Microplastics: The Health Effects & Risk. Get Rid of These Common Household Products Now!

Dr. Roger Seheult is quadruple board-certified in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Diseases, Critical Care Medicine, and Sleep Medicine through the American Board of Internal Medicine. Dr. Seheult joins our MBB Report to break down the prevalence of microplastics and nanoplastics in our oceans, our drinking water, our clothes, our make up and our food, and help you understand what that means for your health. He shares the science behind leaching, when the forever chemicals in plastics seep into your food and your body. Dr. Seheult explains that the misleading term "BPA-Free" does NOT mean something is free of harmful chemicals, and how loopholes in regulations mean BPA-like chemicals are still in most common household products. Mayim and Jonathan tackle the different ways YOU can take actionable steps to decrease the amount of microplastics in your home and in your body. WATCH NOW to uncover the horrifying reality of microplastics and nanoplastics and how you can better protect yourself against them! Roger Seheult, MD is the Co-Founder & an Instructor for MedCram, a medical education website where not only professionals go to learn and get accreditation but also patients and lay people go to learn about medical conditions and tests that interest them. Check out their YouTube channel for evidence-based, up-to-date medical education on contemporary topics: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG-iSMVtWbbwDDXgXXypARQ BialikBreakdown.com https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ YouTube.com/mayimbialik https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTOocPnDh2YQZZwh86K2OxA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mayim Bialik?

  Plastic was hailed as a phenomenal revolution in material making. What's the story with microplastics?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Like, we are just starting to learn about how much of this stuff comes off. And the things that you would think are in the equation would be very surprising.

• 0:15Mayim Bialik?

  Cleaning products, carpeting, paint.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Water evaporating off of the sea contains microplastics, so that means it's in the rain.

• 0:23Mayim Bialik?

  This is beyond far reaching.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  What will dramatically increase the absorption of that BPA into your skin?

• 0:32Mayim Bialik?

  Is? Stop it!

• 0:34Speaker 01

  But there are people that are interested to say, hey, what can I do today in my own life? We can avoid these toxic compounds and still build things for a reduced price and not have to introduce these things to the population.

• 0:54Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 0:55Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:56Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our Breakdown. This is a special MBB report. Thanks for being with us. There is an enormous risk to your health that so many people don't know about, that we're going to talk about today. It's something that's been normalized. Many people have ridiculed it. It is now moving from the fringes right to the mainstream. It has to do with what we eat. It has to do with what we wear. It has to do with how we cook. And it has to do with literally what we breathe and what gets into our bodies. It's incredibly pervasive. Not thinking about it sets ourself up for a variety of problems. There have been links between this health risk and potential coronary

• 1:39Mayim Bialik?

  disease, increased risk of certain cancers, and disruption to the endocrine system. What are we talking about? We're talking about microplastics and nanoplastics. We're talking about BPAs and we're talking about PFAs. We're going to be talking to Dr. Roger Schwelt. He is a quadruple certified physician. Dr. Schwelt is an associate clinical professor at University of California, Riverside School of Medicine. He is also an assistant clinical professor at the School of Medicine and Allied Health at Loma Linda University. He is quadruple board certified in internal medicine, pulmonary disease, critical care medicine, and sleep medicine. Dr. Schwelt is someone who's on the forefront of demystifying.

• 2:26Mayim Bialik?

  Medical misunderstandings. He's the co-founder and an instructor for MedCram, which is a medical education website for professionals who can get accreditation, but also for patients and laypeople to learn about medical conditions and things that interest them. He also has a YouTube channel. We'll post all of that below. But we've brought Dr. Schulte on to try and help us understand what microplastics are. Is this a real threat? What are the implications? And what are the things that we can try and do about it to minimize the risk, if not eliminate it? We're going to go through every category that we discussed. We're going to go through plastic water bottles, cans. This is not an episode designed to scare you. It's designed to educate you.

• 3:08Mayim Bialik?

  This is information that has existed that in many cases has been kept from us. And we do not believe that talking about this information will lead to hysteria. We believe it will lead to empowerment and the ability for you to decide for yourself if you want to make changes, how you want to make those changes, and how those can significantly impact your health. Before we welcome Dr. Schulte, I want to say that we do start off this episode with a little bit of lightness, a little bit of, gosh, what happens if we open this BPA can of worms? But we're going to absolutely approach this with the seriousness that it deserves, which we hope that you will all appreciate. This is something Jonathan's been talking about for a long time that I'm really grateful that we have Dr. Schulte

• 3:52Mayim Bialik?

  to sort of break down so we can figure out what's true, what's association, what's correlation, and how concerned should we be? So without further ado, let's welcome Dr. Schulte. Break it down. We've brought you here today to talk about something that Jonathan has been having nightmares about for years. Here's a quote. "Plastics are probably one of the largest exposures we experience as humans. It's been ongoing most of our lives and our parents' lives. Plastic was hailed as a phenomenal revolution in material making." Like, people used to wear bras made of, I don't know, aluminum. I don't know. But, you know, plastic is one of these things. Like, this was, this was a great, a great thing

• 4:35Mayim Bialik?

  that we humans crafted. What, what's the story with microplastics?

• 4:43Speaker 01

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

• 4:59Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, Tupperware, hashtag Tupperware.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Isn't there a quote in some movie? I can't remember where it's like, plastic is the best, biggest. I can't remember the movie it is, but you probably remember. Yeah, no, plastic is is great in that sense. And we've made a lot of it. If you go back to 1950, I think the total production in 1950 was like 2 million tons. Okay. And today it's over 400. This is per year. Now today, it's like over 400 million tons. So it's, you know, 2 million to over 400 is a huge amount. And and every year it's increasing because there's such a demand for it. Think of plastic as as little plastic, plastic blocks that you played with when you were a kid. You know, remember those little blocks? They have like the two

• 5:47Speaker 01

  by two and then like the two by three blocks, right? And you put them together. So there's, there's, there's monomers. Those are like little pieces. And when you put those pieces together, you can make long pieces, but they're made up of individual parts, right? So that's what we call a polymer. And that's basically what plastic is. And the biggest ones that you'll see are polypropylene and polyethylene. So polypropylene, for those of you who went into organic chemistry, that's three carbons, right? Very good. And then polyethylene, those are the two carbon ones. And the and as you can imagine, the three carbon one is a little bit stronger, it's a little bit more solid, it's a little bit less flexible. And the polyethylene are is a little bit more of the opposite. So it's more like the pouches,

• 6:31Speaker 01

  the plastic bags. That's, that's basically it. The problem is, is that these, these substances are, they can have water sort of penetrate into them. Sometimes they're not as durable, they can break down. And so if you take those plastic blocks that you use and imagine like putting crazy glue and sticking them together to make sure that they are durable, to make sure that things that can't get into them. Those are the things that we often see as consumers, like, hey, what's in that plastic and, you know, BPA and, and all of these sort of things. So these chemicals that they're putting into the plastics are trying to make them either more durable, last longer, be more, be less brittle, for instance, or and then resist water and oils,

• 7:14Speaker 01

  not staining. So these are ways of, of making those creations that we make out of these blocks last longer and be around for a longer period of time. So when we talk about microplastics, there's actually two aspects. There's the blocks themselves and what effect they may have on the human body. And then there's the glue that scientists have developed over time to put those blocks together. So I'm sure the discussion will be on sort of both of those topics.

• 7:40Mayim Bialik?

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

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:13Mayim Bialik?

  So, so what we've got is we, we manufactured plastic, we started manufacturing plastic, and then we kept trying to better it in ways that we thought would make a better product. However, we're now learning that those things, they don't necessarily stay in the plastic. So can you talk a little bit about this word that nobody likes, leaching?

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Yes. So there was a study that was done and published in the, one of the journals of the American Chemical Society, where they looked at microplastics and they were actually able to look at the amount of microplastics by doing some sort of detection using a gold plated filter. Okay. So they could get down to the, to that kind of a detail. Look and what they found and what we is what we now know is one of the major ways that we get microplastics and things into our body is they took something either a liquid or food, they put it into the microwave and it's not just the microwave, it's any

• 9:21Speaker 01

  kind of heating actually and they heated it up and what this does is it breaks down the the plastic and those chemicals that are locked into the plastic and it released it into the into the food sample. So how much are we talking about? Well, in this particular in this particular study, they looked at different compounds. They looked at the polyethylene, which are the pouches. They looked at the polypropylene, which are the solid state containers. And they looked at different types of substances, those that were acidic that you might see, for instance, in like tomato sauce or fruits and those that were neutral that they use like distilled water for. So they did a wide range. And what they

• 10:04Speaker 01

  found was that anywhere from, this is per square centimeter now, okay, per square centimeter of the surface, anywhere from millions of nano and microplastics all the way up to literally trillions were released in that type of a situation. In that same study, they they looked at, they estimated based on what they were seeing and the amount of plastics and how they were able to detect it. And they showed that we are on an annual basis taking into our body, probably about anywhere between thirty nine and fifty thousand particles

• 10:43Speaker 01

  of of microplastics a year. And it just goes up if they include inhalation, that goes up. And then if they add, and this was the, this was the real kicker, this is the one that kind of floored me, people who drink tap water versus bottled water. That was a huge distinction because bottled water could add up to ninety thousand.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Particles, 90,000 particles versus just five for tap water. Like, we are just starting to learn about how much of this stuff comes off. And the things that you would think are in the equation would be very surprising. Let me give you an example. For instance, when you get the receipt paper, you brought up that you asked the question about receipt paper. It is coated with BPA so that when the thermal printing occurs, it's going to show up as ink on the page. It's not really ink. It's actually a reaction from the BPA. BPA stands for, I'm blanking.

• 11:42Mayim Bialik?

  Bifernal.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Bifos- Fossil Fernal A.

• 11:49Mayim Bialik?

  Bisphenol A, yeah.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So if you touch that receipt, it's probably not, you're not getting a lot through that skin. However, what will dramatically increase the absorption of that BPA into your skin

• 12:06Mayim Bialik?

  Is?

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Is hand sanitizer.

• 12:08Mayim Bialik?

  Stop it! Stop it!

• 12:10Speaker 01

  If you've just hand sanitized, and this alcohol-based thing, it will actually be able to

• 12:15Mayim Bialik?

  Yep.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Absorb much more of it, and it'll be able to pass through into your skin much more. This is what the science is showing.

• 12:22Mayim Bialik?

  Uh huh, that's an oxygen and a hydrogen group, just waiting to suck something in.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Exactly. So that's the example. So how much of that is happening with the sucking on the toys and the paint and all of this? You know, back 20 years ago, what was the big drama? It was lead, right? Lead in the paint.

• 12:39Mayim Bialik?

  Sure.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Now, we've figured that out, and we're trying to make changes there. Now, we're just moving on to something else that we've done, and we're finding out the

• 12:48Jonathan Cohen?

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• 14:10Jonathan Cohen?

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• 15:31Jonathan Cohen?

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• 15:35Speaker 01

  Issues there.

• 15:36Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so I wanna, I wanna ask the skeptical, but scientifically based skeptical question. So, humans process all sorts of things. We are organisms. We are, you know, eukaryotes. We are animals. We're just like, living in an environment where things are happening all the time that we have to process. We have to break things down. We have an entire organ of our body that processes toxins specifically, like, that's what it does. Like, you know, your gallbladder is really important, your liver's important. These are, you know, highly adapted organs and systems. We have a very beautiful, sophisticated immune system, as do other animals, you know, but ours is very, I think, very special because there's very

• 16:19Mayim Bialik?

  special challenges and obviously ways we can talk about it. So, some people might say, "Okay, Dr. Schwell, you know all these things because of your fancy microscopes. And you know all these things because of your, you know, fancy new ways of looking at things. And that's great for you, but the body is made to break shit down. And you've got all these big numbers with lots of zeros at the end, and they're meant to scare me. But, you know, when you say like, "Oh, these things can cross the blood-brain barrier," like, so do a lot of things, and I filter them out all the time. I'm doing a great job, right? I am alive. So, what, what do you say to people who might approach it that way and say like, "Okay, we just know more. We can wring our hands

• 17:04Mayim Bialik?

  about it more. We can get all upset and make things more expensive, and only the rich, you know, will have access to these things." But, don't we have the ability to protect our bodies from these things?

• 17:17Speaker 01

  We do. And you're absolutely right. And it's, it's never a situation where both sides don't have evidence. There's always two sides to that scale. The question is, is on which side is it balanced? And how does it go out throughout the population? And where are we gonna see the end product of, of disease? So, we might see an increase in disease because of something else, right? Or because of, of one of these issues. So, let's put it in actual, practical terms. So let's talk about the glue. So whether we're talking about the, you know, BPA, BPF, BPS. These things have fairly short half-lives in the human body because the liver is designed to filter these things out. And if you look at the half-life of some of these substances,

• 17:59Speaker 01

  once it gets absorbed into the body, we're talking about five to six hours. So it does get filtered out. There's no question about it. In fact, there is an enzyme that's called a phase two detoxification enzymes, which take these things that like BPA's and makes them more water soluble so you can excrete it out of the system. So you're absolutely right. That is a good thing. The problem is, is that we're, if you're being exposed to these things continuously, all the time, then it's just basically like it's coming in on a conveyor belt and you're just trying to get rid of it. And it's constantly trying to get rid of. So BPA, BPF, BPS, this, we could talk about, you know, all of these, these chemicals that they just keep renaming

• 18:41Speaker 01

  slight variations of and keep putting it into the same products. And then they say it's BPA free, but it's, you know, it's got something else in it that's trying to make it, you know, whatever it is. But the real problem is, is these forever chemicals. So BPA is not a forever chemical. It gets metabolized after five or six hours. What we're talking about now are the PFAS. PFAS, which is the polyfluoroalkyl substances. So let's go back to chemistry. Let's go back to organic chemistry. And you'll see why what we're talking about here has some real scientific basis to it. So if you remember the periodic table, in the total top, upper right-hand corner

• 19:21Speaker 01

  of that periodic table is not helium. Yes, it's helium, but the one that's actually right before those noble gases, that the group seven, if you will, is fluoride. And fluorine is one of the most electronegative atoms on the periodic table. But that means it loves to suck electrons toward it, just the way it is because it's got seven electrons. It really wants to have eight and it's going to suck that electron in. So if you take carbon, which were all sort of carbon life forms, and instead of putting hydrogens on those carbons, you stick a bunch of fluorides on those. That bond between carbon and fluoride is the actual, it is the strongest bond known

• 20:04Speaker 01

  in organic chemistry. I mean, I'm excluding silicon fluoride and hydrogen and fluoride. Those are a little bit stronger, but in terms of life forms, carbon fluoride bonds are extremely electronegative. They actually have a little bit of an ionic character to it. So it's extremely hard to break CF bonds. Now imagine making sure that every single car or hydrogen on that carbon molecule is fluorinated with fluorides. What you've got there is it's no surprise that they're called forever chemicals. These things have half-lives in the human body of not hours, not days, not weeks or months, but years. And these are

• 20:44Speaker 01

  the real issues that that we have concerns about. They have been shown to have issues with disrupting endocrine systems. I know you have a PhD in neuroendocrinology, so you can, you can certainly pick this up where I may leave it off here. But not only are these chemicals simulating some of the hormones, but they can also interact with the receptors for hormones. And so what we see in animal models and we're starting to have theories and hypotheses about in the humans is that it can disrupt fertility, it can disrupt all sorts of things when these things hang around for long periods of time.

• 21:18Mayim Bialik?

  And just to be clear, these are substances that resist grease, they resist oil, they resist water, and they resist heat. Is that right? Like, that's the sort of category that we're talking about. They were first used in the 1940s because, you know, that's when a lot of things started being invented. They are in the kind of thing, I'm just going to say where they are. They're in stain resistant fabrics, they're in water resistant fabrics, cleaning products, carpeting, paint, firefighting foams, which it's obviously very important to have these things, but the question is the chemicals that are used to sort of make

• 22:01Mayim Bialik?

  them. And they're authorized for limited use in cookware, food packaging, and food processing equipment, probably because the FDA is like, we don't know what to do if we don't have these.

• 22:16Speaker 01

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

• 22:43Jonathan Cohen?

  I feel like we're very calmly describing something and sort of tiptoeing around what I feel much more enraged about.

• 22:54Mayim Bialik?

  He's Canadian, so that's what enraged looks like.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Hey, well, I'm a fellow Canadian as well.

• 23:02Jonathan Cohen?

  When I'm hearing this, I'm like, well, I hear that we don't know exactly what is happening, but can you first describe some of the health implications that we're seeing in animal studies that we believe have correlation in humans? What are the impacts that we can see from having this constant exposure to this level of microplastics and forever chemicals without the ability to detox it? And what does it mean for our bodies to be in this constant detox process, having to handle this load just to get its head above water?

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, let's start off with the probably the one that we have the most evidence for. There was a paper that was just published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine. Okay, so pretty, pretty good publication. And what they did was they looked at these atheros, which are basically scars inside the coronary arteries of human beings when they get taken out and looked at, and they assessed them for microplastics. And low and behold, it wasn't in every one of them. It wasn't universal, but they certainly found them. And what they found was this, is that those patients that had microplastics in their bodies, so we're not talking about the glue anymore, we're not talking about

• 24:20Speaker 01

  the PFAS, the PFAS, or the BPA, we're just talking about the actual plastic itself. That there was an over fourfold increase association with coronary artery events. So again, that's that's not necessarily causative.

• 24:37Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, what's yeah. Yeah. Do we have a mechanism? Because I love a good mechanism.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it could very well be that these plastics are lodged in the coronary arteries. And then we develop an immune response. We know that coronary artery disease is a is an inflammatory situation. So.

• 24:56Mayim Bialik?

  Well, it's so inflammation is one thing. I mean, the other thing I'm also thinking about transport proteins and, you know, the the systems that that are involved in transporting cholesterol, like all these things, those can be disrupted in many ways and are often regulated kind of from an endocrine level.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And and we know that there is endocrine dysfunction that is occurring at the level of in these animal studies. So again, these are animal studies. We haven't done the human studies or if they are doing them, I'm not aware of them. They are looking at this, though. Obviously, this is the hypothesis.

• 25:35Mayim Bialik?

  Well, you know, Dr. Schwal, I'm just going to say it. The human study is the one that's being done by us being given all of these chemicals and lied to and not really told the entire truth about what it is that we're ingesting, holding and processing. That's the human study that they're doing. We're it.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:55Jonathan Cohen?

  Explain to us a little bit more about what does it mean to have endocrine disruption?

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Basically, the way cells communicate, one of the ways that cells communicate with each other is with hormones. Cells create proteins. Those proteins go throughout the the blood and they latch on to the receptor. And what those hormones do is largely based on what the the cell receptor is going to do with that message. So whether it's diabetes, whether it's, you know, for insulin, whether it's glucagon, whether we're talking about reproductive systems with FSH, LH, whether it's the cortisol from your adrenal gland with ACTH. These are, these are all very, very important substances and and processes that are going on in the human body. So TSH for the thyroid, growth hormone in children.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  These are all proteins that are secreted from the the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland together and control basically many of these processes in the human body.

• 26:54Jonathan Cohen?

  So summarizing, pretty much every biological process in the human body can be disrupted through having too much microplastics and these forever chemicals. Like, I'm oversimplifying it and asking for these explanations because, you know, it's a little insider baseball between the two of you. And I think it's important to really hit the nail on the head about, look, we're talking about a level of disruption and exposure to a substance that is new in the last 60, 80 years. That hasn't happened before. And this is an experiment. But what I'm trying to sound the alarm on is that for people listening who are like, yeah,

• 27:36Jonathan Cohen?

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

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:56Jonathan Cohen?

  Am I going to get angry at my coffee shop for saying, no, I'm sorry, we can't fill that up for you? And which is something that has happened to me, where they try to put it in a plastic cup. And I have to say, please do not do that. And then they look at me like I'm crazy. And then they put it into a metal, a metal measuring cup and then put it into mine. But like, where I'm going is that I think we need to fundamentally rethink some of the assumptions we have, which is, I don't leave my house and expect that every one of my needs is going to be catered to with disposable utensils and plastic plates and takeout containers, because there is a big trade off that we're not being told about.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah. And this is not the only topic of discussion where we've seen in the last 50 years, this type of a dramatic change. There are other fields that maybe for another discussion.

• 28:50Mayim Bialik?

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• 29:33Mayim Bialik?

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• 30:18Mayim Bialik?

  Starting my day with this easy, health-focused task reminds me to continue to make healthy choices the rest of the day. For a limited time, visit drinkag1.com/breakdown and get a free immune support bundle, including omega-3 fish oil and vitamin D3 plus K2 with your first subscription of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com/breakdown. And after checkout, be sure to let them know that MyobioX Breakdown sent you. I would like to kind of build on that because, you know, I grew up in an era where we did not wear seat belts. We sat in the way, way back, as Jim Rash describes in his movie by the same title.

• 30:57Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, we sat in the back, we had a, we had a 75 Dotson, Dotson, for those of you who remember Dotsons. We had a 75 Dotson station wagon and we would frequently sit in the trunk with like our arms on the back of the seat, like peering at it. Whoever was sitting in the middle row, just because like it was fun to sit back there. You know, many of us grew up at a time when people smoked in your face. Your parents smoked in your face with the windows rolled up in a car. You know, those things we thought, well, that's never going to change, right? I mean, cigarettes were advertised to children like Joe Camel. It was like, you know, we smoked candy cigarettes. We had those candy cigarettes. We thought that we were so cool, right? Another thing, drunk driving.

• 31:42Mayim Bialik?

  We were like, that's never going to change. We were, we were able to turn that around. Jonathan Haidt, the anxious generation, he was told you will never get people off their phones. And indeed, we have a movement that has swept the globe of kids having to put their phones by the door when they walk into classrooms. Right? So there are things that we think we cannot turn around. I'd like to believe this is not impossible, but I think there's a lot of fear about either causing hysteria or an hysterical reaction. So what Jonathan is talking about is this is beyond far reaching. It's ubiquitous. This is a ubiquitous system that we're part of.

• 32:24Mayim Bialik?

  Can you talk a little bit about what, what it would be like to, to turn something like that around?

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Just before we get into turning it around, I feel like we still need to list. Like, I think people are still not aware, like, I could do the list with you. We can, we can pass it back and forth, but like, cutting boards, cooking utensils.

• 32:46Mayim Bialik?

  When Jonathan talks about coffee cups, he's talking about like the, the paper cups.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:52Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, the bottled water needs its own category of conversation. But like, that's blowing my mind. Cooking utensils, cutting boards, anything that's that kind of like hard, durable, plastic, nonstick pans.

• 33:08Mayim Bialik?

  Apparently canned goods, things that are canned.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  No, and that's, that's important to know because those canned goods are lined with, with this plastic. I saw a YouTube video or some sort of short on YouTube. It's in my mind where they actually put the can into something that dissolved the metal. And you could see that was left behind was, was this plastic pouch that lines the inside of all of these aluminum cans that we think, oh, it's metal. It's got no plastic. It's lined with plastic.

• 33:37Mayim Bialik?

  Canned drinks. Food storage containers, like for those of us who use stainless steel and glass and our children are like, my lunch bag is so heavy, that's why. Tea bags, coffee filters, plastic wrap, parchment paper that is lined with plastic. In addition, things like air fryers and toasters, things like that. The next level, like synthetic clothing, you know, we all have that like cozy blanket that you're like, how did they make it so soft? Guess what? They're poisoning you with softness. Uh, it's in.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Polyester.

• 34:18Mayim Bialik?

  Polyester, it's a polyester. And this is something that is in, we're sleeping on it. We're spending whatever percentage of our life.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  And I was just gonna add to that too. I was just gonna add to that too, while you're on the topic of, of sportswear. When you're, when you're sweating, these clothes that are designed to wick away the sweat.

• 34:38Mayim Bialik?

  Underwear. You know how many times they've talked about wicking away moisture from my whoo-hoo? It's a whole industry.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 34:47Mayim Bialik?

  A lot. It's an entire industry of wicking moisture away from ladies whoo's.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  By the way, that came up in one of the studies is when they, when they looked through the human body to see where the microplastics were, were showing up. Obviously the GI tract, obviously the lungs, but the urogenital tract was, was another place, uh, very concerningly as well.

• 35:12Mayim Bialik?

  This is something we've talked about here before, but I, I want to underline it for this conversation. Beauty products.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 35:22Mayim Bialik?

  Like this is a real big one. This is a big one because you're literally putting it on your skin. In many cases, you're being told, exfoliate first so that your skin can absorb it better so that you clean. I mean, it's, it's a thing. This is literally. I mean, it's, it is, it's gotta be one of the largest earning markets, right? Is beauty products, which has now spread, it's not just for women, men too.

• 35:47Jonathan Cohen?

  A lot of our athletic wear, yoga pants, when did those get invented?

• 35:51Mayim Bialik?

  Everybody wears them all the time. I've talked about this a lot.

• 35:54Jonathan Cohen?

  What is it, 20 years ago only that they, like, they didn't exist? And now what they're studying, they're finding that almost every single brand of yoga pant has forever chemicals lined in them and they're being slapped onto people's bodies directly against the skin in very porous areas and people are leeching in these chemicals. We've seen in animal studies that the immune system does have a response and goes to attack the plastic, but of course, the plastic doesn't respond to that. Is that accurate?

• 36:27Speaker 01

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

• 36:31Jonathan Cohen?

  So the immune system is able to sort of break down the plastic into further microscopic particles and then is it better to have clumps or is it better to disperse them?

• 36:42Speaker 01

  It's better to have clumps because you have less of a surface area to disperse the glue, if you will, and these chemicals that are leeching out. So what often happens in the human body, I can speak to things like silica. Silica is one of the most abundant substances on the planet, basically sand. And we actually have a condition in the lung called silicosis where you inhale particles of sand, the immune system will surround these particles of silica and they will do, nothing happens to the silica, they just form these clumps of hyperimmune cells and nothing gets broken down, unfortunately. And I, I'm pretty sure this is exactly what's happening in the human body to plastics,

• 37:24Speaker 01

  because this is exactly what they saw in that New England Journal of Medicine article where they saw in these atheros, in these lesions in the coronary arteries, they were actually able to see microplastics in there.

• 37:37Jonathan Cohen?

  What is the effect, and I know it needs to be studied more, but what is the effect of having the immune system activated when it's not an active disease threat?

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's autoimmune conditions. You name it. We see this with a number of diseases. We see this with silicosis, as I mentioned, but we also see it with a number of other conditions, for instance tuberculosis, cocciotis, these are fungal and mycobacterial infections, where the immune system will wall off the infection and it will just keep it at bay and the person will go throughout their entire life perhaps without actual disease, but they are currently infected. Now, at the end of their life, if they become immunocompromised, this infection can then become reactivated. But yeah, this often will cause a reaction and maybe even cause an autoimmune reaction where the antibodies and the immune response

• 38:30Speaker 01

  gets confused and where it feels like it's attacking the initial intruder, but it turns its energies and actually attacks the body itself. And this is the basis of most autoimmune conditions.

• 38:40Mayim Bialik?

  You know, one of the biggies for women is thyroid. And the thyroid is like this sort of like gimme gimme gland that is sort of, you know, taking in, processing, it's highly hormonally regulated, connected to so many incredibly important systems. And, you know, it's one of the things we first see kind of go in women. And as we've talked about here, which is not a popular thing to talk about, you know, who's being sold chemicals to put in their nails, in their hair, in their eyes, and you know, the inner linings of, you know, every mucous membrane is being, you know, you're inhaling something as a woman, you know, that is chemically beautiful.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, and just to speak to Jonathan's point even more in terms of how pervasive this is, it blew my mind, but you know, water evaporating off of the sea contains microplastics. So that means it's in the rain. They've looked in the tundra. They've found microplastics in the tundra. So there's, there's really no way you can escape too. This is in our oceans. It's, if you look at salt, for instance, people consume salt. There's a difference between the type of salt that you might consume in terms of the microplastics. So if you actually get sea salt. There's going to be a high proportion of microplastics there. If you get salt that comes from rocks that obviously were formed well before the 1950s, there's going to be a relatively much less a level of microplastics in that type of salt.

• 40:05Mayim Bialik?

  Sorry, I'm just, I'm looking at Jonathan and he's this, his, his organic sea salt is flashing before his eyes. We're going Himalayan and nothing. It's like Himalayan salt or bust.

• 40:17Jonathan Cohen?

  The salt conversation is, is a whole other, other beast. Up until the nineties, it was legal and considered reasonable to dispose of plastic in the ocean. We're now studying our fish supply, both small fish and large fish who are eating the small fish to see the amount of microplastic happening in, in fish. So when we're encouraged to eat fish for our brain health, um, now we also know that we're getting an enormous amount of microplastic load. Can you talk about the brain? You know, I've, I've heard that it potentially gravitates towards the brain because of what the body, how the body is coding it and processing these microplastics when they're going through the liver.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  So there's microplastics and there's nanoplastics. And microplastics is anything from half a centimeter down to a micron, which is a thousandth of a millimeter. And then anything less than that, we're talking about nanoplastics, which are basically so small that they can go right through the blood brain barrier. They can go into the cells, they can, they can do all sorts of, of, of harmful things, we believe. But yeah, no, that's, these very small particles, these nanoparticles, and by the way, these are some of the particles that we saw in that study that were released when they did microwaving of, of food products in plastic containers. Those are the things that went off, off the, off the charts.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  So if these things go into the brain, uh, obviously the brain is extremely complex and there's all sorts of hormones and these things can disrupt, uh, not only the neurons themselves, but also the supporting cells that, uh, that allow these things, these processes in the brain to continue to work normally. And of, of course, If those are affected, then things aren't going to work. There's a neuro glymph system which allows lymphatics to drain from the brain. These are all, you know, possible ways of mitigating some of this microplastic aspect. But again, this needs to be studied and it's it's difficult to do in human beings because obviously it's invasive. So I think more study needs to be done.

• 42:23Jonathan Cohen?

  Given that it's in the food supply, given that it's in the rain, given that it's in the ocean, it's not really about preventing exposure. It's about reducing exposure as my you're talking about load and how much we're being exposed to. Because while more, we don't exactly know the impact, it can't be better for us. So.

• 42:46Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I mean, some some could argue, and I guess this is a question. Is it too late? And this is just sort of the cost of being human right now? Is that how we should look at this? Like, what's your what's your personal take?

• 42:59Jonathan Cohen?

  I cannot accept that, by the way.

• 43:00Mayim Bialik?

  Right, well, but that's.

• 43:02Jonathan Cohen?

  Just before you give that take.

• 43:03Mayim Bialik?

  No, but I know, but I think it's an important point because that's really, this is a psychological point. Because there are people who feel like this is the cost of being a human in this revolution of the industrial age. This is the cost. This is what we've brought upon ourselves. I was talking to a friend of mine who's a devoted Buddhist, who was like, I just would like to reduce suffering today. So I'm gonna live my life today to the best of my ability. You know, it's more of a psychological decision or kind of approach.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Well, my brings up a great point because here's the thing. We know that microplastics probably has risk that that is adverse affecting. But the thing that we have to understand is that there's so many other things that can also affect us in risk. And particularly, I'm gonna I'm gonna point out that people who are constantly in fear for a particular thing and perseverate on it and actually become overwhelmed. And we see this sometimes, not just not in terms of plastics, but in terms of other conditions. Can actually affect them and cripple them so much, it's actually worse than the actual thing that they're afraid of. So we have to realize that there's a balance that we have

• 44:21Speaker 01

  to take. And as it turns out, I believe, and we can talk about this as we go on, there are some pretty simple, low hanging fruit things that we can do to substantially reduce our risk of getting these microplastics, realizing that we can't eliminate every single risk that we're exposed to.

• 44:39Mayim Bialik?

  I'm into that. I want to hear it.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, all right. So.

• 44:43Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm all for the reduction.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And realize here that I want to be clear that in no way do I believe that any of these things that I would suggest to do is simply trivializing the whole problem. These are no, these are things that will not prevent these things from getting into the environment. We obviously have to be good stewards of the environment and do what is responsible. But but there are people that are interested to say, hey, what can I do today in my own life that can potentially improve and reduce microplastics? And you guys probably know just as well as I do, but let's start talking about that.

• 45:20Mayim Bialik?

  In general, anything that's getting hot is, in theory, more susceptible than something that's not getting hot. And it's funny, I know a lot of this from some of the laws of cashroot, of cosherness. A lot of our rules are based on what can leach into a product, because you don't want to quote contaminated with dairy or meat. So it's kind of interesting. So one of the things is about hot foods. So when we're talking about, you know, a hot beverage in a plastic cup, or even in a paper cup that's lined with plastic, when we're talking about microwaving things, getting them hot, those are the times when we're going to see, in theory, more leaching, correct?

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. This is the laws of thermodynamics now that we're talking about. When we're talking about molecules, is heat allows things to degrade faster, reactions increase. And that's just one of the things that is absolutely true. In the study that we referenced before, whether it's microwave, whether it's on the stove, whether you're heating it up, these are all things that will dramatically increase the amount of leaching and breaking down of the plastic into the product.

• 46:28Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so in this case, if you're going to heat something up, heating it in glass is a good idea. That's just like, at this point, glass is safe.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. So remember though, when you're doing this, oftentimes when you're at work and you put things into a microwave, you've got to be, you know, you've got to be thinking about some of your colleagues and making sure that your food isn't splattering everywhere. So what do you put on top of the Pyrex that you're now doing it safe?

• 46:50Mayim Bialik?

  A piece of BPA.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  A plastic container. So like, okay, well, maybe you should put like a napkin because you could also put Saran Wrap, right? And again,

• 46:59Mayim Bialik?

  You could also just watch it. Don't heat it till it splatters and no one needs to have an issue.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  See, and this is the thing is like, everything you reach for, you start to realize it's got plastic in it. It's almost like the end of a horror movie where

• 47:12Mayim Bialik?

  We are living in a horror movie, Dr. Schwell. That's exactly what this episode is. Okay. So, so heating things.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Putting a, you know, piece of, of paper towel over it. I don't know. We haven't talked about paper towels yet, but hopefully they're okay.

• 47:24Mayim Bialik?

  I don't own them, but okay. So, okay. So we dealt with heat. Let's go into water bottles. So the most ubiquitous thing, and especially as someone who works in the industry is like crates and crates and crates of plastic bottles. I grew up in a time when no one drank water. Does anyone else remember this time? Like no one drank water. You were always drinking like soda or juice or like, I don't even know what was happening. I never drank milk. I never drank water. And now everyone, we were told, drink water. It's so good for you. You're made of water. What do you do about plastic and water?

• 48:01Speaker 01

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

• 48:28Speaker 01

  You know, going to your, your favorite coffee place and asking them to do this. There, I've heard now that some of these coffee places will actually give a discount if you bring your own cup and, and allow them to fill it up. So I think, I think that we're turning a corner there. If enough people start to ask for it and hopefully listen to this podcast and we can start to make a revolution of change, then-

• 48:51Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, they're saving you the money that you'll need for your autoimmune condition that you're going to get anyway.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  And, and they don't need as many cups, right? So-

• 48:58Mayim Bialik?

  Right. So this water that I'm putting in my bottle, instead of drinking a, a plastic bottle of water, that water, you want to have it filtered, right?

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:13Mayim Bialik?

  Do I, do I ask you if I want fluoride in my water?

• 49:18Speaker 01

  That's a great question. So, um, you know, there are a number of products on the market, depending on how much money you want to spend to take out these things. So if you want to, if you want to, to spend a, a decent amount of money, but you're not willing to like, uh, spend the whole bank on it, you know, a carbon block filter can filter a lot of these things out, but, and, and especially if you get a casing that's aluminum, but the filter themselves have plastic. So, you know, you're, you're trading off big things for smaller things and, and less. You're cutting it down. If you really want to, you know, spend the bank and you want to completely eliminate microplastics, the, the way to do that would be with reverse osmosis systems.

• 50:01Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  The problem, the drawback with that is, is that there are healthy minerals in the water, they also get removed as well. So you have to add those back in.

• 50:10Jonathan Cohen?

  And remineralizing water has had some issues.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there, there's a downside. And this is the thing that I was talking about before. You could become so focused on one issue that when you go to the, and we all know about diminishing marginal utility, right? The more, the, the first candy bar that you eat tastes the best, the second one, not as well, the third one even less, the more money and time you put into eliminating plastics, each dollar that you're spending is going to eliminate less and less and less and cause more problems. So it's a balance.

• 50:41Mayim Bialik?

  Another simple thing that I think we should talk about. If you haven't gotten rid of your Teflon or your whatever that makes nothing stick to it. I understand it's a real drag when things stick to your pan. I get it. I've lived it. There was a time that I ate eggs and had to cook them. And I totally get it, but that's like a big one because we're using that stuff all the time. There are a few very, very expensive options that don't have those chemicals. But you know, the story is you may become friends with a cast iron skillet.

• 51:25Mayim Bialik?

  That might be your new friend, but there's also issues with cast iron skillets. So finding a way to cook that doesn't involve that non-stickness. And you know, also, we were all raised with television showing us that the ideal is for that omelet to just slide off the pan. Like, I know it. And I remember as a child, I'd be like, I want that life. I want to be that lady. And it just, but the fact is, like, this is the kind of sacrifice that we're sort of talking about. Is this is a level of convenience that we have all enjoyed. It was great while it lasted, but it is time to find other solutions.

• 52:07Mayim Bialik?

  You're not going to have that picture perfect omelet experience. That's just the truth.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Exactly. And imagine, again, we just talked about heat. We're not talking about heating things up in a microwave. We're now talking about such extreme temperatures on the stove where you're cooking that you're really activating these things and they're leaching, no question about it.

• 52:29Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, it's time to, it's time to get rid of it. I'll actually, I'm going to post, I have this one pan that's my latka pan. Because latkes, you know, you really don't want them to stick. I'm ready to part with it. I'm going to do it. I'll post a picture of it on the internet.

• 52:41Speaker 01

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

• 53:09Mayim Bialik?

  And I will say, as someone who's been using wood and bamboo for years, they do wear out. I'll be honest, they do. You know, if you want to be that person who's like seasoning your cutting board with mineral oil, whatever, I'm sure there's a reason you shouldn't do that either. But yeah, this does mean that you, you may end up replacing them. But in this sort of toss up of environmental impact and biological and endocrine impact, there, there's going to be a trade off. There's not a perfect solution here. But having a cutting board that you think is going to last forever, it's actually not going to last forever. And it's going to last forever in a special way inside of your endocrine system.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, bamboo wood, I'm sure has, has a half life that's much shorter, and it's probably not affecting your endocrine system.

• 53:54Mayim Bialik?

  Yep. Jonathan, any other categories? Oh, the other thing, this is, you know, having a reckoning with your beauty product is really, really a hard one. I don't even, I don't even know how to touch that. It's, I, I mean, I've had to do it.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Only you can touch that one.

• 54:08Mayim Bialik?

  Right. I mean, I've, I've, I've had to do it. Yeah, I've had to do that myself because I have a system that let me know when things weren't working for it. And, you know, it's kind of interesting having an autoimmune situation where your body is that sensitive to the things that we're all sensitive to. It's just some bodies are going to show it sooner than others.

• 54:32Jonathan Cohen?

  Can you talk a little bit about the BPA fallacy? We all were taught, or we're all sold this idea that these companies were really going to do a massive service for our health and take away the toxic chemicals. But it turns out that isn't the case.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so actually, Joseph Allen from the Harvard School of Public Health came on our channel, talked about the whack-a-mole, and that's what this is. It's basically BPA. We didn't know a lot about it, and then the studies started to come out and show that, in fact, BPA was toxic. BPA was doing this, BPA was doing that. There was a huge consumer backlash about this, and anybody was now picking up things, looking at the ingredient list, looking at what was in the production, and they saw BPA, they refused to buy it. So what happened was is they, the scientists, the evil scientists, went back and they found other substances that wasn't called BPA, and they started to put that in place of it because it did the same thing. Remember, what's the purpose? Why would they want to

• 55:33Speaker 01

  put BPA into plastics? Not because they want to be evil, it's because they want the product to be stable, they want the product to not be brittle, they want it to last, durability, and that's what this product does. Well, they found other products that did exactly the same thing, and were probably as toxic, but again, we didn't have the studies. So now, they can say, hey, look, there's no BPA in this product, it's now BPF, or BPS, or something else. And did we have actual studies on those particular substances? No, we didn't, because they had just come out with it. And so, that's what this toxic whack-a-mole is called. They now call it regrettable substitution, which is kind of a misnomer,

• 56:17Speaker 01

  because it's almost like, oh, I'm sorry, we slipped up and we substituted this. But it's all very intentional, and it's using this thing so they can be able to say, we don't have studies that show that these chemicals are toxic. But the thing that you have to understand is that the absence of evidence doesn't necessarily equal the evidence of absence. So, we believe this. And so, actually, in talking to Dr. Allen, he was saying that they're actually putting together programs, and they're actually showing that they can build systems, and they can build things that, where they say, we don't want to have any of these toxic chemicals, no matter what they are, and they're able to actually build things that don't have these toxins. Toxic chemicals in it for the same price and that we don't need to do this.

• 57:02Speaker 01

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

• 57:28Jonathan Cohen?

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

• 57:41Speaker 01

  Oh, I totally, I mean, I remember go. I remember when when my my first child was born, this is back in 2005, and we were trying to look and my wife's like, hey, I just saw a video on BPA. We cannot get anything with BPA. So we we've got those things. We've got BPA free, whatever it is.

• 57:58Mayim Bialik?

  I literally was intimidated by my 15 year old because I thought he'd complained that his lunch was too heavy because I was sending him to school with glass containers. And I finally kind of had to get over it. And I was like, so this is the lunch thing container that you're gonna have? And he's like, gosh, that's really heavy. Okay, that was it. End of story. And the conversation was like, this is how we're gonna do this now. We've got a couple really precious glass containers. Do not leave them at school. Don't leave them at your dad's. This is how we eat now. He won't use the bamboo fork. We I can't get him to do that yet. He still is taking a plastic fork, but I figure like I do what I can.

• 58:40Jonathan Cohen?

  Speaking of things that need to be redesigned, which I'm very excited that there are teams working on that. Can you talk about black takeout containers? And the evidence that has recently surfaced about the chemicals that we thought had been legislated out and are still in there?

• 59:00Speaker 01

  That one I'm not too up on. You must be getting out to tell me about it. I'm interested to hear.

• 59:06Jonathan Cohen?

  The short version is that there's flame retardant in these black plastic takeout containers that are used by restaurants all over and that specifically black plastic utensils have been shown to have flame retardant in them at a levels that were previously known to be harmful and that we had legislated the end of and turns out that they were never actually removed from the system.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Wow. So those little packages that we get of the spood and the fork combined and those things with the lids on them, those are flame retardant. Wow.

• 59:43Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah, bleaching flame retardant as well as the microplastics. This is just on CNN and other mainstream outlets. This is not underground information.

• 59:55Speaker 01

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

• 1:00:07Mayim Bialik?

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

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

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

• 1:00:56Mayim Bialik?

  Wonderful. Thank you so much. You made this very palatable and I'm only a little bit terrified.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Thank you very much.