey’s direct, actionable style, and Josephine Musco’s evidence-based, passionate advocacy for both personal and planetary health. It finishes on a note of empowerment and calm: avoid paralysis or doom, make practical harm-reduction choices, and fortify your resilience for longevity and vitality.

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Key memorable takeaway:
“You don't need to stress about it. ...Just take action to move yourself in the right direction and at the same time become stronger, more vibrant, better at detoxing...”
— Dave Asprey [61:01]

Transcript

[Josephine Musco]

Every single time you see a tea bag, it releases up to 11.6 billion microplastics and 3.1 billion nanoplastics in your cup. They were even found in the brain, in postmortem brain tissue. They are making, you know, 0.5% of the brain tissue is made from microplastics.

[Dave Asprey]

Like half a percent of your brain could be made out of microplastics right now. It's not just you have a microplastic. You have a microplastic embedded with all sorts of pesticides and things and then just causes inflammation.

[Josephine Musco]

Right? It's causing Alzheimer's, dementia, all kinds of mental cognitive decline. It's really affecting level which, you know, as we know, affects everybody. Men, women, children, adults, young adults.

[Dave Asprey]

Do you think microplastics make people fat?

[Josephine Musco]

They absolutely do. Lactobacillus have shown to decrease microplastics in blood by 82%. I am guessing that they will help break down the microplastics and help the body get rid of it.

[Dave Asprey]

You don't need to stress about it. You just want to take action to move yourself in the right direction and at the same time become stronger, more vibrant, better at detoxing. You're listening to the human upgrade with Dave Asprey.

[HeartMath Narrator]

Poor recovery speeds up aging. When you don't recover from stress properly, your cells get weaker and accumulate damage. Heartmath changes that the inner balance coherence plus trains your body to recover at the source your nervous system. The setup is pretty simple. You connect a sensor to your ear that pairs to the heartmath app, which guides you through an HRV exerc. In five minutes a day, your body shifts out of stress mode and into coherence, the state where recovery, focus and peak performance happen. Most devices only track recovery. Heartmath trains it. It works by targeting heart rate variability, or hrv, your body's most reliable marker of resilience. Higher HRV means faster recovery, deeper sleep, and stronger performance. Decades of science prove that heartmath works. Over 400 studies show measurable results in as little as six weeks. That means less anxiety, better sleep, more energy, and sharper focus. That's why elite athletes, hospitals, and the US Military all use the interbalance coherence plus. This is one of the things I think everyone should be doing. Don't just track recovery. Train it to get 15% off. Go to heartmath.com Dave Modern life keeps your nervous system in overdrive. Most solutions try to change your brain chemistry, but your body also runs on electrical signals and rhythms. Your brain uses electrical waves, your heart beats in patterns, and your nervous system sends signals through tiny pulses. Light and sound are also forms of energy your body can sense. Scientists have studied them for decades because certain wavelengths and frequencies influence how cells and nerves resp. That's why I use the One Device. It combines light and sound in a wearable. It sends gentle signals your body can respond to while you work, meditate, or wind down. Most wearables just track stress. The One device supports your nervous system directly without any Bluetooth or emfs. People who wear it report sleeping more deeply and feeling calmer, more focused, energized, and grounded. It's wearable frequency support you can use all day long. Learn [e-mail] Dave.

[Dave Asprey]

This is the first episode of the Human Upgrade, recorded here outside the hills of Austin, Texas, where I've got a new studio under construction. So you can see if you're watching. Behind me is, well, a big screen, but it's going to get cooler and cooler. And this episode is about microplastics. Microplastics are one of the many contaminants that are affecting human biology. And we've known about these for quite a while. And even going as far back as my fertility book in 2011, like, you might want to have less plastic on you, and one side of plastics is you don't want plastic clothing because it has effects on your electrical current in the body and it basically affects the electrical portion of your being. And if I say that and it kind of makes you say what? Well, here's the deal. You are simultaneously a chemical being, pretty clearly, and a biochemical being, which means you use enzymes to make chemistry work better. And you're simultaneously magnetic, vibrational, which includes sound, light based, magnetic based, electrical based, quantum based. All of those systems are active in your body at the same time. And so if you mess with one of them, you got a problem. But it gets much worse when you start taking this plastic and putting it inside your body. So I brought in an expert in one of the top sources of microplastics, which probably isn't what you might expect. And we're going to talk about what you can do about that. Named Josephine Musco, and she's the founder of Elixir T strips, which is a way to solve one of the many sources of microplastics. We'll go deep on all these. Josephine, welcome to the show.

[Josephine Musco]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Dave Asprey]

When you look at the fact that microplastics are like in brains and organs and Blood in, like, reproductive stuff. What do you think people still don't understand about them?

[Josephine Musco]

People cannot see them. So microplastics and nanoplastics. Microplastics are from 5 millimeters to 1 micron, and nanoplastics are below 1 micron. To put that in perspective, at 5 millimeters to 1 micron is the size of a sesame seeds and down to the point where you cannot see with the naked eye, and one micron, which is nanoplastics, you cannot see them with naked eye. It really involves some advanced tools to look at it and see those particles. So that's number one. Number two, they are not really associating the health symptoms that are having with microplastics because it's not something that they are used to. So that, you know, we know we catch a cold, we have a cold symptoms, but they don't know that infertility, inability to lose weight on all the other things are caused by microplastics. Like, for example, they just found micro nanoplastics in the plaque of the carotid arteries. And they found that these subjects that had the microplastics in the plaque of their carotid arteries had 4.5 more likelihood of having a cardiac event.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow.

[Josephine Musco]

They were even found in the brain in postmortem brain tissue. They are making, you know, 0.5% of the brain tissue is made from microplastics.

[Dave Asprey]

It's like half a percent of your brain could be made out of microplastics right now.

[Josephine Musco]

That is correct.

[Dave Asprey]

And microplastics don't behave like normal fats in the brain.

[Josephine Musco]

They don't. And they're finding that in post mortem. Wow.

[Dave Asprey]

Brain tissue microplastics also accumulate toxins from the environment preferentially. So it's not just you have a microplastic. You have a microplastic embedded with all sorts of pesticides and things that becomes a part of the brain and then just causes inflammation. Right.

[Josephine Musco]

It's causing Alzheimer's, dementia. Wow. Mental cognitive decline in people. It's also, you know, as we know, it's crossing the blood brain barrier, but it's also causing the blood testicle barrier and the blood follicular barrier. And it's. It's really affecting testosterone level, which, you know, as we know, it affects everybody, men, women, children, adults, young adults. So we are, you know, there's a lot of health concerns that we are seeing caused by microplastic contamination that is not really brought out to the surface.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow. So it seems like the reproductive act May just be like 3D printing at a certain point. Because all this coming if we keep

[Josephine Musco]

it up with the plastics. Yeah. You know, the thing is, so that the bigger particles, the microplastics, the 5 millimeter ones aren't as bad, but the smaller ones, which are the nanoplastics, which are caused by heating plastic up, which is, you know, the cups, you to go cups, your tea bags, your cookware, where the plastic is really heated high and the nanoplastics are getting very, very small. That's when they are being able to cross the barriers and really get into our bloodstream. The other, other really big one is can soup. I don't know if you heard.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, yeah.

[Josephine Musco]

So if they. They found that if people had one can soup per day, over the course of five days, their urinary BPA increased by a thousand percent.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow. So maybe canned soup is a bad idea.

[Josephine Musco]

They're pasteurized too. Yeah, they're lined with plastic. The cans are lined with plastic. And then they're pasteurized or whatever to prevent them. To make them, you know, last long on the shelf.

[Dave Asprey]

What's the difference between BPA and microplastic?

[Josephine Musco]

Microplastics are in bpa, it's all the same. It's actually all petroleum biochemicals. Like, it's all petroleum byproducts.

[Dave Asprey]

They're all petroleum byproducts. But BPA is a chemical that gets impregnated into the microplastics so they kind of ride together. You can get BPA without getting a microplastic. Right. It's a endocrine disruptor.

[Josephine Musco]

And there's bps, too.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, and bps and BPA free. So we found an even worse BP to stick in there.

[Josephine Musco]

Yeah. So beware when you see BPA free. That doesn't mean it doesn't have some type of hormone disruptor. Yeah, it will have bps.

[Dave Asprey]

One of the things that I've done for many years when I became aware of the microplastics in coffee cups, I'm kind of a coffee guy, and I brew my own coffee. I travel with danger coffee, and I bring a metal insulated container and I'll go into. One of my favorite coffee shops is Starbucks, surprisingly, because they have good water filters. And I don't drink the coffee because that would be gross. But what I do is, hey, can I have some hot water? And most of them will just fill my mug. But thanks to Covid, a few places like, no, we'll only give it to you in one of our nasty paper cups full of microplastics. So I'm like, I don't really want that. So what I do now is I travel with a little plug in heater and I boil the water in my metal container with a little plug in heater that I don't have to go to Starbucks.

[Josephine Musco]

That's amazing.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. And then I'll brew the coffee. But I used to just say, well, I'll have tea because I'm not drinking that, you know, green label coffee. But the tea bags, I've known for, I don't know, 10, 15 years, I think. I posted about it a while ago on Instagram. Those little mesh bags are bad news. So I would cut it open and dump the tea out, but then tea's all over the place. It doesn't work.

[Josephine Musco]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

So I know about the tea bags and the coffee cups, but when you're traveling, like, there's just no way to make good tea. And then you came to me and said, I have a solution. What did you do to solve this problem? Because those, those teabags are a massive source.

[Josephine Musco]

Yeah. As a matter of fact, every single time you steep a tea bag, according to Magellan University, it releases up to 11.6 billion microplastics and 3.1 billion nanoplastics in your cup. Plus bleach, epicloridrine, cadmium, all kind of other heavy metals. So I found that out also about 10 years ago or 12 years ago. And that's when I started my journey to create the solution. And so what I do is I take the tea leaves, dry them, and grind them in fine powder. And that powder is made to a strip, and you put the strip in water, it dissolves completely. There is nothing to put in the cup, there's nothing to remove, and there are no leaching of chemicals whatsoever.

[Dave Asprey]

It's pretty remarkable. We were making a cup for my daughter, and you have all kinds of different flavors, including the olive leaf, which has its own whole bunch of benefits. The olive leaf polyphenols have been in two of my books for longevity and cognitive function. So. But it's kind of neat. You just take this thing. It's like a very thin syrup. You just drop it in, it goes poof. So you can't have just tea leaves and other herbals in there. What holds it together?

[Josephine Musco]

Plant fiber.

[Dave Asprey]

Plant fiber. So you get a little bit of prebiotics in there. And this solves the problem. You can have tea when you're traveling. It's more affordable than buying tea somewhere. And all you need is hot water

[Josephine Musco]

right there's nothing to fuss around with. You don't have a tea vac to like, figure out what to do. Especially, like, who are active people, like hikers and whatever. Like, where are they going to put the tea bag? Most of them tell me they put it in their bag, in their, in their pocket or something, all soggy. So that's another issue.

[Dave Asprey]

Do you think microplastics make people fat?

[Josephine Musco]

They absolutely do.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay. I believe in.

[Josephine Musco]

So microplastics are hormone disruptors. They mimic estrogen, and so that, that's gonna control the way you gain and hold on to fat. And the other thing is our body is so smart. So when we get the microplastics in our body, what it does doesn't know what to do with it. So it stores it in the fat tissue. And you have this fat tissue that's made out of fat and microplastics. It's like the ocean strata right now. It's made out of plastic. So when people are trying to lose weight, they can't really lose the plastic. It's lodged into our fat tissue. And that's, I think, a, a big problem.

[Dave Asprey]

It's getting worse and worse. And when you realize that, you know, half of seafood is full of microplastics too, you start saying, I'm going to eat less of that. And then some of the sea salt is full of microplastics. Is there an environmental solution? I'm asking, as you're a biodynamic farmer

[Josephine Musco]

and winemaker as well, to microplastics in the environment?

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. What are we going to do?

[Josephine Musco]

There are some microscopic things that have been found to digest microplastics, and there are some mushrooms that have been found to digest microplastics. But there's nothing that has been created at such a scale to combat the amount of microplastics and plastics in general that we have outputted as humanity over the last few decades in the environment.

[Dave Asprey]

I thought about just feeding them to, like, the politicians at the EPA who are approving these in the environment. Just so that you just take them, concentrate them and just feed them to the politicians. Do you think that's a good idea?

[Josephine Musco]

I think, I think what we should do, I think what the politicians should do, there should be serious taxes on everything that contains plastic. So people like, you know, water, bottled water.

[Dave Asprey]

So it's terrible.

[Josephine Musco]

240,000 thousand particles of plastic per liter in water bottles. That's, that's, that's a crime, really. Those should be taxed. Those should be taxed. Really Heavily because those taxes should be taken to pay for the health issues that they are causing and for environmental cleanup. I think high taxes on, on the stuff could be the answer.

[Dave Asprey]

The other thing that's come to mind is we need innovation in packaging. And even your, your outer packaging is fully compostable and not plastic. Even though it looks like plastic.

[Josephine Musco]

Yeah, some of them, yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay. Some of, not all of them. And as an entrepreneur, there's plastic in my bottles and I don't know what to do about that because when I make glass bottles, I still have plastic lids. And the glass bottles cost about 9 to $10 more at the, at the shelf because of the weight and the breakage. And I don't know how to fix that, but the industry can fix it when we all do it or we all come out with better things. So I'm investigating those as well. So every entrepreneur wants to do this, but we have, the structures are set up so it's very difficult. And we know recycling is possible. It's not happening, but it doesn't happen very much.

[Josephine Musco]

But like I said, you know, microplastics, as long as, not the plastic, as long as it's not getting heated at like the 95, 75 degrees centigrade, it's not as fatter, is not matching as much as it would do if it was, you know, in your paper cup and your tea bag and all that

[Dave Asprey]

cooking stuff like having pills in a bottle, it's not going to create microplastics until the bottle ends up in the

[Josephine Musco]

ocean or if it's sitting in hot trucks, for example, which is not advisable for supplements, obviously.

[Dave Asprey]

So, yeah, we do temperature controlled, except on the delivery route. And even then there isn't. It's not a liquid, so it's going to work. But what I've been thinking for years is we have an easy solution to microplastics that's called incineration. And if you have, you know, 3,000 degree heat and you burn plastic in that, you get almost no environmental pollution other than ash, which you can concentrate and put in barrels and just put it next to nuclear waste. So we need to not allow plastic to leave without it being burned at high temperature with scrubbers, because it's worse to have microplastic in the environment than to have some carbon from burning it. It's the only solution I come up with, or turn it into, into fuel, which we can do. But right now those are early technologies and they're just no incentive to do it. So I'm hoping We really fix that. The other way is entrepreneurial, like you saying, well, let's choose one of the major sources, which is these tea bags, and then let's just come up with something that works better. So thank you for doing that. I just appreciate the levels of ethics that went into making elixir.

[Josephine Musco]

Yeah. I mean, there are 5 billion tea bags consumed annually on the global level.

[Dave Asprey]

My God.

[Josephine Musco]

So if we can make a dent in those 5 billion tea bags, that's going to make a huge environmental impact on.

[Dave Asprey]

And so here's the deal. If you run a large company that makes tea bags, and I know there's a lot of big company execs and doctors and. And leaders who listen to the show and thank you, seriously, you're no longer allowed to use a fine plastic mash, even though it looks cool to put in your cool triangle tea bags and all that. It's actually out of integrity for humans. And there probably. And your insurers are listening to this too. There probably are liability concerns at the board of directors level that you want to pay attention to because microplastics will be the next asbestos. So now that we know this and the science is very clear, it's time to in your R D department say, well, what would happen if we went back to maybe paper tea bags the way we used to? Now paper teabags are clearly better, but there's some limitations on paper tea bags. Talk about those.

[Josephine Musco]

So paper teabags will, you know, will have a few things. So number one, I'm gonna just give you a very realistic example. If you go to the printer and you get a piece of paper and you put it in your cover, first of all, you drink that. I don't think so. I would not drink that. But the other thing is, what happens to that piece of paper? It will disintegrate. So every tea bag has to have some type of a treatment so it does not burst in water. So I don't really believe in clean paper tea bags. Plus, you have the ceiling that crimp that you see around on the side of the teabag. That's definitely achieved with plastic. I have not found one.

[Dave Asprey]

They're putting plastic when they crimp them. They don't just.

[Josephine Musco]

That's the way to close to seal the teabag. And that's, you know, after all the research I've done, I just think the concept of putting a foreign object that's not meant for human consumption, such as paper or even fabric, like you have the muslin tea bags that all the indie people Right now are doing and you know, it's just gross and you know, bleached. That's why it's bleached. So that bleach is not going to go anywhere. You know, vapor and fabric are not originally white, you know, they're tan in color. So they bleach them to make them more appealing to the consumer. And that bleach is not going anywhere. Just like a bleach that is in your clothes. Like would you, would you bleach your clothes? Because you know you wouldn't. I would use them, put them on your, on your skin and then you can smell it. You can smell it and it's going to go on your skin because our skin is our large organ. So I just think it's time for the tea bag to say bye bye, to go away and to be replaced by something more wholesome and more better for us and for the planet. I'm not, you know, I know it's not going to happen overnight, but you know, it should be something that we just give up. It's been the status quo for a long time. It has never been questioned and I'm just shocked. I'm shocked that all of these companies are willingly poisoning billions of consumers every single day and just going to sleep happily on there.

[Dave Asprey]

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[Josephine Musco]

Yes, there are a lot of ways to get them out of the body. You, There are several foods that you can eat. So first of all, you want to up your fiber intake, your soluble fiber intake, 25 to 30 gram, even 50 gram. You have your inulins, you have your mucilages, you have your. So you know, some infectants.

[Dave Asprey]

Acacia gum.

[Josephine Musco]

Acacia gum, Another good one. You have the lactobacillus in yogurt.

[Dave Asprey]

And there's studies on all this.

[Josephine Musco]

Yes. And there's El Roteri in kimchi. Actually, Dr. Vasilis have shown the decrease microplastics in blood by 82% is just

[Dave Asprey]

because they're making you have a healthier lining in your gut. So they can't get in. Or how does that work?

[Josephine Musco]

I think both. But also they help break it down. I'm not sure how the actual mechanism, but I am guessing that they will help break down the microplastics and help the body get rid of it. Well, with the fiber, it actually attaches to the microplastics and helps it come out and.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. Preventing absorption.

[Josephine Musco]

Yes.

[Dave Asprey]

And people who are longtime listeners probably remember from my longevity book, I came up with a formula that used primarily acacia gum, which is a prebiotic fiber.

[Josephine Musco]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

And it has very little flavor. You can put it in your coffee or your tea or your smoothie, it doesn't really matter. And I quadrupled the number of gut bacteria and the number of species of gut bacteria in three months doing that, which is correlated with longevity. And since this also protects you from microplastics, it's like an added bonus.

[Josephine Musco]

Is that some. Is that a product that's on the market or should you buy in acacia.

[Dave Asprey]

I don't make it anymore. So you can just buy acacia gum fiber, which is a tree SAP. And it's it's easy to do and it doesn't cause farting like inulin because yeah, if you take a lot of inulin, man, you might feel that.

[Josephine Musco]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

You have to work your way up on it. There's also a couple studies showing that inulin in a meaningful number of people actually irritates the gut lining and in others it doesn't do that. So you gotta notice when I was testing inulin, at least for me, I found that when I added a meaningful amount via Jerusalem artichoke extract, I put on like 20 pounds of bloating in a week. And I was like, ah, this is not the right one for me. And so it's, that's like a double edged sword. But many people tolerate it and it can be good. But okay, so upping those things just to bind it and help the gut bacteria so they're better.

[Josephine Musco]

There's also like keeping your glymphatic system activated.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Josephine Musco]

Like we have two teas that are focused on the lymphatic system, on the glymphatic system that have herbs that keep it, you know, activated. Rebounding in the morning, like 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the evening. Just keeping your glymphatic system really moving is great.

[Dave Asprey]

Proper hydration, you can even do lymphatic massage, lymphatic drainage. You go to an upgrade labs. We use a whole body vibration which has a similar but faster effect than rebounding. Going for a walk after meal would be a really good idea anyway to reduce blood glucose and to increase lymphatic circulation.

[Josephine Musco]

Having muscles, having muscles works. Chlorella spirulina. Olive leaf. Olive leaf actually most understated and most underutilized nature's medicines. It's the biggest gift nature has given us. I mean I studied, you know, I have a patent on olive leaf powder that I use in my teas and it's, it's, it has 26,215 micrograms of polyphenols per 1 gram of olive leaf. Yeah. And that's as you know, antioxidants, polyphenols are free radical scavengers. So they're going to attach to anything that's not good for you in the body and just help the body get rid of it.

[Dave Asprey]

Polyphenols are foundational in my cognitive enhancement book, which is how to strong and then in my longevity book because they're, they're fascinating, these colored plant based compounds. Number one source is actually coffee in the US diet anyway, but colored plants have Some. And herbs and spices and teas have way more. So if you want superfoods, you actually look at herbs, spices, teas, coffee, even chocolate as real superfoods, as opposed to something like kale or, you know, some kind of colored potato. Like it's just not a cowgirl. And. And then polyphenols are interesting because, well, they're colored compounds and color compounds receive light. And what we're finding is they have an effect because of photobiology. And we're also finding that most of them work via two pathways. They work via the antioxidant direct pathway, but the other one is they get digested as prebiotics. So your gut bacteria see this olive leaf polyphenol and it changes the composition of your gut bacteria to be more beneficial. So you're getting this double benefit. And as far as I'm concerned, the more polyphenols you get from a variety of polyphenols, the better off you are. So, yeah, I get my primary source probably from coffee, but I do about a tablespoon or two per day of ground up oregano, rosemary, marjoram and thyme, which have a lot of, a lot of evidence, probably yarrow is something I keep meaning to add because it has a lot of polyphenols. And you get into olives. Now olives themselves have some polyphenols, but not that many. And olive leaf is like the most powerful. A lot of people seem like grape seed and grape skin. In fact, I've done an episode with Vinya about those. And the sister molecule to that would be olive leaves. And olive leaves are industrial waste. Otherwise, unless they are. So how do you turn an olive leaf into a polyphenol rich supplement? That seems hard.

[Josephine Musco]

It's actually I developed a patented process to do that with the USDA in Berkeley. They gave me a credit agreement. That was my first gig right out of college. So I take the leaves and you know, I take the leaves from the tree. There are specific times to have the leaves, which actually is the ideal time to have the leaf which is pruning and harvest. That's when the highest amount of lipoles are found in the leaves. And then I run them through a very gentle and eco conscious drying process actually. And that stimulates the production of antioxidants in the leaves, then stabilizes it because as we know, antioxidants are very delicate creatures and they don't do well with like light, temperature, you know, humidity. So those polyphenols are stable in the final powder after the process, the Pattern process and then I grind them into a fine powder and there you have it as super potent antioxidant powder. That's antimicrobial, antiviral, all kinds of different. You know that. You know also that olive leaf has been found to cure herpes.

[Dave Asprey]

And I did not know about that,

[Josephine Musco]

but yes, there's a lot of literature on that.

[Dave Asprey]

Amazing. I kind of laugh at people who freak out about herpes. Whether it's, you know, cold sores or the other kind of herpes, it is so eminently curable without drugs that it's just not scary anymore. Between what you just shared about olive leaf and something called bht, which is actually an industrial antioxidant that you don't want to have at micro doses, but if you have a breakout, you can take about 350mg of BHT in a capsule and then magically, it doesn't matter if it's chickenpox or any of the other conditions associated with it, or if it's any of the kinds of herpes, within three days, the lesions dry up and go away because it directly inhibits viral replication. So if you're listening to this and you have a cold sore, you might want to get some olive leaf containing tea. And you might want to get some bht. And BHT at low levels is an endocrine disruptor. At exceptionally high levels, like half your body weight, it's associated with cancer. And at the dosing I'm talking about, it has a use for 40 years of absolutely stopping any of the pox virus families, including herpes, right in its, in its tracks. So that's our little masterclass on herpes and getting good quality olive leaf. I mean, you invented the process for how to do that, which is super cool. And if I was to just go pick some olive leaves and put them in hot water, it's not the same thing. Or is it?

[Josephine Musco]

It's great. Just as long as they're fresh, as fresh as possible.

[Dave Asprey]

Would I get the same dose?

[Josephine Musco]

Would you get. No, because I. The process actually creates more antioxidants in the fresh leaves and then it stabilizes it.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay, got it. So if you were to take whatever, five olive leaves and put them in a bitter tasting tea, you're going to get some and you're going to get what, 10 or 20 times more in an elixir stroke?

[Josephine Musco]

Probably.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay, got it. It might be hard to quantify because there's a lot of things there.

[Josephine Musco]

I did that patent like over 10 years ago, so I don't have all the, all the exact details, but it is a pretty surprising and considerable amount higher than fresh leaves.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay, cool. In your lymphatic formula. And again, lymphatics are really important for getting rid of microplastics. And we didn't mention sauna, which is a part of getting rid of microplastics. But in your formula for lymphatics, you have an interesting ingredient. And Tim Ferriss has been on the show a couple of times. In fact, his first time was before he started his show. He's a friend and he mentioned that his favorite nootropic of all time is yerba mate. And you've included that for lymphatic uses, why?

[Josephine Musco]

I found it to be a good herb for. For the lymphatic pro stimulation.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay. Are there studies about that?

[Josephine Musco]

There are a lot of studies. So everything that you see, all of my teaspoon, all of the plans, everything that I do, I do extensive amount of studies and research before I formulate them.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay. What did you study at Berkeley if you're doing like USDA and stuff like that?

[Josephine Musco]

You know what? I actually have a master's in business and then I'm a scientist by trade.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, no.

[Josephine Musco]

Okay. I got into the USDA lab and got trained by the top scientists in the country on how to do science.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, that's so cool. So wait, are you allowed to do science without. Without like a permission slip?

[Josephine Musco]

Yeah. So, so basically I got a credit agreement, right. So I can actually work on my own project. And while you're working. So the credit agreement is the government actually finances your studies.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow.

[Josephine Musco]

And they give you the ability to work in their labs and you're working with all these scientists and you are learning from all of these. I mean, there are. That lab has the top scientists in the country, hand down.

[Dave Asprey]

And it's funny, I'm sort of asking tongue in cheek because every now and then you'll get someone who says you can't do science without some sort of piece of paper that's ill defined. And like we all learned the scientific method in about sixth grade, which is you observe, you form a hypothesis, you test. And so everyone who knows the process is a scientist. And some people are better at mass spectrometry or big data analysis. But you are a scientist in your own life. And if you don't believe me, like, we can talk about like punching yourself in the face. You've observed that that hurts. You made a hypothesis that that hurts. You did it again, maybe accidentally and it hurt again. You tested your hypothesis and now you're reasonably certain that it's true there. You're a scientist, like it's not that hard. And so anytime someone is out there saying, I've noticed this thing and it's observable and it's testable and you'll, you'll find like that I have a PhD license to insult you personally. I call this the Biolane effect. Well, doesn't mean the person not scientists. It just means that the person who's attacking them is just child traumatized, bullying kind of stuff. So they don't offend me.

[Josephine Musco]

They don't offend me. Actually, in a few years we're not going to need doctors, we're not going to need nurses, we're not going to need anybody. AI is replacing a lot of that. So what it takes is your ability to, like you said, observe and learn and use your judgment. You know, the scientists that were working with me at the USA lab, one of them that has been there for like two decades, actually wrote me a letter thanking me for including him on my project and including him on my patent. That was his first patent in his whole life as a scientist.

[Dave Asprey]

That's cool.

[Josephine Musco]

I don't, you know, and he's like, he's like quadruple scientist or something. Doctorate.

[Dave Asprey]

It's fascinating because the vast majority of the university researchers I spoke with, they're so curious and they're so passionate about the thing they're studying. And their frustration is that, well, no one knows about my research. Like, I wanted to get out there. I wanted to be in the world because it matters and it really matters to them. And some of the, like, my happiest conversations have been with, you know, PhD grad students and people saying, oh, like the world's finally discovering this cool thing. And all the research on polyphenols came out of those kinds of laboratories. And if you go back in time, so, you know, like the, the Greeks were eating olive leaves and we have this history of tea and spice trading around the world. Right? That's because polyphenol containing things like tea, coffee, mineral containing things like salt and these herbs. They were the original supplements, people. Right?

[Josephine Musco]

The original currency too. Yeah. They were used to trade. Actually. Olive leaf was used in the modification of the pharaohs.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, wow.

[Josephine Musco]

Because of its, you know, protective properties.

[Dave Asprey]

It's so cool that we're seeing ancient knowledge, things like yerba mate and the other ingredients you're using that have been a part of. Oh yeah, Guarana. We'll talk about that too, we're seeing these that have been known historically, whether it's from Ayurveda or it's from just ancient herbalist practices. And then we're doing all this university research to figure out how to make them more powerful, how to make them more effective and that they actually work and what they do at a level that we couldn't understand a thousand years ago because we didn't have the knowledge we do now. So I think this is kind of a golden age and with AI on top, it's amazing. Talk to me about guarana. This is another stimulating herb that you've got. So your lymphatic drainage is a morning formula, I'm guessing, because these are pretty stimulating things.

[Josephine Musco]

Yes. It is the number one herb that have been found to stimulate the lymphatic system.

[Dave Asprey]

No kidding.

[Josephine Musco]

Yeah. So you feel it right away.

[Dave Asprey]

What? Yeah, Corona is very, very potent. What is it?

[Josephine Musco]

It's a, it's very funny. It looks like an eye, it's like a, it's like a berry. It's like a fruit from the Amazonian forest. And it's super unique. You know, it's, it's just very, very potent and very powerful and it's only found, I think, in the Amazon forest.

[Dave Asprey]

As far as I understand that's the case. And, and it used to be pretty common in pre workout formulas because it's pretty stimulating. So if you take one of your lymphatic drainage things, you do that in the morning, probably with coffee, and you're like, I have a pretty good day.

[Josephine Musco]

Right. To conquer.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Josephine Musco]

What we like to do in the morning is drink a tongue scrape first because that's a, you know, we know that the mouth is the entryway to our digestive system and the lymphatic system. So tongue straight, have a cup of room temperature water and then have your cup of lymphatic cleanse amt and really you're ready. You know, you're after rebounding for 10 minutes.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay. Yeah. That's going to be quite the morning. Can we talk a little bit about skin care?

[Josephine Musco]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

I mean, obviously you're, you're doing some good stuff for your skin. It looks great.

[Josephine Musco]

Thank you.

[Dave Asprey]

Microplastic exposure through the skin. What's the deal with it?

[Josephine Musco]

So our skin is our largest organ.

[Dave Asprey]

Yep.

[Josephine Musco]

And the sad part is that people don't understand that. And you have people at Sephora right now. You have like 40% of shoppers are between the age of 12 and 16 year old. And it's sad. It's crazy, but skincare contains a lot of chemicals and it's also stored in plastic containers. And all of that is actually ending up in your skin, on the skin and in the bloodstream. And, you know, it's. It's a major source of microplastic ingestion as well. I personally have zero skincare regimen. I wash my face with organic Casti soap. Even if I'm at a hotel or whatever, I just use any soap, any shampoo that I have and I wash my face with it. What I do is I do a lot of exosomes and microneedling.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Josephine Musco]

But. But yeah, I stay away from all skincare. Like, no exceptions.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow, that's an unusual.

[Josephine Musco]

I use some ayurvedic oils. Like I'm have a dry skin. They're in glass bottles that I know. You know, who created them. I like to buy them from actual herbalists.

[Dave Asprey]

Super cool.

[Josephine Musco]

But yes, no skincare.

[Dave Asprey]

It's. It's kind of funny. Microplastics absorb best in fats. And if you have fats and water emulsified, which is what most skincare is, and they're in plastic, you are going to get some microplastics and they can absorb through the skin. So glass packaging is definitely better. I use a variety of skincare products and many are in glass and some aren't. And I also think, you know, risks versus benefits. So I have a microplastic removal regimen like sauna and things like that, and

[Josephine Musco]

tell us about it. I want to hear about your microplastic regimen.

[Dave Asprey]

It's. I use the whole body vibration stuff for lymphatic movement, and I do saunas regularly and then I don't absorb them very much.

[Josephine Musco]

Talk about saunas. How many. There's a lot of confusion about sauna use, temperature, how much, how much time you want to be in the sauna, how many days a week. So can you tell us about your regimen, please?

[Dave Asprey]

Well, this is the cool thing. If I took you downstairs, I will after this and I showed you my vitamin room and he said, oh my gosh, I want to take everything you take. I spend about three grand a month on supplement. You would probably not get the good results because we're entirely different biologically. So the answer for almost every biohack out there today is it depends on you. It's like, what's your goal and what's your current state and what are your capabilities? So I don't make very much glutathione, so I take more glutathione because I know my body doesn't have the genes. Even if I do everything in my environment, if I don't have the hardware to do it, I'm just going to be deficient. So my detox pathways don't work as well unless I handle that. So that's a big caveat to say there is no single sauna protocol that works well for everyone. And epidemiology loves to do this. Like, well, we looked at a million people and when they do this, there's this big, nice curve in the middle of the curve. This is what everyone should do. Well, that doesn't make sense because if you're someone whose biology is at either end of that curve, this will make you sick. And this is why you should not allow politicians and epidemiologists to ever make any law based on epidemiology, because it removes the care duality. Yeah. For the people who don't have normal biology and no one listening has fully normal. You might be totally normal here. And on this other variable, you're way off in this direction. This direction. So from a sauna perspective, there's great evidence for just plain hot saunas, whether it's steam or dry. And there's evidence for that because that's the technology that we had in Scandinavians who've been using this and doing studies for years. So some people say it has to be 198 degrees and you have to do exactly eight minutes and then do, you know, three jumping jacks in the snow or something. Okay, yes, there's evidence for that. The problem is that men and women respond differently to stress. And if you are very toxic and you do that, you'll be disabled for the rest of the day. Right. So what I like to do before going to the sauna is take activated charcoal or chlorella. And I do that ahead of time so that when my body releases more toxins that they'll be absorbed in the gut and make sure I shower off right away afterwards. There's plenty of evidence showing that infrared saunas, things like the sunlight, and they've been on the show multiple times, they cause a massive increase in detoxing because they're heating more inside the body. I haven't seen microplastic tests of regular sauna versus using an infrared sauna. But infrared saunas are much better for heavy metals and pesticides. Something like 95% more of these. So I use my sunlight, and in the morning I do at least 20 minutes and usually 40 minutes, and that's for my biology which is relatively clean. I used to be very obese. And something that no one talks about is, well, how much fat you have on your body. Because if we biopsied your fat, or say my fat when I was £300, you're going to find that the body is storing heavy metals, mold, toxins and microplastics. Exactly.

[Josephine Musco]

So, like, yeah, all the bad stuff.

[Dave Asprey]

So there's like, if you took a little tube of fat out and you looked at it, you're like, my God, this is terrible. So years ago, I published something called the Rapid Fat Loss Protocol. And I had a guy lose a pound a day for 75 days.

[Josephine Musco]

Wow.

[Dave Asprey]

On this protocol. And I've had people get ready for the weddings, but there's this huge warning thing on there. It says how to lose fat faster than you're supposed to. Because you can't really do this in mother nature. And if you're dumping that much fat, all the toxins have to go through your lymphatic system, your liver, your kidneys. And if you don't handle that, go into your brain. So people get profound brain fog if they don't follow exactly the protocol, which includes activated charcoal and glutathione every day in order to help with the excretion of these. So if you're that overweight person full of toxins the way I was, you probably don't want to do, you know, 40 minute or two 20 minute sauna sessions. And if it's a dry sauna, they'll be shorter sessions. You don't want to do that every day because you won't be able to handle it. So you do it maybe every two or three days. And as you become less toxic, as you get rid of these things, it's like a gentle detoxing. Otherwise, a wave of toxins in your brain. That's bad news. And it loads the kidneys. So it's like this gentle detoxing. And what with knowing what you shared about the ingredients in your lymphatic blend, it would make a lot of sense. Drink the elixir. Lymphatic. And then do your sauna.

[Josephine Musco]

Yes.

[Dave Asprey]

And probably then do some rebounding. Or would you rebound before the sauna?

[Josephine Musco]

I like to rebound first thing in the morning. Like you wake up your system with rebounding. You get out of. I have a rebounder ranks in my bed.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Josephine Musco]

Literally, I get off the bed and I rebound. I think it's a great way to just shake things up so the body can start. Pathways can open up and start detoxifying getting anything out.

[Dave Asprey]

There's a lot of other benefits. Either whole body vibration like we do at upgrade labs, or to rebounding. They're quite similar, but not identical. If you do that, in addition to the lymphatic pathways, you're also waking up the fascia, and you're causing something called a shearing force, which causes your body to keep your collagen in the right. In your fascia in the right condition so it doesn't get remodeled and get more fibrosis. So there's a lot of evidence that says, you know, it's not that hard. You could double down. You could have a red light therapy device. I do. So I'm like whole body vibing naked in front of my red light for just five minutes. It doesn't take very much. And then like, okay, now I'm, I'm good to go. And then you can hop in the sauna. I don't always do in that order, and I don't always do any of these every morning. But I do some mix of that. And number one, reduce exposure. So I don't do plastic soup. And I drink very, very little plastic bottled water these days. If I'm at an airport on a very long flight.

[Josephine Musco]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

And I can't find glass. Fine. You do what you can do.

[Josephine Musco]

You know, I have a hack for you.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, what's that?

[Josephine Musco]

If you take a bottle of water, sealed, like Evian or a mountain valley. Yeah, sealed. You tell them it's water grade. Is. Is a medical grade water bottle.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Josephine Musco]

They will let you go through with it. They just, like, test it and they will, like, that's what I do all the time.

[Dave Asprey]

So I could bring like, my San Pellegrino then?

[Josephine Musco]

Yeah. And then you just. As long as it's sealed, and you tell them it's. It's medical grade water and I need it on my flight. They will. You can go through.

[Dave Asprey]

I've got to try that. I'll bring like a six pack of San Pellegr.

[Josephine Musco]

No, just one at a time. When I think 1.

[Dave Asprey]

I don't want to be dehydrated, guys. And it. There is some conversation around whether glass bottles, because of the, the cap.

[Josephine Musco]

Right.

[Dave Asprey]

Have more microplastics. I am questioning those studies. Just from a surface area. It doesn't make any sense because why would we have more microplastics? Because the inside of the lid is actually plastic. It's not painted the way they said.

[Josephine Musco]

Somebody paid for that.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, that was the plastic bottle industry. As far as I can Tell. So glass bottles are still superior. However, if you are a manufacturer, like San Pellegrino slash Nestle. Oh, they make a lot of pasta bottles. They won't fix this, but maybe Mountain Valley would. So, yeah. Avion in glass. So what you would do there is just look at the lining of the lid. Just make one that doesn't have plastic in it or has the minimal plastic. And then you'll be able to have some marketing claims so you can say you're better than, you know, the garbage. Plastic water that's out there. So that was a big source that I've eliminated. Sometimes I'll use the water filter at the airport. Problem is, they never tell you how they filter it. It's. I don't trust it. Yeah, yeah. And then I don't have plastic rugs in my house. This is a huge source.

[Josephine Musco]

Yes.

[Dave Asprey]

So no carpet. And all my rugs are wool or silk.

[Josephine Musco]

Bed sheets.

[Dave Asprey]

Yep.

[Josephine Musco]

Bed sheets, furniture stuffing, the pillow stuffing. I'm sure.

[Dave Asprey]

You know, mattresses, latex mattress. I use an essentia mattress and actually designed one with essentia.

[Josephine Musco]

I was so jealous. I was like, ah, lucky.

[Dave Asprey]

And. And you just want to avoid these wherever you can. So polyester is a No. I stopped wearing my polyester thongs. I'm kidding. But I use wool or sometimes cotton. Organic cotton for underwear is very important because you have the most moisture and heat in those regions. Right.

[Josephine Musco]

It's a very, very vulnerable area.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. And then for clothing, throw away your fleeces. They're recycled plastic bottles. And running your dryer is a major source of microplastics, especially if you wear them. Since I don't generally wear them. I do have some things like that, but not that many. And nothing with, like, furry stuff on it. Except at Burning man, there's an exception. There's none in my environment. And that is the number one thing to do.

[Josephine Musco]

And I'm sure you don't have any nonstick cookware or black utensils. Black plastic utensils, yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

People don't talk about that as much. Those cheap black plastic utensils are microplastic directly. And plastic cutting boards, those are the

[Josephine Musco]

worst, by the way. Those are made from recycled electronics. And you're supposed to have the most lethal type of plastic in them.

[Dave Asprey]

And heavy metals are bad. So I'm going to be using wood whenever I can.

[Josephine Musco]

The pods, the plastic pods that go in the dishwasher and washing machines.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. There's microplastics in those things that dissolve and those chemicals do derive. There are healthy versions of pods available made out of some kind of fiber. But they're much. You have to buy like an eco brand for that. So here's the thing. You're not going to escape EMS in the world. And EMFs are terribly useful because you can have a phone, you can have access to all this stuff, but you don't want to bathe in them. So turn off your WI fi at night, you know, minimize things. You take your phone, put an airplane mode. All these things. Microplastics go the same way. So plastic is actually kind of useful. It lets us do all kinds of stuff. So minimize the use of things that form particles of plastic. I mean, you can never have plastic in your home, and you don't need to be paranoid. So increase excretion, use the elixir, lymphatic blend. Use all the stuff we just talked about, and then just take less of it in. And that's all it takes. Like, you can be peaceful about this and recognize it's a problem in the world. It's a regulatory problem, it's a behavioral problem. And then to the best of your ability, buy some stuff in glass or metal when you can. You know, you go into my kitchen, you're not going to find plastic containers. You're going to find metal and glass containers. But you know what they have? They have plastic lids, some of them.

[Josephine Musco]

As long as you're not putting it on when it's hot.

[Dave Asprey]

Exactly. You don't put on when it's hot, and you don't let the food touch the lid. So. Okay, I'm all right with that.

[Josephine Musco]

Yes, sure, sure. The other one is right now there is this, like, whole trend of, like, heated yoga and heated Pilates, and people are doing these classes in polyester, very tight workout curls. Like, you know, you have other yoga, lululemon, all that stuff. And that I believe is really needs to be addressed because that I cannot imagine the amount of microplastics that's going into the bloodstream from one hour of heated. Yeah, you know, just like switch over to organic. There's a lot of really good companies right now that are doing organic workout clothes.

[Dave Asprey]

You're totally right, because I don't really wear stuff like that. Yoga pants look pretty attractive. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna say that. That those outfits aren't actually really comfortable and perform it. And they wick and all that.

[Josephine Musco]

Thank you.

[Dave Asprey]

They're full of bpa. They're full of endocrine disruptors, and they disrupt the electricity flow over your body when you're supposed to be doing yoga for that kind of stuff. And because you combine heat and moisture, like, it's like a transdermal patch for microblasts.

[Josephine Musco]

Oh, yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

So problem is, especially for women, like, what are you gonna do for a sports bra that's gonna work when you're doing yoga? What are they? They're made out of cotton. Are they stretchy enough?

[Josephine Musco]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay, cool. I'm not an expert in there.

[Josephine Musco]

Yeah, there are, you know, really good organic, natural alternatives that are, you know,

[Dave Asprey]

starting to show up, and they have enough support. Because no one wants to fall out in a yoga class.

[Josephine Musco]

Yes. Yes.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay, cool.

[Josephine Musco]

Ask me.

[Dave Asprey]

I've been to a lot of yoga classes.

[Josephine Musco]

I need the most support.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay, got it. And you're also fashionable. In fact, you have a whole fashion brand. So do you ever use plastic or synthetic fibers in your fashion?

[Josephine Musco]

No. Our fashion is actually 100% either leather or metals. Precious. Semi precious metals. Stones, Gold, silver, copper, and a lot of stones. Gemstones, semi precious stones, Pearls, emeralds, rubies.

[Dave Asprey]

Love it. One of the things we were going to do, I was going to stage a fake demonstration. You know how these animal rights activists will throw red paint on fur?

[Josephine Musco]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

I was going to have my kids come out and throw motor oil on fake fur and be like, how dare you? You're killing the fish with your vegan fur. You're polluting the environment. And the reality is, vegan clothing is usually made out of plastic.

[Josephine Musco]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

Which is worse? Leather biodegrades. It lasts for 100 years.

[Josephine Musco]

It lasts a long time. It gets better with wear. That polyester stuff gets ruined with wear. Like, it doesn't look good. It creases, it cracks. Leather, you know, is amazing. It. It lasts forever. It gets better. And I don't think that the negative impacts from leather and fur is anywhere close to the negative impacts from the polyester clothing that's being produced. And it's all fast fashion, by the way. When you buy a leather jacket or a fur jacket, how much you pay for it? A lot. You're going to take care of it, you're going to use it for a long time. You're gonna pass it on. However, when you buy the fast fashion polyester stuff, you pay very minimal for it. You don't care about it most of the time. You're gonna wear it a couple times, you're gonna get rid of it, and it's just accumulating as a bio waste. And, you know, it's. It's all around a terrible cycle. The polyester clothing.

[Dave Asprey]

You're basically going to be eating the polyester clothes that you wear.

[Josephine Musco]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

50 years from now.

[Josephine Musco]

So because they end up in our, they end up in our soil, being up in our waters, in our oceans. 99% of fish tested found some type of microplastic in it. So it's, it's all going back in

[Dave Asprey]

our food chain and everything. We just said double down on that at least three months before you're planning to get pregnant for both the father and the mother, if you're interested in fertility, because this really affects the health of the next generation too. So it's, it's a big deal.

[Josephine Musco]

Especially for boys, by the way, because women, we, you know, we change. The, the egg is continuously being renewed. But for men it's much more critical. If a mom is pregnant and she has a boy, she has to be so much more careful with her macroplastic intake. And the other critical time in the boy's lifetime is during puberty. These are very important times to be aware of microplastics.

[Dave Asprey]

Now this is a strange biohacking fact that probably only I would know because I spent five years researching a fertility book so that I could. Happy children. There's a measure, basically the spacing between your butthole and the beginning of the reproductive tract. And when there's more microplastics, when there's more endocrine disruptors, the, the spacing changes. So we can measure the net effect based on this. And over the last couple generations, I forget if it's getting closer or further. I think it gets closer together, closer. And this is a sign that we're doing like species wide experiments on ourselves with microplastics. So we don't, we don't want to do that because exposing small children to testosterone has a radical effect on them. But there's really no environmental testosterone unless like the father has testosterone cream or something. So it's not an issue. But when you take boys who need a right ratio of testosterone, estrogen, and you fill them with estrogen from microplastics and associated endocrine disruptors, it really affects their cognitive development, their emotional development, their puberty, and even their fetal development in the womb. So for moms, you gotta be really careful. You don't get extra estrogen from your environmental stuff and you keep your microplastics down. And what I think is missing from the conversation is this idea that what you do long before pregnancy, or not that long, but at least three months before, six months before, it doesn't just change the likelihood of getting pregnant. It changes how healthy the kids are. And that's why Dr. Ann Shippy was just on the show with her book the Preconception Revolution. And you know, she's an environmental doctor who studied this incredibly deeply. And she'll say the same thing. Get rid of microplastics long before and enduring. So I, I think the number of pregnant women who drink tea because you can't drink coffee, tremendous. You don't drink tea if it's made with tea bags, like drink elixir or get like a little ball and scoop the tea out and all that. Either one's fine. But just be extra careful. That's all I'm saying.

[Josephine Musco]

Yeah. And you know, the good thing with the pregnant, you just write it up. So when I was pregnant with my daughter is when I was developing the olive. Olive leaf.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, no.

[Josephine Musco]

And I was drinking those every day. And you don't get sick because it's a great, it's a great herb for immunity, immune support. So drink. If you're a pregnant woman and you want to be healthy and you don't want to get sick and you don't want microplastics in your placenta, that's going to end up in your child's brain, let's switch over to Alexa T strips and especially the olive leaf based ones because they are free from caffeine and they have great health benefits, as you'd

[Dave Asprey]

expect if you listen to the show frequently. Anytime an entrepreneur or researcher comes on who's making a product like, hey, people just spend an hour of their life listening to you and learning from you, you gotta give them a discount. So this is what elixir looks like. And you can go to Elixir O L y x I r dot com, use code DAVE10 and get a discount. And if you drink tea, this is a better way to do it. It's delicious. And there's just nothing bad in here at all and only the good stuff. Carefully researched. Patent holder and someone who runs a biodynamic farm and winery and is one of us. So, Josephine, thanks for putting your entrepreneurial efforts into solving a major source of microplastics.

[Josephine Musco]

Thank you so much for having me. This is a great, great honor and I, I cannot be happier or more ecstatic than to have you, you know, like my product and use my product. That's like the biggest compliment and honor I can get.

[Dave Asprey]

Thank you.

[Josephine Musco]

Thank you.

[Dave Asprey]

If you like today's episode, you know what to do. Go out there and leave a review or maybe have a cup of tea, or dare I say some coffee with a friend. But just do it right. Do everything you can to minimize microplastics and not be afraid at the same time. Like we recognize there's a problem. There's all kinds of problems in the world. You don't need to stress about it. You just want to take action to move yourself in the right direction and at the same time become stronger, more vibrant, better at detoxing. And that combination gives you the resilience that's behind the entire biohack lacking movement. So take in less poison and become so strong that the poison you choose to take in because it was worth it. See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.

[Podcast Disclaimer Narrator]

A Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of process of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully, read all labels and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Proof Media.