#907 - Dr Rhonda Patrick - How Microplastics Are Ruining Your Health

What have you been interested in recently? You're always learning new stuff.

Yeah, I think most recently I've had a real interest in ultra-processed foods, in plastic, microplastics, their associated chemicals, what they're doing to human health. That's been my latest obsession.
Okay, microplastics. Teach me about them.
What do they do? So microplastics, I mean, we're all familiar with plastic.

You know, if you take a look in your refrigerator or your pantry i mean almost everything is packaged in some kind of plastic container plastic breaks down over time right so things that can accelerate that breakdown would be like heat exposure to exposure to oxygen and so that breakdown sheds plastic particles into whatever is being contained in that plastic container, food, beverages, whatever. So microplastics, they sort of vary in size anywhere between five microns or micromillometers to 100 nanometers in size.
And when they're like five micromillometers, that's like something that would be equivalent to a size of like a grain of rice. You can see it.
When you get down to the 100 nanometer range, I mean, that's like a thousand times smaller than a grain of rice. So you're not going to see it, right? And that's honestly, those are actually technically nanoplastics, but we all just kind of call them microplastics just for simplicity.
And these microplastics are getting into food as we consume whatever food they're contained in, whether it's a beverage or, you know, disposable food, you're digesting it and they can be absorbed, right? Now, not all of them are absorbed. I think, you know, there's some studies saying that we basically consume anywhere between, you know, hundreds to thousands of particles a day.
So how much of that we absorb? Not all of it, you know, a fraction of it. But it's a lot of particles that we're absorbing every day.
And, you know, these microplastics are in our water. So water is contaminated with them.
If you think about water treatment plants, you know, wastewater treatment plants are treating the water for pathogens, right? Viruses, bacteria. They're not treating them for plastics that are getting into the water and our water sources are contaminated for a variety of reasons not to mention if you if you're you know turning on your faucet and getting water through the sink oftentimes the water is transported through these pipes that are made of you know pbc which breaks down the you know there's plastic in that and it breaks down over time and sheds microplastic into your water.
So water is another source. Of course, if you're drinking bottled water out of plastic bottles, that's another added source of microplastics as well.
And so microplastics themselves are, there's a growing body of evidence in terms of what they're doing to human health, and we can talk about that. But there's also chemicals that are associated with them, right? How, like just how prevalent are these things? Like how difficult is it to avoid microplastics? It's impossible to avoid.
I mean, the fact that it's in our water source is kind of indicative of that. Unfortunately, it's not just just in our water but it's in our soil so plants are taking that up um it's it's in the soil um because it's it's it's essentially you know runoff from you know rain and stuff it's in microplastics and plastic chemicals are everywhere.
So they're in the air. And so when rain, you know.

So that's so small that they can go up with precipitation? They're in the air because the main source from the air is actually our clothing. So our clothing, polyester, nylon, like the stuff that I'm wearing for sure.
I'm not wearing 100% cotton. When you wash it, it gets, you know, into the oceans.
When you dry your clothes, the dryer is, you know, it's putting microplastics. The dryer is atomizing your microplastics and pushing them into the atmosphere.
Into the air. And tires are a big source.
So tires aren't 100% made of rubber. They're rubber and a bunch of plastic, you know, stuff.
And so cars on the road, shoes on our, you know, the rubber soles on our shoes, all that stuff has plastic and all that stuff is getting into the air. So the major source of microplastics are oral ingestion, which we talked about, and then inhalation.
That's how they're getting into our bodies. So when it rains, that stuff, you know, the rain brings the microplastics into our runoff, right? And that then gets into the soil, it gets into our sludge, you know, this is like fertilizer that's used.
So it's pretty much ubiquitous. It's everywhere.
You're not going to avoid it. Not to mention, I mean, I guess even if you were to try and not consume any condiments or foods or anything like that made out of plastic, you're going to do a huge service.
You're going to greatly reduce the amount of microplastics you're consuming. Let's say you have air filters.
You're trying to filter the air, but you're not going to filter it everywhere you go. You're in your car.
You're walking around on the street, especially if you live in a metropolitan urban area. It's very, very difficult to eliminate microplastics.
What's the sort of levels that we get exposed to? How much does that get down into being absorbed? Because the Earth's a big place. It feels to me like the atmosphere has got loads of room in it.
I don't know how much of the air that we get exposed to, even in downtown New York, is going to be filled with microplastics. I'm going to guess that there's on the triage list of stuff to worry about, there's probably other stuff up there, carbon monoxide, high levels of carbon dioxide, stuff like that, that might be a problem.
But yeah, like in terms of how we get exposed and what are the sort of levels that we get exposed to, what do we absorb? So it does depend on, of course, your lifestyle. So it depends on what you're eating, you know, what you're consuming, where you live, how polluted it is, right? Like that's obviously, if you have air filters in your home, which is a big one, if you're drier, you don't want your dryer to ventilate inside of your home.
That would be like a huge source of microplastics that are concentrated inside your house. So you want it to ventilate, of course, outside, of course, but then that contributes to the microplastics in the environment, right? Which ultimately makes its way back into our food and our, you know, the air we breathe outside.
But, you know, there's a lot of studies trying to quantify how much microplastics that we are taking in daily. And there's been a variety of studies and some of them have said, well, there's a credit card of plastic a day that we consume.
And that was a very, I would say, sensational headline that was published in a peer-reviewed study. But it turns out when you're trying to really quantify the gram weight of microplastics, it's very challenging because they vary in size.
I mentioned five micrometers to like 100 nanometer in size. And so it depends on what your source of microplastics are when you're trying to quantify that.
And so a lot of studies that have looked at some of these, you know, in gram weight, how much are we consuming used microplastics that are found in the oceans. So in the oceans, a lot of that's coming from our clothing runoff from our washing our clothes.
And it's not necessarily the same size particles that we're consuming if we're drinking water from a tap or we're drinking water out of a bottled water made of plastic. So it's not really a credit card in plastic that really isn't, I would say, accurate.
Again, it comes down to, you know, it could be thousands of particles a day. Absorbing-wise, there have been studies in animals, okay, not humans, that showed that animals absorb up to 2.5% of those particles.
There are a variety of factors that actually can help you blunt that absorption. So microplastics, really the major one is size.
So as you get smaller in size like nanoplastics, those can be more readily absorbed through your intestinal cells because of the size. It's really easy for them to kind of pass the membrane of your cell.
I'm going to guess that if you've got a leaky gut of some kind, or you've got a more permeable gut wall, is that a risk factor for this? It is. Yeah.
Presumably. I mean, there's not a ton of evidence on that, but it makes sense.
You know, the question is, you know, I mentioned heat breaking down the microplastics. Well, heat can break them down into nanoplastic size.
So you don't want to microwave any food in plastic. You don't want to cook with any plastic utensils.
And you don't want to drink out of something that's going to have a hot beverage poured into it because that's going to rapidly, you know, accelerate the breakdown into smaller particles. So, for example, a lot of to-go coffee cups are lined with plastic to prevent the leaching of the beverage into the cup, the paper cup.
And so when you pour hot water into that, you can rapidly break down those plastics into small size as well as chemicals. So you think maybe up to 2.5% of what we consume per day we might absorb? Well, that's from animal studies.
So who knows? Something like in that range. But the other thing that's really interesting that actually can affect the way you absorb these microplastics is, believe it or not, dietary fiber.
So there's two types of fiber. There's fermentable fiber.
This is what the bacteria in the distal part of your gut, this is the colon, they're fermenting into a bunch of short-chain fatty acids to regulate your immune system and do all sorts of beneficial things for your gut. Then there's also non-fermentable fiber.
This just moves stuff through your intestines, right? Well, the fermentable fiber, which is found in fruits and vegetables, that is fermented into like this viscous gel that encapsulates microplastics and nanoplastics and stops them from being absorbed. The non-fermentable fiber, just like the stuff that moves, you know, foods through your intestines, also just moves the microplastics as well.
So you're going to be excreting it through feces more rapidly. So those two, those are two ways that fiber actually is beneficial for basically inhibiting the absorption of microplastics and nanoplastics.
Where do plastics go in the body? Do they congeal in certain places? Yeah. So there's been, again, this is like an emerging field.
There's a lot more evidence on the chemicals associated with plastics, which we can talk about. But there's been a variety of studies, actually a lot of them coming out in 2024 last year, some new ones coming out this year, showing that microplastics seem to accumulate in the brain 10 to 20 times more than other organs.
And this was a study out of San Paolo, Brazil, where there's moderate air pollution. I mean, it's not like Mexico City, but there's a significant amount of air pollution there.
And I mentioned air pollution because you would think, well, why are microplastics accumulating 10 to 20 times more rapidly in the brain than other organs? They've been found in the heart. They've been found in the liver, in the kidneys, in the lungs.
Of course, you're breathing it in, in the testes, reproductive organs, everywhere, placenta. But why are they accumulating so heavily in the brain? And it's not really known.
It hasn't really been investigated. But I think it has to do with the fact that we're breathing in these particles in addition to consuming them orally from our foods and beverages

and things like that. Because I mentioned microplastics are in the air, right? They're

in the air. We are breathing them in.
They get into our lungs. So the blood-brain barrier is

supposed to protect chemicals from getting into the brain. And you would think, well, if anything-

Do your job.

Yeah. You'd think it'd be like less microplastics in the brain than in the lungs, right? And also particle size plays a role.
So again, particle size, if you have a nanoplastic, it can more readily transverse across the blood-brain barrier because it's smaller in size, similar to what's happening in the gut. But when you breathe in something, it's a direct route to the brain.
So it bypasses the blood-brain barrier. And this is because your olfactory neurons, when you smell something, there's a direct connection to the central nervous system.
And this is why a lot of drugs that are administered intranasally are done so because they are trying to bypass the blood-brain barrier. So I think what's happening is you're getting a combination of both oral consumption and you're getting the nanoplastics in circulation.
Because once these things get into circulation, there's really no point. It's kind of beyond the point of return, right? They're going to organs and they're accumulating there.
I don't know how they're going to get out of the organs once they're there. This isn't something that we're excreting unless it's at the level of the intestines when we're eating it, consuming it.
Then, like I mentioned, if the fiber is there, you're excreting it. But once it gets into circulation, it's going to organs.
So I think the combination of the breathing it in and eating it is why you're getting it in the brain 10 to 20 times more. And here's why that's a problem.
Because in that same study, they looked postmortem at people that had dementia like Alzheimer's disease. And those individuals that had dementia and Alzheimer's disease had 10 times more microplastics in their brains than people that did not have dementia and Alzheimer's disease.
10 times more. So of course, this is a correlation.
You can't necessarily say this is causing it, right? Microplastics are causing Alzheimer's disease. But there are animal studies that have shown that microplastics in the brain can cause inflammation, chronic inflammation.
And we do know that plays a big role in brain aging, dementia, and Alzheimer's disease. I wonder if you would be able to run a study where you had people who, for one reason or another, were breathing in cleaner air compared, but still eating the same sort of diet compared with people eating the same sort of diet, but breathing in less clean air.
So people that maybe lived out in the countryside, but were still eating food that was wrapped in plastic. So you have that, which is the systemic through the mouth one, but then you also have the sniffing a line of plastic from your daily breathing equivalent that's coming from the people that live in cosmopolitan metropolitan cities, something like that.
That'd be really interesting to try and split that out. I guess, well, you mentioned before the sort of types of plastics that we're talking about.
I've heard about, what have I heard about? BPAs, heard about those. What else? Are we worried about BPAs anymore? Is that like? Yes.
Yeah. Okay.
So the bisphenol A is a chemical that is put into plastic. It's a chemical that's, it helps with durability, robustness, flexibility, right? So those chemicals would be bisphenol A, BPA.
Phthalates are another one. Then there's BPS, which is the replacement for BPA.
So you'll often hear BPA-free. It's just got BPF or BPS in it instead.
It's got BPS. It's the delta-8 equivalent of getting around the weed law.
It's like, oh, this isn't cannabis. This is Delta-8.
You go, well, I mean, functionally, it does the same thing,

but you've just changed some molecule

that means that legally it's not an issue.

Exactly.

It's essentially a good marketing strategy

because people, I know I have many friends

that thought BPA-free was like, oh, this is healthy,

but you have to realize, no, they're still plastic.

Like you can put hot water into a BPA-free mug that has plastic in it, and you're still going to get microplastics, and you're still going to have the other chemicals like BPS. So these chemicals are called endocrine-disrupting chemicals because they disrupt the endocrine system.
So BPA, BPS, these are chemicals that are often referred to as xenoestrogens because they mimic estrogen in the body. And they bind to estrogen receptors.
They bind to androgen receptors. And they can block the activity of them or they can enhance the activity depending on the dose of the chemical.
And so that has a lot of effects on hormones. So there have been a variety of studies looking at how BPA, BPS, I mean, there's fewer studies on BPS because it's newer, but it seems as though it's doing something very similar to BPA.
What about BHT? I've heard about that. I don't know as much about BHT.
I think this was the thing that Vani Hari popped Kellogg's for having on the inner lining of their America cereal bags, that they didn't have this particular BHT in the Canadian version, saying they didn't have the red 40, they didn't have the blue three, they didn't have the yellow four, and they didn't have this particular type of plastic additive that was on the inside, helps with preservation of the food, makes it last longer, does something else, maybe it's cheaper, I'm not too sure. so who are the big culprits what are the big

ones bpa is one of the biggest ones um bps is now you know coming along because there's a lot of companies that are manufacturing and marketing bpa free um phthalates are a big one those are also found in a lot of like personal hygiene products and cosmetics shampoos deodorants creams everything like anything personal hygiene. And then there's also the forever chemicals, PFAS.
Those are also found in a variety of things that are water resistant, oil repellent, you know, anything like that. Well, so these chemicals, so I mentioned hormones, you know, they're disrupting testosterone.
So there's been a variety of studies looking at, for example, urinary BPA exposure and testosterone levels. And there's an association with higher urinary BPA exposure, higher urinary BPA excretion, and lower testosterone.
Again, because these things are affecting, you know, they're affecting hormones through feedback loops because they're binding to these estrogen receptors, these androgen receptors. And this is something that microplastics themselves are, you know, leaching in.
So if you have microplastics accumulating in your testes, for example, I mean, there was a study, it was a small study that was done that found 100% of people, and they also tested dogs, 100% of both people and dogs had microplastics in their semen. Like, not a single sample that didn't have microplastics in semen.
And this was also associated with disrupted morphology, so the structure of sperm and also motility, so the ability to move and swim, right? So this stuff is sort of fundamental, right? It's affecting our reproduction. It's kind of, and it's everywhere.
It's ubiquitous. So it's not something to ignore.
You know, there's obviously a lot of other lifestyle factors that are important, being, you know, maintaining a healthy weight and exercise and all that. But I do think this is a growing issue.
It's affecting hormones. BPA is also affecting the brain.
So a lot of studies on brain development, but also like studies looking at, you know, just correlations between high BPA levels in adults. Neurodevelopment is a big one because developing, you know, fetuses like males that are developing, boys that are developing, it's affecting their neurodevelopment.
So women that have higher urinary bpa levels are six times more likely to have a child diagnosed with autism and also it's affecting the sexual development of boys so agd is getting impacted right um there's yes exactly so um it's both the angio the anogenital distance so that would be the distance between the anus and the penis, right? Glad that you said it. And so that's shorter, right? These plastic chemicals like phthalates in particular is a big one.
Also BPA is affecting the anogenital distance. But it's also affecting, phthalates in particular are affecting undescended testicles is a big one i mean it's it's really common now if you talk to like parents like how common it is to have a boy with an undescended testicle and also hypospadia so that's that is the um in boys it's the urethra slit where urine comes out of it's like further back on the on the penis and so it's basically you some some boys have to sit the entire physiology yeah so your stream isn't normal right you might have to sit down to to urinate because the the slit is like further back on the on the on the penis this is a big thing that phthalates are it's affecting sexual development because these hormones are really important they're signaling during right development how organs- You're a male, you're a female.
Exactly. They are.
And so, you know, this is a, I think it's a growing problem. I think we have enough evidence now to be alarmed about it.
There should be some conversations about it because, you know, it's not like we're going to have a randomized controlled trial where you're going to give a pregnant woman BPA and phthalates, right? That's unethical. So you're never going to have that gold standard.
We're going to have to look at this observational data, which at the end of the day is, of course, always correlation. But there's a lot of it.
And there's a lot of animal data showing causation in animals, showing how it's happening. And we have to kind of connect the dots and say, look, this is something we need to be concerned about.
These chemicals are affecting human development, and they're affecting adults. They're affecting cognition.
How so? What's the impact of plastic on cognition? Yeah. I mean, again, it's correlation, but there have been studies looking at high BPA levels.
Again, it's always urinary because we excrete BPA through our urine. That's how we detoxify it.
And so high urinary BPA levels is associated with decreased cognition, decreased memory scores, decreased learning. So again, correlation because you could say, well, people are consuming packaged foods, which are ultra processed, and that also is associated with poor cognition.
Is it what they're consuming or is it what they're consuming is contained within? Right. But we do know that BPA can cross the blood-brain barrier.
It can disrupt neuronal signaling. Again, when you look at the animal data and you have a mechanism that's very plausible there you start to connect the dots and go well there's plausibility here we can understand what it's doing we have human data that's correlating it so you know we need to start to think about these things like there's only so much that you can you know that you can do without of course being unethical and designing an experiment right We just learned about the way that microplastics are making their way into our bodies.
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But yeah, what's the sex difference story?

It does. It does seem like males tend to be more susceptible.

God damn it. I knew it.
I knew it.

You know, males in general, like, like during development, it's like they seem to be more vulnerable to a lot of different environmental stresses, including acetaminophen. There's all kinds of studies where you'll find, oh, this is happening in a male fetus, like a male that's developing, not the female.
Female privilege. But yeah, again, we mentioned all these reproductive effects in men men right um it's it's and also autism effects i mean men is like twice men are twice as likely or boys are twice as likely to be diagnosed with autism than than girls so 12 times more likely if you've got a ton of microplastics in you i don't know that i'm not sure about that but but i mean i also don't do maths very well but anyway um yeah it is it's i mean what is it what's the saying males are nature's play things that there's just more male variability there's more male variability in terms of iq in terms of height in terms of all of these different things and um every fetus starts off as female as well right um i think there's some kind of there's some kind of sex there's i mean first of all the sex is determined by the male sides of the sperm right um and i'm not exactly sure that i would say it starts off as female but like it depends on what is this not the reason why men have got nipples you need to have all of the you need to have all of the individual bit like this is where we need to go i'm pretty sure someone chat gpt it someone chat GPT it and tell me whether or not I'm right.
I feel like I might be right here. But okay, sex differences.
How does it impact men and women differently? And it also goes with like, you know, a lot of these plastic chemicals like BPA are also affecting ADHD, not just autism. And again, it seems like boys are more susceptible to that but these plastic chemicals do affect women as well uh you know it's also something that's affecting fertility it's affecting egg like so there's been studies on in vitro fertilization and women that have high levels of bpa they have like 50 less viable eggs so it's not like these plastic chemicals aren't affecting women as well.
And cognition in general, I mean, it's affecting both sexes, right? It's not just men. But it seems as though like sexual development, really, it seems to be targeting males, especially the phthalates.
What about testosterone levels, energy, energy production, stuff like that? So testosterone levels, as I mentioned, there seems to be, because you've got BPA and some of the other chemicals, they are endocrine disrupting. They are binding to estrogen receptors.
They are binding to androgen receptors. and depending on the dose, this will affect the hormones that are signaling to the hypothalic pituitary gonadal axis, the HPG axis where testosterone is produced.
And so ultimately what happens is there's these feedback loops that are important in order to make hormones like testosterone. And so that gets disrupted, and then the HPG axis is disrupted.
And so you don't make as much testosterone. Again, a lot of this has been worked out in animal studies.
When you look at the human data, it's okay. Men with higher levels of BPA also have lower levels of testosterone.
So the question is, you know, like, okay, well, what can we do about it, right? Like, you want to try to avoid some of these plastics, plastic chemicals.

Well, let's actually before we get into that, you've sort of touched on them a few times, but just do a rundown for me of the most common places that people are getting exposed to the highest levels of microplastics. Yeah.
So the most, I would say, common places, one is drinking out of bottled water, like bottled plastic bottles, right? Like a lot of people drink out of plastic bottles. That would be a big source.
Tap water, that's unfiltered. So tap water, again, also has microplastics.
Unfortunately, our oceans are contaminated, so microplastics are also found in a lot of fish and particularly they accumulate in the digestive tract of fish. So if you're eating shellfish or clams or oysters or anything where you're eating the whole digestive tract or a sardine whole, whole sardine, then you're going to be getting microplastics.
Heat is a big, big one. Okay.
I would say that is one of the main, you know, culprits when you're combining that with plastic. So a lot of your to-go coffees that you're drinking from Starbucks, anything like that is going, that is a huge one because you're, you're, you know, there's been studies looking at BPA leaching into liquid when it's when heat like boiling water is applied.
It increases the leaching by 55 times, which is huge. It also increases microplastic, you know, breakdown, right? Because you're breaking down the plastic itself.
You're getting more. You're making the plastic smaller, which allows it to be permeating through the gut more effectively.
Exactly. Exactly.
I can't tell you how many like to-go coffees I've had in my life. And, you know, another big source now, this is like new coming out.
I mean, there's been a couple of studies that have come out on this, is tea bags because you're adding hot water to tea and the tea bags themselves are made of either polypropylene, they're made of nylon, or they're made of, interestingly, cellulose, which you would think wouldn't have microplastics, but I think there must be a mixture of stuff in there. And this new study came out, you know, really just a couple of months ago, showing that you can get anywhere between millions to billions of microplastic particles per milliliter.
I mean, per milliliter. How many, how much is that compared with the normal sort of, that's a large dose? It's a lot.
It's a lot. What I'm getting at is, you know, I, you know, there's not, I think what's happening is the heat is breaking the plastic down.
These teabags are made of plastic. And so consuming these teabags, again, when you're getting to goatee, it's like now I'm like all I can think about is I'm consuming a plastic tea.
But you have to remember there's a lot of studies, at least with green tea, showing that green tea has huge benefits for cognition. It delays dementia.
It might even offset the microplastics you've had to consume. Yeah.
So, I mean, clearly people are drinking tea out of probably teabags. So it's not like, at least with green tea, it seems like there's some benefits.
Right. But so those are some of the major sources.
And then there's also, it's in our salt. And then air, right?

So like that's another one.

If you're living in a polluted place, if you're again, you know.

Internally venting your dryer.

Dryer ventilation in your house.

That's another major source.

And then another one would be also to consider would be black plastic.

So I know you're like, what?

This is kind of some new data coming out. Black plastic is often made from recycled electronics.

You mean bits of plastic that are black?

I mean, black utensils like your black spatula or black plastic, you know, forks and knives or your black plastic lid on a coffee to go coffee cup.

Black sushi, the bottom of a sushi container, bottom of like a rotisserie chicken. If you've ever bought a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store, that black, right? Black plastic.
It's often made from recycled electronics. And recycled electronics often have chemicals in them that are added to prevent fires from starting.
They they don't want electronics starting fires. So they add these brominated flame retardants, which are carcinogenic.
They are not supposed to be in food. They're not supposed to, they're not, you don't suck on your electronic.
They're not supposed to go in your mouth, right? So these black, these black plastics have very high levels of carcinogens that are normally not even found in regular plastics that were, you know, in things that were consuming. And there was a study out of the University of Plymouth that found black utensils, black toys for babies, you know, they're putting in their mouth.
They contained between 30 to 40 times the safe limit of these brominated flame retardants and other carcinogens and endocrine disruptors in them than safe. So that's another sort of, and think about it, if you're buying like a rotisserie chicken or like you get it to go pho or whatever soup, and it's in like a black container, you got the heat.
That's the added factor on top of that, right?

So that's another major source. What about dermal stuff? Yes.
So again, we mentioned the phthalates, right, which are in personal hygiene products. And that's something I do want to mention because you might think, oh, I'm looking at the ingredient list and there's no phthalate on there.
But there's two different chemicals that are very, very sneaky because they mean there's phthalates. And they're in a lot of personal hygiene products.
One is fragrance. If the word fragrance is in the ingredients list, that means there's phthalates.
And parfum. Not perfume, but parfum.
That is another chemical that means there's phthalates. So you really want to look for phthalate-free personal hygiene products.
Again, very important, especially for people that are considering conceiving because those are the chemicals that are associated with the sexual, you know, disrupting sexual development in boys. And then the other one is receipts.
and this is a really big one. Because maybe not for you and I, right? Receipts are, they're a thermal paper.
And so essentially they're coated with BPA because there's a thermal reaction that happens when heat is applied to the BPA. It prints text on the receipt without actual ink.
ink so that's how it works and if you ever see like a white coating on the receipt like that that's bpa so the bpa in like plastics at least it's kind of contained in a plastic matrix like this is just it's purposefully liberated yes exactly it's like free for all on the receipt and um so there's studies looking at people that handle a lot of receipts. Like when I was in the airport.
Check out stuff and stuff like that. Yeah, I was in the airport coming here.
And, you know, the guy that was like handling the receipt, he's like, do you want the receipt? I'm like, no. And I saw him take it out and put it in the trash.
And like I thought about there's this huge line of people. You're doing that 500 times a day.

Exactly.

And I looked at the guy and I was like, I was like, hey, dude, you know, I just want to tell you that these receipts are lined with endocrine disruptors that disrupt hormones. And he goes, I mean, wish somebody had recorded this.

Oh, my God.

This lady is going through the airport.

I met this lady earlier on today.

She started ranting and raving about the receipts. Said it's sort of covered in this magic dust that's killing me or something.
Like that's- I couldn't help myself. I felt like I couldn't not say something, right? And he looks at me, he goes, you mean like testosterone? I was like, yes, testosterone.
It's been correlated with a decrease in testosterone. I was like, you need to wear nitrile gloves.
So bottom line is BPA,

it's lined on the receipts. Nitrile gloves can stop people from absorbing it.
So people that are like, you know, basically any kind of cashier, anyone that's handling a receipt multiple times a day, highly recommend they wear nitrile gloves. Latex doesn't do that.
Also, if you wear cream or hand sanitizer, it's been shown to increase the dermal absorption of bpa by a hundred fold fuck off some people are like i don't want to get my hands on the i don't want to get covid or whatever right how many hundred x hundred x absorption think about how many times these i seen, I've seen them do it, you know, and then they touch the receipt. So I think, I think this is like something that is not really talked about.
And here I am worried about my like one-time exposure. So, you know, for people out there, it's like, yeah, you can opt for no receipt.
Two decade career of working in Target or something like that. So the first time that I ever learned about receipts, you won't know who this is, but Owen Schroyer, who is Alex Jones's sort of second in command.
I went for dinner with him when I first moved to Austin like forever ago. It was him and a bunch of other people.
There was a couple of girls at the table with us as well, just downtown in Austin. And the receipt came out and I was like, oh, I'm sort of new here.
I'll get the meal. It'd be like nice.
It'd be a nice thing for me to do. So I did it.
And as I'm going to get the receipt out, one of the girls that sat around the table like hits my hand away. I'm like, what? She's like, what are you doing? As if I was about to walk out into open traffic.
And like, I was gonna take the receipt and I was gonna put the tip on. She's like, are you crazy? You're gonna touch that? I'm like, so it kind of does show that the fringe insight from three years ago, some of that stuff ends up being a bullseye and sort of percolates around.
Now, I'm not saying that all of it is, but some of the stuff ends up being legit. Right.
It is. It's definitely legit.
And it is a concern, particularly for people that are handling them daily, multiple times a day. And I don't know that I've really...
I've seen a couple people wearing gloves at cash registers.

They've got special ones that are like finger

things. Have you seen those? Right, I've seen those.

So maybe just the sort of your first

two fingers and your thumb are something rather

than having to wear sweaty gloves all day.

And I imagine that's...

It gets through latex as well.

It gets through latex.

BPA is like... It's fat-soluble and stuff stuff we can talk about ways to get rid of it but like you know final final thing i guess on sources you mentioned clothing going through the dryer i don't know what this t-shirt's made of it looks a little bit shiny maybe there's some polyester in it i know that the brand of pants that i tried i shit you not 15 different different types of pants until I settled on these are bamboo cotton.
But I'm like, what about the elastane liner around the top? What about the way that this is stitched? There's probably a dermal absorption in an area that I really don't want that to be too much of it. How much are we getting leached in from the thick the clothes that we wear

yeah that's a great question so again um it's not the bpa and those chemicals most of the time you might have like forever chemicals and some of that as well right like especially if it's like a not maybe not the underwear but like like a coat or something that's anything that's waterproof Like a Gore-Tex-y type thing.

Yeah.

But I guess, I suppose the one advantage of outerwear

being higher in forever chemicals is that by virtue of it being outerwear, there's usually some layers in between you and it. Right, right.
When it comes to, you know, undergarments or even just like our shirts and clothing, the dermal absorption is not the major source from clothing. It's not the major way that like BPA and these chemicals are getting into our system.
With that said, if you're sweating, if you're working out, if there's a lot of friction, like sweat, heat, that opens pores, right? And so you can increase some absorption somewhat. There's no real data on this.
It's just me like thinking about mechanism, right? mechanism right i guess as well you know one of the weird quirks of gym kit especially the sort of gym kit where people sweat is that it's polyester sort of fitted t-shirts leggings things like that that people are then moving friction which is going to liberate something you're sweating that's heat there's water pores are open larger aperture for whatever it is to get in exactly so i mean i still like we're not panicking yeah you can go you have to choose your battles right you have to choose your battles i do think that yeah maybe some people can wear cotton athletic wear.

There's not a ton of it out there.

Like it has to be 100% natural fiber.

So you mentioned bamboo.

That would be a natural fiber.

I mentioned bedding as well, stuff like that.

Bedding as well.

Exactly.

If you're like sweating in your bed and also just like your breathing, like your face is

right there every night.

I mean, so if you can get like 100% bamboo sheets are like really soft as well.

So, I mean, that would be, I mean, again, you can start to go down the rabbit hole. Believe me, I've been there.
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That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. The one elephant in the room when we're talking about this which is and obviously everybody including me is now thinking all right okay where are the places i've got plastic in my life well i've switched all of my tupperware out from plastic to glass i use glass water bottles or i use like an aqua true reverse osmosis thing that's good that goes into a glass carafe and i'm using like like a yeti called blah blah blah but the food that we eat

even the best quality steaks they unless you're going to the farmer's market and he's chopped it off the cow and put it in wax paper it's wrapped in plastic right i work with piedmontese and make amazing beef that my favorite beef in the world tastiest stuff, arrives to me wrapped in plastic.

So have you got any idea when it comes to packaging, packaging of vegetables, even the organic double-washed spinach that's in one of those sort of big tray things with the plastic across the top and it's all around the sides, how big of a deal is that? Yes, exactly. I've gone down that rabbit hole, so I'm glad you brought it Uh, you know, when it comes to like meats and stuff, I mean, exactly.
Unless, and even if you're like out hunting it, like you're gonna, you've got a lot of meat, you're gonna store it in your freezer and you're gonna vacuum seal it and it's gonna be in a plastic vacuum seal bag, right? Like it's not, it's unavoidable. The reality is that the more the plastic breaks down over time so time oxygen heat these are all a factor in the breakdown of plastics to our food into our food and also the chemicals associated with them so if you're you know just if the plastic is only on your meat for a short period of time or it's in the freezer, at least it's a little more stable.
As opposed to if you've got a bottle of Evian in Dubai that's been transported via truck two or three or four different journeys and it's been hot and it's been cool again, then it's been hot and then it's been cool again. Then finally it gets into a fridge and you go, ah, it's been in the fridge.
It's cold. Exactly.
And you go, what about the rest of the supply chain bingo exactly so i mean this is the way i think about it and you know when it comes to like the vegetables and all that stuff the same the same goes i mean like i when i get my vegetables i rinse them off because you do you can rinse off some of the stuff that's not quite absorbed but you know don't you don't want to put it in a plastic bag and store it in your refrigerator if you can like i just put like a paper towel down and put the vegetables on top of that if you're if you're getting like i buy blueberries they come in a plastic container like what are you going to do you rinse off the blueberries you kind of hope for the best it's not like the blueberries have been in that plastic container for years right obviously blueberries can't have been in there for that long or else they'd be dead right so so so you have to have some peace of mind and realize, okay, we do live in a plastic world. At the end of the day, it does come down to the breakdowns of this plastic.
And so the things that you want to avoid are, like you said, the bottled water, the heat touching the plastic. You want to get a reverse osmosis filter.
So reverse osmosis, you mentioned AquaTrue. That's a great countertop one.
Shout's a great countertop one yeah i have a lot of friends that use that because it's a countertop you can just um i'm actually in the process of getting an in-home like full system you know are you using greenfield for that no you know his dad makes one of the most advanced water in-home water oh no i didn't know that yeah it's like actually absolutely like father like son biohacker so the company i can't remember i have to look at my phone but the company that i was going with are they store the water the water stored in um stainless steel instead of plastic like jugs um oh so you're getting it delivered you're not getting no no no what i mean is like like the tubes, and then like, you know, they have, there's like the storage containers that are like part of the system. Okay, right.
I don't know exactly how it works. So they're remapping the whole house to have no plastic in the pipes? No.
No, no, no. It's just the filtration that's, well, actually, I mean, in a way, it's just what's coming through my showers, what's going to come through.
Because the filtration is going to be close to the last point.

Exactly.

Right.

Understood. Well, Ben will be listening, so I'm sure he'll tell me whether or not.
Well, the one thing to consider with reverse osmosis filtration is it does. So the great thing about reverse osmosis is it filters out not only microplastics, but it filters out nanoplastics.
It filters out really, really, really tiny, tiny particles and chemicals, including trace elements and minerals and things that we need. What's your favorite? This is a good question.
What is your favorite remineralization protocol, presuming that you use some sort of reverse osmosis system? So that's what I was looking into and um there are some systems that will re-mineralize the water after it's been filtrated so you don't have to think about it or add something back which is kind of annoying um however you can add something back particularly if you've already got a system in use and you haven't done most people the most realistic solution that people will get will be some sort of tabletop type solution rather than re-plumbing their entire house. So there's a variety of drops that you can add to your water that are in like a glass container that will re-mineralize the, you're talking like magnesium, potassium, you know, lithium, manganese, just a lot of the trace elements that are taken out.
Do you have any brands that you like? Do you know? Well, I haven't gotten any of those those but there's also a mineral supplement you can take and i do know of a good one from pure encapsulations it's called it's called mineral 50 or pure 50 and there's a one with and without iron depending on you know a lot of men don't want iron and it really is it's essentially all the minerals that are filtered out of of water from reverse

osmosis and it's just one like tablet that you take a day yeah i mean i i you know i was a partner with aqua true i think there's still maybe you can try for the people that are listening you can maybe try mw25 uh as a code i'm not on commission but um i was a partner with aqua true for ages they also make air doctor i'm not sure so air doctor is a carbon and there's two types of filter for your house again just a standalone unit that does it's called ideal living as the company they also did this i didn't realize you may have looked into this atomizers you know you put essential oils into them uh the process that that goes through also pushes a ton of stuff that you don't want into the atmosphere um uh yankee candles and candles and stuff like that also liberating a ton of stuff that you don't really want i remember ogs of the channel will remember that where we very very first started this podcast in my house in newcastle, I had a candle obsession for a while and the ceiling of this room had accumulated so much soot that it looked like it was moldy. It was a really nice house, really nicely decorated room.
And we got shit on the internet for six months, more, more than six months, like a full year before I had to pay decorators to come in just to paint the ceiling so the people on the internet would shut up my point being i was i went through like a candle a month or something and i was like huh that's on the seat that's in my lungs like not good right yeah i this is i'm this is i'm glad you brought that up so obviously there's air filters like a highA filter, which is a great one, that does filter out the microplastics. You know, vacuuming also can disturb and bring microplastics in the air.
Some vacuums have HEPA filters on them as well, you know, but a lot of things to consider. But you mentioned air quality and air pollution and chemicals that are in it.
And that's another. So the other area is, can you get rid of any of these chemicals like BPA? How do you excrete them or some of the things that you're breathing in, right? So that's the next question.
I actually think before that, before we get into how you get them out of you, can you just do a run through of best tactics for avoidance? Like super simple. This is what we know.
I know it's going to be imperfect. I know that everybody with health anxiety is just the heart rates, you know, 20% higher than it should be.
What's the 80-20 on avoiding plastics in consumption? I do. I think there's imperfect avoidance, right? You're not going to avoid it 100%.
But I think that I would say the top things to consider and try to implement in your life

would be one, get a high quality reverse osmosis filter, whether it's countertop or whole house

system. That's first and foremost.
Number two, avoid drinking as much as possible out of plastic

bottles. Also cans are lined with plastic lining as well um so consider that as well um number three avoid heating plastic so really like the to-go coffee mugs is a big one bring bring your own you know mug like this here yeti i i bring yetis to i bring them when i travel and i ask them to can you put my my latte in this mug? And they do it.
I just had an idea there. So I've become addicted, where you are, but I've become addicted to Dutch Bros Coffee and I kind of need to tell the internet about it.
It's phenomenal. I wonder if there is a way, I was watching them make it, because when you go and go through the drive-thru, you can actually see the process of them going through it.
A lot of the time when they make an iced coffee, an iced latte, they're pouring it between almost what looks like a cocktail-year's shaker, the steel thing, pouring it between that and pouring it between your cup. I haven't done this yet, but one of the things that I thought about, because the cup is typically filled with the ice, then they pour the hot liquid over the ice and that's what cools it i was like huh if i said rather than you pouring it from the steel thing into the plastic could i just get you to do two steel things side by side put the ice in that one cool it down and then pop it into the plastic thing for me obviously the gold standard would be to take your own cup but if you would say that you don't have that i also have to assume that iced drinks are going to be better, even if you get a splash of hot hitting the cup that you can't get them to do some fancy cocktail trick with.
It's going to cool it down more quickly, so it's not going to liberate for as long to as small. Exactly.
And if you think about it, if you're getting an iced cup of fill-in-the-blank, that's plastic, the beverage isn't in that cup for that long, right? So the breakdown, it's like, it's not really happening. As opposed to you waiting for 20 minutes for it to become a consumable temperature.
Yeah. Or as opposed to like bottled water, like you said, it's like, how long has it been in there and the heat it's been in, how many trucks has it been on and warehouses has it, you know, gone through before it's been in that refrigerator that you think is cold um so you know and i do want to mention another thing with coffee but i'll get back to the imperfect avoidance we've got uh reverse osmosis not drinking tap water second up is avoiding bottled water third one is avoiding heating plastic which would include tupperware reheating meals meal prep companies stuff like that i'm gonna.
Yes. Yeah.
All that because that's, you know, they're putting a lot of stuff in plastic. Right.
And then I did mention like canned soup is really bad because it's in a can that's lined with BPA and the soup goes in hot. It goes in hot.
Oh, when they fill it? Yeah. So there have been studies that have compared people that get canned soup to soup made in glass.
And it increases urinary BPA by 1,000%, which is insanely high. Do you know what the inside of tetra packs are like? Those sort of more carton things? Do you know what I mean? I don't know what's in it, but I'll tell you this and this is what i want is going to get back to fucking bpa there's something called polylactic acid that you can line i think you can line cans with it i know you can line to go coffee mugs like some i know blue bottle coffee lines it with polylactic acid rather than um like bpa plastic so polylactic acid why not replace that's not that's not liberated in the same way that's not that wouldn't impact us it's it's an organic it's not it's not plastic polylactic acid it's like an organic compound okay yeah so i mean you just have to make sure that you know with anything sometimes companies will mix a little plastic in there and you never really know, right?

Like that's always-

The supply chain of your plastic, let alone your food.

But let's just assume that everyone's credible and doing the right thing.

Yeah, polylactic acid.

I don't know why Starbucks and all these companies and cans, everything should be lined with it because it's healthy.

It's a healthier option.

I'm going to look into that for Nutonic. Okay,'s what's next up after this soup heating stuff tupperware i mean dear god please just replace all of your tupperware with glass exactly and also um your utensils like don't don't use spatulas that are made of plastic wood wood is fine yeah wood um you know also teflon like pans and stuff, coating.
You want to have stainless steel or you want to do cast iron or ceramic. You don't want things that are coated because you just never know what's in that coating.
I saw a comparison image on Twitter of one of those, the nonstick pans, but one of those that you've used for two and a half years and it's got loads of scratches in it.

And that causes all hell to break loose and be liberated into the food absolutely i mean think about the scratches like that stuff is going somewhere like where's it going right it's going into your food right it's going into you so that's another um heat is a really big one and also also microwave popcorn. So the inside of bags, the inside of the bags of microwave popcorn are lined with forever chemicals.
Forever chemicals are called that PFAS because it takes our body like two to five years to get rid of them. And they are carcinogens.
They're terrible. And you're heating it up, right? The popcorn's heating up so popcorn popcorn bags is is um another one but i think uh you know in terms of that and then you know with respect to like the foods obviously like if you can like shrimp eating whole sardines anything like microplastics are in the digestive tract of those foods so like limiting you just don't want to eat shrimp like every day huh what are um what are capsules double zero zero capsules for supplements what's that made of what are those you know like a capsule like a like magnesium stearate like any type of creatine capsule or something where it's in a it's capsulated as opposed to just a tablet is that what it is is it gelatin typically it's usually not plastic i was just looking at it and thinking i bet that someone somewhere has realized that we can make it 50 cheaper if we use some sort of but it's typically going to be like a gelatin thing usually a high quality supplement would be yeah i haven't i haven seen the plastic ones, but I don't go around to the...

Well, that's the first place that I've identified that doesn't have plastics in so far.

So I can breathe a sigh of relief around all of the tablets that I take every day.

I think if you're doing those things, though, that's like the majority of trying to decrease your exposure.

Ventilate outside from the dryer.

Right.

And then have a healthy filter in your house.

What do you like to use?

I mean, you can use like, there's a lot of different, there there's like high high quality medical grade ones that are a little more expensive which are great but for people that are just like like say they live in a condo or like they have a small flat or something you know even getting like a honeywell hepa filter like for each room they're really not that expensive and they do filter out a lot of particulate matter um that you're you know breathing including microplastics. So, I mean, that's a pretty, I think, feasible option for people.
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That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Okay, so if we've got, that's how to avoid them, this is where they come from how possible is it for our bodies to actually get rid of them what are the ways that we can speed this up actually first question is it possible to test can i go and work out how many how many microplastics are in my body um that's a good question so i've had people emailing me about tests they're developing for for measuring microplastics in circulation you to remember, once it gets into circulation, that's when it's going to other organs, right? I haven't seen any validated tests on actual microplastics yet, but there are tests on the chemicals associated with them.
So like BPA, phthalates, forever chemicals. And the test that I use is from V have a really yeah they have a really great um toxin panel test total tox yep and so they do everything like all those chemicals and others they do like microtoxins they do heavy metals and uh you know i don't have any affiliation with them but i think they're just they've got a great same one that my that my doctor gabrieon.
It's the same one that her team suggested and it came back and everything was fucking red. So yeah, I can vouch for the fact that it's accurate.
Right, so that would be, you know, the testing wise. Now, again, with microplastics, I think we're going to start to see a lot of tests come out now that this is- Brian Johnson's trying to develop one.
He was tweeting about it recently. I mean, he's tweeting about a lot of things at the moment.
But yeah, he was tweeting about some microplastics test. Interesting.
Yeah, there's a variety of companies. And I'm sure Vibrant Wellness is probably going to add that to their list as well.
Okay, so that's how we find out. How can I get rid of them? I've got too many microplastics in my body.
How do I get rid of them? Yeah, so microplastics, we kind of talked about a little bit getting rid of them and that really, the main source is excretion through feces and that happens with dietary fiber. So if you are eating a lot of fruits and vegetables, that does increase the chances that microplastics are going to move their way out through feces more readily.
Is that only microplastics that you're consuming along with it?

Or is it able to pull microplastics deep and sort of detoxify them from your body?

I think it's, I think it's in general, to be honest, because if you think about like fiber,

what does it do?

It moves stuff through your body.

It doesn't necessarily have to be something that you just ate, right?

Like it could be something that you had hours before.

So if you're getting like fiber, daily fiber, right?

Like thinking about getting your total daily fiber.

I think that's something that you had hours before. So if you're getting like fiber, daily fiber, right? Like thinking about getting your total daily fiber.
I think that's something that is important because it's moving it out of your body. So you can't absorb it through both ways, like the ways of just moving it through, but also, you know, with the type of fiber that's found in things like, you know, berries and apples.
So these are pectins, like inulin, all this type of fermentable fiber, green bananas, resistant starch, like that stuff makes viscous gel-like substance in your gut, which encapsulates microplastics that you're not absorbing them. So really, I think it's just like more important to focus on the daily fiber intake versus like with a meal.
So is that the biggest mover, daily fiber intake, do you think and this is all animal data like there's this is all new there's no real human data yet on on that area in terms of like screening it through feces and absorption intestinal absorption um but i do think like it's it makes sense like why wouldn't it translate right so um that's something that i think is important. Oh, the other thing, this just came out.
This is interesting. Also animal data.
So forever chemicals, I mentioned forever chemicals, those take two to five years to excrete, to get rid of, I say excrete, to detoxify, get out of your body. They stay in your body forever.
That's why they're called forever chemicals. Unlike bisphenol A, which is, it has, it's in your, in your body for like up to four or five hours you know any from two to five hours this is really kind of daily excretion and it's excreted through urine but there's studies showing that the they're called um beta glucans and they're in oats and they're in mushrooms but the study used oats the beta gluc is, by the way, a fermentable type of fiber, they actually caused excretion of the forever chemicals, PFAS, in animals, which is something that doesn't happen.
So they increased the excretion through, it's this whole mechanism that affects your liver, your bile acid, and liver, and cholesterol, and all this like fancy stuff that you know might be confusing to explain but essentially that's been shown to increase the excretion of forever chemicals so i've actually been adding a lot of um oats in fact i had some oatmeal this morning because i'm like oh my gosh this isn't incredible like the reason why i also think it's happening in humans is because there was a human study not with oats um but it was it's a drug that's used to lower cholesterol and it does the exact same thing that oats the beta the beta glucans and oats do it was shown to clear forever chemicals in people so i'm like oh okay add the dots here what about sauna sauna so sauna um so I'm talking about excreting things um through through urine or feces right so so bisphenol a and a lot of these plastic chemicals the primary route of excretion is through urine and there is a way i think that we can excrete them sauna you're excreting mostly is through sweat and there are a lot of toxins that we're exposed to that we do excrete through sweat. A lot of those are heavy metals.
So for example, cadmium and aluminum, so aluminum is associated with Alzheimer's disease, they are more readily excreted through sweat than through urine. And so when you get in the sauna, you can excrete a little bit of BPA.
It does come out through sweat as well. However, the majority of

excretion chemicals that are being excreted through sweat are things like some heavy metals

and things like that. So that is important for excretion of a lot of compounds that are

detrimental to health. But when it comes to BPA, for example, or phthalates, so these compounds

are fat soluble. And in order for us to get rid of them, we have to make them water-soluble.
And there's an enzyme that does that. And that enzyme is activated by a system in our body called the NRF2 system.
It's a system that's a major transcription factor that basically turns on a lot of genes, turns off a lot

of genes. So what it does is it activates something called the phase two detoxification enzymes.

These detox a lot of harmful compounds in our body. The major dietary activator of this system

is a compound called sulforaphane, which is something that you can produce when you eat

cruciferous vegetables like

Thank you. is a compound called sulforaphane, which is something that you can produce when you eat cruciferous vegetables like broccoli.
Broccoli is a good source. Actually, the younger plant, broccoli sprouts, have a hundred times more of the precursor to make sulforaphane called glucoraphanin.
So you basically, the sulforaphane compound is made when the plant is like broken. So when you bite it, chew it, right, that's when you start to make the sulforaphane.
So broccoli sprouts have a really, really high concentration of that precursor. There have been a variety of studies that have looked at sulforaphane and giving it to humans and it activating this system and causing the excretion of harmful compounds that we breathe in.
So there have been studies in China where air pollution is terrible and people are breathing in, for example, benzene. Benzene is a known carcinogen.
It's also, in addition to air pollution, it's found in cigarette smoke, any plant burning material fires. So this is very relevant to people like in Southern and Los Angeles, where there's a lot of wildfires and the air quality is very bad.
There's benzene in the air. Okay.
Benzene's a carcinogen. So there've been studies in China, more than one study showing that consuming sulforaphane about, it's like 40, about 40 micromoles of sulforaphane causes the excretion of benzene to increase within 24 hours by 60%.
So this is really big. You can't supplement sulforaphane? You can, and I do supplement with it.
So I take a supplement called Avmacol, and that supplement has been used in a lot of different clinical studies because they've got a very reliable source of glucoraphanin and the and the enzyme myrosinase is very unstable it's sensitive to heat so if you heat broccoli up really hot you're actually like degrading a lot of the sulforaphane that you're gonna so if someone's eating broccoli raw would be optimal optimal or just lightly lightly cooked like like lightly cooked so this company has been very delicate with how they've... Yeah.
They've got... So I take two of their advanced Avmacol, which has about, gosh, it's like 68 micromoles or something per tablet.
And so it only... So actually taking one tablet of that was equivalent to the study on benzene excretion.
So I take two tablets a day. And the reason I do that is because I also want to increase glutathione, which is a antioxidant, a very powerful antioxidant in our body.
There have been clinical studies showing that people taking sulforaphane increase their glutathione levels in their plasma and also in their brain. So in the brain, I mean, it's hugely important for cognitive function, for brain aging, everything like that.
So I take anywhere between two to four Avmacols a day because that's, and by the way, I have no affiliation with them. Their stabilization process is really great.
It's in a tablet form versus like a capsule. So capsules are cheaper to make, but they retain water and water degrades the myrosinase enzyme.
Dancing through this minefield is basically impossible, isn't it? There's a lot to consider. But when it comes back to the sulforaphane and BPA, there's not direct human evidence that it's causing the excretion.
I think it's doing it because one, there's an animal study showing that if you give animals sulforaphane and then give them a toxic level of BPA, it doesn't induce toxicity. Two, sulforaphane activates these very enzymes that cause BPA to become water-soluble and excreted.
That's known. Three, we have all this data, human clinical data, showing that sulforaphane causes the excretion of other harmful compounds that also have to be converted to be water-soluble, like benzene and acrylene, for example.
So I think there's a lot of evidence suggesting that sulforaphane would help with excretion of BPA. You touched on something there.
I don't know whether you've got any advice or whether you'd feel comfortable, but a lot of people will have been directly impacted by the fires in LA or indirectly just by it's happened around them. They've been more stressed and they've been breathing in this air, which presumably is still probably going to be in the local ecology.
Is there anything, how worried do you think that people should be about what's been liberated into the air? And if you were someone that's been worried, is there a particular protocol or some things that you would consider over the next few weeks and months to try and just help yourself get back to a good place of health? I do. And, you know, I have several friends that have been, you know, impacted by the LA fires, and I've kind of talked to them about some of this stuff.
So first, I've, you know, avoiding going outside or wearing a mask if you're like there in the thick of it, right, when it's like really, really bad air quality. But having a HEPA filter inside, one, and two, the sulforaphane.
So I've now told several friends that they should be taking Avmacol. Again, I don't have any affiliation with them.
There's multiple clinical studies using their formulation. Very reliable.
And so taking anywhere between two to four a day to increase the excretion of a lot of these harmful compounds that are in the air. now that's not going to cause you like, like the microplastics that you're breathing in, you're not going to, sulforaphane isn't going to help with that.
It's going to help with the chemical aspects of it. The microplastics themselves, like because plastics are burning and lots of stuff, particulate matters in the air, that's where you get the HEPA filters.
That's important to help with the breathing in that air, right? So. I hope that we haven't caused too much um health anxiety for people with that i'm aware that there's a number of vectors everybody can get worried about how much is oh my god i've got them not even the food that i need to be worried about it's what it's wrapped in and i had this story a funny story from a friend that was telling me about he goes to a farmer's market and he wants to get raw milk and the raw milk's in glass bottles and it's got a cap on cap on it.
You know, there's no point, there's any plastic anywhere near it. And he asked the farmer about how they get the milk from the cows, and there's an automatic pumping machine, which runs it through plastic pipes.
He's like, that's warm milk going through a plastic pipe. Even the most psychedelic, progressive farmer's market in the world, where you think, you know, this is basically, you might as well have sort of pumped the cow into a steel bucket and poured it into this.
It's like, yeah, some plastic pipes were in between. I can add to that story.
That's going to freak you out even more. Bring it on.
No one's worried enough. We're talking about forever chemicals, right? And how humans don't excrete them for like years.
Well, it turns out these forever chemicals are because they're in our water source, right? Again, wastewater plants aren't treating for them. So they're concentrating in things like sludge that's used on a lot of non-organic farms, but the non-organic farms are a very close proximity to organic farms.
What's a non-organic farm? Well, I just mean they're not, not, not organic, right? They're not. Oh, right.
Okay. right.
Okay. So organic farms are not technically supposed to use sludge, right?

So which includes like wastewater as fertilizer. It's not as if the wastewater and the sludge knows that this is the boundary of the edges.
Exactly. It gets into the soil and it leaches here, right? So it's actually contaminated a lot of organic farms as well.
and there was a consumer report study a couple of years ago that went and sampled a lot of dairy products off of shelves, like grass milk, you know, the organic grass milk, and just a lot of different varieties of milk. Why were they targeting milk? Well, it turns out forever chemicals, cows do excrete them.
Unlike humans, cows excrete them through their milk. So when you are eating yogurt or milk or cheese, butter, I mean, these are all things where you're like, you have to consider, are there forever chemicals in my dairy product? Because this consumer report found that lots of products, including the organic ones, had much, much higher levels of PFAS than are considered safe.
Obviously, this is one of your many new pet research obsessions. How big of a deal across the entire repertoire of things that people need to be worried about? How highly do you rank the plastics, microplastics, endocrine disruptors? I do rank them highly.
I think the highest would be, you know, exercising consistently, you know, five days a week, not being overweight, obese, trying to eat a more whole foods diet. But that includes like, it's up there after those things.
Because I do think there's insidious damage that's happening. We are accumulating them in our organs.
We're starting to now unpack that this is actually affecting human health. And there are a few high-level things that we can do to minimize our exposure that we've discussed.
Focusing on those few high level things, the water filters, you know, trying to not heat the plastic, trying to like minimize the single use plastics that you're using. It's not going to be, you know, 100%, but minimize it as much as you can.
You're doing a lot if you can do that, right? I do think that like you don't want to become a manic person about it because chronic stress is bad for you. So, so that's like, you have to kind of like draw the line and live your life.
Like I've kind of done that myself where it's like, okay, like I'm not, it's imperfect, but I'm going to do what I can. And I know that that's going to have a good impact, especially if I'm exercising and I'm eating healthy and I'm trying to do all the other things that are like the most important, getting my micronutrients, like doing those things, you know, at the end of the day, it's going to be okay.
Okay. You said you were doing some research into ultra processed foods as well.
I have been learning about this grass, G-R-A-S loophole thing. Is this the pebble at the top of the avalanche that sort of wrecked the American food system? Is that why there's a big issue? No.
Short answer. I know.
It can be confusing. So you're talking about generally recognized as safe grass.
And that's, you mentioned loophole, but let's take a step back before the loophole, There was just grass. There was the generally recognized as safe.
Grass. And that's, you mentioned loophole, but let's take a step back before the loophole.
There was just grass. There was the generally recognized as safe.
And this has been around since like the early 1900s. And it's essentially, things can go into our food supply that are generally recognized as safe.
So it was meant to be, you know, for things like vinegar or salt,

right? Like not these chemicals that we have to have a lot of testing and FDA has to look at all this testing. Well, generally recognized as safe back then was something you did have to submit to the FDA for review.
And then FDA would look over whatever data you gave them if you're a manufacturing company and they'd say, okay, it looks like it's safe. The loophole, it came about and I think it was like the late 1990s, like 1997.
And that was like, that basically said, okay, you manufacturers no longer have to submit anything to the FDA for review. They can just review it internally and decide whether or not it's safe.
So it kind of gave, and there's a lot of controversy over this. There's a lot of, you know, you give a lot of freedom to manufacturers who obviously have a conflict of interest because they want to sell their products and they can kind of decide whether or not something is generally recognized as safe.
With respect to the ultra-processed foods in general, you know, there's processed foods and then there's ultra-processed foods, right? Like, what's the difference? So processed foods typically, like, this is minimal processing. This is something like making oats, something where you want to increase the bioavailability of nutrients, which, you know, oats increases the bioavailability of some of the minerals and stuff.
Or chopping and freezing fruits and vegetables, like frozen fruits and vegetables that you can buy in the fridge. Every food has some form of processing in it, unless you're eating it actually raw from the ground.
Exactly. So it's very minimal right the the ultra processing the ultra processed foods

or upfs as there sometimes you'll see them called upfs these are foods that have a lot of steps of

processing and typically um the purpose of these foods is convenience it's taste improving taste

improving texture and you know flavor improving appearance colors. Shelf life.
Shelf life, exactly. So what ends up happening, these types of foods end up having a lot of calories.
They're a lot of added sugar. They have a lot of chemicals that may make it taste really good, texture really good.
They'll have additives that will extend the shelf life. And they'll have a lot of colors.
So you can find them in candies, cereals, you know, a lot of junk food, cookies, chips, crackers, already flavored yogurts, protein bars. I mean, there's a lot of packaged types of foods.
Like this is, you know, fast foods, already prepared meals that you buy, long list of ingredients. You know, there's over 10,000 chemicals that's in our food system in the United States, 10,000 chemicals that are in our foods.
Like that's a lot of chemicals. They're not all coming in through grass.
I mean, these are chemicals, like a lot of the, for example, the food coloring. So you mentioned earlier in the podcast, red number three, red number 40, yellow number five, number six, blue number one.
Like these food colorings have been around for a long time in our foods. And just recently now the FDA has banned red number three from our foods in the United States because it's a carcinogen.
It's a known carcinogen. And, you know, this is, I think they have like two years or so to actually, manufacturers have two years to get it off the shelf.
So until like 2027 or something like that. But, you know, these food colorings are not only known carcinogens, they're also known mutagens.
So those are things

that damage DNA. It's a precursor for something to become a carcinogen.
There's a lot of human data

that it affects the brain. These colors affect the brain.
They cause and exacerbate hyperactivity,

impulse control. How robust is the evidence on this?

I would say there's varying... A lot of the studies are done in children and adolescents.
And there's lots of data out there. Oftentimes, the randomized controlled trials that are done give all of the colors.
So it's not just like one, but they give all of the colors. And children seem to have varying sensitivities to them.
So there's individual variation. But it's pretty robust that a large subset of children and adolescents are affected by these.
And if you think about by these colors that are in all the foods that are targeted to children and adolescents. A quick aside, what if I told you the only way to be successful in life is to wake up and eat a bowl of Wheaties?

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So we made a capsule version of Nutonic and we got rid of the caffeine and the althenian we added in some bacopa monieri and ginkgo biloba and um i realized i didn't realize this but colored capsules were around in the 90s it's like huh capsules the most boring thing in the world what can we do to make them a little bit more visually exciting turn them into sort of a marketing, also create a little bit of an expectation effect in there as well? Why don't we use colored capsules? That'd be great. It's like, well, pills, red pill.
If we make a red pill, people are going to think the jokes write themselves, Matrix, we did this Matrix theme, and we're there on the launch shoot. And Harry, the guy that runs the ops for Nutonic, came up and he's like, mate, got some good news and got some bad news about the capsules.
He's like, what's up? They look great. He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
They colored with red 40. And I was like, right, you're telling me that the productivity focus product that we've tried to design has something that's been linked to ADHD in children.
And it's it's literally encased in adhd causing color yeah he's a but but we've got these um vegan capsules okay that's interesting let me have a look he gets them i was like that's brown that's brown that's a brown color what we have here on set is this beautiful sort of bright red thing because red 40 turns things bright red uh so we had to get custom beetroot colored capsules that was the way that we got around because i wasn't prepared to do the brown one i wasn't prepared to do the red 41 so we ended up having to get we've got like some absurd number of empty beetroot colored capsules waiting to be filled for the next however long that we keep on selling these things but that was what we the hoop that we had to jump through in order to be able to sort of skirt around trying to avoid red 40, even in just the coloring of a capsule. It's crazy.
Precisely. I mean, there are ways around it, right? Like beetroot, spinach, turmeric, like these can color things and you can find a lot of healthier, quote unquote, healthier.
There's still processed foods. Let me talk about that and get more into that in a minute.
But, you know, there are at least you're not having chemicals that are known, carcinogens, that are known to disrupt cognitive function, to be, you know, to exacerbate and play a role in impulse control and impulsivity and like not being able to focus and pay attention, right? Trans fats were in there too, weren't they? This is incredible. This is incredible because trans fats were actually added through the original grass, generally recognized as safe.
They were added in like the early 1900s, something like 1911. They were added to our food supply.
And, you know, remember trans fats, there was a big push for trans fats, you know, dating. I mean, certainly back into like the 1950s was like when it really started to become sort of popular.
But even before that, they were added to our food supply because they were thought to be the quote unquote healthier alternative because they didn't raise, they weren't saturated fat and therefore didn't raise LDL cholesterol. Okay.
But the problem is, is that so trans fats, they all have their fatty acid chains that have double bonds between the carbons. Okay.
Saturated fat doesn't have any double bonds. And this is really important because it changes the structure of the fat when it's incorporated into our cells.
So we eat fat and it's broken down into fatty acids. These fatty acids get taken up into new cells that we make in our body.
All of our cells that we're making that are new. Red blood cells, neurons, the cells that are lining our blood vessels and our arteries, their endothelial cells.
The reason this is important because fatty acids that are taken up into those cells are making up the membrane. So a cell, if you think about a cell as a circle, has this membrane, and the membrane is movable.
It's flexible. And you want that to be flexible because that's how we transport nutrients into the cell.
There's transporters. There's receptors that bind to hormones, they bind to neurotransmitters.
The cell needs to be flexible for those things to happen and to be correct. It affects the function of the cell.
So when you have trans fats, so saturated fat is like a single bond, same with unsaturated fat, single bond. It's bendable.
It's bendable. It's able to bend and move, right? Trans fats have these double bonds and make it really stiff.
It doesn't move. It's a very stiff structure.
So when they get incorporated into our cell membranes, it stiffens our cells. It totally changes the flexibility of it.
And when that happens in the endothelial cells that line our blood vessels in our arteries, it causes them to become stiff. So our blood vessels can't dilate as well, like vasodilation, right? It causes cardiovascular disease.
It affects hypertension. It's hugely, hugely bad for the heart.
And, you know, this is something that it took. So the FDA, I think it was like in 2006, they started to go, maybe not so good.
And finally in 2015, they were like, okay, we're going to take this out. This is no longer allowed in the food supply, but we got to give manufacturers some time to get it off the shelves.
So finally in 2018, it was off the shelves. We're talking a hundred years, over a hundred years that this

stuff was in our food supply, causes cardiovascular disease. It doesn't take that much time to figure out, yes, cardiovascular disease takes decades to develop, but does it take 10 decades to figure that out? No.
You know, so that was like, transphets is like the golden example of, you know so that was like uh trans fats is like the the the golden example of you know how things get into the food they're thought to be safe and it takes how many decades before we realize oh they're actually responsible for a lot of deaths while that was still in food in 2017 it yeah it is it is and you know the the the trans fats fats, thankfully, they're out of our food now, but there's other chemicals. I mentioned there's 10,000 chemicals in foods.
So the ultra processed foods, another one that's really a big one is nitrites. So nitrites are in- Not nitrites.
Okay. Glad you mentioned that.
Let's discuss. Right.
Brilliant. Nitrites are found in processed meats, right? So they're a preservative.
They're found in bacon, in, you know, ham, lunch meats, hot dogs, like things like that, right? they can be converted you know when we digest them and they can be converted in our gut to

nitrosamines and these are carcinogens and this is why processed meats has been classified sort

of as a carcinogen because there's- Bacon? Bacon with, yeah. Especially when you're cooking it at like a high temperature, you can convert it to the nitrosamines as well.
So nitrites, bacon with nitrites can be unhealthy because of the nitrosamines. How do you know if your bacon's got nitrites in it? Well, there's a lot of labels out there on bacon that says it's uncured.
So they usually cure it with nitrites. Okay, so uncured bacon would be nitrite-free? Well, so here's the question, and it comes back to nitrates.
Oftentimes the bacon— Is this the BPA, Bps thing all over again not necessarily right not necessarily

i think there's a silver lining the nitrates you know are something that's found in plants they're

in vegetables they're in greens they're you know all over in nature they can also be converted into

nitrites and then ultimately nitrosamines however vitamin c prevents the conversion

So vitamin C is also found in plants, it's packaged together. So that's why when you eat a lot of plants or like beets have a lot of nitrates, beetroot juice extract is high in nitrates, but it's also high in vitamin C.
And when you have the vitamin C there, it converts the nitrates into nitric oxide. So if I have a Barocca while I have my bacon, exactly.
A lot of vitamin C while you're taking your bacon in. So the conversion, it basically shifts it towards nitric oxide, which is actually good for your blood vessels.
It's a vasodilator, right? There are a lot of bacons that will say no nitrites, but they'll have like celery powder. I don't know how much vitamin C is in celery powder extract.
I would assume not that much, but make sure you're like eating some pomegranate with your bacon or something high in vitamin C. Okay.
That helps the conversion. Okay.
So there's, yeah. What about the concerns with added sugar? Exactly.
Yeah. So we talked about there's a lot of chemicals in foods and, you know, there's, it's 10,000 chemicals.
So you can figure out how many of those may be detrimental to health. I would say one of the biggest problem with ultra processed foods is the added sugar.
And when we say added sugar, we mean not sugar. Like if you, if you're eating an apple, right? It's got like natural sugar in that that's bound to a fiber matrix.
We're talking about adding table sugar, like sucrose, glucose and fructose, 50% mixture of each into it. Foods have tons and tons of added sugar.
Ultra processed foods have tons and tons of added sugar. And that's part of the hyper palatability of them, right? It's what's make them taste good.
There's a lot of downstream problems with the added sugar, right? On the brain, on overeating. So there was actually a really good study that was published a couple of years ago out of the NIH from Kevin Hall's lab.
And he took the same group of people and gave them either an ultra processed foods diet or a whole foods diet. And he gave the same group the same diet.
So like the same people had each diet with a washout period, and then they measured a bunch of things, right? So you're not looking at a lot of individual variability here, right? It's called a crossover trial design. So he gave these, so what happened is these two groups, so the whole foods versus the ultra process, right? Same number of calories in the food, same amount of sodium, same amount of energy density, there were not similar amounts of added sugar.
So the ultra processed foods had like 50% more added sugar. Fiber was the same, but only because they gave the ultra processed food group drinks with like Metamucil or something, right? Like they had to give them fiber because essentially processed foods have no fiber, right? And then protein was mostly similar.
There was a little bit more in the whole foods group than the ultra processed foods group. But the study basically gave these people, like, again, equivalent amounts of like calories and stuff.
And so the total sugars were the same. So the fruits and stuff had sugar, but it was the added sugar that was different, right? he gave these people these meals that they came into like a metabolic ward to eat,

you know, and they were basically given 60 minutes to eat their meal. So they could eat as much as they

wanted or as little as they wanted. So they didn't like make them eat a certain amount.
The point was

to see if they were going to over consume, overeat, right? It turns out when they were eating the

ultra processed foods, people on average ate 500 calories more

than eating the whole foods diet.

So this was 500 calories more per week.

And so they ended up gaining two pounds more on,

they actually gained two pounds

if they're eating ultra processed foods

and they lost two pounds if they're eating whole foods. And this was- From zero.
From their baseline. Yeah.
From their baseline, yeah. And this was for the two week that the trial happened.
So if you think about it, that's a pound per week they were gaining. That's four pounds a month.
So four times 12 is 48. That's 48 pounds a year.
It couldn't have been 500 calories a week if they gained a pound a week. Sorry, it was 500 calories per two weeks.
Yes. No, that also can't be right.
500 calories. Per meal.
Sorry. Yes.
They were eating 500 calories more per meal. Yes.
But they were gaining two pounds more per two weeks or one pound per week. Yes.
So it was a 3,500 surplus per week. Yes.
It was 500 a day. Exactly.
Because it was 500 per meal. Yep.
Right. So they were overeating and the question is why were they overeating right and there's probably a lot of reasons for that you know one is they weren't having they weren't being satiated so refined added sugar basically disrupts hormones it disrupts the hormones that are involved in satiation like leptin ghrelin is a hunger hormone so So those things were being disrupted in those individuals.

And the question is, if you're eating a refined sugar diet, if you're eating a lot of ultra processed foods, you're probably eating more of the foods, right? Why is that? Well, you're not being satiated for one. Two, even though there was less protein in the ultra processed foods, it seemed as though people were eating more almost to get their protein needs.
Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah.
Have you heard of the protein leverage hypothesis? No. It was Stephen Simpson.
Simpson, I think, was one of the main scientists involved in this hypothesis. And essentially what it is is that your body needs a certain amount of protein per day to maintain physiological functions.
And so he's hypothesized that no matter what, if you're eating foods that were low in protein, you're going to overeat because you had to maintain this amount of protein that your body really needs, right? And so him and his colleagues have done some randomized controlled trials sort of proving this hypothesis where it's like you can give people lower protein, same, you know, everything else, but they will overconsume if they have the lower protein just to kind of like get up to that protein need. So that's another possibility.
Again, if you're eating a lot of ultra processed foods that are low low in protein. Protein is satiating for one, right? That's also something to consider.
But it does seem as though like there's like, it's interesting. There might be this protein leverage hypothesis that might be partly explaining some of this as well, because it's like your body's wanting to meet the protein needs for just maintaining a lot of different physiological functions that require protein.
How much good research has been done? That study sounds pretty impressive, but is primarily the mechanism that I think most people come to agree on when it comes to ultra-processed foods, hyperpalatable, calorie dense, easier to eat more and per bite tends to be more calorific. So it's easier to gain weight, multiple different ways that it's easier to gain weight.
When it comes to the ultra processed foods, what's in them, how they affect us outside of the palatability and the calorie density, what else is going on that seems to be evidence-based that's something that we should be concerned about? Yeah, well, I think that part of it is that people are consuming more of it

because they're not satiated, right?

It's disrupting the hormones, which I mentioned.

So that is the one thing to consider.

Is that the biggest mover in all of this?

For weight gain, I would say it is

because weight gain really comes down

to eating more calories.

Right. Calories in, out makes makes a big difference um but there's other factors at play here that i think really come down to the added sugar right so added sugar affects so many different things in the body um everything from you know hormone production to cognition so hormones testosterone, I know you're interested in testosterone.
There was a pretty classic study that was done that showed that men, and this was a huge age range, and we're talking young men that were like 17 all the way up to older adults. So young adults, middle-aged adults, older adults, if they consumed 75 grams of added sugar.
So that would be like a medium-sized donut and the Coke. Okay.
Not out of the sort, like people do that all the time. 75 grams sounds like so much, but when you put it in terms of a donut and a Coke, it's not.
That's it. It's not, right? There's a lot of Americans eating a standard American diet and eating donuts with Coke or donuts with coffee and a bunch of added sugar in their coffee, right? So it actually is something that I would say is pretty practical in terms of what people are consuming.
And we can actually talk about what people are consuming in terms of added sugar, but 75 grams of added sugar. And this caused a 25% decrease in their circulating testosterone within a two-hour range.

So it's obviously transient. But nonetheless, 25% less.
That's significant. You're chipping away at that grazing throughout the day.
Exactly. And imagine if people are eating, I mean, if their whole diet is nothing but ultra-processed foods, right? So you're talking, you know, in that study with Kevin Hall, they actually calculated how much it costs to have the whole foods diet versus the ultra processed food diet and it was 45 more um a week for the ultra sorry the whole foods diet so that that's significant it adds up over like a month right so we're talking about 180 dollars a month it's expensive to be healthy for a lot of people that makes a difference and so it's like economically your people are economically incentivized to eat ultra processed foods because they're cheaper there's also this is cali means this whole thing and vani harry's as well about um whatever the food stamp system is called oh right um snap yes snap the uh the sorts of foods that tend to be available on snap right trying to eat in a more healthy manner on that is very difficult right more difficult so what you mentioned there about what are americans eating typically what what are they putting in their bodies? I mean, it's ultra-processed foods.
So the refined sugar, or I'm calling it refined sugar, it's really added sugar also kind of interchangeably. But, you know, ultimately, people are eating 13% of their daily caloric intake is coming from added sugar.
That's a lot. 2,000 calorie a

day, if you just consider that like on average, that's a lot of coming from sugar. In fact,

guidelines, so the guidelines for like the strictest guidelines suggest no more than 5%

of your total daily caloric intake coming from added sugar. So that would be like no more than

25 grams a day. 5%.
People are eating 13% of their total calorie intake from added sugar. So that would be like no more than 25 grams a day, 5%.
People are eating 13% of their total calorie intake from added sugar. So added sugar is also affecting probably what's happening also is there's a mechanism there.
It's hyper palatable. It tastes good.
You know, people want things that taste good, but there's an addictive aspect there as well. And that's been shown in certainly a lot of animal studies, but also some human data as well.
So there's been studies showing that if people eat added sugar, it activates dopamine reward pathways in the brain, in the striatum, more than like eating fat, for example. So there was a study that compared fat versus added sugar.
and so it's activating these dopamine reward pathways. Animal studies have found that it's

activating dopamine reward pathways, much like addictive drugs do, but to a much milder degree, of course. So what I'm saying is that you can have addictive drugs like cocaine, methamphetamine, nicotine, will activate these dopamine reward pathways in parts of the brain.
Sugar activates them too, to a much milder degree, of course. But in animal studies, they'll keep going back for the sugar like this addictive thing, right? Now, again, you got to take the animal studies with a grain of salt because we are not rodents.
But there is human evidence that these pathways are being activated in our brain with added sugar. And there's also evidence that if you look at people that are obese, you know, the obesogenic diet is largely consists of a lot of added sugar.
Well, people that are obese have a lower density of dopamine 2 receptors, D2 receptors, really indicative of something called tolerance. So what happens if you keep activating the dopamine reward pathway is that your body as an adaptive response, a feedback to it goes, oh, I don't need so many dopamine receptors because I had a lot of that signal coming in, right? But what ends up happening is when you have fewer of those receptors, then the little bit of dopamine that you have, you're not feeling it as much.
It's you need more and more, right? And so, you know, you kind of connect the dots here. And I would say certainly we need more evidence in the human arena on the, you know, potential addictive properties of added sugar.
However, what we do have is a lot of animal evidence and, you know, some human evidence. And I think that it really indicates that there is, it's affecting reward pathways.
It's affecting our dopamine system. And that's, you know, unhealthy.
How legitimate are the links to cancer when it comes to ultra processed foods and sugar? I, you know, there's a lot of ways to get there. So I'll give you, you know, obviously when you, when you talk to a scientist, like the most most robust evidence is, well, we need a randomized controlled trial.
We need a proof causation, right? Well, you're never going to get that because it takes decades for cancer to, you know, rear its ugly head. And that's, like, too expensive of trial.
But the evidence that we do have, you know, for one, people that are obese tend to eat more added sugar. I mean, that's a fact that obese people are eating added sugar.
As a proportion. Yes.
Yeah. Because they'll eat more of everything overall.
They're eating more ultra processed foods, which are higher in added sugar, don't have a fiber matrix. You know, the way sugar is metabolized

when it's packaged in with fruit is very different than added sugar in ultra-processed foods, which has no fiber matrix. And so what happens when it has a fiber matrix is it slows the metabolism of it.
It really slows it down. It's not this big bolus.
For one, your gut isn't seeing a big bolus of it, which causes, you know, it actually causes intestinal permeability.

And that causes inflammatory molecules to leach into your bloodstream. Inflammation is a major driver of aging, cancer.
It causes damage to DNA. So all those things happen, right? And there have been studies that have shown that men, young men that consume, it's like 20 ounces of a sugar-sweetened beverage a day for three weeks, okay? These are healthy young men.
They're consuming like a big Coke, right? Something like that. After three weeks, their inflammatory biomarkers go up like a hundred percent, like a hundred percent.
So that's causing inflammation in healthy, just healthy young men. Again, inflammation is something that is involved in driving cancer.
We know that obesity is very intimately linked to cancers. There's like 13 different cancers that obesity is known to play a role in.
There's just a lot of evidence that lifestyle factors like eating ultra processed foods, like being overweight, obese, like these are factors that can dramatically reduce cancer incidence if they are, you know, reduced. If you reduce your ultra processed foods, if you reduce your added sugar and lose weight, like these are things that are that are known so um i do think that it's pretty pretty strong link and again it's multiple ways that it's happening it's not just like you know there's there's through the obesity right mechanism but it's also causing you know there's the insulin sensitivity and insulin production and just all sorts of things that are that are at play.
I think it's important to separate out the obesity side from what else is going on because lots of people that listen to the podcast will probably have a good indication of, well, where's my body weight at? And I'd probably go to the gym and I'd do all the rest of this stuff. What else is happening? How else can I motivate myself to pick the healthier option,

even if I know that my waistline isn't going to be the determining factor for this?

Obesity isn't that much of a risk for me. So what is it that could be happening? So I think

it's interesting to sort of break it apart like that. I guess another area that I'm particularly

interested in is brain health and energy levels when it comes to the impact of the ultra-processed

foods, the added sugar, stuff like that. And that's probably one of the biggest areas that

Thank you. particularly interested in is brain health and energy levels when it comes to the impact of the ultra processed foods, the added sugar, stuff like that.
And that's probably one of the biggest areas that it also has an impact on, you know, so if you're, if you're eating a lot of added sugar, then, you know, you can have higher than you can basically be on the high end of the normal range for blood glucose levels. So you're within the normal range, but on the higher end, right? So you're not diabetic.
So you might think, oh, I don't have diabetes. I'm fine.
I'm still within the normal range. But there are studies showing that people on the high end of the normal range have increased atrophy in the hippocampus part of their brain that's involved in learning and memory.
And they have higher atrophy in the amygdala part of their brain that's involved in emotional regulation compared to people on the lower end, have blood glucose levels in the lower end of the normal range. So that's an association study, right? There's also- They're angry and forgetful.
Right. But again, it's association study.
There's also other studies showing that higher blood glucose levels are associated with increased, like 54% risk, increased risk for vascular dementia. So glucose, what it's doing when you have a constant intake of glucose and that glucose, let's say you're not exercising enough to have that glucose get disposed into your muscle, which is really where you want it, right? You want it to get taken up into your muscle.
Exercise really helps with that. So when you exercise, you cause a lot of glucose transporters to come up to your muscle, which opens up the gates to allow glucose in.
You want it to go to your muscle instead of your adipose tissue. If that doesn't happen, if you're not exercising enough, the glucose will stay around in your bloodstream.
And what happens is, yes, there's an insulin response and all that metabolic stuff, but there's also something that happens that's called the Maillard reaction. And it's where glucose reacts with lipids, it reacts with DNA in your body, it reacts with proteins and damages them.
And when it reacts with proteins, like for example, collagen lining your pericardium surrounding your heart, your myocardium surrounding your heart, lining your blood vessels, it causes the collagen to become stiff. It changes the properties of the protein.
It makes them stiff, kind of like trans fats. Actually, that's a really good analogy.
I didn't think about that. But it's really kind of a similar thing.
It causes your blood vessels to become stiff. It causes the tissue surrounding your heart to become stiff.
And that plays a major role in the stiffening of the heart with age, which affects cardiovascular disease risk, right? So you're talking about just an accumulation of these, this Maillard reaction. What happens is it forms something called advanced glycation end products.
And that's what is basically stiffening the proteins like collagen, which are around forever. You don't, your collagen surrounding your heart and it's there and, you know, you don't want to make it stiffer, right? So that's something to consider as well as the fact that it is affecting cognition and the brain as well.
So we talked about brain aging. It causes inflammation.
So, for example, I mentioned the study of men that consumed the sort of 20-ounce sugar-sweetened beverage and they had 100% increase in their inflammatory markers after three weeks. Well, inflammation essentially is those molecules are getting into

the brain, crossing over the blood-brain barrier, and they're getting to the brain. It was thought

for a long time that inflammatory molecules don't cross the blood-brain barrier, but that

years ago was debunked. We now know a lot of cytokines and inflammatory things are crossing

the blood-brain barrier, and when they get into the brain, they are doing a variety of things. For one, they're affecting mood immediately.
And we know that for a fact. We know causally.
You can take a healthy person and inject them with lipopolysaccharide, which is something that's found in our gut. It's a component of bacterial membrane.
So we have a lot of bacteria in our gut, makes up our microbiome. When you have leaky gut, intestinal permeability, lipopolysaccharide gets into your circulation.
Refined sugar does do that. You can inject normal people, normal healthy people with lipopolysaccharide or placebo, which is saline, and it causes massive inflammation.
Okay. Like, like what I just talked about with-sweetened beverage.
And those people then end up getting depressive symptoms. So it plays a role in their mood.
But if you blunt that inflammatory response with something like EPA, which is a component of omega-3, it's one of the omega-3 fatty acids, it doesn't cause the depressive mood. So inflammation does affect mood.
We also know that when you have a high inflammatory state, which I just gave a lot of evidence for in terms of added sugar, it changes the metabolism of tryptophan. Tryptophan is an essential amino acid we get from our diet.
It's in proteins. It's a precursor for serotonin.
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that's involved in cognition, executive function. It's involved in mood.
What inflammation does is it causes tryptophan, instead of being converted into serotonin, it causes it to be converted into something called kinuronine, which is involved in inflammation. It's basically your body.
Your body's going, oh, I'm inflamed. I've got a pathogen.

Okay, there's no pathogen. It's actually just added sugar, too much added sugar, right? Constantly.
And so your body thinks it's a pathogen. And so it's trying to then make anything it can to activate immune cells to take care of the pathogen, right? But the problem is, is that it's not a pathogen.
So kynurinine helps with that whole activating the immune system. But also what it does is as it's metabolized, it can form something called quinolytic acid,

which is a neurotoxin, and it's also associated with depression. So you're talking about

inflammation now affecting, you know, key metabolic processes that are important for cognition,

executive function, mood, and dampening those processes, right? So you can immediately

the metabolic processes that are important for cognition, executive function, mood, and dampening those processes, right? So you can immediately have an effect on cognition. I mean, you get like a quick sugar high, but boy, does that go away pretty quick, right? I mean, it's like you immediately start to feel like that sort of- If you wanted to reliably make your mental performance bad, having a donut and a Coke an hour before you were supposed to do something important is probably a pretty good way to do it.
Exactly. It's almost like when you're sick, how you feel, right? You feel foggy, brain foggy because your inflammation, your immune system's activated.
You've mentioned a couple of times today about leaky gut permeability. At a high level, what can people do? I've heard the words, I kind of understand what it means.
It's kind of in the name. What can people do to rebuild the gut and make it less leaky? Well, you know, leaky gut is kind of the common word, the real, it's intestinal permeability.
And essentially what it is, is you have tight junctions that are holding your endothelial cells that line your intestine together and they sort of open up, right, and allow, basically they allow these LPS and cytokines and stuff to go into your circulation and cause inflammation. Essentially, there's a variety of factors that can increase intestinal permeability.
Obviously, there's genetic factors at play as well. People have celiac, I mean, that's a big problem, and Crohn's disease, inflammatory bowel disease, like all those things are sort of chronic issues that do cause intestinal permeability.
But generally speaking, an obesogenic diet, so the worst thing you can do is have a diet high in a lot of fats, particularly saturated fat combined with refined sugar. So think like ice cream, right? Like anything that's really high in saturated fat plus refined sugar can cause intestinal permeability.
Obesity itself can play a role in that as well. Binge drinking is another one.
Chronic stress. So psychological stress, anything like relationship stress, financial stress, emotional stress, work-related.
Stress itself, releasing stress hormones causes intestinal permeability. There have been studies on that.
They took people that were about to give a presentation when you're stressed. In fact, if they would have measured mine before the podcast, they would have been like, oh, she's got intestinal permeability.
You got the corticotropin-releasing hormone, but stress also does it. So really, again, it comes down to fiber plays an important role in preventing intestinal permeability for a couple of reasons.
One, 70% of the energy used by your gut is called butyrate. Butyrate is made from bacteria in your gut by fermenting that fermentable type of fiber I was talking about.
So things that are high in pectins, that's a type of fermentable fiber, that would be berries or apples with the skin on it, or inulin, so onions, asparagus, or the mushrooms, so the beta-glucans, mushrooms, oats. Basically, eating a lot of fermentable fiber increases butyrate production, really helps keep your gut healthy and prevent intestinal permeability.
But I think the main thing really is you want to make sure you're eating whole foods. So fruits, vegetables, lean meats, poultry, fish, like a whole foods diet.
Ultra processed food diet increases intestinal permeability. And then you also want to make sure that you're getting that fermentable fiber as well, right? Because you want to give yourself the butyrate production.
So those are, I think, some of the major drivers of, you know, preventing intestinal permeability. Lots of people are going to be hearing about this and have been eating processed foods forever.
Everyone has an idea in the back of their mind that when you're faced with the apple and a Twinkie, that the apple is going to be better for you. But some people have been moving through different levels of wealth.
Some people have been moving through different levels of convenience. Some people are sort of really understanding their health journey.
Other people are on the road so much that they have sort of these limitations. No one's going to be militant about it all of the time.
Inevitably, you're going to go to a sports match and like, what are you going to do? This is like, you haven't pre-cooked your rice and beef and taken it in with you. So what are the best ways to mitigate the impact of ultra-processed foods, given sort of a typical way that people are going to exist in the world? How much can it be offset? I mean, I think, I think to answer your question is like, you're, it kind of goes back to the imperfect avoidance, right? Like you're going to do what you can.
And most of the time when you're at home in an environment where you can eat whole foods, do some meal prep on weekends, you know, do what you can to kind of make it more convenient for you to have whole foods. You're going to, you're going to do that.
And then when you're traveling or you're going out to have fun at a stadium or whatever, you're going to live your life and have fun and like have, have the ultra processed foods, right? Because if you're, if you're 80% of the time doing it the right way, you're really doing, you're doing good. I think exercise your question, it's the forgiver of most of our sins, basically.
So if you are exercising and it is a part of your personal hygiene, you're doing it almost every day to some degree, you are mitigating. So the added sugar component, right? You're getting glucose and bringing it into your muscle.
You're improving cognition in so many different ways. Exercise plays a role in improving cognition, not only in the short term, but in the long term.
You're, you know, exercise also increases butyrate producing bacteria independent of diet. So exercise is actually a stress on the body, on the brain, on the gut.
And it actually very, very transiently causes intestinal permeability. But as an adaptation, like exercise does, adaptations, it does cardiovascular adaptations, your brain adapts, everything's adapting.
Your gut actually increases the production of butyrate- producing bacteria so that the next time you exercise, guess what? You have more butyrate around to really help your gut be more robust. So I think that you could just come up with every explanation why exercise is going to be beneficial for X, Y, or Z unhealthy thing that you do.
And it's going to be like, okay end of the day i am i am getting that exercise i'm doing i'm really doing a good job is there a particular type of exercise here i'm going to guess that you're going to tell me it's high intensity again well i mean i think it depends on on what you're what you're looking for right i mean so if you're looking to build muscle mass and strength and increase testosterone more we're going to talk about compound lifts, right? Like doing multi-joint compound types of exercises like squats and deadlifts and, you know, rows and overhead presses, shoulder presses, on and on. Like that's going to help you robustly increase your muscle mass, increase your muscle strength, function, and testosterone.
Like those are things that are known to affect all those things. So, you know, if we're talking about improving cognition in the short term, like you want a quick pump, like let's say you want to remember something, then we're talking a high intensity interval training session short, like not, you don't want to like, cause you can, you can do a, you know, an hour long HIIT workout and you're just drained after it after it.
But there's studies showing that even a 10-minute HIIT workout will boost cognition and memory recall. Actually, there was an interesting study where doing 30 minutes of...
It wasn't necessarily high, high intensity, but you're like 70% your max heart rate. So you're moderate, getting to the high level, doing that.
So learning something and then doing the 30 minute cycling workout and then having a test after like on your memory recall, it boosts memory recall. So if you really like it's a little hack, I use it all the time.
I used it today. Like I go through some of my material, do my workout.
In my case, I only had 10 minutes. So I did a 10 minute high intensity workout.
My favorite is the back-to-back Tabata as I do 16, you know, intervals. But, you know, that's something I use to boost cognition in the short term.
But there's just so much data out there on aerobic exercise, high intensity exercise, improving cognition, increasing the number of brain cells in the brain. There was one study, I think I mentioned it last time on the podcast, this was in older adults.
They did aerobic exercise for a year. They increased their hippocampus by like 2%.
Usually they're atrophying. Okay.
They increased the size of it by 2%. Amazing.
So I do think like, yes, if you're someone who likes to like, you know, gain muscle. Yeah, exactly.
You want to gain muscle. Great.
Resistance training is good for the brain too. And there are studies on that as well.
But if you want to really have brain benefits and really you want to have your cardiorespiratory fitness improved, you have to add in some aerobic exercise in there. The most time efficient way to do it would be HIIT.
Because let's say you're like, I'm not going to go run 10 miles a week. I'm going to be lifting weights.
I only have so much time in the day. That's where the high intensity interval training comes in because it's very time efficient.
Not only that only that, when you are, when you're getting into that high intensity, vigorous exercise type of workout, that's when you're making a metabolite called lactate. We've talked about this.
When your body's working so hard that it has to use glucose without using it through the mitochondria, basically it's like you're not, you don't need oxygen. You can't get oxygen to your mitochondria quick enough to use glucose.
And so you're making energy without the mitochondria. And that makes lactate as a byproduct.
Turns out it's not a byproduct. It's an active metabolite that's amazing.
And it's getting into the brain. It's been shown to increase brain-drive neurotrophic factor, right? That's a very important neurotrophic factor that can improve short-term memory long-term memory it's it staves off brain aging it makes you feel better it's involved with like neuroplasticity you know being able to adapt to changing i mean it just it goes on and on like you can't like you you want this stuff right and so lactase out there it's a signaling molecule telling your brain to make it it's an adaptation because your brain is working hard while you're working out.
And so your body's making more. All of the bros that just want to do sets of 8 to 14 are going, I need to sign up to Barry's Boot Camp.
I'm going to be sweaty. I'm going to have to do all of this work.
But you convinced me last year and I've been doing the Norwegian 4x4 as much as I can remember and as much as I can tolerate since then. And that's a really good workout for cardiorespiratory fitness, right? Improving your VO2 max, which is really important for longevity, right? That's a big longevity marker.
I mean, if you just think about like sitting here talking, having this conversation, it requires an amount of oxygen to like breathe in and be able to utilize, right? As we get older, like even that becomes hard. So you really want to have a high level.
You want to like build it up as much as you can, because you're going to be pulling on it and going down as you age, right? Things like walking to your car. Have you ever seen like an older person out of breath just by like walking to their car, right? So you VO2 max, Norwegian four by four.
So this is four minutes of like the maximal intensity that you can sustain for that four minutes.

This is sustainable intensity. And then you have a three-minute recovery, total light exercise, and then you go back at it again and you do that four times.
Assault bike. After a year of testing, I've come to believe that the assault bike is the best place to do it.
It's actually, it assaults you. Like, it's so hard.
it's it's well the reason the reason i say assault bike is that with this what you need is to be able

to go very slowly very easily so you don't want something you need to strap into or strap out of so a rowing machine is kind of a little bit ungainly when you've then got to go slow uh the same i guess a skier you can pick up and put down quite easily but uh running on a true form it's speeding up slowing down in that way it's just so difficult and doing it on a static bike a carol bike or something else fantastic but you do have to work a little bit harder because it's just the lower half of your body right so my choice my preference is bike carol bike great assault bike kind of easier to be harder if that makes sense it does um but yeah i've i've tried i agree i i like i think the bike well i actually think the bike is harder when i do the rower i on my three minutes off i actually just end up like not really doing anything because i switch off with my husband and he'll be on so it's like i actually get four minutes off sometimes but yeah but it also it does improve cognition in the brain that's another you know there's some some research on that as well, where like, at least if you're being time efficient, and it doesn't have to be the Norwegian 4x4. Like, you could do a minute on, a minute off, do that 10 times.
Or you could do Tabatas, right? 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off. All of these protocols have been shown to improve VO2max.
They've been shown to improve cognition, also like mitochondrial function so yeah norwegian 4x4 you're going to get a little bit more of a boost because it is a longer interval but you have to do something that you are going to consistently do right i've found the 4x4 to be quite uh easy to stick to i it's definitely miserable because four minutes is a very long time at a high intensity. But there's a bit of me when I'm doing 20 on 10 off Tabata, unless it's a really demanding movement that just think, I can't work hard enough.
I can't sprint fast enough in this 20 second period. And I can't recover enough in the 10 seconds.
That cadence for me, maybe it's just a psychological thing. That cadence doesn't quite seem to work in the same way.
I get it. You know, so I, when I, when I'm really time strapped, I do, I do my Tabata, which is a 10 minute one.
And I agree. It's, I typically crank up the resistance and stand while I'm doing it because I really have to get my heart rate up.
I don't find the 10 seconds is enough recovery. So my performance goes down on subsequent intervals for sure.
But I do find when I do a 20 minute HIIT workout, so I have 20 seconds on 20 seconds off, and then I have a little bit of time in between my, you know, sets. Stations.
Right. So I find that my performance goes up because I have a little bit more recovery time.
And I really do like that 20 minute, I mean, 20 second on 20 second off. 20 minute workout is kind of like a go-to if it's like it is because you know like you said it's like the 10 second recovery is really it's just not enough and i do notice that my next you know five intervals are not as as hard yeah sucking on water trying to get it to go through uh what are you working on next what else have got in terms of a research area? What are you going to be focused on for the rest of the year?

I'm looking into creatine and its effects on the brain and, I mean, obviously muscle, but like

non, I would say popular effects. It's a very interesting, there's a lot of interesting

data out there on creatine and also how it affects the methylation pathway. So a lot of people are sort of obsessed with this.
It's methylation is used in your body for a lot of different biological systems. And a lot of people think of methylfolate.
Well, I need my methylfolate because I have an MTHFR where I'm not making methyl groups as much and this and that. Well, actually, our body makes creatine.
And, you know, that's something that we do make, but it requires a ton of methylation to do so. So if you give yourself exogenous creatine, it frees up the methylation because your body has the creatine now and it doesn't have to keep making as much.
so i'm very interested in the effects of no one's talked about that very cool but yeah tim ferris is currently he has been practicing trialing uh 10 to 15 plus grams a day to see what that does from a cognitive health perspective it's an interesting yeah there's some there's some interesting data on there like 10 grams a day i take five but's also studies on there, studies that have come out on five grams a day for like cardiovascular health improvements. So again, I'm actually having a researcher on my podcast in about a couple of weeks who does creatine research and knows all about that.
The other thing I'm doing I'm very interested in is exercise and cancer, both prevention and treatment. So there's now a lot of clinical research on using exercise as an adjunct treatment to cancer and how effective it is in improving cancer survival, improving, you know, the basically lowering the cancer recurrence risk, right? So like it coming back and also improving like a whole host of like side effects of chemo like your mood nausea like guess what when you exercise along with the chemo people think that i don't have energy to do it but it turns out they actually feel better big surprise to those of us that exercise it's not that much of a surprise i mean exercise is you know there's studies out there now that have compared exercise to like classical SSsris right and they're as good if not better at treating depression did you see what the top rated category of exercise movement was in the one of those studies was dancing with with music oh no i didn't see that yeah so i i think it was it came out at same time, but it wasn't the same one.
But yes, when you compared it, and they then ranked all of the different modes of exercise, I think one of the things especially to do with dancing that you have is this sort of inherently pro-social, intimate, collaborative, partner-based thing that's going on, which is probably doing all sorts of stuff that's oxytocin, that's's serotonin as well vasopressin like there'll be a ton of things going on right that must have been an observational study there's actually been randomized controlled trials comparing a lot of a lot of them are running they do running for the exercise or biking um but like in that sense it's like you're you're really comparing the two right and and in that sense but um yeah there's so many things going on right you're getting the endorphins you're getting you're getting cannabinoids or another one that you're making with exercise that affect your mood um you're getting serotonin oxytocin as well all the good things ronda you're great i really appreciate you i love i love getting to speak to you so creatine exercise and cancer we need to talk about toxic mold and mycotoxins we can do that next time that you come on but why should people go keep up to date with all of the things have you got any more pdfs going out i do yeah i've got so i've got a podcast right i'm i'm on all the places spotify and youtube and apple podcast but i also have a website as well foundmyfitness.com my. My podcast is called Found My Fitness.
And I've got some free reports out there. I've got a new one on, it's called How to Train According to the Experts.
And you can find that at howtotrainguide.com. And it's essentially like all the experts I've had on my podcast that are, you know, in exercise physiology.
So it's how to train to improve VO2 max, it includes protocols. How to train to improve muscle mass, muscle strength, how to improve body composition.
So there's all the protocols that you need and sort of a lot of science explanations as well. Howtotrainguy.com.
I've got BDNF protocols. So that can be found.
I downloaded that one straight after our episode last year. Where can people get the BDNF one? BDNFprotocols.com.
And that's a lot of protocols for improving brain health and cognition, basically, if you want some exercise protocols or polyphenol protocols that are out there that are shown to increase cognition, improve cognition. That's another one as well.
Oh, and I have another one that you might be interested in. It's the omega-3, how to choose an omega-3 supplement.
And it's basically got a list of like eight or 10 different supplements that are like quality, low oxidation, and like how to choose a supplement. And that's at omega3guide.com.
So that's another one. Okay.
People can go and PDF themselves up. Rhonda, I really appreciate you.
Thank you. Appreciate it too, Chris.
Thanks so much. Thank you very much for tuning in.
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