The BIGGEST Step You Can Take To Reduce Microplastics, How To Get Rid of Back Pain, What You Need To Know About Heart Scans & More - Solosode #505

**Ben Greenfield** (0:00)
My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast.

**Ben Greenfield** (0:05)
In this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast, the biggest step you can take to reduce microplastics, how to get rid of back pain, what you need to know about heart scans, and a whole lot more.

**Ben Greenfield** (0:15)
Welcome to the Boundless Life, with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

**Ben Greenfield** (0:37)
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. I'm Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. This is a solo, so we'll all be diving into some news flashes and a few Q&A's. My apologies if A, I sound a little congested, or B, if I look like a Smurf attacks my face. A, because I'm working on a pond renewal project right now in my yard, and as a part of that, I have aerator and I have a muck scraper, and I have a couple big caterpillar tubes filtering about, I believe it's around 15,000 gallons of water per hour into a wetland filtration system, and I've started swimming in the pond, and I'm pretty darn sure there's still some algae bloom in there, because I turned some laps yesterday and I woke up this morning waking up my wife with my sneezing, so not sick, just bloomed with algae. And then B, regarding these blue glasses on my face, I had a late night last night, I got up a little early this morning, and these glasses are wakefulness promoting glasses. They actually do the exact opposite of blue light blockers. They actually concentrate blue light. So I've got like these overhead podcasting lights, it's blasting me with a little bit more wakefulness promoting light than I would normally get. These are made by Raw Optics, RA. Optics. They're called, I don't even know what they're called. We'll just call them the wakey wakeys. So anyways, today's show notes are at bengreenfieldlife.com/505, bengreenfieldlife.com/505.
All right, well, let's jump in to today's topics. Plastics, plastics. Obviously microplastics are a hot topic nowadays. People claim that you have a chronic arse-worth of plastic in your brains. That claim has been disproven. I've tackled that on another podcast, but we all based on the fact that we live in an increasingly post-industrial plastic infused environment, we get a lot of exposure to plastics. Some of it does accumulate in the body, and some of it does not all pass out via, say, the stool, which would be normally how plastics would come out of the body, or the sweat, which would not be the normal way the plastics come out of the body because most plastics, including microplastics, are too large of a size to pass through the typical sweat gland. You lose a little bit via the sweat, most via the stool. So these plastic products that we get exposed to, they contain chemicals. These chemicals have names, phthalates, bisphenols. You've probably heard of these, and they can leach out of plastic during use, let's say plastic containers. So there was a recent seven-day trial. It was pretty interesting. What they did was they looked into what happens when you avoid various types of consumer products and what had the biggest effect on reducing microplastic exposure. So what they really wanted to look at was a few different groups. So they had group one, and in that group, all the food had little to no plastic exposure. So this was the clean, my neighbor is the Ned Flanders of Health group.
They were super picky about their plastic because they were in an experiment where they had to be. Group two was similar to group one, but then they also had no use of plastic-based cookware or kitchenware. So they took things to an even greater extreme. Group three had no use of personal care products that would be associated with plastic exposure. The average toothpaste, shampoo, lotion, etc. that is stored in plastic. That's something important to know.
Your toothpaste maybe might be made out of products that don't include plastics in them. But then if it's stored in a plastic tube, well, guess what? It's getting exposed to plastic. All the more so if it was subjected to heat, say during shipping or in your bathroom cupboard or elsewhere. Same thing with shampoos, conditioners, lotions, etc. Group four was a combination of all interventions. And these folks took things to the extreme extreme. Plastic-free diet, plastic-free cookware, plastic-free kitchenware, plastic-free personal care products. They were the YouTube health influencer of plastic-free, all the way to the max. And then group five was the control. This was your retard maxing neighbor who literally does not give a crap about microplastics or plastics, doesn't even know about them, doesn't care. And they're literally just like, you know, chewing on Tupperware. So what did they find? Well, they found that bisphenol levels were reduced in all of the groups compared to the control group. No surprises there.