#2476 - Shanna H. Swan

SPEAKER_2 (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

SPEAKER_3 (0:06)

Shrain by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

Great to see you again.

Shanna H. Swan (0:13)

Great to see you, Joe. Happy to be here.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

Happy to have you here. So you've got a documentary about the, essentially about the same subject that you talked about last time you were here, the impact of microplastics and all these various endocrine disrupting chemicals that we're dealing with.

Shanna H. Swan (0:32)

Right.

Joe Rogan (0:32)

Right?

Shanna H. Swan (0:33)

Right.

Joe Rogan (0:34)

Tell me about it.

Shanna H. Swan (0:37)

Well, it started as a movie on plastic. And when I met Louie and he filmed me in New York about five years ago also, it wasn't the small study that we have today. But let me backtrack, because I want to tell you something that I never told you, but so important to me. So you remember when I was here, you said, are you saying the toxins in the environment are threatening the survival of the human race? Right. And I said, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

SPEAKER_5 (1:19)

Yes.

Shanna H. Swan (1:19)

Yes. And then you said something which changed my life. You said, why don't people know about this? Remember that?

SPEAKER_5 (1:31)

Yes.

Shanna H. Swan (1:33)

I went home and I thought a lot about that question.

And that was what led me to create the program that I have now, Action Science Initiative, which is doing short, impactful, relatively cheap interventions to alert people to the problem, and communicating this in a way that I'm hoping will reach more people than academia where I was speaking before. Because before I talked to you, I talked to my peers in academia. And the ivory tower, you know, at the meetings where they all went at the, they read the papers that we all read. But the general public didn't get this. So you really were, I have to tell you thank you. And you were actually very influential in my life.

Joe Rogan (2:28)

Well, I'm very happy to help. When I first heard about your book, and I started going over the details of it in the subject matter, I was shocked. I couldn't imagine that something like this could not just have happened, but there's no large scale effort to reverse course, or to change course, or to do something about it, or at least to make people aware of the impact that plastics are having on us. Let me tell you a story about a friend of mine. There's a guy named Philip Franklin Lee, who is a Michelin star chef that lives in Austin. And he has this amazing sushi restaurant, Sushi by Scratch, and great chef. Anyway, he was experiencing fatigue, like always tired, got his hormones tested, extremely low testosterone, but then got his microplastics tested, and they were off the charts.

Did a series of interventions to try to clean his body out from that, stopped drinking anything out of plastic, stopped using plastic. Just by whatever he did, I'm not sure if he did the plasmapheresis thing that I just did recently. His testosterone went up to 1200 With no testosterone replacement, no nothing. Just eliminating microplastics from his life over a period of time, raised his testosterone.

Shanna H. Swan (3:57)

So that's fantastic, and it's what we are seeing in the film and so on. I want to just make a small point, which is microplastics and plasticizers are not identical, right?

Joe Rogan (4:12)

Okay.

Shanna H. Swan (4:13)

So microplastics are a relatively newcomer to the scene, because we've had plastics since 1950, right? Microplastics have been there, but not recognized until relatively recently. And actually measuring them in our bodies is much harder than measuring the plasticizers, which are the chemicals that are put in plastic to give them the various properties that they have.

Joe Rogan (4:39)

Phthalates.

Shanna H. Swan (4:40)

Phthalates is one, bisphenol A is another, and so on. So there are other, you know... And by the way, well, we'll come back to that later. So yes, we can measure those, but measuring microplastics in, particularly if we're going to go into your brain or into your testicles, you know, into a woman's placenta, obviously that's much more difficult. So they're not the same, but the microplastics, what they are is the actual pieces of plastic that carry the plasticizers along with them. So they kind of piggyback on. So they do double damage because they carry the chemical harms, and they also physically enter the cells, right?

So do you remember, I'm sure, as best as you know about, you know, and silicosis, and these were other examples of particles that went into the body and conveyed both chemical harm and physical harm, like inflammation and so on and so forth. So they're all bad, but they're not identical. And what we studied in The Plastic Detox, which is the film, that was, we did not study any microplastics. We studied the plasticizers. So you probably remember, I think I told you last time, well, why should you remember anyway? They're water-soluble. And so they, you remember that? So they go into your urine, and then they're pretty easy to measure. So I'm gonna give this to you. This is a kit. Open it up, I don't tell you what it is.