Plastics, Hormones & the Future of Child Health with Dr. Manasa Mantravadi | HFYH #134

**Dr. Manasa Mantravadi** (0:00)
These additives in our children's food, including plastic, are really causing the spike in diseases I am seeing as a pediatrician. Huge spikes in metabolic disease, in neurodevelopmental disease, and you know, and even cancer risks in children.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:16)
Hi, I'm Dr. Vonda Wright, and this is HOT For Your Health. Join us for conversations on the bleeding edge of science, health and culture, as we bring you tech innovators, thought leaders, and the movers and shakers who are transforming science fiction into your new health reality.
Hi everybody, welcome back to HOT For Your Health, where we have conversations with innovators, change makers, fascinating people. And I am so excited to talk to friend and colleague, Manasa Mantravadi, who is not only a board certified pediatrician, but she is a mother and a founder of a industry changing invention. And now she's a policy maker. So, Dr. Mantravadi, thank you so much for coming back on HOT For Your Health.

**Dr. Manasa Mantravadi** (1:14)
Thank you for having me. It's been a while, and lots has happened, so I'm really excited.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (1:21)
Absolutely. So, what you've done, when I first met you, there was a statement that came out that really alarmed you. When I heard about it, alarmed me. But it's so in line now with the public discourse on the fifth pillar of health, which is environmental toxins. So, I want to roll it all back in case no, I can't imagine people haven't heard of it, but why are we so concerned about plastics and the environmental and bodily harm that microplastics can do?

**Dr. Manasa Mantravadi** (1:58)
Yeah, so I think when we think about health, we think about food is kind of a step that a lot of people think about. But what we don't understand and didn't understand until the past 10 years ago, was really how our environment is impacting our food system. So in 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics came out with a very formal policy statement called food additives and child health. And in that statement, they really talked about the number of additives that are circulating within our food system here in the United States, including plastic as one of those, and how that we are really seeing now huge spikes in metabolic disease, in neurodevelopmental disease, and even cancer risks in children. And so what we have come to now understand is that these environmental factors are important for the planet, but they're also impacting human health. And they're doing so in kind of this silent way every day, because we eat three meals a day, children have two snacks. And so that's why I felt very compelled when I understood from my own academy that these additives in our children's food, including plastic, are really causing the spike in diseases I am seeing as a pediatrician.
And so that's what really motivated me to really now focus my time and energy and effort on pediatric environmental health as it relates to children. So when we talk about plastic, kind of the very easy way to understand it is, I think a lot of people in the public really have heard now about endocrine disrupting chemicals, or hormone disruptors. And we typically think about hormones in adults, you know, we talk about for fertility, for menopause, all of those things. But what most people don't understand is that hormones are crucial for children's development. And if you are a parent or a grandparent, you might have remembered when your child is first born and they have that newborn screen, they're actually testing for a lot of hormone related disease. And why that's so important is because there are interventions to kind of help. And so hormones are really important for children to undergo the normal growth and development at the right ages and stages. And these plastic chemicals are leaching into our children's food and drinks and into our bodies and disrupting this normal pattern. So these chemicals kind of look like our hormones. So that's why we call them endoplasmic disruptors. And so, again, important for all humans, but really, really important for children to grow and develop at the right age stage sequence of, you know, their lives.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (4:58)
Well, when you read about it or hear about it on the internet, there are plastic particles being found in tissues of the body, in breast milk. I mean, how does it physically happen? Do they just chunk off of the plastic when I put food in the microwave or you get a hot bottle of water and it just starts leaching out? How physically does that work?

**Dr. Manasa Mantravadi** (5:22)
Yeah, so there are two parts to what we think about in terms of plastic. So plastic, you know, it was kind of the greatest invention of its time because it was cheap, it lasts forever, and, you know, it doesn't break, all of this stuff. Well, now, for all those same reasons, it's cheap, it lasts forever, it doesn't break. It's actually really harmful to the planet and to our health because it doesn't break down, it does kind of stay in your circulation. So here's the thing, when we think about plastic, you can think about it in two categories. People will hear about plastic particles, microplastics is how the media often talks about it. And then we talk about plastic chemicals, things like bisphenol, phthalates, the chemicals that are kind of infused into plastic to make it rigid, pliable, all the things that plastic does so well. And so really understanding from a baseline, plastic particles versus plastic chemicals. And so we can talk about chemicals first. Chemicals is the bisphenols, the phthalates, things that people have heard. And those are, again, kind of leeching into the food and the drink. Now, I talk about food, but it's also in our clothing. It's in our personal care products. So why plastic chemicals are so dangerous is they're so innocuous. They're so silent. They're invisible, but they're everywhere. And you're exposed to it all the time. That is not meant to scare people because that's not what I want to do. I want to educate and then empower so people can make decisions. So that's how plastic chemicals work. They're kind of leeching in. And those can be from a few different things, absorptions and inhalation.