Transcript
WEBVTT
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Pass this on to friends.
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If you've been trying to eliminate plastic in your life and you have a friend or family member who is just really, you know, determined to not give up their single use plastic bottles, you know, pass this episode on.
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I'm Dr Tina Kaczor and as Leah likes to say I'm the science-y one
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and I'm Dr Leah Sherman and on the cancer inside
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And we're two naturopathic doctors who practice integrative cancer care
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But we're not your doctors
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This is for education entertainment and informational purposes only do not apply any of this information
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without first speaking to your doctor
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The views and opinions expressed on this podcast by the hosts and their guests are solely their own
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Welcome to the cancer pod Hey, Tina.
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Hey, Leah.
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Microplastics.
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They're everywhere in the news.
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Yeah, I was going to say they're everywhere in every sense of the word.
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No, they are.
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They're everywhere in the news.
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They're everywhere.
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Everywhere.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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It, it's finally hitting main street news.
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I think it's been in the news before, but just not hitting mass media until fairly recently.
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Well, as you had mentioned before we started recording, there was that whole thing with the plastic fibers from fleece clothing.
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Like I remember that from like, is that like 10 years ago or something?
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Yeah, I think we heard about it because, um, Patagonia, the brand, Patagonia, saw the problem with washing some of the fleece fibers and the nanoplastics that were coming off of that and going into our environment and started to try to solve for the problem, so I think that they were the first company that I know of, kind of, said, okay, we're going forward.
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We're going to try to solve this problem.
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And you see it, you see it, like if you have fleece blankets or fleece clothing and, you know, I'll run them through the dryer on low.
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And then you see all of that lint that comes off of them in the dryer.
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And so what's coming off in the wash.
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Right.
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That's what you can see.
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And a lot of these plastics we cannot see.
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Right.
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So what is a microplastic?
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Like, I guess we can define What is that exactly?
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Cause I'm seeing those fibers in my lint tray, but are those microplastics?
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Technically, if they're less than five millimeters in length, they qualify as a microplastic.
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So
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That's big.
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That's big.
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It's big! Five millimeters is the size of the eraser head.
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Like a number two pencil, like the eraser is five millimeters, generally.
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Oh, that's what you judge like the size of a melanoma by too, right?
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The eraser?
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Yes.
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That's really big.
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And a lot of folks, if you're too young and you don't know what a number two pencil is, you can look it up and Google that.
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Oh, come on.
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People know.
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Here, look, here's a pencil.
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I don't think people use them all that much anymore, but yes.
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Anyways, we digress.
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But yes, it's anything that is less than five millimeters in length.
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So yes, you can see some of those.
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Those are microplastics.
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And then there's the.
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Nanoplastic.
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Yes.
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Now nano, by definition is something that is one times 10 to the negative nine.
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So that's point.
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Put eight zeros and put a one.
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That's how small it is.
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Millimeters.
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That's crazy.
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So that article that I sent you from the Washington Post had a really cool visual and we'll put a link to that.
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Um, if people haven't seen it.
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It had a really great visual that showed how incredibly small these micro and nanoplastics are.
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And it's confusing because we talk about microns and then we talk about millimeters and they're not equivalent.
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So it gets confusing really fast.
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Just know that we're talking about plastics that the eye cannot see.
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That is a fraction of the diameter of a hair.
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So by definition, some of these are just not visible.
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And the reason we're talking about it is because there have been articles on microplastics and you know, how they're finding them in different organs.
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And there was an article that was fairly recent about is there a connection between microplastics and cancer?
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I think really the big thrust that's hitting the news right now is it's a possible factor in why we're seeing higher rates.
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of colorectal cancers in younger people.
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Right.
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The story adds up.
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I mean, it makes a lot of sense.
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Yeah, we were all raised on plastic.
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I mean I remember like the shift from glass shampoo bottles to plastic shampoo bottles when I was a little kid, you know, and all the plastic toys.
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And I mean, these are safety features, which is why they were put in place, but it's kind of coming around to not be safe.
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Yeah.
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And the idea that plastics aren't safe isn't a new idea at all.
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I think we just happen to have the technology in the last 20 years or so to see them, right?
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They've always been there.
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They were there in the 70s.
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They were there in the 60s when we started using plastics more and more and they started to be more pervasive in our environment.
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But now we can see them.
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We can measure them.
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We can look at organs and tissues the bloodstream.
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and we can actually measure them and that's fairly new.
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That's just because we have the technology now to do that.
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And the plastics aren't just coming from, I mean, a lot of them are coming from things like disposable, you know, single use water bottles and all of that, um, takeout containers, right?
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With a, yes, I cringe every time I see styrofoam because styrofoam is so rare in at least the Portland area.
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Very rare.
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But then it was rare when I was back here in the nineties here, we didn't see a whole lot of styrofoam.
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I went.
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Down to Oklahoma to do my residency and it was styrofoam everywhere
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yeah, like Indiana was the same I remember being in the airport and wanting food and it was like this hot greasy like, you know airport food that was gonna be put into a styrofoam container and I was like I'm not gonna eat
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and there's something to that, you know for a long time I also took some solace in the fact that it all if I just put water in the plastic It's probably not gonna have that much plastic into it You know, like it's different than putting hot soup or hot coffee into a styrofoam or plastic container To me, that was always like, Oh, gosh, that must leach something.
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Now even water bottles are implicated.
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Yeah, so it's those type of like I was saying, like the single use plastics, um, clothing, like we mentioned, the fleece clothing, which is made oftentimes from recycled water bottles, but then they themselves aren't that great.
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The plastic grocery bags or store bags.
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It's in agriculture.
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So to make something to make different fertilizers, kind of be almost time release, they use plastics.
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It's in organic fertilizers, because if you have cows that are eating things, drinking water, they're picking up plastic from the environment.
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I mean, it's just it's everywhere.
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It's so pervasive.
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It's kind of crazy.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And it can be a real downer to think about, right?
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It's kind of like environmental pollution in general can be a true downer.
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This ties into the last episode where we talked with Christina Marusik about the environmental impact on carcinogenesis.
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So Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's out there.
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Yeah, and there's a lot of things we can do.
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I mean, the good old reduce, reuse, recycle.
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We'll get into a little bit more specifics about what people can do.
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um, we had cups in our office and a patient came in and she said, I can't believe you have disposable cups.
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And I said, Oh, you know, it's a multi doctor office.
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I really had nothing to do with the front area.
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And I, but she said, you know, take it literally reduce first, reuse when you can and recycle if you must.
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And I was like, Oh, okay.
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Yeah.
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Good point.
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You know, I should be in that order.
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No.
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And that's, I like that.
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Like it's recycle if you must, like, because that as we'll talk about is also an issue with, um, recycling, but, um,
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has its own issues.
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Yeah.
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So.
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Is there strong evidence that microplastics are causing cancer?
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I think the evidence is accumulating.
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As are the microplastics.
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As are the microplastics and nanoplastics, yes.
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Um, I think as we continue to look, we're going to see it more and more.
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Right now we have a lot of animal data.
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to look at what happens to animals when they're exposed, what's happening to cells that are exposed within the animals when you give the animal cancer, does it affect the growth rate, all that stuff.
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Um, there is accumulating evidence that the microplastics and nanoplastics are actually possibly causative for some cancers.
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And I think the data is strongest for colorectal cancer right now.
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Right.
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Because they're finding people with inflammatory bowel disease have a higher amount of microplastics.
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Yeah, how about that?
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I am sure you looked at the same study I did that was the one in China, where they looked at people who had existing IBD, inflammatory bowel disease, which is Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis.
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And they looked at the stool of those folks compared to the stool of people who didn't have that condition.
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And 1.
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5 times more microplastics were found in the people who had IBD.
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And the reason that's important is that IBD is a definitive risk factor for colorectal cancer.
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So it could be coincidence.
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It was an observational study, right?
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Maybe they don't get rid of their plastics.
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Maybe they did find that they, the people who had higher, higher microplastics also were more likely to have food that was packaged out, be exposed to it through their water sources.
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You know, they, they tracked it back to their usage and saw that yes, they were more likely to have a more exposure history, but it's an interesting study.
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Nonetheless.
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You know, and it makes me think that you go to your cancer center and you're getting your infusion and you get like a little bottle of water, you know, they, they hand them out.
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They have like little, you know, plastic water bottle that you get cause you have to be hydrated as you're getting your infusion.
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So I would say for anyone who's currently going through treatment.
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Bring your bottle bring a reusable bottle.
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I know we're, you know, going to talk about things that people can do But that just struck me that like you're getting treatment for cancer Mm hmm, and I mean we're taking the whole like recycling part out of it those like single use bottles But yeah, it's just you know, you're then you're drinking from a bottle I don't know.
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I know.
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I know.
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And there is no perfect, you know, there is to, to walk through each day without being exposed to or ingesting the plastics is more and more difficult because it's also in our air,
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right.
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And so that I'm going to be uber downer, but you can take control where you can because you can't control everything, right?
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And so you have to let the rest go.
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So you have to be like, I'll just use glass and stainless steel for my water sources when I am out and about.
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That helps.
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You know, every little bit helps.
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Try not to use plastics.
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Don't use single use plastics.
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Don't microwave or heat anything in plastic.
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And you have to be careful when you're defrosting something.
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So if you get like a package of meat or something and it's in your freezer, first of all, that action of freezing it creates You know, there's a chemical reaction that can leach the plastics out into the food.
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And then when you defrost it, it's the reverse, right?
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Right.
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So, if you can, if you purchase something that's not frozen, if you can like repackage it with something, wrap some butcher paper around it, and then seal it.
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In something.
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I mean, I don't even know at this point.
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Like, ah, it's so crazy.
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I'm like, I'm so overwhelmed.
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Prepping for this was so overwhelming.
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It is overwhelming.
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And that's why I said you do what you can and then you have to let go.
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Because I mean, in this latest Medscape article that you and I were talking about before we started, Medscape states plastic contains.
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So what you're talking about when you wrap the meat or the whatever food in plastic or somebody puts their leftover chili in a plastic container, plastic itself contains over 10, 000 chemicals, many of them carcinogenic substances and endocrine disruptors.
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So.
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The plastic is one thing.
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It has issues, you know, that we are going to continue to talk about.
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And then the plastic also contains other chemicals that have ramifications on our health.
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And so avoiding the plastic, you also are avoiding those 10, 000 chemicals that are possible to come along with it.
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And again, we talked about this in our last episode with Christina about how this isn't really tracked for safety.
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There's a false sense of safety when we're given something in the public.
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This must be okay.
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And that's not the case when it comes to human health and safety.
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The onus is on proving the toxicity, not proving the safety.
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Right.
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So, I think that's a, that's a really important place to start from.
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That helps us understand how we got here.
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Yeah, we got here from convenience, right?
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I mean, that's kind of, you know, the advent of plastics was such a revolutionary thing at the time, but, yeah, it's becoming very inconvenient, isn't it?
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That would be an interesting, that would be fascinating, uh, I'm sure there's been books written on it, I haven't looked that up, but, you know, Bakelite was kind of the first one, what, about a hundred years ago, and then from there we kept, Improving quote unquote our plastic usage and plastics are for the most part derived of petroleum products.
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So it's also an outlet for some.
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Petroleum products that, finds a market in plastics.
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And so that's a big reason we have so many plastics today.
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Right.
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Yeah.
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And I think that is an issue with recycling is that people think, oh, well, I recycle my plastics.
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All of these plastics are going to be turned into new plastic.
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And that's not always the case.
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Only about 5 percent of recycled plastic gets reused.
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And one of the reasons is you're not going to get as strong of a plastic from a previous plastic and the other reason is cost.
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It's so much cheaper to start from scratch and make plastic than to go through the whole procedure of recycling it.
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Interesting.
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You know, we have the capacity to make biodegradable plastics.
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The technology exists.
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Like from corn and stuff like that?
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Yeah, from corn.
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And so.
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And there's so much corn out there.
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Well, like they should use it for some, you know, they should use it for something besides like fillers and dog food.
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I mean, like they should use it for something that's going to be better in the long term.
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Well, that's an interesting thing, right?
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The reason we do have it as a filler and we have so much corn is because our growers need a market.
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when I say our, I mean, especially in the United States, we have a lot of corn growth and it needs a market and the end market.
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ends up being our gas tanks and as a filler in a lot of different foods and, and chows for various types of animals.
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But this would be a much better market, right?
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This is a win, everybody wins, the environment wins, we win, there's less toxicants, there's less microplastics.
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Yeah.
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I feel like I would much rather be wrapping my food in a, even if it is not perfect, it would be a better option because it wouldn't end up as microplastic.
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I'd rather be doing that than putting it in my gas tank, where I'm arguably losing about 10 percent of my miles per gallon.
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Right, right.
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So, Were there other things that we wanted to cover before we talk about things that we can do to decrease plastic use?
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Um, what we can do to decrease its use?
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Well, like, like, you know, like, like, how can we help to get rid of plastic, both from the environment and can we get rid of it when it's in our body?
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Um, like you mentioned, one of the issues with ingesting these plastics, Are the phthalates and the BPA and so you see a lot of packaging that now says BPA free and phthalate free.
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That's not the whole picture because there are other BPs.
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My answer to that is if it's a plastic that says BPA free, I have a little bit of don't believe the hype in my head.
