The Effects of Microplastics on Your Health & How to Reduce Them

Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine today we are discussing microplastics microplastics are an extremely interesting and important topic that everyone should know about And the reason is microplastics are indeed everywhere they are in the air they are in beverages we consume they are lining the inside of Soup cans they are lining the inside of paper cups made to hold hot water coffee and tea and there are a lot of

animal data and indeed some human data showing that microplastics which consist of particles of different sizes can be very detrimental to our health at the same time it's important to realize that as Of now we don't have any causal data linking microplastics to spefic specific human diseases that said there's a lot of correlative data and today we are going to review those correlative data and most importantly we are going to discuss the various things that we can each and all do to limit our exposure to microplastics or at least to facilitate the removal of microplastics

from our body because as we'll soon discuss you have microplastics in essentially every Organ and tissue of your body right now and you are constantly being bombarded with microplastics so the challenge for me and indeed for you as well is to frame this topic of microplastics accurately it's important that we understand they are out there they are in us and indeed they can cause serious issues for our health however we also need to take agency we need to understand how we can limit What's called the bioaccumulation of Microplastics in our organs and tissues and I

don't want to be alarmist today's episode is not about getting you to be petrified or about developing some sort of hypoc assis about microplastics it's designed to inform you about what they are where they exist where they exist in particularly high amounts and the things that you can do to limit their impact on your biology because I think it's fair to say that we are not going to rid the Earth of microplastics they are just too Pervasive now the one caveat is that there are certain populations of people in particular people that are pregnant or

people that have young children and those young children themselves that should really strive to limit their exposure to microplastics so by the end of today's episode you can be confident that you'll understand a lot about what microplastics are the impact that they are currently having some of the potential impact that people are Starting to investigate and ways that you can limit their negative impact on your brain and bodily Health before you begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire

and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the General Public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is Element element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't that means the electrolytes sodium magnesium and potassium in the correct ratios but no sugar now I and others on the podcast have talked a lot about the critical importance of hydration for proper brain and bodily function research shows that even a slight degree of dehydration can

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episode is also brought To Us by betterhelp betterhelp offers Professional Therapy with a licensed therapist carried out out entirely online now I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years initially I didn't have a choice it was a Condition of being allowed to stay in high school but pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to overall health in fact I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise including cardiovascular exercise and resistance training exercise which of course I also do every week now there are essentially three things

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sorts of career goals with better help they make it very easy to find an expert therapist with whom you can really resonate with and provide you with these three benefits that I described if you'd like to try betterhelp go to betterhelp.com huberman to get 10% off your first month again that's betterhelp.com slh huberman okay let's talk about microplastics what are microplastics microplastics as the name suggests are Little itty bitty bits of plastic how itty bitty well microplastics range in size from one micron which is 1 1,000th of a millimeter all the way up to 5

millim in diameter okay so anything in that size range is considered a microplastic anything smaller than that so anything smaller than one micron in diameter 1 1,000th of a millimeter in diameter is considered a nanoplastic and indeed there are lots of microplastics floating around in the air there are Lots of nanoplastics floating around in the air there's lots of both of those things in the ocean there a lot of those things in food especially packaged food there are a lot of those things lining cups there are a lot of those things in everything that we

consume essentially so what does it mean to have all these microplastics and nanoplastics floating around in our environment and going into our body through fluids and Foods Etc well there is some serious Concern because these microplastics potentially can disrupt cellular Health organ health and could potentially lead to certain forms of disease we'll talk about the ways they could potentially do that however I want to also emphasize that your body is incredibly good at dealing with for foreign Invaders it's very good at getting rid of stuff that isn't good for it however microplastics and nanoplastics have

been shown to Lodge within specific tissues and stay There for long periods of time so you'll notice during today's episode I'm going to go back and forth between the stuff that's really scary and then reassuring you that we're not sure whether or not we need to be that scared about these microplastics and nanoplastics yet okay what I want to do is give you the evidence so you can decide how much effort you put into limiting your exposure to these microplastics and nanoplastics and how much effort you put Into trying to rid your body of them

okay I'm not here to paint the picture one way or the other because frankly the data just don't line up with one argument or the other that they're extremely dangerous or that they're nothing to worry about let me give you an example of something that you might have heard in the media and on recent podcasts out there that's very scary the argument based on what seem to be a pretty high quality publication that you May have heard is that every single week we ingest up to a credit card's worth of microplastics and nanoplastics okay you

might have seen that in headlines and in other podcasts and indeed there was a paper arguing that however a more recent paper looked at the quantitative analysis they used used a different quantitative analysis and claimed that they vastly overestimated the amount of plastic that we ingest every week what do I mean by vastly overestimated this Newer analysis of the same data claims that the credit card's worth of plastic that it was argued we can consume every week well that was an overestimate by a millionfold and in fact it would take 23,000 years to consume enough

plastic to lead to that credit card's worth of plastic in our bodies okay so now we have very discrepant data or rather we have very discrepant analyses of the same data so you're starting to get a picture of just how confusing this whole Field is but we're going to parse it a little bit further by saying that it's also very clear that microplastics and nanoplastics Plastics are everywhere okay they're just everywhere you look in fact if I were a PhD adviser for somebody in toxicology or a PhD adviser for somebody in environmental science and they

needed to have a Sure Fire publication I'd probably suggest that they work on microplastics and go out there and try and find yet another Source of microplastics and use a better analysis for instance okay doing a graduate thesis isn't just about getting a publication but what I'm trying to refer to here is that wherever people look for microplastic they find them this is true in our environment and this is true in food this is true in water and this is also true for our tissues so in the last couple of years there's been an explosion

in the number of scientific studies exploring which tissues of the Human body so not just animal models but the human body contain microplastics and nanoplastics okay so by examining postmortem tissues that is tissues from people who are deceased it's been discovered that there are microplastics and nanoplastics lodged in the brain so if you take the brain of a deceased adult human what you find is that they have about 05% of the total weight of the brain from microplastic so this is about a teaspoon of salt or sugars worth Of microplastics might not seem like much

but if you think about how little neurons are um a typical neuron will have a cell body this is the area that contains the nucleus with all the DNA and so forth uh that cell bodies of neurons vary in size tremendously ly they can be as small as you know five to eight microns across to as much as gosh I've seen some neurons down the microscope that are um you know 50 microns I've seen some that are 100 Microns across it depends where you look in the nervous system okay so if you start to think

about a half teaspoon of powder of microplastics and nanoplastics that's a lot of microplastics and nanoplastics that could be distributed in lots of different places in the brain and a little bit later we'll talk about what the potential impact is of these microplastics and nanoplastics on the function of particular types of neurons that may impact things like Neurodevelopmental trajectories okay the argument has been made I'm not making this argument but the argument has been made that microplastics and nanoplastics may correlate with things like autism May correlate with things like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder I don't

actually believe that the data there are strong enough to make those arguments at all however I will tell you that the presence of microp Plastics and nanoplastics in the brains that is Postmortem tissue okay so decease people taking the brain chopping up the brain looking at down the microscope and seeing microplastics and then quantifying the amount of microplastics in different compartments of the brain and distribute it across the brain that is concerning to me in the sense that there's enough of it in there and the function of neurons in the nervous system is precise enough

that you could imagine given that these microplastics And nanoplastics are lodged in particular categories of neurons that do in fact impact things like reward and motivation things like movement Etc that they could be impacting the function of the nervous system but there's no direct causal relationship at least not in humans there's some interesting data in animal models we'll get back to that a little bit later so there's microplastics and nanoplastics in brain you'll find microplastics and Nanoplastics in other tissues that have a blood organ barrier what do I mean by that well the brain is

encapsulated in the so-called BBB the blood brain barrier and that's because your brain tissue because it doesn't turn over across the lifespan you don't produce many new neurons there are a few places you produce new neurons like the olfactory bulb the dentate gyus of the hippocampus a few places but these are far and few between most of your brain Tissue that you're born with is the brain tissue that you're going to die with provided you don't lose that brain tissue through the course of your lifespan through a head injury or something like that the neurons

you have when you are born actually are far more numerous than the neurons you have at the time when you die this is important and it's one of the reasons we have a bloodb brain barrier nature is very smart IT designed a barrier so that Molecules that might be dangerous to the brain can't enter the brain and that's what the BBB is for microplastics and nanoplastics are making it from the bloodstream into the brain okay this is what I mean when I say they can cross the blood brain barrier then if we take a step

back and we ask ourselves what are some other tissues in the body that have a very robust barrier from the blood because a lot of things get into the blood and that's not necessarily Good but it's not necessarily bad if you can excrete those things right we have a lot of detoxification mechanisms that include our liver detoxification Etc but if these particles are getting from the blood into the brain what are some other tissues that they're getting into that have these thick barriers or these very stringent barriers as you can imagine two other tissues that

have very stringent blood to organ barriers are the blood Testicular barrier why would that be okay why would you protect brain Well it can't renew you don't want those neurons to get contaminated with things so you put a BB be in a blood brain barrier you also put a blood testicular barrier in males why well that's where the DNA are that's where the so-called germ cells are so you don't want things getting into the testicle and mutating the DNA there because then those mutated DNA could be passed on to offspring guess What microplastics and nanoplastics

can cross the blood testicular barrier and in fact there was a lot of press this last year about microplastics and nanoplastics being present in every human testicle that was analyzed in or I should say from postmortem tissue likewise there's a blood follicle barrier in females okay this is where the eggs come from and microplastics and nanoplastics can cross the blood follicular barrier so this is why people Are starting to get concerned right I suppose we shouldn't be so surprised that we're inhaling microplastics given that they are everywhere I should mention that you know there wasn't

much plastic around or in use prior to the 1950s if any of you have ever seen the movie The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman this is the only time you'll see somebody driving Eastward across the bay bridge all right toward from San Francisco toward Berkeley on the top Deck it actually runs in the other direction they shut down the baybridge that's in The Graduate and the other thing that's in The Graduate is this famous scene if you're old enough like me to Remember the movie The Graduate Dustin Hoffman's lying in the pool it's after his graduation

he's lying in the pool he doesn't really know what he's going to do with his life and this guy comes up to him and he says you know the future is Plastics and it became this Kind of famous line or pseudo famous line now that movie takes place at at a time when Plastics were really booming as an industry and indeed polyethylene polyurethane these plastic materials were developed because they were very durable they were long lasting in fact they are not biodegradable they're not broken down very easily if at all and certainly not within biological

tissues these Plastics went from essentially non-existent in the 1940s and prior to In pretty much everything involved in manufacturing okay even in different aspects of uh surgical implants and things of that sort so Plastics are indeed everywhere and that started in the 1950s hence that line from The Graduate so it's not surprising that microplastics and nanoplastics would get into our body right if they're everywhere in our environment and we're inhaling them all day then of course they'll get into our lungs and then They're small enough they can get into our bloodstream but as I mentioned

the body has these cleansing systems these detoxification systems to remove things but they're not removing the microplastics or at least not all of them from brain testicle and follicle and I should point out that microplastics and nanoplastics are also found in all the other tissues of the body in fact I don't think there's a single investigation of human tissue or Animal tissue for microplastics or nanoplastics where they didn't get a positive result meaning where they didn't find them in the tissue you can find them in not just the upper lungs but in the lower lungs

so they're getting deposited in the lower lungs you can find them in the bloodstream from from a blood draw you can find them in human placenta and you can find them in What's called the meconium which is the first stool that a baby takes this is Typically taken within the or the stool is given given taken it's taken by the doctor it's actually analyzed for various things it contains bile and a bunch of other things it's actually an important indicator of the health of the child um it turns out that this first stool that happens

in the first 24 hours or so after birth when that's been analyzed for microplastics there too you find microplastics and nanoplastics and That's really got people concerned because what this means is that microplastics and nanop Plastics that mothers are ingesting or that they somehow have lodged in their bodies are making their way to the fetus now you could say well is it really a problem well a few years ago is it was at least concerning enough that bpas and we'll talk more about bpas bisphenol a which is a component of microplastics this is a known

endocrine disruptor it disrupts Certain estrogen-like Pathways we'll get into this in a few minutes bisphenol a and bpas were banned from sippy cups and kids and from any food containers for young kids so the FDA in the United States and there are European countries as well had enough date on this or enough concern about this to say listen we are going to make it illegal to have BPA line sippy cups or food containers for young kids in part because the BPA is correlated with microplastics and Nanoplastics so what I'm saying here is that the government

has taken pretty avid measures to restrict the amount of BPA exposure through microplastics and nanoplastics to young kids and yet the fetus clearly is being exposed to microplastics and nanoplastics this is why at the beginning I mentioned if you are pregnant or you have young kids or if you are a young kid you want to go out of your way to limit your exposure to these microplastics and nanoplastics But if you're an older adult you probably want to do the same and we'll talk about ways that you can do that so I could go on

and on about the various tissues besides placenta in your bloodstream brain testes follicle lower lungs you can find nanoplastics in the liver you can find microplastics and nanoplastics in pretty much every tissue that you look for them the real question is how detrimental are these microplastics and nanoplastics and then Of course we can talk about where they're coming from specifically in ways that you can control and limit and when I say control and limit what we're really talking about here is yes trying to limit your exposure to these things if I were to w rattle

off the different sources of microplastics and nanoplastics you would go wide-eyed and you would probably also just say okay I Surrender they're truly everywhere in fact I'll do that okay I can't help but Do that but keep in mind you do have some control uh in terms of the end result of these microplastics and nanoplastics on your health so here I go plastic bags storage containers bottle caps rope gear strapping utensils cups floats coolers containers rope fishing nets textiles sorry I'm not laughing because it's funny I'm laughing CU it's just pretty much everywhere latex paint

Coatings medical devices Automotive Parts tires on the road degrading giving Off little microplastics into the air microplastics raining down from the sky literally pipe film containers laminated safety glass car windshield oh great even the car windshield drinking bottles textile fibers resins paints varnish construction Automotive Parts okay so basically everywhere right these things are everywhere huh so what are we to do well what we are to do is to limit the long-term accumulation of microplastics and nanoplastics in our system there are Ways that we can limit their introduction to our system but as long as you're

breathing as long as you're walking around as long as you're near a road you are exposed to microplastics so until there's a huge movement to make better tires that don't degrade as quickly or to create filters in our home environments that remove the microplastics which frankly I think both of those things are not reasonable expectations at least not in this Lifetime well until then what you can do is you can try and limit their entry and accumulation into your body so rather than list off all the ways that you can limit so-called bio accumulation of

microplastics and nanoplastics at the beginning or at the end of today's episode I'm going to intersperse them at times that are relevant to what I just discussed about how microplastics get into our system and the tissues they are lodged in so I'll tell you right now That a few ways that you can really do your a service in limiting your exposure to microplastics is to limit your consumption of water from plastic bottles okay that might seem kind of obvious but check out these data this is pretty wild there was an analysis of the number of

microplastic and nanoplastic particles in bottled water and it was estimated that there were about 30,000 of these particles per liter of water Okay and those data stood for quite a long time then Imaging techniques for measuring the number of these different particles in particular the really small Nano particles the ones that are less than one micron in diameter the Imaging tools for those improved okay and I'll explain a little bit about that in a moment and there was a paper published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2024 that showed that the

Amount of nanoplastic in particular but microplastic and nanoplastics that are present in bottled water was actually vastly underestimated in that previous study rather than 30,000 particles per liter the reanalysis with better methods showed that it was anywhere from 110 all the way up to 400,000 particles per liter and the average was 240,000 particles per liter so that means that the amount of Microplastics and nanoplastics in bottled water is actually much much higher than we initially thought and a very simple way to limit your exposure to microplastics and nanoplastics is to avoid drinking water from plastic

bottles in particular plastic bottles that have been heated up now you might say well I don't heat up my plastic water bottles right but you don't know what happened to those plastic water bottles and root to the store you bought Them at or and root to your refrigerator right they could have sat in the back of a hot truck they could have sat in the back of a loading dock any number of different things now this is not to say that if you drink the occasional water out of a plastic bottle that you're going to

harm your health I'm absolutely not saying that however it's pretty clear that there's a lot of microplastics and nanoplastics that are completely avoidable at least avoidable In terms of your ingestion of them in plastic water bottles so it makes sense to me why you would want to avoid those also as a consumable that's not very reusable I suppose you could reuse those plastic bottles but most people don't at least they don't use them for very long they get pretty flimsy pretty quickly you're much better off having either a stainless steel bottle or some sort of

ceramic mug or or using glass or using some other vessel for water that Is reusable and of course that is not made of plastic and then of course the question arises how much microplastic and nanoplastic is in tap water and it turns out there's quite a lot of it now it varies according to location but there are ways that you can get those microplastics and nanoplastics out of your tap water the best way turns out to be a little bit expensive admittedly and that's to use a reverse osmosis filter so reverse osmosis filters will get

rid Of all the microplastics nanoplastics of course it will also remove some key minerals from the water so you'll have to remineralize that water if one looks at the price of reverse osmosis filtration systems they're not cheap uh they can range anywhere from 300 to 500 or even $600 for a home unit and many of those units will remineralize the water so basically it takes the water cleans out the microplastics nanoplastics and a bunch of other bad stuff that you don't Want and then it's going to remineralize the water so that you're getting enough minerals

your water now if you look at the cost of a reverse osmosis filter I like you kind of go a little wide-eyed like that's a lot of money for water but if one thinks about the total amount of money one spends in a given year on plastic bottled water that we consume and then you know throw away essentially the bottles or even bottled water from glass bottles I've in the habit of Trying to drink water from glass bottles and when you go out and you buy those you feel better that you're not consuming a lot

of microplastics and nanoplastics but they are very expensive so the costs probably line up pretty well and when I did that analysis I realized well actually the home reverse osmosis filter with remineralization actually will save on costs provided that one is good about filling glass bottles or stainless steel bottles with That water and making sure to you know when you leave the house to take those bottles with you again I don't think it's possible for everyone to avoid all consumption of water from plastic bottles that's just not reasonable to expect right you don't want to

be that person that's carrying around water everywhere you go to friends houses at dinner Etc I don't think we need to be that concerned about the amount of microplastic and nanoplastic in water Sources it's certainly you wouldn't want to avoid drinking water from plastic bottles to the point where you dehydrate yourself or put yourself at risk I'm not trying to create that kind of concern here what I'm trying to say is if you are concerned about microplastics and nanoplastics and you really want to limit your exposure one of the best ways to do that is

to limit your consumption of water from plastic bottles and because microplastics and nanoplastics Are present in tap water you're going to need some way to remove those microplastics and nanoplastics from your tap water if you're very concerned about them I'm not here to say everyone should do this I'm certainly not saying that I'm saying that if you are concerned about microplastics and nanoplastics and we'll talk about some of the reasons one might want to be concerned about them well then installing a reverse osmosis filtration system on your home water Might be a good idea and

it's likely to save you costs if you look at it in comparison to buying disposable bottles of water now there are a lot of other other ways besides drinking water from plastic bottles that microplastics and nanoplastics make their way into our system and I can list off many of them but I'm trying to create a hierarchy here of the things that are potentially the major sources and the ones that we can most easily avoid and that are Likely to save us costs overall so one thing that's very clear is that there's a lot of microplastics

and nanoplastics in sea salt who would have thought but then you think about it and it's like well this stuff is getting out into the ocean there's a lot of plastic in the ocean it's a super depressing scene when one sees the pictures of all the plastic floating out there in fact there's a book that I read in preparation for this episode gosh it was so depressing but Important for me to read uh maybe you want to read it as well it's quite good although it it will be a bit of a downer uh the

title of the book is a poison like no other how microplastics corrupted our planet and our bodies by Matt Simon and I listened to this book and gosh it really convinces you that there's microplastics every where both on land in the air and in the ocean unfortunately and of course sea salt comes from the ocean so a simple Solution to this is if you're going to use salt and I'm a big fan of salt not overdoing it but salt has its role right it's a wonderful substance both for sake of taste and for sake of

Health I did an episode about salt again don't over consume salt don't blast your blood pressure don't blow a gasket but many people would do well to have a little bit more salt especially if you're eating a really clean diet especially if you're hydrating very Well focus on something like pink Himalayan salt or salt that comes from a nonmarine source okay it's very simple to do it's some of the best salt out there it's not terribly expensive and you would do well to avoid sea salt and get your salt from those other sources in doing

so you're going to lower your exposure to microplastics and nanoplastics there's some pretty scary pictures of sea salt under the microscope and all the little bits of Plas IC that are in there and you only have to see those pictures once or just hear it from me to make the shift to Himalayan sea salt or in the pink salt is pretty it looks nice it tastes great so that's an easy very lowcost shift that you can make I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor ag1 ag1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink

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sea salt another major source of these microplastics that was very surprising to me is from the lining of canned soup I don't think I'm ever going to eat canned soup again unless I absolutely need to sorry cannn soup companies but there was a study the study was entitled canned soup consumption and urinary Bisphenol a a randomized crossover trial I'll describe a little bit more about what bisphenol a is a little bit later but bisphenol a is a known endocrine disruptor it mimics estrogen in ways that can activate or block estrogenic Pathways so it messes up

hormone Pathways either by activating them or blocking them it can also bind to Androgen receptors potentially and cause some issues there bisphenol a or BPA is not a good thing turns out there's lots Of it in the lining of Soup cans the reason is soup tends to be a little bit fatty so even if you get the non-fat soup it tends to have some lipid in there and it also has some acidity to it and the lining helps maintain the flavor and the freshness of the soup in those cans in this study what they did

is they gave people either fresh soup or canned soup for 5 days then they did a so-called two-day wash out where they took a break from soup and then they Reversed the conditions I'll cut to the chase here because the conclusion of this study is wild what they found was that consumption of one serving of canned soup daily over the course of 5 days here I'm quoting by the way was associated with more than a th% increase in urinary BPA in bisphenol a now that's urinary BPA so people are excreting it I want to emphasize

that but a thousandfold increase in BPA from canned soup I don't know I'm not alarmist but I Only have to read this once think about my love of can soup not that great done I'm not eating canned soup again unless I'm absolutely starving and I need some soup very very badly my suggestion would be unless you have a powerful reason to consume canned soup don't consume canned soup the one caveat being that if you can find canned soup that does not have any BPA that is it says no bpas on the container well then go

at it have as much canned soup as you want but I Should be very clear that a lot of canned products now say no BPA but they contain other endocrine disruptors and the amount of microplastics and nanoplastics in those soups is still unknown so part of my hidden motivation of this episode and perhaps the motivation of other podcasters in the health space that are talking about microplastics now and by the way Dr Ronda Patrick did a really wonderful podcast about microplastics just Recently we didn't coordinate that's why we both ended up doing it roughly at

the same time we talked about it afterwards and chuckled about that I guess you know we're both interested in some of the same themes of course one of the perhaps hidden agendas is that some of these food manufacturing companies and beverage manufacturing companies will start to include more thorough descriptions on their labeling of what is and is not contained in the Various products such as canned soup and water Etc not just no bpas but hopefully some of the other things that are problematic that we'll talk about in a moment such as BPS which is another

endocrine disruptor so if you see no BPA sometimes there's still BPS in there okay we'll talk about BPS as well as phalates which are something that make plastic and other containers more durable and more flexible and phalates have been discussed by people like Dr Shaina Swan who will soon be a guest on this podcast and has shown up on other podcasts talking about how phalates are known endocrine disruptors in development and likely in adulthood as well so I guess my push for you to never consume canned soup again might be a little bit harsh that's

just my decision here's what I'll do I'll make a bargain with the canned soup companies if you all start putting a more thorough description about what is and is not Contained in those Soup cans all right not just no BPA but is there truly also no BPS are there no Fates Etc then maybe I'll make the move back to canned soup and of course most of you have probably heard that that you're not supposed to microwave plastic containers now you'll see microwave safe on a number of different containers that just means that it's not going

to melt in the microwave it does not mean that you aren't being exposed to microplastics And nanoplastics and bpas BPS phalates Etc so in general it's a good idea to avoid putting any kind of plastic into the microwave at least if you're going to microwave food and then consume that food the other surprising at least to me source of bpas and bps's so these endocrine disruptors and microplastics and nanoplastics that's very robust is paper cups goodness gracious I would have thought paper cups are safe but you know those paper cups that you put hot Liquids

into and that often have a plastic lid well even if they don't have a plastic lid on them the lining of the paper cup which makes those cups durable when you put hot liquids in there like hot coffee or hot tea well that contains typically unless it says no BPA and no BPS it contains lots of BPA and bps's microplastics nanoplastics and so putting hot liquid in there actually there was an analysis that showed that if liquid that's heated up to 100° f is Put in those containers it starts to leech out it starts to

pull those microplastics nanoplastics bpas and BPS from the cup Linings so the other day I went across the street and bought a cup of coffee of course they sold it to me in a paper cup and I thought oh goodness I forgot to bring my mug and my my travel mug my stainless steel mug or my ceramic mug did I not purchase the coffee no I had already ordered the coffee I didn't walk back what I did is As soon as I got back I took the coffee and I poured it into a ceramic mug

so I'm not extremist I'm not somebody who's going to completely avoid these things but in the future I'll try and remember to bring my mug over some places even give you a little discount on your coffee so again these are cost-saving approaches you're certainly limiting or reducing the amount of waste that you're creating in the world so that can only be a good thing okay and the plastic Lids probably a good idea to avoid drinking through those plastic Lids too often again I want to emphasize I'm not one of these people that's going to freak

out about drinking a hot liquid through a plastic lid these microplastics and nanoplastics are everywhere we're consuming them all the time we can remove them from our body and later we'll talk about ways that you can accelerate or increase the amount of removal of them from your body but if We're just a little bit more conscious about how they get into our body and we're a little bit more conscious about the elevated cost and the elevated amount of trash that's going to recycle into landfill and so on probably a good idea to just bring your

mug with you your travel mug with you try and make those mugs and travel mugs ceramic stainless steel or some other vessel that doesn't contain bpas or bps's before we move on to talk about what Happens when microplastics and nanoplastics make it into say the testicle or the brain like what the consequences of that is and are I want to just briefly return to something that I flew past a while ago and that's the analysis of microplastics and nanoplastic particles that are in bottled water remember initially it was thought to be 30,000 particles per liter

then later it was discovered using better techniques that it's actually More like 240,000 on average particles per liter how did that huge discrepancy in data arise now I realize this is not a data analysis discussion but I want to talk about this just briefly because it illustrates for you something really important about science which is as tools for measurement get better so does our understanding about what's going on in our brains and bodies and it's a very simple and kind of cool thing related to light so you could imagine that the First paper was looking

under the microscope at a drop of water taken from a bottle that was plastic and then imaged the number of little plastic particles in there you'd say well there's a particle and there's a particle and there's a particle and there are tools that can count those particles well what if you have two particles that are really close together right if you recall microplastics are anywhere from one micron in diameter all The way up to 5 millimet in diameter but nanoplastics are less than one micron in diameter so how do you know that when you see

a clump of stuff under the microscope in that drop of water that you're looking at one big piece of plastic versus thousands and thousands of little pieces of nanoplastic or even just much smaller pieces of microplastic well it has to do with What's called the point spread function and I don't really want to get into this in too much detail But basically when you shine light on something you get uh kind of a little Hill of light if you will there's a Peak at the center and then it had drops off with distance the reason

why the numbers jumped from 30,000 to 240,000 is not because the researchers got much better it's because the tools got much better okay there are new Imaging techniques and I'll put a reference to this for those of you that into this kind of stuff entitled rapid single particle Chemical Imaging of nanoplastics by SRS microscopy okay pretty nerdy stuff but it's fun if you're interested in light and how light can illuminate things and show detail or not detail but basically what we're realizing is that there are a lot more particles of plastic in different tissues in

different things that we're ingesting Etc because we're getting better and better ways of separating those clumps of light into lots of little clumps of light and Realizing oh that looked like one particle right remember it's particles per liter it's not one particle it's 10,000 particles now you might say okay well what's the difference between a bunch of little particles and one big particle ah there's a big difference what's the big difference little particles can make it across barriers that big particles can't these little nanop particles of plastic are especially concerning because those are The ones

that you find in greatest abundance or I should say among the Plastics that you find in different tissues the ones that are in greatest abundance in the brain the testes and the follicle again these tissues that nature and evolution have gone out of their way to protect with these very stringent barriers like the blood brain barrier like the blood testicular barrier like the blood follicle barrier those are the ones that are getting Across because they're very very small they can sneak through the little holes in those biological fences they're getting deposited in those tissues brain

testicle and follicle and they're staying there at least until people die which in the case of the analysis of postmortem tissue is many many decades later okay so I'm not just raising this discussion about ways to disambiguate large particles from small particles just to be nerdy and Technical it turns Out to be a really important issue with real biological implications okay so lots of itty bitty little pieces of plastic getting their way into tissues like brain follicle testes liver lung Etc what are some of the implications of this now there are a lot of animal

data data in fish data in mice Etc that have explored how microplastics and nanoplastics can disrupt any number of different biological functions but it's probably worth looking at how Nanoplastic and microplastic accumulation in specific tissues is correlated with specific Health detriments in humans even though the data are correlative right it's much harder to get causal data from Human studies because the animal studies frankly are hard to translate to humans in this case in particular because a lot of the features of animal biology while similar to human biology humans are animals but you get the point

they don't Correspond so easily when looking at microplastics and nanoplastics for the following reason let's say you have a little fish that fish is a couple centimeters long and it turns out there's uh I don't know about an aspirin size of microplastics and nanoplastics in that fish when that fish is analyzed postmortem you say okay well that's kind of a lot right an aspirin's worth in a or an aspirin siiz batch of microplastics and nanoplastics in that Little fish and then you look in humans and you realize okay well there's more microplastics and nanoplastics but

not that much more how much of a detriment is there really going to be can you look at the study in the fish seeing for instance and this has been demonstrated that you have disruption in neurological Pathways the formation of those Pathways like brain development is altered reproductive function is altered Etc it's hard to translate we don't really Know what it means in terms of humans so we'll turn to the correlative data in humans and I'll look to the strongest data at least that I could find out there and there kind of three major cases

that I think are worth highlighting the first one is that there was a study done in humans this is published in 2021 it was published in the Journal of environmental science and technology that found much higher levels of microplastics in the stool samples of People that were diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome okay irritable bowel syndrome is very disruptive to people's well-being there isn't an obvious cure for irritable bowel syndrome although some people find Relief by improving their gut microbiota by limiting body-wide and gut inflammation through any number of different things improving sleep and eating a

low- inflammation diet Etc this is something that I'll probably cover in A future episode of the hubman podcast gastrointestinal challenges that is so I want to be very clear there was no direct causation established but it was clear that there were higher levels of microplastics found in the stool tissue coming from people who had irritable bowel syndrome than in individuals who did not have irritable bowel syndrome and while no study is perfect they included a number of important controls in the experiment to control for age Range and some other features so it's reasonable to assume

that the accumulation of microplastics in the gut or somewhere along the GI tract had somehow led to or related to irritable bowel syndrome okay now you could also Imagine the reverse this is very important to understand you could also imagine that people who had irritable bowel syndrome perhaps are less good at filtering microplastics and nanoplastics from the food and liquids they consume Than are people who don't have irritable bowel syndrome so the causality if it exists at all could run in either direction or both nonetheless I think it's an interesting study and if you're somebody

who suffers from gastrointestinal distress such as irritable bowel syndrome or otherwise I think you'd be wise indeed all people would be wise but I think you'd be especially wise to take into consideration some of the to-dos and not To-dos that I'm covering during today's episode such as avoiding consuming water from plastic bottles some of the stuff we talked about earlier avoiding canned soup and other BPA BPS containing containers and things of that sort or things that come from those containers the other area where there was some really interesting correlative data relates to reproductive function and

Hormone Health and this is where we can start to get into a bit more detail About bpas and bps's and phalates and some of their roles in disrupting endocrine that is hormone Pathways so there's a study I'll put a link to in the show note captions that's entitled the urinary phalate metabolites are associated with decreased serum testosterone so that's in blood in men women and children okay this is an interesting study for a number of reasons first of all it emphasizes something that everybody Should know which is that testosterone plays key roles in men women

and kids okay it is not the case that testosterone is just present in men and boys it's also present in women and girls and it plays an important role in everybody okay it's involved of course in some of the things that we normally associate with testosterone such as muscle mass bone density strength Etc but testosterone can be converted to estrogen testosterone is involved in Libido in both men and women it's involved in brain development in boys and girls in genitalia development and on and on so it's an important hormone and it was clear from this

study that elevated levels of phalates that is phalate metabolites are associated with lower testosterone levels in all those populations they point out quote that the strongest and most consistent inverse relationships between level of phalates and testosterone that is Elevated phalate metabolites lower testosterone were found among women ages 40 to 60 years this is very important if you saw the episode that we did with Dr Mary Clair Haver on per menopause menopause she emphasized that per menopause menopause which typically sets in somewhere between one's late 40s and 6s okay there's huge variation there sometimes as early

as one's 30s that would be early however more often in one's 40s and 50s sometimes as late as 60s involves reductions in estrogen but also in testosterone and this has major implications for creating less feelings of vigor lowered libido less recovery from exercise and other life stressors and things of that sort now the study also interestingly shows that in quote adult men the only significant or suggestive inverse association between phalate metabolites and testosterone were observed among men 40 to 60 years old now there are a number of different Ways that we could interpret those data

one is that men younger than 40 have high enough levels of testosterone that or the ranges ofest testosterone are great enough in that sample of younger than 40 years old that somehow that was able to swamp out any reductions in testosterone that were caused by phalate metabolites or rather that once men get from 40 to 60 years old that there's somehow a vulnerability of the testosterone Pathways to phalates or and None of these are mutually exclusive of course that the phalates had built up in those men's system over a number of years and then we're

having their major effects on those men between 40 and 60 years old I do find it interesting that the major effects were observed in both men and women 40 to 60 years old and the interpretation of those data that makes the most sense to me at least is that there's a cumulative effect of these phalates over time that reveals itself At least statistically in men and women once they reach 40 to 60 years so what are these thades well these thades are things that are included in Plastics that house liquids and foods that we eat

or that we cook with or that simply exist in our environment and are getting broken down and that we're inhaling and then are making their way across the blood testes barrier blood follicle barrier or into any number of other tissues those phalates are there of Course to make plastic more flexible and durable but they are known endocrine disruptors Dr Shaina swan has done beautiful work showing that young animals and potentially humans who are exposed to phalates from things like pesticides in particular can actually have a fairly major disruption in What's called the anogenital distance okay

withhold your Chuckles the distance between the penis and the anus uh in people that Have been exposed to phalates or mothers of boys that have been exposed to phalates those boys are born with a shorter penile to anal distance okay typically it's of a certain distance and there's a correlation with reduced anogenital distance that is a external marker okay it's not that that itself is necessarily A Bad Thing that's not what we're saying here but that's an external marker that can be measured in mice and there are some studies that are Exploring that in humans

as well that correlates with a number of other things including lower sperm counts reduced sperm motility and things of that sort likewise bpas the bisphenol A and BPS are known endocrine disruptors I talked about this a little bit earlier they're known to bind estrogen receptors so they mimic estrogen sometimes they activate those estrogen receptor dependent Pathways so they literally mimic Estrogen sometimes they block those estrogen receptors so the estrogen cannot have the normal role of docking in those receptors and causing their normal functions and BPA and to some extent BPS and potentially phalates can dock

to Androgen receptors as well sometimes referred to as testosterone receptors Androgen receptors so the point is that bpas bps's and phalates are not good for endocrine function and they are present in basically all Plastics unless it says no BPA or all phalates removed they're present in herbicides Etc and they are of real concern and it's very clear as I mentioned earlier that you can detect microplastics in human testes and I didn't mention this earlier and in semen and it is now very clear that that's correlated with reduced sperm counts and lower sperm motility now I

also want to be very clear remember I'm not an alarmist I want to be clear that just Because sperm counts are significantly lower and people that have a certain amount of microplastics and nanoplastics potentially in their testes or that they've been exposed to does not necessarily mean that they're infertile it is true that total sperm count and sperm motility forward motility being an important indicator of sperm Health are correlated with one's ability to fertilize an egg okay this was covered in a quite long but quite Detailed episode that I did about fertility in both males

and females there a number of things one can do to increase sperm counts or to at least limit sperm count depletion there number of things that one can do to improve sperm motility I encourage you to check out that episode I'll provide a link to it in the show note captions in fact I'll link to the specific time stamp in the show note captions that gets to those uh particular strategies but the Point here is that microplastics and nanoplastics are found in human testes and that's correlated with reductions in sperm count and reductions in sperm

motility I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors function I recently became a function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing while I've long been a fan of blood testing I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing blood urine and saliva to Get a full picture of my heart health my hormone status my immune system regulation my metabolic function my vitamin and mineral status and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to

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like to try function go to function health.com huberman function currently has a weight list of over 250,000 people but they're offering offering Early Access to hubman lab listeners again that's function health.com huberman to get early access to function today's episode is also brought To Us by eight sleep eight sleep makes Smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking capacity now I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each night that's truly the foundation of all mental health physical health and performance and

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$350 off their pod 4 ultra eight sleep currently ships in the USA Canada UK select countries in the EU and Australia again that's 8sleep.com huberman another study that got people's attention that I think is worth mentioning which relates to microplastics nanoplastics and cardiovascular disease this was a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2024 so this is a a Fabulously good journal and what it found was that polyethylene which is a component of many Plastics out there were detected in the cored artery plaques of in this case 150 patients which is approximately

58% of the ones that were included in the study and they also found using a technique called electron microscopy today's fun because we get to talk about different types of microscopy electron microscopy allows you to look at things That are smaller than a micron you can look all the way down into the nanometer range right you can start breaking up that 1 1,000th of a millimeter into nanometers and you can start to see things that are really really small and in this study electron microscopy showed that there were these little Jagged Edge foreign particles among

the plaque macras of the cardiovascular plaques okay macrofagos are part of the immune system these are cells that go in and Try and eat things up they're kind of like little ambulances later we're going to talk about microa which are the brain's resident microphases or microphages depending on where you live and how you like to pronounce it but the point here is that when using a technique like electron microscopy that allows you to look at really really small stuff it was very clear that the plaques that form these you know basically occlusions within the arteries

These are not good um this is one of the reasons you want to eat properly and do cardiovascular exercise and take great care of yourself Etc electron microscopy made very clear that there were little plastic foreign Jagged particles deposited in some of these plaques now were they the cause of these plaques did they contribute to some of the occlusion caused by those plaques unclear but it's reasonable to assume that they form part of the physical substrate that could ude Blood flow through these arteries which of course leads to cardiovascular events which of course are not

good so I'll put a link to the study in the show note captions again these are correlative studies in humans correlative studies are only that they're just correlative but I'm trying to provide a patchwork of things that suggest that it would indeed be a good idea to try and limit your ingestion or at least facilitate the removal of microplastics and Nanoplastics from your system another reason to do that relates to the so-called peases okay these are a group of chemicals sometimes referred to as the quote unquote forever chemicals because they are very longstanding once they

get into your system these things have names other than pasas which is an acronym things like perlu alkal things like polyl alkaly I don't know how good my pronunciation of those is but um if you look up the pases you'll see that These things are known to cause liver damage they can damage the immune system they are considered forever chemicals because they are not broken down they last forever then again some of the other components of microplastics and nanoplastic Plastics are also known to last forever so you're starting to get a picture of these little

tiny bits of plastic some tinier than others depositing themselves in our tissues they're everywhere out there they are Most prominent in certain sources but they're going to get into our system now does that mean that we can't get rid of them no we absolutely can get rid of them in fact we have a number of different ways that we get rid of toxins and foreign Invaders in our body some of those include the immune system right even if you have just some sort of foreign object like a Splinter your immune system has a reaction to

that typically you get some puss around it Some inflammation and that pus and inflammation is part of the process of isolating that forign Intruder that splinter and then eventually creating some tissues that extrude it or allow you to extrude it you of course also have what's called your adaptive immune system which doesn't just react to the presence of something foreign but creates antibodies which can combat that and so on and so forth so your body has these frankly miraculous ways of dealing With foreign Intruders of different sorts but it does seem that microplastics and nanoplastics

can deposit themselves in their tissues and stay there does that mean that you don't have any chance of getting them out no you have a liver your liver yes contains microplastics and nanoplastics very likely if you've been alive for any amount of time but it also has what's called phase one and phase two detoxification processes that Allow you to break down and get rid of certain foreign products including microplastics and nanoplastics so let's talk about liver Det detoxification and some of the things that can facilitate liver detoxification that you actually have control over Okay so

let's talk about liver detoxification the liver is such a cool organ it does so many cool things it's not just about detoxification by the way it does all sorts of things related to Blood clotting it's just an amazing amazing organ we should probably do an entire episode about the liver and not just eating liver I'm not a fan of eating liver I do it every once in a while um because I'm told it's nutritious but let's talk about the living functioning liver there are two types of liver detoxification processes okay so this is not about

detoxing your liver you may hear about detoxing your liver that's a whole other discussion I Don't want to get into at least not here there's type one and type two liver detoxification okay there's type one so calleded phase one liver detoxification is also called the oxidation phase it involves something called cytochrome p450 enzymes okay so enzymes are involved in the breakdown of different things it converts toxins into less harmful components that ideally are excreted from the body okay type two or phase two liver detoxification again This is not detoxification of your liver this is detoxification

by your liver is also called the conjugation phase of detoxification it involves enzymes that attach molecules to toxins okay it makes those toxins water soluble and easier to excrete from the body in the form of urine okay it neutralizes reactive intermediates from phase one okay so phase one and phase two detoxification work together during phase two of liver Control detoxification is where toxins are broken down and those broken down components are prepared to be removed from the body okay it is thought that the liver plays a primary role in the removal of microplastics and nanoplastics

bpas and bps's and by the way I realize I didn't say this earlier and I should have these bpas and bps's are sometimes chemical components within the microplastics and nanoplastics they Sometimes attach themselves to the microplastics and nanoplastics I should have said that earlier forgive me the microplastics and nanoplastics can act as what are called vectors or carriers of things like bpas bps's phalates and forever chemicals okay I should have mentioned that earlier so type two that is phase two of liver control detoxification is where these toxins that are in the body and potentially these

microplastics themselves and Nanoplastics themselves are not necessarily broken down because some of those things can't be broken down but where they are prepared to be excreted from the body and we have some degree of control over phase two of liver controlled detoxification again I'm calling it liver controlled detoxification so that this doesn't get misconstrued as detoxing your liver which frankly is a very controversial topic and may not be possible at all Although simply by saying that I'm probably going to get attacked but here we're just talking about your liver's ability to break down and remove

things from your body that you frankly don't want in your body one way that you can enhance Phase 2 liver control detoxification processes is by increasing your intake of something called sulphoraphane which is present in cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli and Cauliflower now is there enough sulphoraphane in cruciferous vegetables such that you could eat reasonable amounts that you wouldn't have to overeat cruciferous vegetables in order to get this enhancement of phase 2 liver detoxification processes potentially yes the animal studies that were carried out so this would be in rodents like rats used supplemented suhane at

dosages that were comparable to the amounts of sulphoraphane that a human might ingest From a large serving of broccoli or a large serving of cauliflour so this could be a few cups of raw broccoli or raw cauliflower although frankly if you're like me that basically translates to gastrointestinal distress I can't tell you how many times I've gone to a party and there's some like you know broccoli and cauliflower maybe with some dip or something like that I usually avoid the dip because I'm not really into dips but we'll have a few pieces of Broccoli and

boy does that disrupt my gut I don't know about you um and most things don't disrupt my gut that's not something that I uh struggle with I prefer to cook broccoli and to cook cauliflower if you cook broccoli and cauliflower lightly okay so you don't just you know turn into a complete Mash you don't boil it such that a lot of the nutrients are leeched out out into the water around it so if you do sort of a light boil or a steam or something like That or you pan pan cook it maybe in some

olive oil this is making me hungry by the way you'll still maintain the sulphoraphane in those cruciferous vegetables meaning it'll still be beneficial to you now some people including me don't tend to eat that many cruciferous vegetables I don't know why I just somehow don't make it a point to shop for them enough I ought to for people like me or perhaps you're in the same boat you can supplement with Sulphoraphane and what you'll find is that sold by various companies and it's available at a quite wide range of dosages you'll see for instance two

products similarly priced one product will contain 50 milligrams of sulphoraphane the other product will contain 225 milligrams of sulphoraphane now if you go to what I consider a really excellent website for thinking about and evaluating this kind of stuff which is examine.com I've talked a lot About this um site on the podcast before on examine.com they talk about the translation of the rodent studies to humans and here's what they say they say supplementation of .1 to.5 mg per kilogram of sulphoraphane in rats has been noted to be bioactive okay just bioactive they're not getting specifically

at removal microplastics or nanoplastics and they translate that to a human dose of okay if you're 150 PB person then that's going to be anywhere From 1.1 to 5.5 milligram for that 150 lb person if you're a 200 lb person that's approximately my weight I think right now I'm sitting somewhere around 215 so about 100 kg 215 I don't know somewhere in there hav't uh stood on a scale in a while it's 1.5 to 7.2 milligrams for a 200 lb person now then you think about the typical dosages that are found in supplements of 50

milligrams per serving versus 225 milligrams per serving and in either Case you realize that that's much much higher than what's being discussed here so what that says to me is that I would probably go with the lower dosage although according to examine.com they say quote these low quantities are likely attainable through raw broccoli or cruciferous vegetable products so that's great what this means is that you don't need to supplement with sulphoraphane if you're willing to eat raw broccoli they're specifically saying Raw broccoli or other cruciferous vegetable products while higher dosages may be further beneficial so

this is still a bit of a vague space I realize there's some discrepancies in what I'm describing here I said you could like L cook the broccoli or cauliflower that's my read and understanding of sorane that it's not broken down at low temperatures but perhaps you just decide to eat it raw if you can bear it I can't so I don't you could supplement it if you Choose what dosage well that depends on your weight and it seems that in any case most supplements are going to more than cover the amount of sulphoraphane that's described

here translated from the rat studies so in my case after researching this episode I opted to start taking 50 milligram 5 milligrams of sulphoraphane per day I'm going to see how that goes um I guess it's fair to say that I'm sufficiently concerned about uh microplastics and nanoplastics Given that I'm 49 years old all my biomarkers seem fine but hey I'm always interested in doing something for my health or to promote my health that is if I can and it's pretty clear to me that if one's thinking about liver control detoxification both for sake of

offsetting or removing bpas bps's but also other potentially toxic metabolites from microplastics nanoplastics and other environmental factors that taking 50 Milligrams of sulphoraphane per day perhaps can be beneficial so I don't think it's necessary for everybody in fact I think everybody should probably be getting some cruciferous vegetables in their diet anyway at least once a week or a couple times a week so if you're not interested in supplementing that would be the route to go if you are interested in supplementing I'll provide a link to this particular location in the examine.com agage so that you

can Translate some of these dosages to your potential sources of supplemental forms of sulphoraphane the other way that microplastics and nanoplastics can be excreted from the body is in the bowel and one way to potentially increase the amount of microplastics and nanoplastics bpas bps's phalates and forever chemicals those pf's from your body is to make sure that you're getting enough dietary fiber now most people can do that simply by eating A fair amount of fruits and vegetables which I always make a point to do I also ingest starches okay so I'm not pure carnivore I

things like rice like oatmeal I like uh fresh pastas although it's mainly rice and oatmeal for me these days in terms of starches plenty of fruits and vegetables that's something I just really make it a point to do why is fiber good at doing this well it can bind lipophilic molecules okay it can bind Molecules that are able to cross cell membranes and earlier we were talking about the fact that BPA and bps's mimic estrogen and combine to estrogen receptors and potentially to Androgen receptors as well keep in mind that one of the reasons why

those so-called steroid hormone Pathways I know people hear the word steroid and they think performance-enhancing steroids but no turns out that testosterone and estrogen are both steroid hormones one of the Reasons those are interesting is that because of their structure they're able to bind cell surface receptors and have effects on those cells they are also able to pass through okay the hormones okay here I'm not talking about bpas and bps's but the hormones testosterone estrogen can actually get to the nucleus of cells and can control gene expression these steroid hormones testosterone and estrogen work in

a very coordinated fashion to create what we call secondary Sex characteristics which are the characteristics of the external body and brain changes and internal changes all over the place right ovaries testes Etc that are what underly what we call puberty and that's because these molecules can actually control gene expression so when we talk about these molecules like bpas and BPS is impacting these Pathways like estrogen and androgen Pathways this is serious stuff because what you're doing is you're Potentially activating or blocking Pathways that are involved not just in the function of those cells but actually

the genes that those particular cells Express and this is particularly concerning for any kind of hormone dependent cancers right it's perhaps not surprising to you but based on what you now know about how hormones work with gene expression Etc that many tissues that turn over cells a lot such as the testes right producing sperm pretty much Throughout the lifespan the follicle and eggs right breast tissue right these are common sites of cancer okay there are other cancers that can form of course in other tissues like the pancreas and brain Etc but tissues that turn over

quite a bit because of the involvement of the cell cycle and because cancer is among other things the disregulation the cell cycle and an overproduction of cells that we call tumors those are Pathways that are Particularly vulnerable to endocrine or hormone disruption and this is why there's additional concern about microplastics and nanoplastics perhaps increasing cancer rates in particular in tissues like the ovary in particular the testes in particular any tissue where there's a lot of cellular turnover so the point here is that eating broccoli eating cauliflower potentially supplementing with sulphoraphane here I'm summarizing a bit

what I talked About earlier avoiding drinking water from plastic bottles maybe getting a reverse osmosis filter avoiding those diabolical canned soups I had no idea about these canned soups or ensuring that the canned soups that you're eating are safe in the ways that we discussed earlier avoiding sea salts avoiding I'm throwing a few other things in here that I haven't mentioned yet avoiding non-stick pans trying to cook mainly with cast iron or ceramic and making Sure that those are BPA BPS and past free just look at the packaging do a little bit of homework there

and get this one this is a really surprising one or at least was surprising to me carbonated water okay mineral Waters a few years ago there was an analysis of different popular forms of carbonate water which is sold in glass containers okay it turned out that Topo Chico which I happened past tense happened to love Topo Chico had 9.76 particles per trillion of these pases these forever chemicals okay that was an analysis done in 2020 perier 1.1 San pelo 0.31 so we're comparing 9.76 versus 1.1 versus. 31 which tells me I'm avoiding topoo I might

even avoid perer I'll probably drink San pelegrino I'm probably buy a perryer and drink a perer every once in a while I'm not crazy about carbonated water by the way this was an analysis by consumer reports And it caught some attention such that the Coca-Cola company which makes Topo Chico said that they were going to fixed this problem and they claimed okay I don't know if they've done this all right I don't want to get the folks at Coca-Cola angry with me Coca-Cola claimed that by 2023 they were going to cut the amount of these

particles in half but that would still make them 4.5 parts per trillion still much higher at least four times higher than any of the Other brands so I have to be direct I'm speaking from my own experience and choices until I see data that Topo Chico has reduced the amount of these foreign contaminants to basically less than 0.31 I'm going with San peligrino or perer okay I don't tend to drink a lot of mineral water but given that you're ordering it in the glass in a glass container that is given that these things are not

particularly cheap right and that you have choices you could Either decide to avoid carbonate water altogether or if you're going to be smart about it you probably want to avoid the ones that contain more of these foreign contaminants because of their ability to get lodged in different tissues in your body so that was very surprising to me that you would have these forever chemicals in carbonated water what it tells us is that the water going into those products contains either microplastics Nanoplastics Paces from other sources or something and so I think that we should all

be aware of this if you're going to drink carbonate water probably go going with a perer or S pelino would be better than going with Topo Chico because even though they've haved the amount of these forever chemicals in there it's still quite High okay so I've mentioned some todos to reduce your microplastic nanoplastic BPA BPS and past exposure such as ingesting cruciferous vegetables Potentially supplementing with Sil forane trying to avoid drinking out of plastic water bottles there a few other things I'll just list off here to keep it relatively short talked about making sure you're

getting enough dietary fiber I talked before about using a glass or steel vessel and reverse osmosis water using Himalayan salt avoiding sea salt the other thing that you can do oh and I mentioned using cast Iron and ceramic as opposed to non-stick cookware whenever you can and if you're going to microwave food making sure that you're doing that on plates or in containers that does not or do not contain plastic of any kind even if it says microwave safe the other thing is to sweat okay we vastly underestimate or downgrade the power of sweating sweating

is an incredible mechanism now I realize that as soon as somebody says sweating is a great way to remove toxins from the Body that a bunch of people out there get really inflamed pun intended I'm not saying that what I am saying is that there are a number of different ways for foreign products to leave the body including urine feces but including sweat okay so I'm not saying that's going to detox you completely that's not what I'm saying okay I don't fall into that camp however there are a number of beneficial aspects to sweating and

also there are a number of beneficial aspects To doing the things that make you sweat so I've done entire episodes about deliberate heat exposure so things like sauna done anywhere from once a week to four times a week pretty impressive data in terms of reducing all cause mortality improving cardiovascular function it's also for most people pretty Pleasant to sit in a sauna if you don't have access to a sauna taking a hot bath not so hot that you burn yourself but a hot bath that also will activate some of these Same Pathways things like hot

yoga things like going out for a run in a hoodie trying to get your body to sweat pretty robustly at least once a week is a good idea for all sorts of reasons also just your ability to Thermo regulate by the way for those of you that don't sweat much sweating is actually something that you can get better at that's right you can get better at sweating by what by sweating by exposing yourself in safe ways to Heat and I talk about that in the deliberate heat exposure episode we also have a newsletter on deliberate

heat exposure I'll put links to those in the show note captions and those explain safe ways uh to encourage sweating why am I talking about this well sweating may help remove some of the things that are attached to microplastics and nanoplastics that can act as endocrine disruptors it's very very unlikely that the microplastics and nanoplastics would Actually be removed as whole particles in sweat I think that that's very unlikely frankly what's more likely is that the microplastics and nanoplastics aren't really getting removed from or broken down within our body at all they're getting lodged into

these different tissues but the stuff that's on them and in them is potentially causing some of the biological harms that we've talked about and so removing those more robustly is what sweating is About it's what consuming cruciferous vegetables is about and so on and so forth so those are a few more todos the other to don'ts or I should say don'ts are things like avoiding consumption of packaged food or food that's packaged in plastic now this is tough to do you know I love berries for instance I love blueberries I'm what you call a driveby

blueberry eater if there's blueberries in a bowl I just kind like sweep them up like by the fist full so if they're Blueberries on the counter you're probably not getting very many um I'm getting most of them I love blueberries but I noticed that I was starting to accumulate and of course I recycle those blueberry containers that are those plastic containers one way that you can avoid plastic packaging is go to farmers markets bring your own bags bring your own baskets I love that the farmers markets they have those cardboard Containers of course some of

you may be shouting wait but those are colored green and the coloration is a problem and they have the microfibers with the true but probably better than plastic containers that they use now in the grocery store for pretty much every fruit and vegetable okay so solution is either farmers markets or trying to bring your own bags to the grocery store I know this is starting to sound kind of you know hippie dippy but you know these Little things make a big difference over time you're reducing your plastic waste you're reducing the amount of plastic exposure

of the fruits and vegetables you eat this can correspond to a real difference in the number of microplastics and nanoplastics and the bad stuff that comes with them that you ingest and again most of the time these things are going to save you cost as opposed to introduce new costs the other don'ts that we haven't talked so much About are to reduce the number of clothes that you purchase I know this might seem like oh my God what where's this all going but it turns out that one of the major sources of microplastics and nanoplastics

are the microfibers on clothing that come off in washing machines that then get distributed into the oceans through the water or that get Escape into the air there are a number of ways that you can trap those they the things like the guppy bag that you can I Love the name the guppy bag that you can buy at pretty low cost you find those easily online that will trap some of that stuff there are filters that you can put within specific washing machines some places actually require this now that capture those microfibers these microfibers when

I first heard about them I thought oh goodness we're really talking about microfibers and clothing well just I don't know wear 100% cotton clothing but then you find out because I Read this book this um scary book and it is scary it does kind of bum you out when you start reading this stuff that when you read a poison like no other how microplastics corrupted our planet and our bodies you find out that so much of the waste that exists in landfills is clothing that people have discarded and there was nothing wrong with that clothing

clothing has dyes it has little microfibers the stuff gets into the environment gets into the oceans here's The simple solution to all this it turns out that we replace far more clothing than we need to okay this is actually a great relief to me because I love few things more in terms of clothing anyway the feeling of a t-shirt that I've worn many many times and it's really really soft and kind of worn down that kind of distressed look t-shirt even though that might be fashionable to some people to some people it's not I love

the feeling of a really worn down soft t-shirt even The ones that have a little bit of you know sort of uh Jagged toothing along the collar now some people might loath that they only want the pristine t-shirt that you know is super Crisp that's not me I I know I own a few of these black button- down shirts and indeed the same ones I use them over and over again I do own a fair number of them but I use the same ones over and over again and I think that's in keeping with this

other recommendation which this book a poison Like no other said could make a major dent in the amount of microplastics and nanoplastics that are out there in the environment that we end up ingesting and that the other animals on the planet who are so very important end up ingesting and potentially suffering from and that's to simply not buy or replace so much of our clothing but to reuse our clothing now the argument has been made and they counter it in the book well then you're just going to wash the same Clothing over and over you're

going to break down those microfibers and introduce those dyes and things into the ocean Etc into the air but it turns out that when you reuse the same clothing and wash it over and over again you actually see a diminishment in the amount of microfibers and the amount of dyes and things that you extract from those clothing over time okay so now in some odd way we're talking about clothing purchases or non-p purchases in This case on the hubman Lab podcast but you know in researching this episode I discovered that these are a major source

if not the major source of microplastic and nanoplastic particles in the environment and landfill Ocean Air Etc so while none of us I believe none of us are going to go out there and create a tire that doesn't degrade as quickly as current tires right most of us don't have the capacity to do that let's face it we got to get around in vehicles all Those tires breaking down not a whole lot we can do about that we're inhaling all that stuff but we can make the decision to use the clothing that we've got for

longer periods of time is it really necessary to keep buying more and more clothes and replacing the old clothes throwing out the old clothes or even donating those old clothes who knows I'm all for donating clothing after you're done with it but now I have justification for just keeping the T-shirts that I have making them softer and softer and softer over time and I should mention that of course when you wear clothing that is shedding these microfiber particles you're ingesting or rather you're inhaling more typically the microfibers and the microplastics and the nanoplastics and all

the bad goodies that go with them you know as I say that I think we need to be fair about what that means and what it doesn't mean I personally just don't see Myself going around and looking at labels finding only 100% cotton with no microfiber shedding uh no dyes Etc I mean there are a lot of things that are now introduced to even 100% cotton clothing that make them a little bit more water and stain resistant it's very very difficult to find such sources of clothing right I know they're out there but they're very

difficult to find and they're quite costly in many cases if you happen to know of some true lowcost Versions of those things please put those in the comment section on YouTube but I think we have to be realistic here Plastics were introduced in the 1950s they are everywhere they are in our clothing they are in tires they are in medical devices they're just everywhere the point of this discussion today is not to try and eliminate Plastics I don't think that's reasonable I don't even think that would be useful relative to the incredibly Powerful use of

Plastics in just about every industry there's always a trade-off with these sorts of things and I acknowledge that what I'm talking about is trying to limmit your exposure and trying to buffer yourself against this bioaccumulation in ways that can protect your endocrine system protect your brain protect your cardiovascular system protect your liver protect the organs and tissue systems of your body so that You can Thrive as much as possible so there are some other not todos or things to avoid microwave popcorn turns out to be a major source of these things basically any bag or

container can bag or plastic that has a lining that prevents oily stuff from staining it and getting through such as microwave popcorn very likely is a source or I should say a rich source of microplastics nanoplastics and endocrine disruptors does that mean that if you Have some microwave popcorn every once in a while that's going to screw up your estrogen or testosterone system and make you infertile no I don't believe that these things are all a matter of dosage exposure over time and so on toothpaste and plastic tubing another rich source of microplastics nanoplastics that

people ingest of course because you're putting in your mouth when I did the oral health episode I talked about some tooth tablets I've become quite fond of These I have no Financial relationship to the company that makes these but these are tooth tablets that um include something called hydroxy appetite which is great for the remineralization of teeth because it turns out your teeth can fill in little cavities that start to form and overall tooth Health it's also great for travel because first of all these things come in a glass jar so no plastic you take

the tooth tablets you just chew them up and then you brush Your teeth uh it's great because you don't have to worry about how many ounces is going through the uh you know the screening process is the airport because it's not a a liquid it's not a paste it's a tablet they're super convenient I love those we'll probably link to those in the show note captions even though I have no relationship to the company I'm just big fan of of that sort of thing the convenience and the fact that it's housed in glass but as

I Say all this stuff right avoiding drinking out of plastic don't turn over your clothing so much wash your clothes but don't purchase and throw away clothing too much or more than is necessary avoiding sea salt these kinds of things these are all just choices for you in the buffet of options of ways to reduce your microplastic nanoplastic ingestion and exposure and the bioaccumulation of those things over time and to increase In the case of things like Sul forane and sweating Etc and to increase the detoxification and removal of some of the more harmful products

attached to or Within These microplastics and nanoplastics right I certainly don't expect anyone including myself to start living Life free of microplastics and nanoplastics to do that you'd probably have to leave planet Earth I know certain people are developing plans to enable us to do that even if we're not Astronauts and frankly when you get out to Mars or you get it into outer space those microplastics and nanoplastics based on everything I've learned and how incredibly sneaky small and pervasive they are well they're probably in outer space as well now the final thing I want

to touch on is the potential role of microplastics nanoplastics bpas bps's and forever chem on the developing brain this is an area that I'm very familiar with because much Of my career I've focused on brain development neural development and one can find a lot of papers out there about the potential neurotoxicity of micro and nanoplastics certainly the established neurotoxicity of microplastics and nanoplastics in animal models and the potential neurotoxicity of those things in human tissues now of course because this animal literature and some correlative human literature have been out there for a while the media

and some People in particular have become concerned about and have mentioned the potential role of microplastics nanoplastics and the bad goodies that attach to them or come from them in potentially causing neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and ADHD I want to be very clear I went into this literature I read this review it's a quite nice review the plastic brain neurotoxicity of micro and Nanoplastics and sure there's a lot of animal literature showing for instance that there's a disruption in certain enzymatic Pathways within neurons in particular and this is the one that intrigues me the

most A disruption in what's called acetycholine esterase aceto Coline is a neuromodulator involved in neuroplasticity in attention among other things levels of alertness a number of things including control of the so-call neuromuscular Junctions that Allow for us to move our limbs acetylcholine esterase is involved in the degradation the breakdown of acetylcholine in the synapse so neurons release acetycholine into the synaps where it can have an effect on muscle or it can have an effect on other neurons if we're talking about within the brain and indeed there's a fair amount of evidence showing that microplastics and

nanoplastics are correlated with reductions in or just changes in acolin Estras activity now it is true that where acetycholine is released in the brain it can impinge on dopamine circuits that are involved reward Pathways and movement but I want to be clear people have taken some of those findings translated them to the correlative data in humans and have started to link the presence of microplastics and nanoplastics in their words not mine in their words to neurodevelopmental disorders such as Autism and ADHD and while there is some evidence that some of the behavioral components or cognitive

components of autism and ADHD May in increase in line with increases in microplastic or nanoplastic exposure the data there are still in my opinion very very weak so in my opinion it's far too early to conclude that microplastics and nanoplastics have any role and certainly not a causal role in the development of autism or ADHD or Other neurodevelopmental disorders that said the presence of microplastics and nanoplastics in placenta and in that first stool from babies which shows us that those microplastics and nanop Plastics are getting into the developing fetus well that does I think raise

level of concern and it certainly should motivate pregnant women as well as people who have newborn kids or going to have kids to look around their home environment think about the things They're putting into their body or the vessels they're using to ingest liquids to ingest foods and to start limiting microplastic and nanoplastic exposure certainly during but also perhaps before pregnancy and after pregnancy when one is breastfeeding so the point here is that we can't draw a direct relationship between microplastics and nanoplastics and neurodevelopmental disorders I don't Think it would be appropriate at all to

do that however given that microplastics and nanoplastics have these issues both from their own breakdown their presence right their own structural presence can be a problem the chemicals within them can be a problem the chemicals that attach to them can be a problem potentially I think learning to limit our exposure throughout our lifespan learning to reduce the bio accumulation through detoxification and excretion Pathways using the various approaches that we talked about and certainly to pay extra attention to those things around the time of meaning before during and after pregnancy is especially important because we just

don't know all the things that these chemicals and these Plastics are doing but none of them seem to be very good at least not in terms of the ways that they impact our brain and bodily tissues okay so today we've talked a lot about Microplastics what they are where they're found how they get into our body where they get lodged within our body what they potentially do in our body none of which is good some might be innocuous some might be bad none of which at least as far as I know is good and some

ways both through some todos and some to avoids that we can increase our excretion or our breakdown and removal of the bad stuff on and in microplastics and Nanoplastics and I realize that even though we covered a lot of things we also just scratched the surface for instance we know that receipts are rich sources of bpas okay so if you are somebody who handles receipts a lot for your job probably best to use nital gloves okay not latex gloves but nital gloves those are going to protect your hands if you're somebody who purchases things maybe

just say no thanks I'll take the electronic receipt or no Receipt okay however we need to be reasonable here as well does this mean that if you touch a receipt that you're going to screw up your testosterone or estrogen no but you probably don't want to be rubbing those receipts and it's very clear that if you use sunscreen or lotions of any kind on your hands you handle receipts it can increase the access of those bpas to your bloodstream and if you're somebody who handles receipts a lot well then probably best To use those nital

gloves the point here is that there are a lot of different sources of these bpas bps's PFS so-call forever chemicals microplastics nanoplastics I also would just encourage you to do your research look at the cans that you drink from ensure that they don't include bpas look at the different things that you cook within your kitchen try and cook from cast iron or ceramic and if you don't look at the other pans and cans and things in your environment And see what your likely exposure to these bpas bps's and forever chemicals is and make choices accordingly

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you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments for those of you that Haven't heard I have a new book coming out it's my very first book it's entitled protocols an operating manual for the human body this is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for

everything from sleep to exercise to Stress Control protocols related to focus and motivation and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the Protocols that are included the book is now available by pre-sale at protocols book there you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocols an operating manual for the human body if you're not already following me on social media I am huberman lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram X formerly known as Twitter threads Facebook and Linkedin and on

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you for your interest in science [Music]