Shanna H. Swan details how microplastics and endocrine disruptors like phthalates cause infertility, citing chef Philip Franklin Lee's testosterone surge to 1,200 after eliminating plastic exposure and UCSF couples achieving pregnancy within three months via lifestyle changes. She critiques US regulatory failures compared to Europe, highlights Lou Gillette's research on shrinking alligator penises, and advocates for water distillation and non-toxic alternatives like silicone bags and plant-based fabrics. Ultimately, the discussion urges viewers to watch "The Plastic Detox" to shift away from traditional medical narratives and take immediate action against pervasive chemical pollution. [Automatically generated summary]
So you've got a documentary about the, essentially about the same subject that you talked about last time you're here, the impact of microplastics and all these various endocrine-disrupting chemicals that we're dealing with.
I went home and I thought a lot about that question.
And that was what led me to create the program that I have now, Action Science Initiative, which is doing short, impactful, relatively cheap interventions to alert people to the problem and communicating this in a way that I'm hoping will reach more people than academia where I was speaking before.
Because before I talked to you, I talked to my peers in, you know, academia and the Ivory Tower, you know, at the meetings where they all went, they read the papers that we all read.
But the general public didn't get this.
So you really were, I have to tell you, thank you.
And you were actually very influential in my life.
When I first heard about your book and I started going over the details of it and the subject matter, I was shocked.
I couldn't imagine that something like this could not just have happened, but there's no large-scale effort to reverse course or to change course or to do something about it, or at least to make people aware of the impact that plastics are having on us.
Let me tell you a story about a friend of mine.
There's a guy named Philip Franklin Lee, who is a Michelin star chef that lives in Austin.
And he has this amazing sushi restaurant, Sushi by Scratch, and great chef.
Anyway, he was experiencing fatigue, like always tired, got his hormones tested, extremely low testosterone, but then got his microplastics tested, and they were off the charts.
Did a series of interventions to try to clean his body out from that, stopped drinking anything out of plastic, stopped using plastic.
Just by whatever he did, I'm not sure if he did the plasma phoresis thing that I just did recently.
His testosterone went up to 1,200 with no testosterone replacement, no nothing.
Just eliminating microplastics from his life over a period of time raises testosterone.
So microplastics are a relatively newcomer to the scene because we've had plastics since 1950, right?
Microplastics have been there but not recognized until relatively recently.
And actually, measuring them in our bodies is much harder than measuring the plasticizers, which are the chemicals that are put in plastic to give them the various properties that they have.
So there are other, you know, and by the way, well, we'll come back to that later.
So yes, we can measure those, but measuring microplastics, particularly if we're going to go into your brain or into your testicles, you know, into a woman's placenta, obviously that's much more difficult.
So they're not the same, but the microplastics, what they are is the actual pieces of plastic that carry the plasticizers along with them.
So the kind of piggyback on.
So they do double damage because they carry the chemical harms, and they also physically enter the cells, right?
So do you remember, I'm sure asbestos you know about, you know, and silicosis.
And these were other examples of particles that went into the body and conveyed both chemical harm and physical harm, like inflammation and so on and so forth.
So they're all bad, but they're not identical.
And what we studied in the plastic detox, which is the film, that was, we did not study any microplastics.
We studied the plasticizers.
So you probably remember, I think I told you last time, well, why should you remember anyway?
They're water soluble.
And so they, remember that?
So they go into your urine, and then they're pretty easy to measure.
My colleague Jenoa and her team will analyze it for not everything in the world, but the bisphenols, the phthalates, and the parabens.
They're going to be adding pesticides soon, and that would be great to have that as well.
Then, if you want to go to phase two, I have some things here that you could swap in your kitchen, and you could go to that QR code and find out other things that you could reduce.
And then if you wanted to, we could send you another kit and you could see if your levels changed.
So you would be doing what the couples in, part of what the couples in the intervention did.
The couples in the intervention also were infertile.
And so we're not going to touch your fertility question, but they also, the men collected sperm, and we can do that if you want, but I don't think you, you know, you may not want to talk about that on your phone.
But that's what we did in the intervention.
So in the intervention, we found, I'll just, this is what the intervention was.
There's a company called Fellow, which is grown out of UCSF.
And they're very big now.
I think they have like 200,000 men in their files who have had their semen tested.
And at the time they have their semen tested, they're asked, could we recontact you for research?
That's one important question.
And they're asked, why did you want your sperm tested?
And if they say, because we're infertile or subfertile, or are we worrying about our fertility, we ask, or they ask, how long has it been that you've been having this problem with fertility?
And if it's more than 12 months, then they're technically infertile, right?
So if they said they would agree to be recontacted and they were infertile, they were potentially eligible for this intervention.
And they sent it in and they figured out how to get all the parameters right, even though it's mailed.
And yeah, so the couples did that.
So we had over time levels in their body of the chemicals, semen quality, what they were doing, what they changed in their life, because we had this record of everything they changed.
And then finally, we saw who got pregnant.
And I hope your listeners will watch the plastic detox.
It's a movie that a lot of people love and found really moving.
So if people stop at a place like that on a regular basis on their way to work in the morning to get coffee and they use, they bring their own plastic, or excuse me, they bring their own stainless steel thermos or mug that would eliminate some of it, but perhaps.
Well, I mean, it's the thing that came out of the episode that we did that shocked me the most is how little this is discussed in the mainstream.
And I had not known until you brought it up, until you became a guest on the show, until I started researching it, I was stunned.
I couldn't believe that this was something that was so common.
And so, so one of the things that comes up all the time is infertility with couples that are trying and they're using IVF and it's more common now than ever before.
And there's been a lot of things that people, a lot of factors that people have attributed to that reason.
A lot of them being older people that are, you know, they put their careers aside in their 30s.
They decided now it's time to have kids.
They're worried that it's too late.
But listening to you talk about it, it seems like that's only one part of the issue and not the big part.
The big part seems to be that we're being poisoned and we're doing it by virtue of our modern world that we live in where so much of your life relies on plastic.
And it's very difficult for people that are so set in their ways, they have routines, they don't really understand like what can I do to eliminate this stuff from my life.
Just having the conversation and understanding that these things are having an impact is great.
But the steps that people need to take in order to eliminate these things from their life, I think that's what's really important to get out there now.
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So the fact there's little or no regulation of clothes or textiles we wear each day from uniforms to fast fashion, outdoor gear, and even the face masks that have become ubiquitous in recent years.
Wicker explains how we got here, what the stakes are, what all of us can do in the fight for a safe and healthy wardrobe for all.
And Japan is getting there, and all of that Southeast Asia.
And so when there's a lot of articles about this, a lot of editorials, a lot of articles, and they make me so, Joe, they make me so mad because they say correctly that having a child at older age will do this to some extent.
You know, not wanting to have children, as many children, will do this to some extent.
But they never mention toxics.
They just, and so I've written editorials saying, hey, guys, we're not alone on this planet.
And we're not the only species that's declining in number.
And then if you look at the curve of the number of species that are declining and the rate of decline of human fertility, they're parallel.
It's all about 1% per year.
And we know they're exposed, these other species.
You showed it.
Those fish in that water are exposed and animals on the periphery.
So I would love for everybody when they look at these numbers of declining fertility, consider that it's not all choice.
Animals are not choosing to have their children later or to delay childbearing, right?
20 to 25 percent smaller penis sizes compared to males from a cleaner reference lake.
Males of lower testosterone levels, around 70% lower.
Abnormal relationships between hormone levels and penis growth, unlike alligators from cleaner lakes.
Alligators from polluted lakes also show other reproductive issues, abnormal sex hormone patterns, altered gonads, low hatching success, various birth defects, all consistent with exposure to endocrine-disrupting contaminants, EDCs, such as DDT derivatives, dildrin, PCBs, and related compounds.
Wow.
So it's all endocrine disruptors from pollution.
Oh, boy.
Yeah, I mean, you would think that this would sound the alarm.
Well, it's just so confusing how few people are even aware of this.
We were talking, I didn't realize it had been five years since our last podcast, which is pretty crazy.
But in that five years, you barely hear about it.
It's occasional.
People bring up certain chemicals they think are bad.
Oh, avoid this.
Paul Saladino was the one that showed that the paper cups that you get from a coffee shop, that if you take that paper away, what you have is essentially this plastic membrane.
And that's what you're drinking your coffee out of.
You're not drinking your coffee out of paper.
And how terrible these things are for you.
But even that, it's like people just dismiss it.
The line around Starbucks is always the same.
There's always people going and get their coffee.
They don't think anything of it.
And they're just consuming these chemicals that mess up your health, mess up your vitality, your energy levels, everything.
So just to add to that, how it affects you, not you, maybe your levels are lower.
I don't know, but we'll find out.
But both men and women who have lower fertility on average, these are studies, there have been about four or five studies that have shown this, lower fertility and sperm count on the male side, die younger.
So I want to go back to this question I asked, is whose responsibility?
So I don't think it's, I mean, it's great for you and I to be concerned and for your listeners to be concerned, but in fact, it shouldn't be our responsibility because, you know, the drug FDA does drugs, right?
We have to get people angry enough to put pressure on, you know, there's a bill, the Tosca Toxic Substances Control Act, which should be doing a lot of this.
And I think it's coming up for revision.
And, you know, maybe people can pay attention to that and read about it and think, government should be doing this.
It's not our job.
It's not our job to worry about what's in our pants and what's in our this and our this and our this, and you were asking what kind of was in, you know, denim and so on.
If you want to kid something on clothing and, you know, on this yeah, i'd be happy to.
Yeah yeah but um, just because it was relatively new to my consciousness when I was, you know, doing the film and before that we didn't collect data on that unfortunately, you know, maybe we should do another study, which reminds me.
There is just like so much work to be done and for my program there's so many interventions.
I want to do that.
We did this one with great success and now we're doing another one and we have another one.
But if anybody wants to help, you know, with this it's all privately funded.
The government is not going to fund this right unfortunately, unfortunately.
So, you know, let me know.
If anybody comes to you and says, how can we help, and all that well, i'm sure somebody will reach out.
Um, the the thing that I I would imagine would be the response to something like this was that there are so many industries that are established already that require the use of all these compounds, all these chemicals, all these endocrine disrupting chemicals, and it is, it's just everywhere.
It's everywhere and everything.
They use plastic in the production of so many different things.
These things are leaching into our food, they're leaching into our clothes, they're leaching into all these various products that we use that contribute to these chemicals entering into our body, disrupting that.
So, like you, you're aware glyphosate, i'm sure um, they were trying to eliminate glyphosate from the industrial agriculture.
Well, the president passed an executive order blocking it because some enormous percent 90 something Percent of all of our food in terms of wheat, corn, all the agriculture in this country relies on glyphosate for production.
And so the idea is we need poison so that we can make food, which is so crazy, especially when you consider the fact that all these other countries don't use glyphosate and feed their population.
So how are they doing it?
And what do we need to do to get back on that track?
And, you know, I had RFK Jr. in here to discuss it, and he was very crestfallen when he was explaining that there was an executive order passed and that he was working very hard to try to eliminate glyphosate.
And something that he discussed in previous meetings that he and I had that was one of his primary concerns.
Glyphosate is toxic.
It's terrible.
It's just completely awful for your body, yet the use of it is ubiquitous in agriculture, industrial agriculture.
And he was trying very hard to try to eliminate it.
And then the government passes this executive order because in their estimation.
Yeah, exactly.
Pressure.
Yeah.
And this is what I worry about with I don't want to mention any names, but there's a lot of these popular clothing brands that people wear that are, you know, fitness, I'm healthy, I'm fitness wear.
And these fitness wear that you're these clothing that you're wearing are leaching these chemicals into your body that are screwing up your health, which is so crazy.
But it's so, I don't want to say it's perfect, but it sort of encapsulates how screwed up our modern life is.
One of them is they have this new device, which is like the same way these machines pull the crops out of the ground, these machines go over the crops and zap all the non-essential crops with a laser beam.
So as the corn's growing or whatever else it is, they're zapping all the other stuff that's growing around it that's sucking up all the resources, all the weeds.
And I asked, does it have any residual effect on the food?
He said, no.
Well, that's great.
But then, you know, farmers, one of the big problems is they're already barely making money.
So if you now require them to spend, you know, X amount of dollars on some gigantic weed-zapping laser that has to cover who knows how many acres, they're running these.
I mean, I'm sure you're aware, but monocrop agriculture, for people who've never seen some of these places that grow corn and wheat, you're talking about these massive pieces of land that only grow one thing, which in nature doesn't exist.
So, of course, nature wants to rectify that.
Nature's like, why is there only wheat here?
You need weeds.
And so, you know, birds drop seeds, all these seeds fly in the wind, and then all these things grow.
So, you're going to have to get these machines that are capable of traveling over all of those crops and zapping out all the weeds.
How much is that going to cost to people that are already struggling?
You know, because the American farmers are barely getting by, barely, and we need them.
And, you know, the last thing you want to do is burden them with another cost.
But also, the use of, especially when it comes to things like wheat, because they're using it after they harvest the wheat to dry it out quicker so that it doesn't grow mold on it.
What is the issue with drinking distilled water for health purposes?
And is it recommended that you add electrolytes or minerals or what have you?
Because that's what, so one of the things that fighters do when they're cutting weight, I don't think most of them do it anymore, but a lot of them were drinking distilled water so that the water would go in their system and right out of their system.
Because cutting weight for fighting, I don't know if you know about this, but they have to weigh in at a certain weight glass.
And essentially what they do is radically dehydrate themselves 24 hours before a fight.
It's not a great idea.
It's a terrible idea.
So Perplexity says it's generally safe to drink distilled water.
People do not need to add minerals to it as long as they eat a reasonably balanced diet.
Distilled water is simply water that's been boiled and recondensed, so it's very low in contaminants and minerals.
Health sources note that it is safe to drink but tends to taste flat because minerals like calcium, magnesium are removed.
What about minerals?
You get the vast majority of needed minerals, calcium, magnesium, potassium, etc., from food, not water.
So distilled water alone does not usually cause deficiencies in healthy people with a good diet.
However, some organizations and reviews point out that long-term use of very low mineral water may slightly reduce mineral intake.
And in specific groups, children, heavy exercisers, there we go.
People with certain illnesses could contribute to electrolyte imbalance if diet is poor.
So when might adding minerals help?
Distilled water is your main or only drinking water and your diet is low in fruits, vegetables, and other mineral-rich foods.
Adding a pinch of mineral salt or using a remineralization cartridge, that sounds terrible.
Cartridge sounds like plastic, right?
Or drops can help restore small amounts of calcium, magnesium, and electrolytes and improve taste.
Athletes who sweat heavily, people with kidney or hormonal issues affecting electrolytes and those on very restricted diets should be more cautious about relying exclusively on distilled water and may benefit from electrolyte or mineral placement as advised by a clinician.
I mean, I recommend people take electrolytes anyway.
And when you do the distill, do the process, which Stephen does, you know, every other day, and he goes to clean the container that you put the water in, it stinks.
I would like to study someone like Michael Phelps, someone who spent like thousands of hours in a pool, whether or not it's affected his body in any way.
Whether or not there's like measurable chlorine levels in his urine or what have you.
Chlorine in properly maintained pools is generally considered safe, but it can cause irritation of eyes, skin, and airways.
Well, that can't be good.
And heavily frequent exposure, especially indoors, can contribute to respiratory problems in some people.
What chlorine does in pools, it kills germs like bacteria and viruses in pools and is key for preventing infections and diarrhea illnesses from contaminated water.
Public health guidance typically recommends free chlorine about one to four parts per million with pH 7.0 to 7.8 within this range.
Disinfection is effective and side effects are usually mild.
Common short-term effects, irritation of eyes, nose, throat, skin, common when levels are high, when chloramines build up, especially in indoor pools.
Chlorabines form when chlorine reacts with sweat, urine, and other organic matter, can become airborne and irritate the respiratory tract, causing coughing, wheezing, or tight chest in some swimmers and staff.
Long-term, regular heavy exposure in indoors, poorly ventilated pools has been linked to increased respiratory symptoms.
Some studies suggest increased asthma risk.
Okay, put this in as a follow-up question.
Is exposure to chlorine through the skin responsible for any health issues?
Let's just through the skin.
See if there's any studies on that.
Chlorine getting into the body through the intact skin from pool water does not appear to cause systemic whole body health problems in otherwise healthy people.
Its effects are almost entirely local to the skin itself.
What skin exposure actually does, chlorine is an irritant that strips the natural skin oils, disrupts the outer barrier, leading to dryness, tightness, itching.
So put this in.
What exposure does chlorine have to healthy skin flora?
Because healthy skin flora, you know, I do jiu-jitsu, and one of the things that happens with jiu-jitsu is you get a lot of skin diseases.
Like you get, people get ringworm, staph infections.
Well, you're getting scratched up a lot, and you're rolling around on the mats, and if the mats are dirty, and if it's just there's exposure to it, you can have a problem.
And then one of the problems that people have is to treat that, they use antibacterial skin soap.
So what that does is strips the skin of all the healthy flora, which actually protects you.
The counter to that, I always bring this up.
I have no affiliation with this product, but it's an excellent product.
It's called Defense Soap.
Defense Soap is my friend Guy Sako, he invented it.
He's a wrestling coach, and it was a solution using healthy things like tea tree oil, eucalyptus in this soap that kills the bad bacteria but does nothing to the healthy flora.
Chlorinated pool water does disturb normal skin flora temporarily, but in healthy people, the microbiome usually recovers within hours to a day or so after swimming.
So that's a problem if you swim every day then.
Chlorine is a broad disinfectant, so it kills or suppresses both good and bad bacteria on the skin surface.
Reducing overall microbial diversity right after swimming.
Experimental and field studies show that even short exposure can cut measured microbiome diversity markedly, often cited around 30 to 40 percent, with composition shifting away from the usual dominant groups right after a swim.
How long disruption lasts after leaving the pool?
Many of the resident species begin to recolonize from deeper skin layers, hair follicles, and the environment, and community composition tends to drift backward towards baseline over the next 24 plus hours.
With frequent repeated swimming, daily or high-volume training, the skin may be in a more chronically perturbed state with less time for full microbiome recovery in between exposures.
I know a lot of people have switched their pools over to saltwater pools for this very reason.
I think there's a problem with saltwater pools in very high temperature areas, though, where it's not effective enough to stop mold and all the junk.
The pool is ordinary salt, sodium chloride, dissolved in the water, usually around 2,700, 3,400 parts per million, which is about one-tenth the salinity of the ocean.
And close to body fluid levels, the water passes through an electrically charged salt cell, which uses electrolysis to convert some of that salt into active chlorine, mainly hypochlorous acid and sodium hypochlorite that sanitizes the pool.
After chlorine does its job, it ends up back as chloride, and the cycle repeats, so you keep generating chlorine as long as the system runs and there's enough salt.
What's different from your standard chlorine pool?
You still have free chlorine in the water at typical pool levels, about one to four parts per million.
The difference is the source, salt generator, versus liquid tabled chlorine, not the sanitizer itself.
Most people find salt pools a bit gentler.
The water feels softer, and continuous low-level generation can mean fluoride, fewer chloramines, less smell and irritation if the system is sized and maintained correctly.
Interesting.
Okay, so it's still chlorine.
So it still probably disturbs your microbiome, which sucks.
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They use it for wild game in particular because you can slow cook.
So one of the things about wild game, it has a very low fat content.
And a lot of people find that it's more tender if you slowly cook.
So let's say if you like medium rare is like, what is medium rare?
Like 135 degrees, I think.
So what you would do is you would take this piece of meat and you would seal it up in a vacuum sealed container and you dunk it in this sous machine and it keeps the water at 135 degrees.
You can cook it for several hours at 135 and then you sear the outside of it.
it doesn't get like cooking hot so it's like what is but if the sous vide bags don't have plasticizers in them like if they're made of silicone right food based food what is it Food-grade silicone.
I have a machine, and I use this vacuum-sealed machine.
So if I get wild game and then I cut it up into pieces, and then I seal it in these vacuum-sealed bags to freeze it.
Silicone-based sous vide bags are generally considered safe for food use and do not significantly leach, significantly a weird word, leach harmful chemicals under typical cooking conditions.
High quality, food-grade silicone is inert, BPA-free.
Regular plastic bags can be reasonably, I don't like that word, safe for sous if you use the right kind, food-grade, BPA, and phthalate-free and rated for hot food.
But all plastics can leak some chemicals, and the data specific to sous V is still limited.
What regular bags are safe?
Look for bags made with polyethylene and or polypropylene that are labeled food-grade and microwave-safe.
Is there a plastic that's microwave-safe, though, is that real?
Yeah, these are considered safe with food up to around 190 to 195 Fahrenheit.
Most brand zipper bags, Ziploc GLAD, are polyethylene, BPA, and dioxin-free and are commonly used for sous at typical temperatures below 176.
Purpose-made vacuum sealer or boil-in sous vide pouches, that's what I use, are specifically certified as food-grade for cooking and are the safest plastic option if you want disposable.
So it seems like it's reasonably safe to do that.
A review by Utah's Department of Health notes that there's a lack of studies directly measuring chemical leaching from sous vide bags, but recommends using FDA-compliant BPA and phthalate-free plastics, which are not known for estrogenic activity and are considered safe for food contact.
Eating U.S. freshwater fish can expose you to chemical contaminants like mercury and PFAS and if eaten undercooked or rawed parasites and some bacteria.
Most people can still eat freshwater fish safely if they follow local advisories and avoid high-risk groups, pregnant people, young children, eating too much.
Main chemical risks, mercury, methylmercury.
Nearly all wild fish contain some mercury, but levels of many U.S. freshwater fish can be high enough to harm a fetus or a young child's developing brain and nervous system if eaten often.
That's crazy.
PFAS, forever chemicals.
Many U.S. freshwater fish have miserable PFAS and in some studies show widespread PFAS plus mercury in fish tissue at levels that pose health risks for frequent consumers.
PFAS exposure has been linked to changes in liver and kidney function, cholesterol, immune response, pregnancy complications, and increased risk of certain cancers.
Yeah, this guy in Denmark studied people on the Faroe Islands, which they all eat fish.
They catch them, you know, the Faroe Islands, and they catch them there.
And so he looked at the levels of PFAS, and then he looked at their antibody response to vaccination down.
And so think of what that means in this time of COVID or whatever.
I want to do an intervention where we take kids who are getting PFAS-free school uniforms.
Remember, I told you PFAS was in school uniforms?
And then when they come in at age six for their first grade, they will have just had their booster, so then we could get their blood and see if the booster antibody levels were lower in the kids that had the PFAS uniforms versus the clean uniform.
There's a can there a card there to scan the QR code and you can go to that and um, but it would be nice if there's like a one, so if you scan the QR code, is there a one-stop shop?
It could be very well like one of those California rules where they say like this building has got dangerous chemicals that could cause cancer and people and it like has to be weird that that's in the actual stuff that you breathe in and smell.
It says burning incense products, smoke, and chemicals that can irritate your lungs, worsen asthma and allergies, and with heavy long-term use in poorly ventilated spaces may increase risk for heart disease and some cancers.
You know, you think incense, you go over someone's house, they do yoga, they eat vegan, they burn incense, they must be healthy.
Long-term health risk, repeated long-term exposure daily for years, been associated in studies with increased risk of bronchitis, reduced lung function in children, and chronic respiratory symptoms in workers heavily exposed to temple incense.
Epidemiological studies, mostly in Asian populations with heavy daily use, have linked long-term incense exposure to higher rates of cardiovascular problems, hypertension, coronary artery disease, stroke, chronic limb, what's that word?
Lack of blood flow to part of a body, usually because of an artery is narrowed or blocked, severe or prolonged, the affected tissue can be damaged or die.
Oh, great.
Oh, wonderful.
So you think about incense, you think like healthy, natural people.
But I could do it now, and maybe I have very low levels.
And we could attribute that to the, because I haven't done the best job.
Well, like I said, I did get rid of my plastic coffee machine at home.
I did that about three or four weeks ago.
One of the things it's done is it's made my morning coffee a lot harder to get.
It's more of like a ritual now because I use a steel water boiler thing that heats it up to 200 degrees.
And then I have a steel French press and I grind the beans in a steel thing.
It's like right.
And then I pour the beans in the French press and it takes 15 minutes rather than 30 seconds.
It tastes way better.
But I'm a big coffee drinker.
I love coffee, but I like it black.
Like I love the flavor of coffee.
I really do.
And so it just tastes better.
French press, I think, is the best way to drink coffee anyway.
And so I kind of decided, like, why am I, I'm avoiding all these microplastics.
I don't drink out of plastic or paper cups.
I do all these different things.
Why am I still using a plastic coffee machine?
I look at that thing every morning and I was like, yeah, but it's going to give me coffee right now.
So I press the button to get my coffee right now.
Then I was like, that's stupid.
So now I just, I only use something like this.
Yeah.
So I'd be interested to see if maybe I have low levels because I certainly feel like my body, it felt refreshed, like I had less inflammation.
You know, but that's like a two-hour procedure.
It's a pain in the butt.
You got to sit there for two hours.
You look like a psycho.
You have like, I should have taken a photo of what I looked like while I was doing it because I was laying there and I had like cords in this arm and cords in that arm.
So I had blood coming out of that arm and going back into that arm.
But the benefits of it in terms of like the people that I know that have done it said it's a game changer in terms of your recovery, market recovery levels, much better sleep.
Like if you're wearing an aura ring or a whoop strap or something along those lines, you get much better recovery.
And I think that's probably the case with me.
I feel pretty good.
But I do a lot of stuff.
I do a lot of things to maximize my health, so it's really kind of difficult to know what's going on.
And it's probably one of the primary factors to why this isn't discussed, because it would reduce fossil fuel consumption, which would affect oil markets, which would affect the economy.
Well, I don't think you're going to get the government to act about this stuff.
I think this has to be done on an individual level where people are aware of it and take steps to protect themselves and their family from these issues.
That's my cynical view of how this is going to be played out.
And I'm really hoping, I know for a fact a lot of people listened to our last conversation and made some lifestyle changes.
I'm really hoping that now, with this follow-up visit, more and more people will be aware of it.
Many people think the government takes care of us, but very few chemicals are actually banned from personal care products, and over 1,100 are banned in the Eve.
To have a child, I believe it is a fundamental human right.
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I think she'd be the best mom ever, and I really want to see that for you.
Plastic doesn't have to come from a toxic petroleum-based material.
It says the worst offenders are synthetic plastic-heavy garments that are fuzzy, coated, or very tight to the skin, especially polyester fleece, recycled polyester fast fashion, and PFAS-coated water stain repellent, outerwear, and activewear.
Polyester fleece jackets, blankets, loungewear, extremely high microfiber shedding.
One study found that polyester fleece shedding orders of magnitude more fibers per wash than other knits, which estimates around 110,000 fibers per garment per wash.
This is both bad for environmental plastic pollution and for indoor dust and air.
Oi.
Recycled polyester fast fashion, like leggings, tees, dresses, and sportswear.
New testing shows recycled polyester garments shed far, said more and finer microfibers than virgin polyester.
Interesting.
So you think recycled, oh, I'm recycling.
I'm a good person.
No, you're killing yourself.
Increased particle numbers and potential toxicity.
These items are often cheaply made, shed heavily in washing, and frequently use intense dyes and finishes.
Hot pink.
Tight synthetic sportswear and underwear.
Yikes.
These are worn for long periods directly against sweaty skin and mucous membranes, increasing opportunity for contact with microplastics and additives like antimony, phthalates, and PFAS finishes.
Cheap synthetic performance or wrinkle-free fashion.
Stain-resistant, easy care, anti-odor, and heavy print coating garments are more likely to use chemical finishes that can off-gas or leach on top of the base synthetic fiber issues.
Hui, lower concern choices.
Okay, not perfect, but generally less problematic for leaching and microplastic shedding.
Undyed or lightly dyed natural fibers like cotton, linen, wool, hemp, silk without stain-resistant or wrinkle-free finishes.
Simple weaves, knits rather than fluffy or brush surfaces, which shed less.
PFAS-free rain gear and outdoor clothing.
Brands now often as PFAS.
What rain gear is PFAS-free?
That's interesting because I've always thought that it has to be coated.
It has been kind of surprising how much interest there is and how much people are taking this up.
And what's great is there are a lot of nonprofits that are in the space that are getting out these messages.
So it's not just me, you know, many, many nonprofits.
And then there's the Plastics Treaty, which is a worldwide.
It didn't pass, but hopefully it will come back and maybe next time.
And then there's the work that the EU is doing, which is miles ahead of us.
For example, I think I might have said this before, but just so in Europe, if you're going to put a new chemical into commerce, it has to pass certain tests to be safe.
Which is very disturbing, but not too surprising when you consider a lot of the other things that are allowed in this country that aren't allowed in other countries.
Like when you show the list of the chemicals that are illegal in the EU that are illegal in America, that's disturbing.
The response when you were on this podcast was pretty shocking for me.
So many people reached out to me.
A lot of my friends that watched the episode were like, I can't believe this.
Oh, I have no idea.
It was five years ago.
But quite a few of my friends that don't reach out with every episode reached out and said, that is just nuts.
Like, I can't believe this.
And especially people with children and they're concerned about the development of their children or people who are pregnant who are concerned with the intake of these chemicals while they're pregnant, which has a radical effect on the child's development.
I hate to say it, but I think, like I said, I don't think the government's going to do anything.
I think it's got to be up to individuals to make choices.
And I'm really hoping your documentary has another big impact.
One of the beautiful things about Netflix is that it's even though things get promoted on Netflix, whenever anything, so many people have Netflix that whenever anything's good, a lot of people just start sharing it and start talking about it and posting about it on social media.
And then next thing, the conversation starts happening and starts raising awareness.
And I really do hope you're going to go on a bunch of other podcasts as well and talk about this.
I feel lucky that I've had this opportunity, like you're speaking to you and your followers and other podcasts.
And then having the opportunity to have designed this intervention and have worked with Louie and others on the film team to put this forward, it's a very big thing.
And, you know, the film costs a lot of money.
And we've had worldwide support for putting this out.
So there's a lot of support behind the pushback.
And we just have to get everybody on board and just say, no, I'm not going to use that stuff.
Well, there's not a lot of incentive to teach this stuff.
That's part of the problem is that especially these petrochemical companies and the use of these things is going to affect so many different industries because if you cut that out and they know, I mean, how much of an impact is that going to have on the economy if everybody just stopped using all these chemicals, if all the Lululemon brands and I don't know, single them out, but all these different companies, if they all just went under tomorrow,
that'd be a giant problem if everybody just stopped using these things.
Three primary categories of non-toxic workout clothes, all natural or almost all natural.
For example, 100% organic cotton or 90% cotton, 10% spandex.
Most semi-synthetic fabric, for instance, 10-cell fabric, plant-based plastic, which is a plastic source from something like castor bean oil instead of fossil fuels.
In general, I'm not a huge fan of plant-based bioplastics.
They are advertised as plastic-free alternatives, but they're still plastic.
And some research shows that they're not truly non-toxic.
I know.
It's disappointing, it says.
Here's the honest to God truth.
When it comes to performance, stretchiness, compression, durability, the plant-based plastics do tend to perform the best.
Huh.
Followed by the semi-synthetics, followed by the, oh, no, I think they mean perform the best in terms.
More and more of these conversations have to take place so that in the general zeitgeist, more people are aware of it and it's just increased awareness and just makes it where more people are making better choices.