What to eat (and avoid) in a world full of plastic | Dr. Sabine Donnai

26:56The olfactory bulb, it's like the nerve node, the first one that sits at the base of your brain. Where the nerve comes in, it's just full of plastic. Coming back to my thinking about my Evian bottle being inert, and I understand it's not just Evian, it's just they advertise water more than anyone else, so it springs to mind. In the same way, you've been arguing that this isn't just inert. But you're, I imagine, also saying that you're not convinced that this plastic in my brain is inert either. Well, how can it be? I mean, it's completely a natural substance in your brain. Who would say, yeah, I'll sign up for that.

27:31You would not want that. I mean, are there enough clinical trials to somehow say, no, this is definitely going to cause dementia or cognitive decline or autoimmune disease or whatever? know and I doubt whether we will ever get there because who's going to put their hand up and say I'll be part of the trial nobody's going to say let's just ingest a hell of a lot of plastic so empirically we can start seeing those causative links definitely that's where it becomes quite worrying as a clinician they're saying if I if I start measuring as we've been doing toxic levels within people then I cannot see how I can ignore that because it causes a massive inflammatory response within our system and our detoxification pathways are completely and utterly overwhelmed.

28:18And so Sabine, I know that you are one of the only people, in fact, I think in the UK, certainly, and one of the few in the world that can screen your patients for plastics. So when you do that, how many do you tend to find in your patient's blood? So now everybody's going to get a fright because we have never seen anybody with no plastics in their blood. Now, the moment it's in your blood, it has bypassed your gut already. and therefore the moment it's in your blood, you can assume it's going to be in your organs. Now, we measure three different sizes of plastics because we always keen to see where they're coming from.

28:48So we're measuring the really small ones, like less than one nanometer, and those are the ones you tend to inhale. Then we measure the ones between one and 10 nanometers, which are the ones you tend to ingest. And then the bigger ones between 30 and 70 nanometers, and those are the ones in the main you actually get through clinical, like a drip, which again is plastic, of course, that you get straight into your veins. So on average, the vast majority of plastics we find, I would say always about 85, if not 90 % of the people that we're measuring are the very small ones. And that therefore becomes an increased worry because the ones that we ingest, at least if it goes through our gut, there are some ways for us to allow them to be helped out if you want.

29:33The ones that you inhale are the ones that we're really struggling with. How am I going to get rid of it? And yet those are the ones that we find highest. So in the biggest ones, the ones that we find the lowest, the ones that you get through medical treatments, how much do we find? I think the lowest I've ever seen was about eight, and that's eight particles per milliliter blood. And the highest we've seen was about 170 particles per milliliter blood. We definitely find people that live in urban cities. We've had people that cycle because it's healthy and they cycle to work and they cycle through London.

30:09And then we find a lot of particles in their blood purely because they're just breathing it in. All the time, right? Because they're not cycling with a mask. I mean, you're trying to do the right thing and you say, well, no, I can't even cycle to work because I'm just going to be full of plastics in my brain now. I mean, we've got clients from Nigeria where there's heavy pollution and those levels are really, really high. I'd love to ask you about the role of these plastics in blood vessel health. Could you tell us a bit more about what we think might be happening with heart health, blood vessels and plastics?

30:39We've got a blood vessel wall, which we call an endothelium, tries to make it as smooth as possible for the blood really just to flow nicely. Now, anything that irritates that blood vessel wall, the system's going to react to that as an inflammatory response. And that can be anything, as we probably know, from cholesterol to blood pressure to being overweight. OK, plastics do exactly the same thing. It irritates that endothelium, that blood vessel wall, and the blood vessel wall starts reacting to that. So it creates more plaque. So they found people that have had strokes of vascular disease, definitely in the carotid arteries going to the brain, in the plaque that is sitting there, they found plastic particles in the plaque itself.

31:24So you have that plaque that narrows the blood vessel wall, which puts you at risk of heart attacks and strokes. But what can happen is that a piece can kind of break off. And then those would be the people that say, I've never had a problem. And suddenly, okay, I had a heart attack out of the blue is because then the piece breaks off and it travels down down the artery and then clogs up suddenly. And that's exactly what a plastic does. That makes it very unstable. So you have that sudden event without actually getting any warning. I think what you're saying is that if I have a lot of these plastics in my blood, it's sort of irritating my immune system in a similar way to if I was having lots of saturated fat or something in my food, which we've talked about often on this podcast is sort of leading you to fur up your arteries.

32:08Exactly. But more than that. So worse than the saturated fat. And then you're saying there's a second effect though, which is because there's like plastic in these sorts of furring, it's more likely to break free from like the side of my blood vessel and then float around and end up in my heart and then cause like a blockage there and a heart attack. Exactly. So that sounds pretty bad. Yes. Because I know that all of this is very new science. How strong is the evidence today that if you were to get yourself tested and you have, you know, one of these really high plastic levels, that that's really, you know, sort of significantly increased your risk of these sort of furring and heart attacks and things like this?

32:49Yeah, I mean, you're spot on. I mean, it is a young science, but I think there is sufficient indication now to somehow say we need to start taking this serious. I would like to pick one thing up, though. I think that the risk of heart attacks and the risk of the furring, the bigger risk still comes from poor diet, smoking, excessive alcohol consumption. The plastics play almost like an additional role. Diet is still like absolutely a primary player when it comes to preventing these kinds of conditions. The plastics alone is not going to give you furrowing of your arteries. OK, I think we need to understand that.

33:25Where there already is risk factors for furrowing of your arteries, the plastics make it more unstable. And that's where the additional problem comes in. But it's not just vascular disease and it's not just brain. And we haven't talked about hormonal health. It's not so much the plastics per se, but it's those added chemicals like the BPA and the phthalates. They're very what we call hormone disruptors. Could you explain what this hormone disrupting thing is? How your hormones work is that you produce a hormone and then it's almost like a key that needs to get into a key lock to open a door. So you have a receptor and the hormone needs to attach to the receptor to actually be effective.

34:06Now, what these chemicals often do, they actually kind of block these receptors. So you might have sufficient hormones, OK, but they actually can't really be activated. They can't really do so. There's significant research now that actually proves the impact on fertility of bisphenol A, without a doubt, and phthalates. That's the BPA that you were talking about before? Yes. So, I mean, I actually want to say something else about BPA because I think it's something that people are completely unaware of very often. And that is receipts. So you go to a shop and you get a receipt and somebody wants a receipt.

34:39I mean, I'll be the first one to say, no, but I don't want the receipt. I don't want to touch that. For us, maybe getting a receipt once a day is not a problem. But people that work on a till and give out receipts every day, I feel like I want to shout out and say, just don't do this or wear specific gloves like nitrate gloves. It's not printed with ink. There's a layer of BPA, the one we've talked about earlier, that is on your paper and it gets activated by heat. And that's how the numbers come up. Then you're going to touch that and you've got BPA on your fingers. And then you might be grabbing your sandwich or whatever it is and you're going to put it in your mouth.

35:15It is a big source actually of BPA exposure. And they've definitely seen in people that actually handle receipts very often. OK, they've got very low testosterone levels, the infertility, your likelihood of actually absorbing BPA if you've got a hand sanitizer on your hands or you've got some hand cream on your hands, OK, is about 150 times higher, I think it is. So you're trying to do the right things. Let me put on some hand sanitizer and now I'm going to touch your receipt, OK? And now you're really absorbing that BPA so much through your skin, of course. And you're saying that then lowers my testosterone.

35:48Testosterone levels, exactly. Men are so much more susceptible than women, actually. Many couples who change their exposures to these things as part of a lifestyle and dietary change actually do improve their chances of fertility. The more we bring BPA down and we actually get rid of the environmental chemicals without needing a testosterone supplementation, you can see testosterone levels just go up. And with that, your strength goes up, your cognition goes up, your energy goes up, your muscle mass goes up, which then has massive positive benefits. Is there any evidence that these microplastics are also linked to this hormone disruption you're talking about?

36:24Yes. On bisphenol A, there are loads of trials on that. So that has been well researched and that's why it is the one that we tend to see as in BPA-free, BPA-free, because the awareness has definitely come in and the manufacturers, as I said, have started now to eliminate BPA from a lot of products. Fertility, as we know, is becoming a big problem in women and male. Hormones and hormone disruption is a big problem, whether it's anything from prostate cancer to breast cancer, clearly. And then I'm not even talking about cognitive decline. The vast majority of environmental toxins actually have an impact on our hormones.

37:03Patients that we do get with cancer, we often check what we call a DNA addict. It's a chemical that actually physically kind of touches onto your DNA and changes the way DNA expresses itself. And in the main, the DNA addicts we find, particularly in people with breast cancer, are those chemicals that actually do change the way you actually responding to your hormones. And there's no doubt that that is then 100 % linked to the increased risk of breast cancer or prostate cancer, without a doubt. Well, we've talked about lots of exposures, touching, breathing, and we've touched on the fact that foods also contribute.

37:38So what do we know about plastics in our food? What do we know about where they crop up most and which dietary patterns of foods are kind of the worst culprits? Well, when I think of food and plastic, I think there's three different elements to that, isn't it? I mean, there's one is food packaging, which is a big one. I mean, if I'm going to buy my cold sushi, the likelihood that that sushi has been in there for a very long time. and it's not been heated, therefore, am I really going to be worried too much about getting a lot of plastic from that? Unlikely. But if I would get a takeaway and that is in plastic and they've put a warm curry in there and then I'm going to warm it up in the microwave, that is a big problem.

38:17So I would definitely not do that. So there's contamination to food, but in food itself, there are plastics that have been found in food. Clearly, the biggest culprit in that would be fish, Even in wild Alaskan salmon, you find plastics now. I think it's mainly in the digestive tracts of the fish that you find the microplastics, whether it's the shellfish that you would be eating, mussels and things like that, where you eat the whole thing, or whether it's sardines, which are super healthy from an oil point of view, but you tend to eat the whole fish and therefore you eat the intestine with it, where you find most of the microplastics.

38:56So the bigger fish where you actually leave out the intestine tend to be a little bit healthier, but then they've eaten a lot of the small fish. So that accumulation adds into that. So you count a bit of a catch-22. Red meat would be the same. There's a lot of microplastics in the feed to beef. So just to confirm, you're saying fish is bad, but then you're like red meat, which has got nothing to do with the oceans. You're basically saying it's in the same situation as well. Not as bad. I would say fish is definitely on the top. So then beef would be less than that. Vegetables, we do find microplastics in vegetables because the soil is full of microplastics now.

39:37But out of all the foods that we can eat, for sure, I would say the vegetables and the fruit are the least affected. Well, those are the ones that will help actually eliminate them as well. It's a double benefit. and you're saying, well, fine, it is very healthy food, at least in microplastics, and they will help you eliminate the microplastics. So we're all for that. 10 out of 10. Yes. If like me, as you've been listening to this podcast, you've realized there are things that you want to change in your life in order to reduce your exposure to microplastics, I imagine many of your friends and family will feel the same way.

40:11If so, please share this episode with them. I'm confident they'll appreciate it. I would like to shift to what can we do about this? It seems pretty clear to me that I can't completely avoid this microplastic. I'm thinking right now I'm sitting in this studio, breathing it in. Could you now tell us about actionable advice that also doesn't leave us sort of so paranoid that we're sort of unwilling to live our lives? And I've been down that rabbit hole. Okay. I've been there. I said, I can't breathe. I can't eat. I can't sleep. And I think it is all about relativity. I think we need to accept that the world is what it is and then say, what are the easy ones?

40:52There are things we can all do. And the first thing we need to do is put things in perspective. So it is not by touching one receipt that you're going to get plastics in your brain and you're going to get Alzheimer's. That's clearly not what we are saying. But I think it is about creating an awareness that plastics are not just the problem of the oceans. So what can we do? I think your biggest win, the way I see it, and the biggest impact that I've seen people have made is water. There's such a thing called reverse osmosis water. Have you heard of that? Please explain. Okay, so there's water filters and the vast majority of water filters that you might be aware of, they'll take out heavy metals, but they won't take out those smaller particles.

41:37So reverse osmosis filter is a type of filter that actually really cleans the water completely. It also cleans it from the good minerals because you kind of need to remineralize the water then. but they've become quite affordable now okay and and therefore it it is a good way to somehow say at least when i'm going to be boiling my rice or my steaming my vegetables or whether i'm going to drink water or tea or anything i mean tea is another one we should talk about actually i think i saw you earlier tipping your tea bag i said there's a lot of microplastics that come from a tea bag a lot of the newer more upmarket bags say that they're made from like non-plastic compostable from plant, is that actually going to be fine for me?

42:22That's a better option. Yeah, absolutely. And that isn't going to cause these problems because it comes from a... No, that's not going to cause these problems. Or loose leaf tea, clearly. For example, I mean, in my kitchen, I use cling film, but I use cling films made from sugar cane. There are now, thankfully, quite a lot of alternatives. So water, a reverse osmosis, I think is a very good option. And Sabine, what do you think about the sort of more accessible filters, the jugs? Yeah, I mean, at home, I've got an on-the-counter one and perfectly fine. I mean, we've measured it afterwards and they work very well.

42:50Your top tip is water. Correct. What else should I do? I think what would be worthwhile doing always is just avoid warming food in plastic. I think that's not negotiable. To start warming food in glass rather than in plastic, I think it's a no-brainer. utensils in the kitchen whether you use spatula I mean don't use plastic ones I mean just use wooden ones okay so so they're very easy wins I think once you start looking around in your kitchen and you say actually okay do I need to drink out of a a plastic bottle of water no I mean you can buy a metal bottle which I've got okay and and they're inert a soup tin it's made out of metal so you might think it's fine but but it's lined with plastic on the inside just like your coffee cup you go to any coffee shop okay you buy some coffee it's made out of paper on the outside but it's got a plastic lining on the inside and going to your kitchen utensils as well go back to stainless steel porcelain so using things that are like your grandma would have cooked in and less of the plastic coated non-stick cookware so ceramic glass metal.

44:03Yes. Not plastic. Exactly. Children's toys nowadays, including things like teething toys, are made of plastic and often coated with the PFAS and other chemicals. So I send my daughter, who's six, into school every morning with a plastic water bottle. My son, who's almost 18, I did that simile for 10 years. I'm pretty sure you're going to tell me that I need to do something differently. No, you need to do exactly that, but put clean water in it and don't put it in a plastic one. You start putting things into perspective and say, okay, as a totality, this is what I can do. This is sensible and that's all I do.

44:39And then I move on. It's a two-pronged approach. One is try to reduce input, okay? And the biggest ones would be water, would be physical plastics that you warm your food into. It is indeed dry cleaning clothes. Try to wear natural fabrics. Am I going to wear only cotton when I go to the gym? No, I wear lycra when I go to the gym, okay? And I know when I sweat, my pores will be a little bit more open. I probably will absorb a little bit, but that is way more comfortable in the gym than wearing something in cotton. So it is about the balance, okay, for sure. And then it's about what can we do to actually try to eliminate it.

45:14And we've got a beautiful detoxification system. And just let's stimulate that. What can I do to detox myself of these plastics then? I'm not sure whether detox is the right word because you're never going to get rid of it entirely. But can you eliminate as much as possible? And then it comes down to our gut. The vast majority that we ingest can be eliminated through our gut, as long as you don't have what we call a leaky gut. Soluble fibers are brilliant because what they do is do two things, actually. They improve transit through your gut. So this is the speed of things. So just make sure you get constipated.

45:50You can just see that you're more likely to really absorb things in your system. if you actually just have that transit going nice and smoothly. OK, that will help. So that's where fibres come in. That's where water drinking does come in. Bacteria as well help. Things like mushrooms help. There are definitely things we can take. I mean, there was a trial, actually. I think it was with fenugreek. They had water, put a lot of plastics in there. They put a fenugreek in there and then measured it again. And almost, I think, something like 80, 85 % of the plastics were gone. OK, so the fenugreek just kind of completely encapsulated the plastics.

46:28Now that is in water, it's not in human, but you can kind of somehow see, if that does it in a glass of water, OK, how is it not going to help in my gut? So there's a lot of fibres that will help. Or credit the same thing. That actually just will grab those microplastics, encapsulate it, and through the transit through your gut actually eliminate it. So you can poop the plastics out. And Federica, do I need to take some sort of supplement to get these soluble fibres? No, absolutely not. So it's exactly what we've been talking about diet-wise. So it's having your whole grains, your legumes, so beans, peas, lentils, your nuts and seeds, plenty of fruits and vegetables, 30 plants a week, something we talk about a lot.

47:05So it really helps with that. But also herbs and fragrant spices are really helpful too. Or your berries. Our liver and our gut has got a two-phase detoxification process. And that second phase, which helps your toxins become more water-soluble, is going to be very helpful to eliminate those plastics. and that's where your greens come in, your broccoli and your kale and your sprouts and your berries. They're really very helpful to really start eliminating and to supporting your detoxification. I was struck when you were talking about the blood-brain barrier, the similarities between the blood-brain barrier and the gut barrier.

47:42They work together and when we have this inflammation, we really want to help dampen that and we know that colourful fruits and vegetables like berries help with that as well. So if I can be eating a really good diet that is reducing my inflammation in general, that could potentially be reducing the damage that these plastics are doing that are going to be elsewhere in my body because of what I'm breathing in? I mean, there's enough animal studies that prove that that does make a difference. So if we can translate an animal to a human, I think we can kind of transposition that and say, listen, yes, actually, that is going to make an impact.

48:14So that's definitely a strategy I adopt. Okay. And I would advise anybody to do. We can see that the impact of a healthy diet that focuses on elimination and capturing those things makes a difference in the blood levels of the plastics that we're measuring. The ones that we're struggling with are the ones that we're breathing in. Then you say, well, how can I eliminate that? No, you've got what we call a glymphatic system, which is the waste disposal from the brain. So it's very similar to the lymphatic system in our body, but from the brain. And it's by stimulating that, which you do with deep sleep and exercise, which is going to make a difference as well.

48:53It is possible that your body itself could be pushing these plastics out. I can't prove that because no trials have been done, but it makes clinical sense that that would happen because the particles are small enough to actually get into your brain. They're small enough to actually be as a waste to come out. So if we see, for example, PFAS coming out, and we know that that actually gets reduced with the impact of stimulating your glymphatic drainage, I can't see why microplastics wouldn't be doing exactly the same thing. You can get air filters for your home. Some vacuums have HEPA filters in them so that when you are vacuuming, the microplastics get stuck in the vacuum and don't go back out.

49:36Well, I mean, actually, I think it was two weeks ago, three weeks ago, somebody came out with a product that you can just put on any washing machine now that actually captures the microplastics. If you had to give just one piece of advice to somebody who's listening to this, what would that be? I think the easiest one would be is in stop cooking with plastic, because that's something everyone can do. And it's having that awareness of plastic is not just something I can physically see. It is something that eventually is going to be internalized and is going to inflame my system. And it's actually fairly easy to control if I'm just becoming aware of it.

50:17Sabine, I would like to do a quick summary, if that's right. And please correct me because it's a brand new subject. So the first thing that springs to mind is try not to handle any receipts if you can avoid it. They are full of BPA. That's going to reduce your testosterone. It's a big issue for fertility. It's bad for cancer. and I think we're all being told as we become a bit older as men that this happens anyway and you don't really want that. So just say no to the receipt. Your brain is full of microplastics because you're breathing in these microplastics all the time and there's a sort of highway straight in through your nose.

50:52Your water is also full of microplastics. So you're drinking it and everything. If you're drinking through a plastic bottle and if you're drinking a Starbucks coffee, you are effectively drinking through a plastic bottle. You just didn't think about it. then again you're surrounded by this and your food is also full of microplastics so it's all slightly terrifying but you are seeing there's very different levels between these and the reason why this is a big problem is that the plastic isn't a natural substance natural substances just get broken down but because plastic isn't there aren't all these bacteria and things that are just used to breaking it down over you know like a few months they have found bacteria now that breaking it down.

51:33We're getting there. Yeah, they're getting there. But today, if I leave my plastic out, it's not being broken down. And therefore what you're saying is that it just breaks into these tiny, tiny little pieces. And when we talk about microplastics, they aren't what I thought they were, which is like very small bits that I can see. They're actually tiny, tiny. And so my water bottle can be full of them, but I can't see it because it's so small and it's not getting broken down and it's going into my body. It's ending up getting into my blood and then into everywhere else in these tiny, tiny pieces.

52:05Part of the problem is the plastic alone, but part of the problem is these plastics tend to have other chemicals attached to them. And again, we talked a lot about this BPA because historically that's been used. And so these chemicals are also causing problems. And we talked about how these can affect your hormones, affect fertility, but affect other risks. And then we said there are things that you can do. And the first thing which I love that both of you said is like, put this in perspective, that you can suddenly be obsessed about this. Actually, if you had a choice between this and improving your diet, you'd still say like improving your diets can have a bigger impact on your long-term health.

52:40So, you know, don't say, oh, I'll focus on the plastics and then I'm just going to eat a terrible diet. So don't get paranoid, but think about what you can do. Water is where there's a lot of plastic. And so, you know, Sabine, you're saying in your own house, you put in reverse osmosis water supply that radically reduces the amount of plastic you're doing. And there's also things that don't have to be built in that can just be freestanding. And you use that not just for the water you're drinking, but for cooking as well. Don't reheat takeaways and other things that are plastic in your microwave, which I definitely do.

53:17So don't do that. Don't put things into plastic storage that you then reheat. Definitely do. And interesting, you said if you You use cling film or saran wrap. You can get like a sugar cane version of that. Something that's like plant-based. And then you won't have any of these problems. Or do what I do and just put another plate on top. Get rid of your plastic utensils that you cook with. Because again, you can swap to something that's like wood or metal. You take that out. Replace your plastic bottle. Reduce the amount of plastics in your clothing where you don't need it. Particularly if I'm putting it in the tumble dryer and spraying plastics all over me.

53:53and then lastly really good news if you're eating the sort of healthy you know zoe diet that we talk a lot about then actually you could be eliminating a lot of this plastic from your gut already because these soluble fibers that federica was explaining are in a lot of the plants and plant varieties we're talking about can help to take this and if we can be eating a really healthy diet that's reducing inflammation we should not proven but you said we should be able to help these processes to sort of help remove this and not have the worst side effects. So some light at the end of what feels like a rather dark and depressing tunnel.

54:28No, I think there's only light because the moment you have an awareness, you can take an action. And I think that can only be positive. Reinforcing a diet that is balanced, that is healthy for you, and that is going to help actually clear out the environment that has become quite toxic. It's a win-win, no? At Zoe, we never stop being curious about how people respond to food. Recently, we asked thousands of people about breakfast, what they eat and how they feel about it. Their answers may surprise you. Over 70 % told us that their breakfast is balanced, yet only 6 % get enough fibre. If you've been listening to this podcast, you know that's not enough to be balanced.

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