September 30, 2025 • 18 mins
In this episode of Wellness Unmasked, Dr. Nicole Saphier uncovers the hidden dangers of microplastics infiltrating our daily lives. From drinks to bloodstreams—and even the brain—recent studies reveal alarming levels of exposure. Nicole explains the health risks, including inflammation and possible links to chronic diseases like dementia, while offering practical steps to reduce your risk. This episode is a wake-up call to protect both your health and the environment. Wellness Unmasked is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Tuesday & Friday.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Wellness En mass I'm doctor Nicole Saffire, and
today we're going to talk about a new study that
is just revealing again how many microplastics we are exposed
to every single day. Now, the conversation about microplastics, this
is not a conspiracy theory. This isn't some crazy futuristic
conversation like, oh, one day maybe we'll learn about microplastics. No,
(00:26):
absolutely not. Our exposure to microplastics it's a real problem.
And I'll be honest, I'm a little bit disappointed because
the updated MAJA report they'd mentioned it and all they
said was, you know what we're going to do. We're
going to put a lot of money into studying microplastics.
I don't need any more studies because I'm telling you
(00:48):
it's a problem. I'll break down for you guys briefly
some of the studies that I'm talking about, and you
tell me, do you think we should spend millions of
dollars to study it more? Or should we spend millions
of dollars to try and decrease how much we consume.
So the study that just came out in the last week, Now,
mind you, this isn't some groundbreaking study. It's not brand new,
(01:10):
but it's a new study and it's a study out
of the UK. And they decided to look at a
whole bunch of different beverages and they tested them. They
wanted to see at the bottom of the beverages, so
after they were consumed, you know, if it's tea or
if it's coffee, and there's still some grinds or whatever
is left at the bottom, they tested that little bit
(01:32):
of fluid left over. It was about one hundred and
fifty five samples of various different beverages all throughout UK
supermarkets and coffee shops. They found microplastics inside every single
one and the contamination or the amount of microplastics in
each varied and so it actually does make a difference
(01:53):
in what you are consuming. You know, when most people
hear the term microplastics, they're thinking like soda bottles breaking
down in the ocean, or the garbage on the side
of the road, and somehow these particles are getting into everything.
But no, no, no, the reality is far more unsettling
than that. These studies are showing that tiny plastic particles,
(02:16):
tiny tiny, tiny plastic particles are entering our bodies through
what we eat, what we drink, and even the air
we breathe. They're showing up in places that really we
should all be flabbergasted at how many microplastics are in
what we're consuming. So the study out of Birmingham looked
at just beverages and what they found was the highest
(02:38):
amount of microplastics were in hot tea. Now, if you
watch me on Fox and Friends, you follow me on
social media, this is not breaking news to you, because
I've already told you about it. Tea bags are one
of the biggest culprits when it comes to exposure to microplastics.
And they also think when a beverage is warm, this
(02:59):
causes the microplastics to kind of break off from wherever
they are and enter into the liquid. So hot tea,
you have the tea bag and it's hot, the amount
of microplastics are the highest than any other beverage. There's
another study. It took place, I think in like twenty
twenty four. It found microplastics in nearly eighty nine percent
(03:22):
of healthy adults. These are just from regular blood samples.
They take someone's blood, they looked at it under a
microscope and low and behold there's plastic in our blood.
In fact, about four particles per milli later of blood.
And maybe that doesn't sound like a lot, but you
have a lot more than a milli liter in your
body circulating. And it's not like you're just being exposed
(03:43):
once or twice to microplastics. This is cumulative. They're going
to continue to grow and in number as you live.
So again it may sound small, but researcher discovering that
people with the higher levels they also had more inflammatory
marks in their blood. They also had higher risk of
blood clotting. So it's pretty obvious that if you have
(04:07):
plastic circulating in your blood, your blood and your body
are like, what is this foreign body We're going to
send our inflammatory markers or inflammatory cells. It's going to
trigger the clotting cascade, which happens with inflammation, and you're
going to have systemic inflammation and maybe an increased risk
of clotting disorders. I mean, that's a problem. Another study
(04:29):
further quantified it. So when I just say microplastics are bad,
people are really trying to look at exactly how bad
it is or what the number is. I personally don't
care about the numbers microplastics are bad. The average load
in this one study showed one point six micro grams
of plastic per mile liter of blood. And that's made
(04:49):
up of plastics from water bottles, polyethylene from packaging materials.
In other words, the same plastics that hold our food
and hold all of these other things together. It's just
circulating in our blood stream. It's pretty scary. They looked
at a placenta in twenty twenty one. They looked at
(05:12):
various placentas and they found microplastic fragments in the placenta.
So if a pregnant woman has microplastics in their blood,
of course it's going to go through the placenta to
get to the baby, because that's exactly how babies get
their nutrition and their blood straight from the mother. Why
do you think that the microplastics in the mother's blood
aren't going to actually get there? So is it surprising
(05:34):
that the placentas have plastics. No, in fact, essentially saying
that babies are getting microplastics exposed to them before they
even take their first breath. But it's even more than that.
So we've talked about just checking someone's blood. We've checked
placentas by the way. We've also done autopsies. Now, mind you,
(05:59):
there haven't been a time of autopsies looking at microplastics,
but there have been some, and some studies have reported
on it. One of them, they were looking at the lungs,
found an average of three microplastics particles per sample, when
some much more than that. Again, I'm not going to
get stuck on the numbers because I don't think the
numbers matter. I just want to hear are there microplastics
(06:20):
there or they're not. One thing that they found was
they found microplastics again in the lung also in the
liver and in the kidneys. Now, I'm not really surprised
that these particles are depositing in the lungs because if
you're breathing in things, we know that pollution, toxins, cigarette, smoke, everything,
(06:41):
As you breathe it in, it gets stuck into the lungs.
And so that's why you see those pictures of like
gross black lungs from smokers, because yeah, those toxins get
stuck there. So if you're breathing in plastics, they're getting
stuck there too. Your kidney and your livers. They are
meant to filter your blood stream and so it makes
(07:02):
sense to me that you're going to find plastics in
the liver, plastics in the kidney because they're trying to
filter it all out. Here's the thing that I found
a little bit concerning, and by a little bit concerning,
I'm like, oh my gosh, hold the phone alarms are
going off. This one post mortem research study, meaning again
(07:22):
on cadavers people are already dead. It revealed that micro
and nanoplastics, you know, just small pieces of plastic can
actually reach the human brain. This is a big deal.
The brain is supposed to be protected by the blood
brain barrier and not everything is supposed to get there.
But what they found was there were seven to thirty
(07:45):
times more microplastics and brain tissue than in the liver
and the kidneys. That's a problem. Liver and kidneys supposed
to be filtering it out, but what's happening. Microplastics getting
to the brain, staying in the brain. And then they
took it step further because I guess you can argue, well,
what's the big deal. Microplastics are just in the brain.
(08:08):
If it's not causing a problem, then what's the big deal.
Why not have microplastics in the brain. Okay, I guess
we can talk about that hypothetical. But guess what what
they decided to do was they looked at the postmortem
patients who had the microplastics in the brain, and Yep,
you guessed it. The patients who had a history of
(08:28):
dementia had more microplastics in their brain. So what does
this mean. I don't know. Well, we don't really have
definitive answers about health outcomes. And you hear again like
Maha and other people saying, well, we're just going to
study it some more to figure out what it is.
But here's what I'm telling you. I'm telling you that
we already have studies that show patients with dementia have
(08:52):
more microplastics in their brain. We have blood studies showing
that patients who have microplastics in their blood, which let's
be on us, it's most of us at this point
have inflammatory markers, clotting disorders, or clotting cascades been activated.
When our whole goal is to try and decrease our
risk of chronic inflammation. If we are continuing to consume
(09:15):
these microplastics, all we're doing is putting microplastics into our bloodstream.
It's getting deposited into our various organs, and it's increasing
our risk of chronic disease. I mean, inflammation in itself
is linked to diabetes and cancers and autoimmune diseases. Obviously
we've been talking a lot about dementia, but maybe it's
(09:35):
maybe there will be link to certain brain cancers. I
guess that is one reason to study it. But my
biggest concern is we can't wait ten to twenty years
to continue to study. We have to start taking some
action now to do everything we can to decrease our
exposure to microplastics. I mean, I can't even begin to
think about how awful it was, how long it took
(09:58):
for people to find say, Hi, you know what Sicka
is smoking. That's probably not good for us because it
went for a couple of decades of thinking it was fine.
In fact, there are even some commercials back in the
day where it was recommended to help open up your lungs.
We're still dealing with the consequences of that because of
how detrimental it was for our human health. I don't
(10:21):
want microplastics to be there. We're already behind. If you
think that you don't have microplastics in your blood. You do.
I'm sorry to tell you that, but you do. It's
probably in your brain too. The best we can do
at this point is everything we can to decrease any
more microplastics that we are exposed to. Now, the reality is,
can we ever get to a zero exposure of microplastics? No,
(10:46):
unless you're going to go live in a bubble, and
it can't be It can't be a plastic bubble. It
have to be a glass bubble. But unless you are
going to just go and live in Antarctica by yourself
and have your own water supply and whatnot, you will
always have some low level exposure. We have just become
a society where we are incredibly dependent on plastic products.
(11:07):
But there are some key things that you can do
to absolutely decrease the amount of microplastics that you and
your family are exposed to. Again, I'm not sharing this
to just scare you, but i want to empower you
because if I'm trying to do stuff in my own home,
I like to share it with you. So again, we
can't eliminate this exposure entirely, but we can reduce it.
(11:27):
Some of the biggest ways we can decrease our exposure
to microplastics first and foremost. I know, but let's stop
using tea bags. This breaks my heart. I love hot tea.
I love hot tea in the morning, I love hot
tea at noon, and I love hot tea at night.
I love the various herbs. But I got to tell you,
(11:49):
plastic tea bags terrible, absolutely terrible. And by the way,
iced tea still has microplastics in it, but less than
hot tea. So try to go with loose leaf tea.
I know that gets a little cumbersome what I have
started doing at work because I used to have tea
every single afternoon. I am known to have turmeric and
(12:10):
ginger tea in the afternoon. I love it. It's a great
way to kind of kick off the afternoon. Turmeric is
naturally in anti inflammatory. But so instead of the tea bag,
I actually am using liquid herbs. It's nice that I
actually happen to make tinctures that are liquid herbs. I
didn't actually when I created them. It didn't occur to
(12:32):
me that I would be using them in this way.
But as I have continued to learn more about microplastics,
it has become my favorite thing. Is to now take
liquid herbs and put them in hot water, and that
is my new way of consuming herbal tea. You can
have herbs that decrease your inflammation, give you energy, help
(12:53):
calm you down, whatever it is. You can try it
with liquid rbs or just natural herbs. You can get
herbs herbs from the trophy store or again loose leaf tea,
and that's only if you're a tea drinker. Coffee drinkers,
try not to use plastic cups, plastic tops. If you're
going to your coffee shops and all of that, you
have to know that all of those to go cups,
(13:15):
they're all lined with some sort of plastic inside. So
if you're putting a hot beverage in it, yes, that
microplastic particles are going to come off. You're going to
drink it, it's going to get into your blood and
then it's going to sit in all of your organs
for who knows however long and who knows what it
is going to do. So maybe bring your own stainless
(13:37):
steel or a glass bottle. Trying not to use those
disposable bottles and plastic bottles are obviously a big no no,
especially if they've been sitting out in the sun or
if they've gotten warm, because as you warm up the plastic,
it tends to have the little microplastic particles go into
the liquid. Another big thing. Stop microwaving things and plastic.
(14:00):
Let's do it. Let's stop exact same concept. The heat
accelerates the breakdown. It gets into the food and then
you consume it. So put it into a glass, try
and warm it up on the stovetop. And also this
sounds kind of funny as well, but consider washing your
synthetic clothing less often. Now I have three boys, I
(14:23):
can't I cannot have them rewar things. But in that
whole athletic athleisure wear that everyone's into these days, there
is actually chemicals in it that are plastics that are
being shown to stay on our skin and absorb that way.
The reality is the skin is your biggest organ. You
(14:44):
absorb a lot from your skin. So while we think
of microplastic consumption as something we eat or drink, we
also have to think about what we're putting on our bodies,
because whether it's your clothing, whether it's lotions, whether it's
an oil you put on, your body is absorbing all
of this, so just check the ingredients before you put
(15:07):
stuff on. Again, I'm not telling you to avoid everything,
but I'm just saying we could all probably do a
little bit better in reducing our exposure. And a big
thing is, and it's also just a good thing in general,
is keep your air clean. So make sure you're changing
your HVAC filters regularly. I have a couple of air
(15:28):
purifiers in rooms of my house, mainly because one of
my kiddos has pretty significant seasonal allergies. But microplastics are
in the air from the pollution from car exhaust. And
another thing that I thought was very random, but I
thought of recently as I was preparing for this episode.
You know that feeling when you get into your car
(15:50):
and it's been hot, and as soon as you open
the door and you sit down inside, it almost smells
like a little chemically little synthetic y something going on there. Well,
if that sounds familiar, you are right, because again, if
you have closed your doors, closed your windows, and your
(16:10):
car has heated up, you have a lot of plastic
in your car, so you're aerosolizing a lot of that plastic.
So one thing that you can do if it's not
raining out, you can crack your window to try and
let some of the airflow, and as soon as you
get in the car, you can also roll down your
windows and just try and kind of let everything escape
the car. So I guess here's the takeaway. I would
(16:34):
love to say that the government or whomever is going
to start focusing on microplastics and push for smarter policies
to really curb the whole single use plastics and all
of that, but the reality is, I don't think it's
very high on their priority. And let's be honest, these
single use plastics and utensils, they're cheap and it's going
(16:58):
to take a lot of fighting with the end to
get rid of it. So all I can say is
we can do things on our own to decrease our
exposure and hopefully decrease the inflammation and the disease that
is probably going to ensue from it. I guess my
takeaway is just basically, this the plastic problem. It's not
just some pipe dream that we hear about about keeping
(17:18):
the ocean clean. It's actually just everywhere. It's in our blood,
it's in our lungs, it's even in our brains, and
as we continue to see more people diagnosed with cancer
and dementia and others. Now's the time to take every
step we can to limit exposure, both individually but also collectively.
Teach your kids, teach your friends. If your friends make
fun of you for carrying a glass water bottle, the
(17:41):
jokes on them, because when it comes to microplastics, the
evidence is clear they're already in us. The question is
what are we going to do about it? Thanks for
listening to Wellness Unmasks on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.
Follow Wellness Unmasks with doctor Nicole Staftfire and start listening
on the free iHeartRadio app Wherever you get your podcast,
ask and we'll catch you next time.
Welcome to Wellness En mass I'm doctor Nicole Saffire, and
today we're going to talk about a new study that
is just revealing again how many microplastics we are exposed
to every single day. Now, the conversation about microplastics, this
is not a conspiracy theory. This isn't some crazy futuristic
conversation like, oh, one day maybe we'll learn about microplastics. No,
(00:26):
absolutely not. Our exposure to microplastics it's a real problem.
And I'll be honest, I'm a little bit disappointed because
the updated MAJA report they'd mentioned it and all they
said was, you know what we're going to do. We're
going to put a lot of money into studying microplastics.
I don't need any more studies because I'm telling you
(00:48):
it's a problem. I'll break down for you guys briefly
some of the studies that I'm talking about, and you
tell me, do you think we should spend millions of
dollars to study it more? Or should we spend millions
of dollars to try and decrease how much we consume.
So the study that just came out in the last week, Now,
mind you, this isn't some groundbreaking study. It's not brand new,
(01:10):
but it's a new study and it's a study out
of the UK. And they decided to look at a
whole bunch of different beverages and they tested them. They
wanted to see at the bottom of the beverages, so
after they were consumed, you know, if it's tea or
if it's coffee, and there's still some grinds or whatever
is left at the bottom, they tested that little bit
(01:32):
of fluid left over. It was about one hundred and
fifty five samples of various different beverages all throughout UK
supermarkets and coffee shops. They found microplastics inside every single
one and the contamination or the amount of microplastics in
each varied and so it actually does make a difference
(01:53):
in what you are consuming. You know, when most people
hear the term microplastics, they're thinking like soda bottles breaking
down in the ocean, or the garbage on the side
of the road, and somehow these particles are getting into everything.
But no, no, no, the reality is far more unsettling
than that. These studies are showing that tiny plastic particles,
(02:16):
tiny tiny, tiny plastic particles are entering our bodies through
what we eat, what we drink, and even the air
we breathe. They're showing up in places that really we
should all be flabbergasted at how many microplastics are in
what we're consuming. So the study out of Birmingham looked
at just beverages and what they found was the highest
(02:38):
amount of microplastics were in hot tea. Now, if you
watch me on Fox and Friends, you follow me on
social media, this is not breaking news to you, because
I've already told you about it. Tea bags are one
of the biggest culprits when it comes to exposure to microplastics.
And they also think when a beverage is warm, this
(02:59):
causes the microplastics to kind of break off from wherever
they are and enter into the liquid. So hot tea,
you have the tea bag and it's hot, the amount
of microplastics are the highest than any other beverage. There's
another study. It took place, I think in like twenty
twenty four. It found microplastics in nearly eighty nine percent
(03:22):
of healthy adults. These are just from regular blood samples.
They take someone's blood, they looked at it under a
microscope and low and behold there's plastic in our blood.
In fact, about four particles per milli later of blood.
And maybe that doesn't sound like a lot, but you
have a lot more than a milli liter in your
body circulating. And it's not like you're just being exposed
(03:43):
once or twice to microplastics. This is cumulative. They're going
to continue to grow and in number as you live.
So again it may sound small, but researcher discovering that
people with the higher levels they also had more inflammatory
marks in their blood. They also had higher risk of
blood clotting. So it's pretty obvious that if you have
(04:07):
plastic circulating in your blood, your blood and your body
are like, what is this foreign body We're going to
send our inflammatory markers or inflammatory cells. It's going to
trigger the clotting cascade, which happens with inflammation, and you're
going to have systemic inflammation and maybe an increased risk
of clotting disorders. I mean, that's a problem. Another study
(04:29):
further quantified it. So when I just say microplastics are bad,
people are really trying to look at exactly how bad
it is or what the number is. I personally don't
care about the numbers microplastics are bad. The average load
in this one study showed one point six micro grams
of plastic per mile liter of blood. And that's made
(04:49):
up of plastics from water bottles, polyethylene from packaging materials.
In other words, the same plastics that hold our food
and hold all of these other things together. It's just
circulating in our blood stream. It's pretty scary. They looked
at a placenta in twenty twenty one. They looked at
(05:12):
various placentas and they found microplastic fragments in the placenta.
So if a pregnant woman has microplastics in their blood,
of course it's going to go through the placenta to
get to the baby, because that's exactly how babies get
their nutrition and their blood straight from the mother. Why
do you think that the microplastics in the mother's blood
aren't going to actually get there? So is it surprising
(05:34):
that the placentas have plastics. No, in fact, essentially saying
that babies are getting microplastics exposed to them before they
even take their first breath. But it's even more than that.
So we've talked about just checking someone's blood. We've checked
placentas by the way. We've also done autopsies. Now, mind you,
(05:59):
there haven't been a time of autopsies looking at microplastics,
but there have been some, and some studies have reported
on it. One of them, they were looking at the lungs,
found an average of three microplastics particles per sample, when
some much more than that. Again, I'm not going to
get stuck on the numbers because I don't think the
numbers matter. I just want to hear are there microplastics
(06:20):
there or they're not. One thing that they found was
they found microplastics again in the lung also in the
liver and in the kidneys. Now, I'm not really surprised
that these particles are depositing in the lungs because if
you're breathing in things, we know that pollution, toxins, cigarette, smoke, everything,
(06:41):
As you breathe it in, it gets stuck into the lungs.
And so that's why you see those pictures of like
gross black lungs from smokers, because yeah, those toxins get
stuck there. So if you're breathing in plastics, they're getting
stuck there too. Your kidney and your livers. They are
meant to filter your blood stream and so it makes
(07:02):
sense to me that you're going to find plastics in
the liver, plastics in the kidney because they're trying to
filter it all out. Here's the thing that I found
a little bit concerning, and by a little bit concerning,
I'm like, oh my gosh, hold the phone alarms are
going off. This one post mortem research study, meaning again
(07:22):
on cadavers people are already dead. It revealed that micro
and nanoplastics, you know, just small pieces of plastic can
actually reach the human brain. This is a big deal.
The brain is supposed to be protected by the blood
brain barrier and not everything is supposed to get there.
But what they found was there were seven to thirty
(07:45):
times more microplastics and brain tissue than in the liver
and the kidneys. That's a problem. Liver and kidneys supposed
to be filtering it out, but what's happening. Microplastics getting
to the brain, staying in the brain. And then they
took it step further because I guess you can argue, well,
what's the big deal. Microplastics are just in the brain.
(08:08):
If it's not causing a problem, then what's the big deal.
Why not have microplastics in the brain. Okay, I guess
we can talk about that hypothetical. But guess what what
they decided to do was they looked at the postmortem
patients who had the microplastics in the brain, and Yep,
you guessed it. The patients who had a history of
(08:28):
dementia had more microplastics in their brain. So what does
this mean. I don't know. Well, we don't really have
definitive answers about health outcomes. And you hear again like
Maha and other people saying, well, we're just going to
study it some more to figure out what it is.
But here's what I'm telling you. I'm telling you that
we already have studies that show patients with dementia have
(08:52):
more microplastics in their brain. We have blood studies showing
that patients who have microplastics in their blood, which let's
be on us, it's most of us at this point
have inflammatory markers, clotting disorders, or clotting cascades been activated.
When our whole goal is to try and decrease our
risk of chronic inflammation. If we are continuing to consume
(09:15):
these microplastics, all we're doing is putting microplastics into our bloodstream.
It's getting deposited into our various organs, and it's increasing
our risk of chronic disease. I mean, inflammation in itself
is linked to diabetes and cancers and autoimmune diseases. Obviously
we've been talking a lot about dementia, but maybe it's
(09:35):
maybe there will be link to certain brain cancers. I
guess that is one reason to study it. But my
biggest concern is we can't wait ten to twenty years
to continue to study. We have to start taking some
action now to do everything we can to decrease our
exposure to microplastics. I mean, I can't even begin to
think about how awful it was, how long it took
(09:58):
for people to find say, Hi, you know what Sicka
is smoking. That's probably not good for us because it
went for a couple of decades of thinking it was fine.
In fact, there are even some commercials back in the
day where it was recommended to help open up your lungs.
We're still dealing with the consequences of that because of
how detrimental it was for our human health. I don't
(10:21):
want microplastics to be there. We're already behind. If you
think that you don't have microplastics in your blood. You do.
I'm sorry to tell you that, but you do. It's
probably in your brain too. The best we can do
at this point is everything we can to decrease any
more microplastics that we are exposed to. Now, the reality is,
can we ever get to a zero exposure of microplastics? No,
(10:46):
unless you're going to go live in a bubble, and
it can't be It can't be a plastic bubble. It
have to be a glass bubble. But unless you are
going to just go and live in Antarctica by yourself
and have your own water supply and whatnot, you will
always have some low level exposure. We have just become
a society where we are incredibly dependent on plastic products.
(11:07):
But there are some key things that you can do
to absolutely decrease the amount of microplastics that you and
your family are exposed to. Again, I'm not sharing this
to just scare you, but i want to empower you
because if I'm trying to do stuff in my own home,
I like to share it with you. So again, we
can't eliminate this exposure entirely, but we can reduce it.
(11:27):
Some of the biggest ways we can decrease our exposure
to microplastics first and foremost. I know, but let's stop
using tea bags. This breaks my heart. I love hot tea.
I love hot tea in the morning, I love hot
tea at noon, and I love hot tea at night.
I love the various herbs. But I got to tell you,
(11:49):
plastic tea bags terrible, absolutely terrible. And by the way,
iced tea still has microplastics in it, but less than
hot tea. So try to go with loose leaf tea.
I know that gets a little cumbersome what I have
started doing at work because I used to have tea
every single afternoon. I am known to have turmeric and
(12:10):
ginger tea in the afternoon. I love it. It's a great
way to kind of kick off the afternoon. Turmeric is
naturally in anti inflammatory. But so instead of the tea bag,
I actually am using liquid herbs. It's nice that I
actually happen to make tinctures that are liquid herbs. I
didn't actually when I created them. It didn't occur to
(12:32):
me that I would be using them in this way.
But as I have continued to learn more about microplastics,
it has become my favorite thing. Is to now take
liquid herbs and put them in hot water, and that
is my new way of consuming herbal tea. You can
have herbs that decrease your inflammation, give you energy, help
(12:53):
calm you down, whatever it is. You can try it
with liquid rbs or just natural herbs. You can get
herbs herbs from the trophy store or again loose leaf tea,
and that's only if you're a tea drinker. Coffee drinkers,
try not to use plastic cups, plastic tops. If you're
going to your coffee shops and all of that, you
have to know that all of those to go cups,
(13:15):
they're all lined with some sort of plastic inside. So
if you're putting a hot beverage in it, yes, that
microplastic particles are going to come off. You're going to
drink it, it's going to get into your blood and
then it's going to sit in all of your organs
for who knows however long and who knows what it
is going to do. So maybe bring your own stainless
(13:37):
steel or a glass bottle. Trying not to use those
disposable bottles and plastic bottles are obviously a big no no,
especially if they've been sitting out in the sun or
if they've gotten warm, because as you warm up the plastic,
it tends to have the little microplastic particles go into
the liquid. Another big thing. Stop microwaving things and plastic.
(14:00):
Let's do it. Let's stop exact same concept. The heat
accelerates the breakdown. It gets into the food and then
you consume it. So put it into a glass, try
and warm it up on the stovetop. And also this
sounds kind of funny as well, but consider washing your
synthetic clothing less often. Now I have three boys, I
(14:23):
can't I cannot have them rewar things. But in that
whole athletic athleisure wear that everyone's into these days, there
is actually chemicals in it that are plastics that are
being shown to stay on our skin and absorb that way.
The reality is the skin is your biggest organ. You
(14:44):
absorb a lot from your skin. So while we think
of microplastic consumption as something we eat or drink, we
also have to think about what we're putting on our bodies,
because whether it's your clothing, whether it's lotions, whether it's
an oil you put on, your body is absorbing all
of this, so just check the ingredients before you put
(15:07):
stuff on. Again, I'm not telling you to avoid everything,
but I'm just saying we could all probably do a
little bit better in reducing our exposure. And a big
thing is, and it's also just a good thing in general,
is keep your air clean. So make sure you're changing
your HVAC filters regularly. I have a couple of air
(15:28):
purifiers in rooms of my house, mainly because one of
my kiddos has pretty significant seasonal allergies. But microplastics are
in the air from the pollution from car exhaust. And
another thing that I thought was very random, but I
thought of recently as I was preparing for this episode.
You know that feeling when you get into your car
(15:50):
and it's been hot, and as soon as you open
the door and you sit down inside, it almost smells
like a little chemically little synthetic y something going on there. Well,
if that sounds familiar, you are right, because again, if
you have closed your doors, closed your windows, and your
(16:10):
car has heated up, you have a lot of plastic
in your car, so you're aerosolizing a lot of that plastic.
So one thing that you can do if it's not
raining out, you can crack your window to try and
let some of the airflow, and as soon as you
get in the car, you can also roll down your
windows and just try and kind of let everything escape
the car. So I guess here's the takeaway. I would
(16:34):
love to say that the government or whomever is going
to start focusing on microplastics and push for smarter policies
to really curb the whole single use plastics and all
of that, but the reality is, I don't think it's
very high on their priority. And let's be honest, these
single use plastics and utensils, they're cheap and it's going
(16:58):
to take a lot of fighting with the end to
get rid of it. So all I can say is
we can do things on our own to decrease our
exposure and hopefully decrease the inflammation and the disease that
is probably going to ensue from it. I guess my
takeaway is just basically, this the plastic problem. It's not
just some pipe dream that we hear about about keeping
(17:18):
the ocean clean. It's actually just everywhere. It's in our blood,
it's in our lungs, it's even in our brains, and
as we continue to see more people diagnosed with cancer
and dementia and others. Now's the time to take every
step we can to limit exposure, both individually but also collectively.
Teach your kids, teach your friends. If your friends make
fun of you for carrying a glass water bottle, the
(17:41):
jokes on them, because when it comes to microplastics, the
evidence is clear they're already in us. The question is
what are we going to do about it? Thanks for
listening to Wellness Unmasks on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.
Follow Wellness Unmasks with doctor Nicole Staftfire and start listening
on the free iHeartRadio app Wherever you get your podcast,
ask and we'll catch you next time.
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