The Plastic Detox

0:00Rebecca Lavoie:I'm Rebecca Lavoie, and this is You Can't Make This Up.

0:14Rebecca Lavoie:You Can't Make This Up is the podcast where we uncover the true stories behind your favorite Netflix documentaries and films. On today's episode, we take a closer look at the Netflix documentary film The Plastic Detox. The more technology, the more plastic, the more plastic in the bodies, it's causing people's penises to shrink, balls to shrink, sperm counts are lowering, and miscarriages to go up. Today we're talking to director Luis Ahoyas. Plastics are ubiquitous in modern consumer goods, packaging, and fabrics, and so are the microscopic particles they shed. Science is still learning the effects of microplastics on the natural world and on our personal health.

0:55Rebecca Lavoie:And with a possible correlation between microplastics and reproductive issues, a group of couples are embarking on a bold experiment. If they eliminate their proximity to anything plastic, will it increase their chances of conceiving? The Netflix documentary film The Plastic Detox explores the many ways microplastics are affecting nature and our well-being and seeks solutions to what has become an international public health problem. It follows one scientist asking the question, If people reduce their exposure and let their bodies flush out the microplastics, can that reverse the global trend of infertility?

1:30Rebecca Lavoie:I don't want to scare people, but I want to tell them that this is also an important crisis. This is also something we have to pay attention to. And actually, in terms of our survival as a species, it may be one of the most important.

1:58Rebecca Lavoie:And I'm joined now by director Louis Sahoyas. Louis, welcome to You Can't Make This Up. Oh, thank you. Thanks for having me. You won an Academy Award for your documentary, The Cove. It looks at Japan's dolphin fishing trade. It's one of those films that I absolutely loved. Very difficult watch. I'm curious about how the reaction to that movie, The Cove, informed your filmmaking going forward. oh boy well the cove was our first film and it proved to me that you could take a subject that's difficult the cove is about a dolphin slaughter the largest dolphin slaughter in the world and if you look at it in the right way you can get tens of millions of people to see a film and actually create action that was the goal of it uh get people to see it and and maybe do something about it.

2:50At the time, they were killing about 23 ,000 dolphins and porpoises a year. Last time I checked, porpoise hunting is down over 99.5%. Dolphin hunting is down over 93.5%. So the film had amazing results. A lot of people saw it, but to me, it proved that you could take a subject that people don't want to necessarily see and turn it into, I hate to say this, but like a form of entertainment that can actually change the world. It paved the way for everything else we're doing. It was like, okay, there's a model for this. I think Rolling Stone magazine called the code, they said it's a cross between the born identity and flipper.

3:29And then, you know, this is just a way to talk about a subject that was really difficult by making it into a thriller that, you know, made that film such a success.

3:38Rebecca Lavoie:Right. It was interesting to me that you centered the fertility issue at the center of this film, hearing what the timeline of it was. did you know that the fertility conversation would bubble up so much at this moment right now? I mean, I'm seeing conversations about fertility everywhere. I'm seeing it in politics. I'm seeing it on podcasts. I'm seeing it, you know, it goes well beyond the wellness conversation. It's so deeply personal. Was that just happenstance that you landed there? Or did you have a sense that that was coming? Well, I mean, when I started this film, I thought there was a population problem.

4:09I had no idea about the decrease in population. In fact, when I heard people talking about, hey, we're losing population. I thought, well, that's not what I've heard. Then I started to do the research. You talked to Shauna Swan. You realize that fertility is dropping 1 % a year. The last 50 years, it's accelerating to 2.66%. By 2045, most couples will need IVF to procreate to have children. So to me, it was a huge problem. And plastics is an endocrine disruption. The plasticizing chemicals that find their way into our body or affect our hormones, whether you're male or female affects your hormones.

4:46And that affects everything to do with your regulation in your body for immunity, for ADHD, for dementias, to fertility and obesity. But not everybody's heavy. Not everybody has cancer. But everybody has a mother and a father. And I think the fertility issue gets to the core of why we're on the planet. People said, well, who's this film for? I said, well, if you have a mother or a father, you should probably see this film. because it affects everybody.

5:16Rebecca Lavoie:Shauna Swan, you just mentioned Dr. Shauna Swan, who is at the center of the film. She's been studying this for a long time, and she has a real singular way of communicating about it. We see her in your documentary going on Joe Rogan, and we see her being introduced at a conference as Shauna fucking Swan. And now, tonight's very special guest, the one and only Shauna fucking Swan.

5:41Rebecca Lavoie:well i have to say i've never had an introduction like that can you just talk about her as a figure in communicating this problem yeah shauna swan is great she i think she just turned 89 this year she's kind of a for me she was like a perfect character she's unassuming she's speaks her mind she's brash and she's powerful and she's wickedly smart she's disarming you know and we were looking for a character that could carry the film and at first we were thinking oh maybe you know she's not quite right but the more we talked to her realized this is just what the public needs somebody that has this incredible backstory because like you said she's been working on this for 30 years now this issue and she couldn't get traction you know she was writing papers for for phd colleagues you know going to the conferences speaking to the same 200 people and realized that to really get the issue acted upon and understood she had to come down off of her ivory tower and speak to the people so then she went on joe rogan and comedy central and now there's a netflix film on her and i thought she was just the perfect character for this of a film like this you know they say a good documentary tells, but a great one shows.

6:54So we thought, okay, if we work with you, Shauna, what can we do? And she said, well, we could, you know, work with couples and try to make their plastic levels go down. How would we do it? How would we measure it? How long would the intervention be? So we did this, a three month intervention, 90 days, because it takes men about 70 days to generate new sperm. We were kind of like making the parachute as we were in the plane because we didn't know what was going to happen. We had no idea. A study like this had never been done before. Can you go into somebody's home, do this intervention? There's three ways.

7:30There's three vectors that plastics get into your blood. You absorb it, you inhale it, or you ingest it. So we went through, she went through their homes and figured, went through the refrigerators, the, you know, everything in the kitchen, the bathroom, the personal care products. And we did the swap out of everything that she could think of. And then on day one, the men send in a sperm sample and then she takes a urine sample to measure the amount of phthalates and bpa in their blood but the short answer is that you can reduce your plastic exposure just by reducing or eliminating a lot of these products from your life you have to swap them but there's there's products out there they're not there's so many of them if you look at the film you think well i have a product like that although that almost everything you're touching in the kitchen has plastic associated there's tricks you can learn by watching the documentary you can learn how you can reduce your plastic exposure.

8:22Rebecca Lavoie:The documentary The Plastic Detox does cover a lot of ground. And the fertility thing is really striking to me because the experiment that is in the film involves real people who aren't just going through a process. They're also sharing really intimate details and fears and truths. I've always wanted to have a family of my own that's really peaceful and wonderful. I had amazing grandparents and an amazing mother. and there's a piece of that that's kind of missing and always was missing and so I want it to be that for this child. And I think that's why I'll be so disappointed if we never have a baby.

9:00Rebecca Lavoie:Just, I want to see a little version of you. I think it'd be so cool. I think you'd be the best mom ever and I really want to see that for you. I really want to see that for you. Sorry. Yeah. Okay, I'm good. Yeah, I'm good. What was it like incorporating those extremely personal stories in this film where you're also trying to teach something? Were you thinking about that as you were talking to these people? Yeah, definitely. I mean, it took a while to find six couples who were willing to talk about infertility, you know, especially with guys. It strikes into the hearts of what we think makes us men, which is our fertility, our virility.

9:38But I think most men probably feel like it's the woman's problem, right? They see that they have sperm. And so it must be OK. It must be something internal with the woman that you can't see. When in fact, we found out that, you know, they were subfertile. Five of the men were infertile or subfertile. And then that was pretty shocking to a lot of the guys because they weren't sure of the source of their infertility.

10:04Rebecca Lavoie:The detox part of the experiment, it was amazing to me how much these couples were able to do. But it seems almost impossible to live a plastic free life. What did they find the most challenging in terms of avoiding these things that were potentially harmful to their fertility? Yeah, I mean, the things that they at first thought would be the most difficult, like Bruno, every morning he does his coffee with these coffee pods that are plastic. And he said, oh, that's really difficult. I use that every day. but then finds out that he swapped them out he just he just got his coffee delivered in a different way and a lot of couples ate out less because when you're eating out less you can't control the packaging of the food almost everything in a restaurant comes through a tube or it's in plastic then your takeaway containers are in plastic and usually heat it up because it's hot if you're getting like a curry or something so they avoided that that was probably the hardest for most people is just eating at home more, cooking more.

11:05But then they found that there's huge advantages. They get to spend more time, quality time together, being creative in the kitchen.

11:18Rebecca Lavoie:One of the things I would tell people when I'm going to recommend this documentary, which I will, is to come for the education on the effects of microplastics. Maybe come to find out what you can actually change in your life. But definitely stay for the scene where Dr. Swan measures an anatomically correct baby doll with a caliper in the middle of a crowded cafe. And what we do is we just find the anus, right? We'll put one side. Oh, my God. That is so sweet. Can you talk about making that part of the film, please? Yeah, well, one of the first times I met Shauna Swan, it was near her house, and she said, oh, just meet me at this restaurant.

11:58And I go there and there's this very, very realistic baby that she has sitting down beside her. So, I mean, if you just were casually walking into the restaurant, you'd say, this is a live, real baby. It had, you know, his hair, his features. It wasn't like a Disney baby. It was a real baby looking baby. You know, when we got around to asking her, what's the baby for? She said, well, this is how you measure their AGD, anal genital distance. And she pulls out this caliper. She puts the baby, undresses the baby on the table and then starts showing us, pulling the legs back and showing how you measure the anal genital distance.

12:36And it was just, you know, you're looking at other people and you're embarrassed. And I realized that's kind of her thing. You know, she'll meet these couples at restaurants and public places and explain it, you know. And I thought that was just a hysterical scene.

12:51Rebecca Lavoie:I thought it was hysterical that she knew more nicknames for that body part than Joe Rogan did. There's something which is very key to my research, which is something you might know by the name of the taint. It's not really a technical term, is it? Or the gooch or the grendel. The gooch. I've never. You know about the gooch?

13:12Yeah, I mean, I think one of, I love Joe Rogan. I think he's, that scene is just so funny, you know, because you have this 88 year old woman schooling Joe Rogan on sexual parts.

13:28Rebecca Lavoie:One of the things that really surprised me in the documentary, and I think was really important to include, but I don't think people really know this, is that plastic recycling. We have been told that this is kind of a somewhat of a cure and we are really pressured to do it right. Every time you walk outside of a grocery store, there's two garbage cans, the plastic one and the one for your regular trash. And I was really surprised to see the extent to which that was a kind of a corporate myth. Can you talk about that? Yeah, well, the Keep America Beautiful campaign was actually sponsored in part by the industry, the plastics industry, the fossil fuel industry, to put the onus on plastic and the environment on people, not the overproduction of material you can't recycle anyway.

14:16It was just a kind of a clever way of marketing to say, hey, this is your problem, not our problem. When in fact that they knew at the time that the plastic that we have can't be recycled for economic reasons and for chemical reasons. The economic reasons is it's cheaper to produce virgin nurdles, the core material for plastic, than it is to recycle. And then chemically, plastic is made of tens of thousands of different compounds, and they don't all play well together for recycling. So it takes too much effort to try to sort them out or even just can't be done. So the industry has capitalized for the last, I don't know, probably 40 years on this myth of recycling, when in fact it can't be recycled.

15:02There's no incentive personally that they have for it either.

15:04Rebecca Lavoie:John Warner actually talked about the concept of green chemistry, which may sound to the layperson like, oh, it's just chemistry, but environmentally friendly. But it's not really that. Can you talk about that field of green chemistry? Yeah, John Warner and Paul Anastas, they wrote the book on green chemistry because, well, John Warner, his son had died from what he thinks could have been something he touched in the chemistry room. He's a guy that has dozens of patents, won numerous awards for his chemistry that he's developed over a lifetime. And he thought, well, why don't us chemists know that these chemicals can be harmful and that they realize that because they're not taught?

15:44You do any science, any chemistry you normally would, but you put a layer of interpreting what if this actually succeeds? What if instead of it just being a publication in a journal, some company actually starts making thousands and thousands of kilotons of it?

16:03Rebecca Lavoie:What impact are my decisions on that first day of my invention going to have in the future? So he wrote the book on green chemistry, started the field of it, trying to get it required learning in universities all around the world. And he's been incredibly successful. And the idea is for a new chemist to look at the materials that they're using right at the outset. Before you're thinking about inventing a new compound, understand how this is going to affect, if it starts to scale up, how it's going to affect communities. And that changes the way of thinking because in this country, we don't have a precautionary principle.

16:43There's only, I think, nine banned compounds used in personal care products. Nine. There's 1 ,100 that are banned in the EU. There's over two orders of magnitude more that the EU has much better protections protecting their population, their citizens, than we do. Much, much more. And they are healthier as a result of it. Now, why don't we do that here? It's because, you know, we see regulation as a problem. And so there's a mindset that regulation in this country is bad when, you know, it isn't. It's like we're putting in this country, we're putting money first, not the health of our citizens first.

17:21And that's a top tone thing. And I think, you know, we need to look at that when people say, well, what do you want to happen with this film? I want as many people that are in the Netflix platform, everybody that's on the platform to tell their friends to see it worldwide. That's number one. It's a global problem. It's a big problem. It's affecting you right now, whether you have measurements of your body, how much plastic is in your body. It's affecting you right now. Look at that. See the film. Tell your friends to see it. And then I want companies to change the way that they're delivering this poison to us.

17:52I want them to look at it. I want their mothers and fathers and everybody to look at this and tell the companies that why aren't we doing something better? And the holy grail for me, it would be policy that we do something a little bit more like the EU, where we do what John Warner proposes. Look at these chemicals and see how they're affecting us before we put those in mass into the environment.

18:12Rebecca Lavoie:I think that people should also see the film because you have so many heavy hitters here and there's just so much agreement on the science. And, you know, when you talk about things like toxins and pollutants, I think some people tend to conflate that with some of the wellness mythology around things that are called toxins, right? And cleanses and so forth. Do you think it's important to, in some ways, try to tap into this wellness idea, too? Do you think there's an audience there who might look at this and say, oh, so this bottle that I'm drinking all this water to hydrate from is something that I should eliminate?

18:48Rebecca Lavoie:Like, isn't there kind of a hunger right now for wellness thinking? I think we're seeing it picked up by a lot of the influencers in the wellness space because they're probably more keyed into this. But I don't want this to be an elitist thing. I don't want people to think, oh, well, I can't afford to keep this out of my life. Everybody can do this. It's actually as you can do it inexpensively. There's ways to do it. When you look at what the alternatives are, everybody can do this. You can do it step by step. But, you know, the wellness audience is picking up on it first, I think, because they're more concerned about this.

19:24I mean, if you're spending a lot of time thinking about what you're eating and you're exercising and you're looking at longevity and you're looking at chronic disease, plastics is on your radar. It has to be. You can't avoid it. Since we started making this film, I would have felt like a real wacko talking about this seven years ago when we started this film. It'd be like, you know, oh, another crazy Northern California thing. Now it's mainstream. You know, the public starting to catch up with us and hopefully the film will hit the zeitgeist and it'll get out there and mass maybe starting with the wellness community.

19:59But I think for me, I hope everybody sees this film and tells her their kids. Because it's the one thing that we should unite about that this is affecting our progeny. It's affecting the next generation. It's important.

20:12Rebecca Lavoie:Can you talk about some of the other benefits to health besides the fertility results that we see in the documentary? Other things that folks might not think of when they think about microplastics that they might be helped if they were to take some of the plastic out of their lives. Well, plastics is also an obesogen. If you give the same genetic species of mice the same amount of exercise, the same amount of nutrition, but you give them the same amount per body weight that a human gets of microplastics, the mouse with microplastics is going to be about 75 % fatter. and also make its progeny, I think it's four to five generations down, heavier as well.

20:52So some of the couples in our study, they lost weight, like pretty significant, like, you know, 5%, 10 % of their weight. So that was huge. And, you know, I'm interested in losing weight, you know, especially if it's something I can do that I don't have to work out as hard for it, you know, to be able to keep off weight. The couples are also not all, but most of them are sleeping better and sleep's a huge problem. You know, remember this, this is only a three month study. You know, you really need to do it over a long period, longer period of time to get these, you know, for those numbers to really start to appear.

21:29But what's important, I think, is to realize that the fossil fuel industry is going to say, oh, this is a very small study. But when you have a really strong signal and we have a strong signal from this film, plastic goes down in their body and their bloodstream and their urine, sperm rates go up. Sperm rates go up, fertility goes up. And, you know, look at the end of the film. I cry every time I've seen this film and I've seen it over a hundred times now.