Are microplastics the newest cardiovascular risk factor?

The evidence is growing that suggest that microplastics, or more specifically smaller nanoplastics, are triggers for atherosclerotic disease with increased risk for heart attack, stroke, and death. 

While your doctor wastes your time and money obsessing about cholesterol and statin drugs that should have been discarded decades ago, you need to address the REAL factors that cause heart disease. Add nanoplastics to that list. Thankfully, you can begin to make an impact on your ingestion of plastic particles but may need to re-examine many long-accepted habits.

Chapters

• 0:00 Plastics Move From Environment To Body
• 0:36 Observational Links To Coronary Disease
• 2:25 Carotid Plaque Study And Nanoplastics
• 5:07 How Do Particles Enter Tissues
• 6:47 Inflammation Markers And Event Risk
• 8:04 Rethinking Heart Disease Drivers
• 9:32 Food Sources Of Microplastics
• 11:41 Everyday Exposure And Hot Plastics
• 13:28 Early Ideas For Remediation

Transcript

William Davis, MD: 0:00

I'm sure you've heard the headlines that plastics are becoming a problem in our environment, that they fill the oceans, they fill landfills, animals are ingesting them, many sea creatures die because of that. And of course, it's become an issue for human health. And this has recently leapt forward in the last couple of years based on a few handful of studies showing that yes, microplastics are a threat to human health. But let's talk about plastic as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, especially those plastics that come from food. So two studies have now been performed that I'm aware of that show that, yeah, the level of plastics in your body is a cardiovascular risk factor. One study rated the severity of coronary disease as measured on a cardiovathyzation or caronyl endocram, and correlated that with blood levels of microplastics. Unfortunately, in this study, they did not quantify the size of the microplastics, and you'll see why that's an issue. But in this study, in the graph shown here, you can see that total plastics correlated very cleanly with the severity or the complexity of coronary atherosclerotic disease. This held true across all the different forms of plastic discovered in blood, polystyrene, polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride, and some others. So even though it's observational, that is, there was no placebo-controlled intervention, there was no blinding. So this wasn't the usual double blind placebo-controlled clinical trial, because that would be unethical, wouldn't it? If I said to you, I'd like you to participate in a clinical trial to see whether microplastics or plastics in some form are a cardiovascular risk factor or have other adverse effects. Here's a capsule or a teaspoon of plastic versus placebo, and we'll see in a few years if you have a heart attack or have other no one's gonna do that, right? It's unethical, no one in the right mind would do it. So we don't have, by necessity, we don't have the usual gold standard randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial. We have to rely on observations, observational evidence. Observational evidence doesn't always establish cause and effect. But because there seems to be internal consistency in this obs in these observations, that is, all forms of plastic seem to be associated with increased severity of coronary disease. But a study that really clinches it was a study that looked at carotid atherosclerosis. So about 250 people, all of whom had severe carotid atherosclerotic disease, 70% blockage or more, all asymptomatic, and all underwent carotid endorterectomy, that is, removal of the carotid atherosclerotic plaque by surgical means. Now you could debate about the necessity of doing that in asymptomatic people, but let's put that aside for the moment. So everybody went through carotid endorterectomy, and their excised carotid atherosclerosis examined for the presence or absence of plastics. They did find them in about 150 out of the 250 people or so. And these were all, by the way, nanoplastics. That is, plastics that measure less than 100 micrometers or microns in diameter. So the formal definition of a microplastic is that it's five millimeters or less, which is kind of large. If you swallowed something that was three, four, or five millimeters, you would poop, you would poop it out. It wouldn't get absorbed. So it's really the smaller particles, typically so-called nanoparticles with a diameter of 100 microns or micrometers or less. What's peculiar about all this is in this one study of carotid atherosclotic plaque, most of the nanoparticles less than one micron in diameter. Now, in other studies, larger particles have been studied, have been recovered, typically less than 100 micrometers. Like in the liver, you can get 80-some microns diameter particles, and other in blood, etc. You can find larger particles. But how'd they get there? They could have gotten there via respiration, breathing them in, because it's a bit of a bit of a leap to say it got into the gastrointestinal tract, because the gap between intestinal cells normally is about 1.5 micrometers. So how would something that measure, say, 20 micrometers, get through? So it's not quite clear how this happened. One major, bothersome, unanswered question whether disease gastrointestinal linings can allow larger particles. So, for instance, if you had ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease or SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth that we talk about a lot, that we know expands the gaps between intestinal cells. Could that be sufficient to allow larger particles in? Don't know. No one's explored that. But in this study of carotid atherosclerotic plaque, it's the nanoparticles, typically less than two micrometers, maybe often less than one micrometer, that have gained access to atherosclerotic plaque. Now here's where it got really interesting. They also examined the plaque, those with microplastics or nanoplastics, those without, and the ones that had plastic in the athropic plaque had much higher levels of various inflammation mediators, such as IL-1 beta and TNF alpha. Also, they followed these people after surgery for about three and a half years, and the people who had microplastics or nanoplastics in their plaque, 20% experienced heart attack, stroke, or death. While people without plastic in their plaque experienced 7% with those things, heart attack, stroke, or death. So once again, observational data, it can't always prove cause and effect. But you can see the internal consistency across multiple measures, like inflammatory mediators and uh future events, risk of events, seems to suggest there is indeed a cause and effect. So I think we need to add nanoplastics in particular to our risk of cardiovascular factors that lead to caronary and in this case carotid disease. So add this to small LVL particles, insulin resistance, inflammation, deficiencies of nutrients like vitamin D, magnesium, iodine, uh, omega-3 fatty acids, SIBO, or colonic dysbiosis, and endotoxemia. Those, by the way, are the real drivers of coronary disease, not this silly, outdated idea of cholesterol and saturated fat. That should have been discarded decades ago. The science, this is not something I made up. This is the science is quite solid. The problem is there's no pot of gold. There's no profitable drug or procedure to cause people to engage in these kinds of things, or my colleagues to tell you these things. So they're still stuck on the revenue generating. A trillion dollars, by the way, so far for the statin drug. A trillion, not a billion, not a hundred billion, a thousand billion dollars for this awful, barely useful class of drugs called statin cholesterol drugs. So see, the real tragedy of that is the focus on statins and LDL cholesterol, is it took everybody's attention off the real causes of heart disease. And that's why your hospital may have added a$80 to$100 billion new wing for cardiovascular care. It's the number one moneymaker. It remains the number one moneymaker, remains the number one killer of men and women in the world, and yet uh no one cares to look at the real causes because their attentions are dominated by the silliness with cholesterol measures and statin drugs. But add nanoparticle exposure to your risk. Now, how do you go about reducing this? Well, start thinking about food. This is a surprising list. This science is not fully evolved, but it does identify some really problematic sources of micro and nanoplastics. Unfortunately, a lot of these studies don't break down by size, and so we can't always distinguish micro versus nanoplastics. So microplastics will degrade into nanoplastics in the environment, but probably not in the human body. It takes ultraviolet radiation, heat, salt, and other factors that are in the environment, but not necessarily in you. So we try to eliminate our exposure to plastic in general. And so among the most the foods, so let's talk about foods that have high content of microplastics. If there's one thing that is so horrible for plastic content, it's tea. When you brew your tea with tea bags made of plastic, about 70% of all tea bags are made with plastic because it gives sturdiness and keeps the paper from disintegrating. So you only want to drink tea if the tea bags in the box specifically says not containing plastic. Or get one of those infusing devices and get loose tea leaves and put do make your tea that way with uh loose tea in the infusion device. Because brewed tea made with plastic yields billions, literally billions, not not millions, billions of particles of plastic per serving. Surprisingly, while we advocate consumption of root vegetables, because they're great for your microbiome, your gastro-intestinal microbiome, to nourish the beneficial species, unfortunately it's it's roots that take up the microplastics in soil. And soil has become very polluted with microplastics for a variety of reasons. It's in the environment. Farmers will use such things as plastic mulch to retain moisture and to uh discourage growth of weeds, but it also imparts plastic into the soil. Many farmers also use synthetic fertilizers that are based on plastic pellets. And so that actually adds, so farmers actually add huge amounts of plastic to the soil, and it's the roots that get exposed to that plastic. And by the way, the plastic inhibits growth, so the farmer has less yield and thereby higher prices at the market, right? But anyway, so it's root vegetable. So carrots are among the highest in microplastics. Uh, lettuce is also quite high. So here's a list that had of a few. Not all foods have been studied, so we don't have full analysis of all the foods, but know that root vegetables. So, what do you do about this? If healthy foods, or we thought what we thought were healthy, are filled with microplastics. Well, try to get organic whenever possible. That even that's not a guarantee, of course. Rinse it off thoroughly and take off the peel, which is unfortunate because the peel often has great nutrients, may even have some beneficial microbes for you, but it's also filled with microplastics. Of course, some other common sense things to do. Don't use plastic water bottles. In fact, I always say never use plastic water bottles. Buy a stainless steel or glass lined bottle that does not have a plastic cap. That can help. Take a look at your coffee maker. It's probably plastic. The water reservoir is plastic, the tubing is plastic, the bin that holds the coffee grounds is plastic, and sometimes even the coffee filter is plastic. And so maybe think about getting a French press that's made of stainless steel. There's also percolating devices, either plug-in or stovetop that has no plastic. But think about trying to get away from because you know what's when it's heated, when plastic is heated is when it releases plastics as well as plasticizing agents and other factors. Now that's just a start. There's many other things you can do, but I want to start to get you thinking about plastics exposure as a cardiovascular risk factor. Now, unfortunately, there's no remediation process that anyone's worked out yet. Some of that science is coming from all places. Soil bioremediation. It's become clear that some microbes, both fungal and bacteria and algae, can metabolize plastics down to CO2 and oxygen and other things like that. Now, what does that mean in the body? Now, there are people claiming to have probiotics that reduce microplastics, but they make that claim without formal data. So we do await formal data. But it's looking like our common species that we obtain, say, from fermented foods, like Lactobacillus plantarum, may be helpful. Now, they uh microbes in the gastrointestinal train can't reach into your liver, right? Or brain or blood to remove microplastics or nanoplastics. But at least it's a start, right? If we remove the gastrointestinal reservoir of plastics, because any if we if we took anybody and measured the plastic in their stool, you would find milligram quantities per bowel movement, which is huge considering that milligrams will break down into micrograms and nanograms. So even one milligram yields tons of nanoparticle plastics. So what I'm suggesting is become aware of your exposure to plastic. Start taking steps to diminish your exposure to plastic, both ingested as well as aerosolized. So think about, for instance, putting a HEPA 11 or higher MERV rating in your furnace. Not too high, right? You want to talk to your HVAC guy because you when you have too too strong a filter, it can actually damage your furnace. So you want you don't want to go above 13, I'm told. 13 MERV rating. Also think about an air filter with a HEPA filter attachment or filter in it, because that also removes aerosolized microplastic. This is just a start. I'll tell you, minimizing your exposure to micro and nanoplastics is probably one of the most difficult, frustrating things you'll ever undertake in the world of health. So let this just be the start of a conversation your effort to try to reduce your exposure to plastics, especially as it relates to cardiovascular disease.