What's the deal with microplastics?

23:26Emily Oster:When you have an injury or an infection, your immune system targets cells and antibodies and stuff to that area and does inflammation. And what inflammation is, is an offensive set of chemicals to destroy the thing that is there. Now, if that thing is a bunch of bacteria or something like that, then great. and your body releases those chemicals to destroy the bacteria does do some damage to your own cells as well, but that's sort of a risk you're willing to take. These substances, when they're nicely targeted to an injury or an infection, work quite well. When they are flowing throughout your body, we do know that they can cause significant problems in the long term.

24:11Emily Oster:Certain markers of inflammation like C-reactive protein, if they are higher in your blood, you have a higher risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. There is this sense that there's good inflammation and then inflammation run amok. And there's stuff that we do to ourselves that promote inflammation that aren't giving ourselves infections. So just to like dramatically simplify, if there are a lot of tiny plastic particles around, it is possible that our body will be like, ah, that's like a thing I need to go fight. And that will cause there to be a lot of these inflammatory markers rooting around in our blood.

24:45And that might be bad for our heart because our body's kind of like overreacting to this plastic situation.

24:51Emily Oster:And inflammation is supposed to be transient, right? It's supposed to be like while you heal your wound, while you cure your infection, and then you're supposed to go back to baseline. But if you're sitting kind of above baseline for a long period of time, it really can have adverse effects. But the problem with the microplastic literature, as I dug into it, is there's a lot of these studies in a Petri dish. And then there's very few poor quality studies translating this into a human body. And like the difference is really, really big between those two things. You can mess with cells a lot in a Petri dish.

25:26For me, this is also where I landed in the microplastics debate. And I think it's sort of important to help people kind of separate two things. So one is maybe, maybe like three things. So one is the question of like, how much microplastics are in people's bodies? Could that be bad based on what we know from the lab? And the third is like, is it bad given those two things together? And I feel like in the, the, what's been complicated for people in this literature, and I think we should separate those three things is that we talk a lot about the first thing, how much microplastics are there. We take a lot about the second thing, you know, what happens if you feed a mouse exclusively a diet of microplastics for its whole life?

26:07Like, how's that going? And then, and then we sort of assume things about the third thing. And so let's like talk about the first two and then talk about the third, right?

26:16Emily Oster:Yeah. I mean, just to echo that, I was like laughing out loud when I was digging into the literature at how many, when you are searching for like human effects of microplastics, the ratio of review articles and perspective pieces versus like hard data articles was obscene. And there are all these review articles like, oh, you know, it probably causes cancer. And you're like, oh, it does? Let me like read what you say. And it's like, well, if you put it in a Petri dish, it causes inflammation. And we know that inflammation might cause cancer. And therefore, maybe in humans, it causes cancer. It's like, okay, that's not evidence.

26:49Emily Oster:That's, you know, connecting dots that you haven't proven are connected yet. It's quite frustrating. I like in review articles when it's like, this might cause cancer. And then it's like citation. You're like, ooh, good. I'd like to read the citation. Then you click, and then it's another review article in which they say that. It's like, come on, man. Yeah. Give us something to work with here. This is like, now we're in the weeds of stuff I don't like about the literature. But let's talk about that first question, which is how we're going to put these three things together and and get to the last thing that people care about.

27:20But let's unpack, are there microplastics everywhere?

27:23Emily Oster:Plastic is everywhere. We've talked about that. It's a ubiquitous part of our lives, but microplastics come from a bunch of different sources, right, Emily? So what are the major ways that microplastics get into us, into humans? So basically, to get the microplastics into us, they have to actually come in. You don't tend to absorb stuff like that through your skin very much. So it's really kind of stuff you eat and stuff you breathe or inhale. So the major sources for people are stuff in your diet and then like dust. So in your diet, you know, we can find microplastics everywhere. There's this one study, and I honestly think this isn't over.

28:00I'm not totally sure I believe this, but there is one study of tea bags in Canada, which has like these tea bags are just like basically exclusively made of microplastics. Right?

28:12Emily Oster:They forgot to put the tea in. They just filled the bag with microplastics. Yeah, they just literally put microplastics. But that's not like all tea. Yeah, yeah. It's this particular, I think, yeah. I saw this too. This was a study that had the amount of microplastics in a cup of tea like a hundredfold higher than in any other source, which is - But if you put aside this particular terrible tea situation, generally most of people's microplastic exposure is through indoor dust. So there's just a lot of plastics in indoor dust. There's a lot of plastics in your house and they kind of - indoor spaces and they sort of decay and you inhale them.

28:46And then, you know, of the diet stuff, plastic bottles, drinking out of plastic bottles is kind of the biggest thing. And then tap water. So it's sort of stuff you drink and stuff you breathe is the biggest set of issues. You can generally find microplastics in a lot of foods. And people store microplastics in their fat. So human fat has a lot of microplastics, but we're not eating human fat. So that's not like a dietary source. Not usually.

29:12Emily Oster:Yeah, I should hope not. But it sounds like you're I mean, these are hard things to kind of let's say I'm going to be concerned about microplastics. Like don't breathe dust is going to be a tricky one for me. Right. Yeah, I think that's actually an important point from the practical standpoint here is even if we get to the end of this conversation and we say this is something you should be you should be worried about. It's actually not entirely clear how people could really change their behavior to to affect this. And such a large share of your exposure is just going to be through through breathing.

29:40But in general, yeah, microplastics are around, you're getting them in, which leads to the question of whether they stay, which I will ask you, which is to what extent do we actually know that people are retaining these microplastics in their bodily tissues? Why don't they just poop it out, as I've asked you several times, and I don't feel like I've gotten a straight answer.

30:02Emily Oster:Here, I'll give you a straight answer. They do poop it out. In fact, when you measure microplastics in people, one of the highest concentrations of microplastics is in feces, stool, is in poop. And that's likely because you are getting it in the stuff you eat and it is just passing through you. This is a bit of a problem of size. So you mentioned earlier that microplastics are anything that's five millimeters or less. And to give people a sense, like five millimeters is like a pencil eraser size. This is, it's like micro kind of, but not really. You know, like if I swallowed a pencil eraser, which might be made of plastic, like it's passing right through me, right?

30:46Emily Oster:You're going to, that's going to be okay. You get down to the nanoplastic scale where these things are so tiny that they can, you know, go between cells and stuff like that. There's going to be a lot higher absorption. And clearly there is absorption because there have been plenty of studies looking at human tissues and measuring microplastics in them. You can, you know, depending on the measurement method, you get numbers that are a little bit all over the map. But just to give a sense of where things kind of stand, there have been quite a few studies now that show a reasonable accumulation of microplastics in the placenta.

31:26Emily Oster:There's been a number of studies looking at microplastics in the kidney, which kind of makes sense because the kidney is the major filtering organ of the blood. And so if anything is going to kind of pick up those little tiny micro or nanoplastics, the kidney would make sense. You can find microplastics in the lungs. there's a study showing microplastics in small concentrations but in breast milk some in testicles some in the intestines so it's really kind of everywhere you look and and perhaps most concerningly but also most controversially microplastics in the brain um let me ask you before we on the way to getting to microplastics in the brain i want to ask you so you said there's microplastics in the kidney.

32:09Now you're a kidney doctor. I'm curious how we know that. Like if you see, you must see people's kidneys like after they're dead, presumably sometimes.

32:19Emily Oster:I mean, there's slides prepared from them. Sure. Can you like see the microplastics? How do you know that there's microplastics in people's kidneys? There are multiple ways to measure. So, but yes, you can see them. So under a microscope, you can see little irregularly shaped things that don't belong there. And essentially those are microplastics. And in certain tissues, you can see even an inflammatory reaction around them, or you can find them inside white blood cells, like the cells have kind of eaten them or something like that in an attempt to break them down as a foreign body. But some are even too small to see under a typical light microscope.

32:59Emily Oster:And then there are other methods like mass spectroscopy, where you literally, you burn the tissue and the gas that comes out with, like you burn it with a laser and then the gas that comes out, you sample and measure the chemicals in the gas that comes out. And you can kind of say, oh, look, there's like polyethylene there, which it must have come from plastic. But this is a problem with the literature is it's like, it's really hard to quantify. Most of the data is in units of like pieces per milligram. Like how many pieces did we count in this milligram of tissue, which is such a sort of random thing to me.

33:35Emily Oster:Like I want, like I want grams per milligram. I don't know. Milligrams per milligram. Yeah. So I think it's interesting because those numbers don't have any meaning, but the thing, a thing that I think has really stuck with a lot of people in this literature is this paper that said that there's a spoon worth of plastic in your brain. Yeah. This is because it's like one thing to be like, there's pieces, I saw them, the masks, blah, blah, blah. But this is like, now in my mind, there is an actual spoon. And in my head, of course, it's shaped like a spoon, you know, it's like somewhere in here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

34:08Emily Oster:Like someone like shoved it right up your... Someone shoved it right up. It's like right in there, you know, I could be eating with it. But that feels, I think, to a lot of people, like both very tangible, it is a lot. And my understanding is it's probably not true. Let's talk about this for a second. Yeah, I think we got to do the brain because this is like, yeah, we got to do the brain. This is the paper. So, so this is a paper that appeared in Nature Medicine, obviously got a lot of press. I think the like a plastic spoons worth of plastic in, in your brain, just, yeah, it's very hard for health reporters, including myself, because I wrote about this when it came out to resist.

34:50Totally. The headline writes itself. I mean, obviously.

34:52Emily Oster:A headline writes itself. Let me give you just the data that was in the paper. And then, Emily, you tell me why you're skeptical here. So the way the study worked was it was an autopsy based study. So University of Arizona, I think they have like a brain repository that where people have donated their brains after they died over a period of time. and the authors sampled brain tissue from the frontal lobe, the sort of important frontal part of the brain, and they measured nanoplastics here, so incredibly small pieces, using mass spectroscopy. So that's that shooting a laser and vaporizing the thing and measuring what comes out of the vaporizer.

35:32Emily Oster:And they compared this to the microplastics and other tissues. And to give you some numbers here, I'm not even going to say the units because they don't make much sense, but I'll give you the numbers. So like in the kidney of these patients or in the kidneys, they examined, there was like 500 units of microplastics per gram. And in the brain, there was about 5 ,000 units of microplastics per gram. So not only is it in the brain, but they were like, it's in the brain a lot, like more than everywhere else. They also showed that that concentration increased over time. So between 2016 and 2024, four, like the amount of microplastics in the brains that they had had increased.

36:14Emily Oster:And they also showed that brains with dementia had higher levels of microplastics than brains without dementia. You sort of put that all together. And then you start to get like the real ick that I'm hurting myself by, you know, drinking a plastic water bottle. Yeah. And I think the thing that was maybe on a technical level, more surprising here was people had thought that the microplastics would not be so prevalent in the brain because we have a blood brain barrier, which is supposed to protect your brain. Your brain is like more important than your kidneys. No offense to you as a kidney doctor.

36:49It's okay.

36:50Emily Oster:I agree. We're like, your body's like more interested in protecting your brain. And it was sort of the idea that these probably nanoplastics were able to kind of get through the blood brain barrier and populate the brain at these incredibly high levels was disturbing, I think, is out of place. Yeah, but there's pushback, right? So what's the pushback? There's a lot of pushback. So I think that the pushback here is really related to how hard this is to measure. So again, you're like vaporizing this with a laser and seeing what comes out. But the two criticisms that have come up when people have talked about this are, one, is it actually microplastics as opposed to something else that you are misinterpreting?

37:32the chemical signal of, for example, fat may be more similar to plastics than other things. And because there's a lot of that kind of tissue in the brain, that could lead you to think that it's microplastics when actually it's fat. And when we think about trends over time, since fat, like obesity has gone up over time, that actually could relate to some of the trends. I think that's one thing people have raised. And a second is just that it's really, really hard to control this carefully in the laboratory. And people have raised some questions about this particular study and whether they did a good job.

38:05I mean, this is an example of something where it's so surprising. It was so surprising to so many people that you really probably would want to do it again. And if it were easier to do, someone would have done it again right away. The issue is now it's both hard to do. You need a lot of brains from dead people who have agreed to let you vaporize their brains for plastic or whatever. And yeah, it's just so I think there's a bunch of reasons why this is, why it's been hard to replicate, even though there are a lot of people who think it's probably not right.

38:35Emily Oster:Yeah, I think that's such an important thing. I always teach my students, I'll say this a million times, no one study is definitive, right? Like replication is so important because of these issues. Like you don't get all the data in a paper, right? You get the sort of filtered data that the scientists are putting in their paper and there's ethics about this and stuff, but you don't get to see inside their lab. You it really is important to get replication. To put another spin on this, the total amount of microplastics that they calculated would be in the full brain was about a half of a percent of the entire brain, like the weight of the brain, 0.5 % of that, which to some neurologists is incredibly high.

39:20Emily Oster:Like they're like that level, that amount of plastic, like, you know, half of a percent throughout the brain is not something we would miss. We would, you know, we would clearly see it. And it's so much higher than other tissues that it just kind of doesn't seem plausible on the face of it. But yeah, I guess we'll see. I guess we'll see. All right. So let's, let's just establish whether it's a spoon or a small spoon, a teaspoon ladle of plastic in your brain, that there are plastics in our bodies. And then there's these sort of two other things. So one is, you know, do we have good evidence that in laboratory kind of cell settings, plastics are bad?

39:56And my read of that is yes, that there's a lot of evidence that if we take labs, either mice or cells or organoids, which are like, you try to make like tiny pieces of human organs, and you expose them to a lot of microplastics, all kinds of bad stuff happens to them. Yes. Yes. Fertility issues in mice.

40:16Emily Oster:Yeah. But like contextually speaking, this is also true of like everything we do to cells and mice and stuff in the lab. Like this will come up again and again, which is, you know, if you take a model organism or you take a cell in the Petri dish and you sort of stress it out with like whatever you're going to pour on top of it, you know, whether it's microplastics or whether it's like, you know, roundup pesticide or whatever you do, you're going to get a reaction out of those cells. It's similar to, you know, this particular dye, you know, food dye causing cancer or something like that, right?

40:50Emily Oster:It's like that is the baseline. Again, we always talk about biologic plausibility. Is it plausible that there's a problem? Sure. We have some evidence, kind of the floor of evidence, which is like if you soak a cell in microplastic, it isn't happy about it. But the wellness world tends to run with that and go conclusion, conclusion, conclusion, conclusion. Microplastics cause cancer. Only drink out of a wooden bowl from now on, right? And we actually need to tie those together. And we haven't tied those together very well yet. But maybe, Emily, we can talk about some of the areas that people have said microplastics affect.

41:30Emily Oster:So I think we talked about the brain. We're not too sure what's going on in the brain yet. But other things that have come out or that people claim about microplastics are like obesity, for example. So do we think that microplastic intake is causal, like leads to obesity? I don't think so. All of the literature that I have – so let me say I've read a bunch of this literature and it tends to associate levels of microplastic consumption or eating from takeout containers that have a lot of microplastics with obesity. And the problem is that that is an associational study, not a causal study. And so the fact that people who are exposed to more microplastics are also more likely to be obese could easily, for example, be explained by microplastic exposure from containers that are more likely to contain processed foods, which we know is associated with obesity.

42:35So they're just like so difficult to learn from that kind of evidence. I just think that's I just think that evidence is all such complete garbage.

42:44Emily Oster:I saw my favorite graph recently, which looked at the rate of obesity between 1976 and 2019 and the rate of plastic production between 1976 and 2019. It was like, look, they're both going up. It's like, okay, guys, there's a lot of things that have gone up since 1976. But even like the thing that's amazing about that is like you could draw an interesting causal story there. You'd be like, as it's become more easy to make plastics, actually that has contributed to like things about our food system. So it could be that there's a like in a weird way, there's a causal link between plastics and what it has made possible with the food system and obesity.

43:28but it's not through microplastics. Even if that glyphrocosis wouldn't be for this reason, is what I'm saying. Anyway.

43:33Emily Oster:Yeah, such a good point. The other place I think that people talk a lot about this is infertility. Yeah. And so, you know, we see microplastics in sperm, we see microplastics in the placenta, and people worry about fertility rates. And I will say in mice evidence, again, very high exposure to microplastics in mice does seem to interfere with reproduction. What is your read of that literature in people? Again, very clear that there are microplastics in the placenta. And in fact, it's one of the tissues that they see more microplastics than in some other tissues for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me because the placenta is not like a filtering organ like the liver or the kidneys are.

44:19Emily Oster:Although maybe it is some kind of interface that, you know, makes microplastics more prone to be there. The question is, does it matter? And it's been very difficult to show that there's a link between the microplastic content in the placenta or microplastic exposures and birth outcomes, which is the important thing that we care about here. What do you think, Emily? I mean, this is your wheelhouse. Yeah, I think, you know, I don't think that there's any compelling evidence of particularly important effects here. I mean, and I guess this gets into where I end up on basically all of these things, you know, cardiovascular disease, dementia, etc.

45:00Like, is it possible that there is at some level of microplastics in effect? Yeah, I think so. Is it likely that there's an effect at the levels that we see people being exposed? I don't think we have any evidence of that. And all the literature on this is very, very poor. And to the extent you're seeing a correlation, almost certainly like nearly all of that correlation is driven by other differences across people and not by the microplastics. Yeah.

45:29Emily Oster:Sometimes it's helpful to imagine two people, like the ultimate microplastic consumer and then the ultimate like non-microplastic person, not because they're deliberately trying to avoid them, but like what is sort of the image you have? And if I think of like, you know, who's not getting many microplastics? Well, it's like this, this guy out in a log cabin in the woods, who's like, you know, hunting and fishing and eating whole foods and, you know, doing that kind of stuff and like whittling his own Ziploc bags from a cherry tree. And then I think of the microplastic consumer and you have someone who's eating a lot of takeout and all that kind of stuff.

46:08Emily Oster:And those are all what we call confounders. Those are all problems when you're trying to tie microplastics to something because the type of people who have more microplastics in them are different than the type of people who have less microplastics in them. And those differences can matter in terms of all sorts of health outcomes. Yeah. So, I mean, I think I am very skeptical of claims that exposure to microplastics are an important part of people's health. They're like, is it possible they are a little bit of it? Maybe. Is it likely that this is a very important driver of various problems that people have in their health?

46:40The answer is, I think, no.

46:42Emily Oster:I agree. I think this isn't the biggest problem we face health-wise. But I also always like to look at like, OK, maybe it's not, but are there easy steps? Like if I care, how easy would it be to change this? And as we've been talking, you know, you've told me about dust being a major contributor of microplastics. Like, all right, I'm not going to change that. But it feels like if you believe the tea study, right? Like, OK, maybe I'll just make tea using tea leaves and a stainless steel tea filter. That's pretty easy. Do you think there's like some easy stuff we should be doing? I don't know. Should I have a Stanley water bottle?

47:18Emily Oster:Like low hanging fruit here. So I think there's the lowest hanging fruit is avoiding like non reusable water bottles. So like plastic water bottles are among the higher microplastic giver offers. They are also not very good for the environment. And so there's a kind of double whammy positive of just trying to, you know, not be neurotic and never, ever use disposable plastic water bottles, but thinking a little bit about, you know, limiting those. I think that's that is the simplest thing. I think for most people that would change their microplastic exposure some and almost every other change you would make is totally unrealistic.

47:59Like, don't breathe.

48:00Emily Oster:Yeah, yeah, yeah. We don't recommend that in the medical spheres. I think for me, yeah, I think I can use a reusable water bottle. I think when I'm reheating my takeout food in the microwave, like maybe I'll transfer it to a bowl that is not plastic before I reheat it in the plastic thing. I don't know. That's easy. Sure. Yeah. I mean, again, I think that could be easy. I think you have to ask the question, like, what is easy for you? And maybe that's also a question about reusable water bottles. I think we could say, like, here are two things you could do. use fewer disposable water bottles and don't microwave your takeout.

48:37And then you can think about, you know, how feasible are those changes for you?

48:41Emily Oster:I like it. All right. Let's bottom line this thing. Emily, microplastics, smash or pass, or actually should probably say avoiding microplastics, smash or pass. I'm a pass on this because I think that in the space of things people can do with their limited attention and time for their health, trying to avoid all sources of microplastics is not a very good use of that limited time and energy. So if someone said, I'm going to use fewer single-use water bottles, sure, I think that's a good thing to do for the environment in general. But from my taste, I think people could think less about microplastics for their own health.

49:25Emily Oster:I am going to smash this one. I'm going to smash avoiding microplastics primarily for Mother Earth. I think we all should be using less plastics. And I don't think everything can be avoided. But am I going to maybe not reheat my leftovers in the plastic container, maybe use my aluminum water bottle a little bit more based on what I've seen so far? Yeah, that's a change I can make, change I can live with. OK, it's our first disagreement. Is it over? I think it's over. I feel like we did a good job on that. Respectful disagreement. Okay. All right. That's it for Microplastics, your mailbag question of the week after the break.

50:10What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?

50:19Emily Oster:When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits.

50:58He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Emily and Perry. This is Rachel from Philadelphia, and I have a question about my weight, specifically how I'm ever supposed to trust what the scale says. It's always fluctuating by a few pounds, and I really can't figure out where those pounds are coming from. I feel like my eating habits really aren't changing that much. How often should I be weighing myself, and when is a good time of day?

51:39First thing in the morning, later in the evening? I'm really just trying to get an accurate idea. Thank you.

51:46Emily Oster:Awesome question. I love this question because people get really obsessed with weight. It's part of their daily habit. They get on that scale. And on a day to day basis, there's a ton of stuff that makes your weight fluctuate. And none of it is like the fat content in your body. The primary driver of day to day fluctuation in weight is water. So water is very heavy. A liter of water weighs 2.2 kilograms, which is about five pounds almost. That's a big swing. And you drink water based on how much salt you intake. So the more salt you eat, the more reflexively, the more water you go for. You can experience that after having Chinese food or something.

52:25Emily Oster:It is literal water weight. That is what is driving day-to-day weight changes. The only utility of that is to look at large trends over time to get a sense of what's happening with fat mass, muscle mass, et cetera. Emily, do you weigh yourself every day? I don't weigh myself every day, but I'm going to tell you something that's interesting about water and salt, which is one of the things that I sometimes do before short distance races is take sodium bicarb, which is just a really, really, really high dose of baking soda, which gives you a tremendous amount of sodium, like a billion times, not a billion, but like a lot of sodium.

53:02And it's good for performance in various ways, but it also makes you incredibly thirsty and it makes you retain like an enormous amount of water. And so if you weigh yourself in the morning after a race, after you have taken sodium bicarb, it's like a substantial amount of weight gain that sort of like fades out over time. I did once experiment by weighing myself every day for like four or five days after, and it took a few days to kind of come back to normal.

53:28Emily Oster:Yeah, this is classic physiology they teach in med school. So if you are tracking your weight over time, there are a few different ways you could do it. You could weigh yourself every day, but look for overall trends over time. I tend to think that that makes people who are trying to lose weight very anxious. And so I don't think it's like a generally recommended thing to do, but certainly there are some medical circumstances in which it would make sense. If you are going to weigh yourself every day, try to do it at the same time. Yeah, typically we tell people in the medical field, people who should weigh themselves every day, typically people with heart failure, where we really are managing that fluid status, that's so important.

54:05Emily Oster:And we're using it not to see what their fat or muscle mass is, we're using it to assess water weight. So if you don't have heart failure, no need to weigh yourself every day. We do tell people if you want consistent results, do it first thing in the morning after you pee. That's it for us today. Stick with us next week when we'll ask, what's the deal with stem cell therapy? Wellness Actually is produced in association with iHeart Media. Our senior producer is Tamar Avishai. Our executive producer at iHeart is Jennifer Bassett. Our theme music is by Eric Deutsch. And our content is for educational purposes only.

54:42Emily Oster:If you like the show, help other people find us. Leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice. And help us spread the word about the show. You can follow us on Instagram at wellnessactuallypod. And don't forget, we want to hear from you. Head over to wellnessactually.fm and leave us a question for our mailbag or suggest a topic for a future show. We'll let the influencers have the last word. Microplastics. Here's a public service announcement. If you go get a cup of coffee and it's in a paper cup, the entire paper cup is plastic. When they put the hot water in there, you're drinking a cup of plastic.

55:16Emily Oster:They're already showing that it's disrupting hormones. It's disrupting mitochondria. It's disrupting so much of it. Infertility. They're finding plastics in people's testicles. Anyway, so finding a detoxification while your body is detoxifying in a sauna helps push it all out.

55:53Emily Oster:You're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, a.k.a. Neurolinguistic Programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. cosmos!