Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. Chuck's here, Jerry's here, I'm here, We're all here. Are you here? Great? Well, then that makes this stuff show.
You know what else is here? What? Microplastics?
Yeah? What else? Uh?
I don't know? All kinds of p fasts and xenobiotics.
Yeah, maybe a little bit of bpds THCs.
You can only say that if you sing it, like what's his face?
Cars one?
No, a little bit of.
Lou Bega.
Yeah, the guy who faked listened to our show, the fake lou Bega who listened to our show.
What does he have to do with?
Uh? Well, he said a little bit of And you can't start any size like that without singing it. Lou Vegas Doyle.
Well, I love that joke that I just smashed all over the place.
A little bit of plastic in your gut?
That's about right, man. So you you mentioned what we're talking about xenobiotics, and just that word is a little unnerving, you know, So we're not talking about so zeno means foreign. You're a xenophobe, You're afraid of immigrants. If you're a xenophile, you really love immigrant immigrants. Yea. But zeno means foreign, biotic means body or life or something like that, and
it's not to be confused. Ed helped us out with this, and I think he made a good point, since to be confused with xenobiology, that's the search for extraterrestrial life of any kind, not that this is xenobiotics, meaning substances that are foreign to life, foreign to the body, foreign to biology. And there's just such a mind boggling array of them, and they are so fully set into the global environment that it's we're just now becoming aware of
how a wash we are in these things. And now we're saying, okay, just exactly how are these things going to kill all of us?
Should we read that textbook definition now or did you want to hang on to that?
Oh?
Go ahead, all right. Xenobiotic is defined, oh here we go, elementary school style as a chemical that is not used And this is who's this from, By the way, do we even know?
No, I don't know, all right.
A xenobiotic is defined as a chemical that is not used by the reference organism. So in that case we're talking about, like could be human, could be an animal, could be a plant in a wetland. Not used as a nutrient chemical is not essential for maintenance of normal physiologic biochemical function, and homeostasis does not constitute a part of the conventional array of chemicals synthesized from nutrient chemicals
normal intermediary metabolism. So, like you said, that's sort of a baggy way of saying it's a foreign thing that gets into our body or the body of an animal or a plant, like the plant body, whether on purpose or you know, like you drink booze. Technically that's a zenobiotic, Oh, yeah, for sure, or unknowingly, which is like microbeads in your lipstick.
Yeah, And there are things that we put into our bodies that are technically foreign to our bodies, like essential amino acids like trip to fan. We don't make enough of that, so we can put that in our bodies through way like eating turkey or whatever, and that is used in the normal physiological processes of keeping you alive.
It would not qualify as xenobiotics. Zenobiotics do things in your body that's beyond normal homeostatic physiological properties the normal stuff your body would be doing if none of these things were in your So that's another big key thing too. They typically have some effect or another on our body, and a lot of times it's because our bodies are responding to them or doing things to them and can actually make them worse in some cases.
Yeah, And I mean you can purposely or accidentally ingest it, like literally ingest it by eating it. You can inhale it, like I mentioned the cosmetics and stuff. You can come through your skin. There's all kinds of ways, and they're and they all are quite proficient at seemingly getting into the human body.
Yeah, they'll get in basically anyway they can. If you stand there with your pants off, they're gonna find a way in.
Yeah. And we should also say upfront, like a lot of this stuff is really kind of sad and scary. We should say there are like tens of millions of zenobiotics and they're not all dangerous necessarily. A lot of this stuff is, and we'll talk about why it's all you know, fairly new as far as really as far as really editing it. Sometimes they can even be beneficial. It seems like that's on the rare side than when they're harmful. But one example in here was the stuff
in soy isoflavvones. They can help regulate the converted, of course, and they can help regulate estrogen.
Yes, But there was a famous Renaissance Swiss physician named Paracelsus who's known as the father of toxicology, and he had a paraphrase quote that the dose makes the poison. So like you could take too many iso flavones, eat too much soy, and all of a sudden, your endocrine processes are going to be disrupted. So things can have beneficial effects for us at certain amounts, but beyond that it can be you know, terrible for us, or something can be terrible for us, but beneath a certain amount
it'll have no effect whatsoever. So that's a really important thing to remember. They're not all necessarily dangerous, and they're not all necessarily even though they're foreign, they're not necessarily all synthetic.
Yeah, I mean people, and we've been guilty of throwing the word chemical around. Sometimes there's chemicals in this, and there's chemicals in that. I think using the word zenobiotics drills down a little more. But even then they're not all synthetic.
No, and that doesn't necessarily mean like, oh, not all synthetics are harmful for you. We don't really know enough about that, and a lot of them are. What it's saying is just because something's natural and natural, naturally occurring chemical doesn't mean that it's necessarily good for you or isn't harmful.
Yeah. Throughout some numbers like tens of millions. According to the Journal of Chemical Research in Toxicology, more than fifty two million organic and inorganic substances have been synthesized, and they're about thirty nine million that are commercially available and in your life, like the average person walking around will be exposed between one and three million different xenobiotic substances in their life. Yeah, one to three million different ones.
Not one to three million times you're going to be exposed to zenobioty, Yeah, different different ones. That's remarkable, it is, and one of the other one of the big problems about this. So that just goes to show you like they're everywhere, and they get in our bodies really easily, and they do weird stuff that we're just starting to
wrap our heads around. Frequently, very dangerous or harmful stuff to us, and that there's an NGO called ChemSec that pointed out that of the chemicals that are in use in European Union countries, sixty five percent of them are
harmful to human health. Yeah, and I read a kind of a critique of toxicology by a toxicologist who said the field is basically obsessed with proving without a doubt that something is harmful, and that that prevents them from branching out and looking at new stuff because they're busy proving the original stuff is beyond doubt harmful for you or the effects that it has, and that that's just the ones that we know of that we've tested, sixty
five percent of those are harmful. There are so many chemicals natural and synthetic in our world that we interact with that we ingest, that make their way into our body that we have no idea what they do right now.
Yeah. Yeah. As far as what we're going to be talking about though, is xenobiotics, meaning the stuff that has we've come into contact with, it's in our bodies, and unusual things like happen after that.
Yeah, beyond German.
We're not talking. Yeah, we're not talking about the three million things. We can't.
No, we're not going to go over each one if that's what you mean.
Yeah, there's no way. We don't have time. This is not a Xenobiotics lifetime show where we do this for the next thirty years. They talking about three million zenobiotics.
It could be that'd be neat. So one other thing you mentioned when you came up with plant bodies, Yeah, this can affect not just humans but other animals and
plants as well. And I mean, aside from concern for polluting the environment and affecting animals who have nothing to do with this, the moral quandary of that, we a lot, very frequently eat those animals and those plants, and so we ingest those things that get introduced to those environments in those animals, and so the whole thing scales up. And there's some really interesting analogy between ecosystems and zenobiotics entering ecosystems or becoming part of ecosystems, and how they
enter and impact the human body as well. So it scales all the way up from the individual organism and even as far as their cells, all the way up to entire ecosystems, and now we're realizing the world, the entire world.
Yeah. Well, and in the water we drink and stuff like that, the air we breathe.
When we're talking about like polluted anything, food, soil, whatever, what we're saying is that those things have an excess of zenobiotics. Like that's what's polluting them. And it can come in all sorts of different forms of fashion and all sorts of stuff can be polluted. But that's what we mean. We're saying like polluted air or polluted water.
Yeah, and that's easier to say than xenobiotics over and over and in fact this you know, we'll get to microplastics and specifically microbeads. But Obama and it actually got one hundred percent sentate support.
On rotten tomatoes, which is.
It broke the tomatometer when he signed the Microbead Free Water Act for Free Waters Act in twenty fifteen. Oh okay, so this is when they said, hey, no more microbeads, And I thought like, oh great, So there's not microbeads in cosmetics anymore. Not necessarily, there's no microbeads. What the act says is it can't be in a rinse off cosmetics. So what that's saying is because we want to protect
the water. You know, like when you wash the exfoliant off your face, Yeah, it goes down the drain and into the water systems, but it can still be in like lipstick and mascara and stuff. So again, you know, it was a good thing, and it's and it's helped, but there are still microbeads and cosmetics, just not in stuff that goes down the sink.
Yeah, and my friend, that's just microbeads, just microbeads. So one thing that I find just absolutely fascinating. I could talk about it all day is the trouble that lies in trying to categorize zenobiotics. Don't you find that fascinating?
I do.
So there's it's all over the place. And one of the reasons it's important is because it shows just how new this field of understanding xenobiotics is. We can't even figure out how to classify them yet.
That's true because there's a lot of them. We talked about the mini millions, and there's a lot of overlap. So like it's it's kind of the case of where like if you classify, you're saying it's it's just this. Uh, but you know, if you want to say, well, it's this chemical family and but this is how it's used, and this is how the body responds to it, and this is what effect it has on the body. Like each of those could be its own classification. So it gets very unwieldy very quickly.
Yeah. I think the EU has seventeen groups of classifications for zenobiotics, and those are just the ones that they have listed as the ones of most concern. But because there's so many, there's so much overlap, there's so much well yeah, overlap, that it almost renders classifying them either.
So you have to get so detailed that your your book of classifications would be like the universe wide, or it renders them basically useless because because some would just show up in every classification you.
Have, right, and you might be thinking like big woop, who cares if you can classify and they're still out there. But classification is how you group things into, like getting funding to study something like you can't just write a very vague funding statement and say like we just want to study you know, microbiotics and yeah, or like how it's bad for you, Yeah, because I think there's like more than eighteen kinds of microbead even or maybe more
than that. But you know, that's how you like get funding, that's how you science classify things. It's how they talk about things, and so it is an important deal.
Yes, And so the other thing about the difficulty classifying these things is that it also shows just how ubiquitous they are. Yeah, Like they're everywhere, Like they're in our cosmetics, they're in our cooking pants, they're in our food packaging, they're in our shampoos like you were saying, And they're in the water we drink, the air we breathe. They're passed on through the womb, through breast milk, through blood donations. That it's in the Arctic, it's in the deep ocean.
Like xenobiotics, especially synthetic ones, have settled all over the world in most human bodies.
Boy, I think that is a great unsettling intro.
Yeah, And I want to just point out though, before we go to break, we're not trying to be alarmist or prompt any sort of hysteria or panic or anything like that. Like breastmolk is a great example. Yes, zenobiotics can be passed through breast milk, but if you read about breast milk, health organizations still say it like the benefits of breast milk so vastly outweigh the harm that zenobiotics do, at least as far as we know now
that you definitely want to keep breastfeeding. So we're not trying to like scare anybody or prompt a panic, but this is the current state of the science right now.
Yeah, and go read in any cosmetic companies mission statement on zenobiotics and microbeads, and they'll say it's really no big deal, that's right. I did that today and I was like, oh, okay, and since twenty fifteen, we've been doing this and this. It didn't say, well, because an entire Republican and Democratic Senate agreed right to make that illegal. It made it sound like it was some voluntary thing.
And all of those posts always end with now, let's get back to being pretty right.
It's just click on the link to go back to shopping, all right, So we'll take that break. Now, we'll come back and we'll talk about what the body can do with this stuff once it gets inside of us, all right, So, as promised, we're going to talk about what can happen once this goes in the body, and you shouldn't be surprised to learn that the body tries to do with it what it does with most things that it ingests. There's only a handful of things that the body can do.
They can absorb it, which means it's going into your tissue or in your blood, or back and forth between the two. But basically it absorbs it and kind of stays there. They can distribute it, and that's when it's going back and forth between different parts of your body, like.
A shuttle cock and a badminton game.
Exactly.
Sorry, you've got shuttle cocks on the brink because I saw the Wham documentary last night.
Oh is it good?
It's great?
Were they into badminton?
There's one part with the shuttlecock and George Michael.
It's very tantal here it is.
It's as tantalizing as it sounds.
Believed me, I gotta watch that. What's that on?
I'd rather not say, I'm just kidding Netflix.
Okay, I'm about to drop them, so maybe I'll watch it and then drop them.
Yeah, it's worth watching before you drop them, for sure.
Okay. Biotransformation is when the body breaks it down into its you know, it's different parts, and then from there it can be metabolized, which of course means it's going to be converted into some new kind of chemical. And we'll talk more about metabolism in a minute, because it's pretty important. Or the last thing it could do is eliminate it. It could you know. The liver, of course, is where it's usually gonna go, is the first stop
processing center of the body. And then it's gonna you're gonna pee it out or poop it out or sweat it out, or it'll be in your hair and it'll grow out through your hair and then you'll cut that hair. Like Britney Spears, Man, you're just dropping the funny rest today, thanks Shuttle Cocks, Britney Spears what else?
Oh, just you wait, buddy, Okay. But sometimes that stuff's eliminated intact, like it had no impact or effect on the body. And one of the very famous examples of that chuck is when your pea trans bright yellow after taking a multi vitamin. Right, what you're seeing is the excess B six or twelve that your body didn't absorb that's being sent out intact vitamin B has a fluorescent look to it, so it's taking your yellow P and boosting it in a neon status.
Like wham style.
Yeah, but technically you could drink your P with that vitamin B and you would inguest some more. It's just that there was more than your body needed at the time in that vitamin. So it's just excreting it out just the same way it came in.
Yeah, and a lot of the stuff, you know, I mentioned those four ways, it's not just one or the other. Like a lot of these overlap as well. So a good example of that is you might ingest like, well THC. Let's say you let's see a puffed on a doobie. Okay, that THC is a xenobiotic, and THC is the most people know who know anything about it is absorbed in fat mainly. Yeah, it was called adipose.
Yeah, that's your fatty tissue.
Yeah, adipose fat. And that's where a lot of that THHC goes, and it doesn't stay there forever anything, but a lot of different kinds of xenobiotics may go into that those fat deposits. Let's say, lose some weight, it's gonna burn that fat off and then sometimes those xenobiotics can be released back into the bloodstream and it may be kind of the same or it may be changed, but it's in your body again because you have burned fat that was storing that stuff.
Yeah, and just from it being present when you burn fat means that it could have been chemically changed into some new chemical compound, which is a frequent happenstance with zenobiotics in the human body, and that actually can be the fate of a lot of different xenobiotics. Your body takes them and turns them into entirely new things, so that that can happen to say THC that's part of a fat cell. Like it's burned for energy, it turns into PCP.
It's amazing. By the way, the keen eared lister might have heard a little momo.
Cameo, oh yeah, could you hear mo?
I heard a little bit before you. You got up and said, mo, come on, you know in the red light's on? What that means?
She's like, sorry, I know, but I just can't stand landscapers.
There may have been a couple of barks in there, though, but I like that. I like a mumo cameoles leave.
All right, cool, we will, She'll love it.
Oh yeah, so uh we're pcp oh he is what you're talking about.
Pcp Oh. There was one other thing that happens too, Right. So when this, say, the THD gets released back into your system, chuck one of the things. As it enters the bloodstream, you're it might get taken finally to the liver. And this is where the fate of most xenobiotics. The vast majority of xenobiotics end up in the liver or liver, and the liver actually produces enzymes that seem to be dedicated to but babolizing xenobiotics. We have a whole class
of genes called cytochrome four fifty genes. They express enzymes that convert zenobiotics into less harmful stuff in the body. Pretty cool, right, And it also shows that like, zenobiotics are nothing new as far as our bodies are concerned.
I know, it's kind of awesome and sad all the same time.
Right, So the liver's going to process what it can. When it renders it harmless enough, it will send it to the kidneys or to the intestine, where it's either pooped out or peed out or the intestines will reabsorb it and send it back to the liver, and it'll be processed further and broken down further, and eventually, over
enough time they call them half lives. Just like with radioactivity, the thing has been basically rinsed and repeated so many times that enough it's just so little of it in your system that it's essentially gone, even if there might be little trace amounts left.
Yeah, and then I know we talked about this in our maybe an alcoholism or did you just do on on hangovers? Maybe sometimes it gets broken down into something that's worse for you, that's actually really bad. And alcohol is a great example. When it hits the liver, those enzymes go to work like they're trained to do, and it turns it into acetold hyde, and that's a metabolite
of alcohol, and that is the carcinogen. That's the thing that is you know, if you're a severe alcoholic and you're dying from it, it's from that acetaldehyde which comes about because your liver is trying to break down that alcohol that you're just dumping on it.
Yeah, that's a metabolite of alcohol. So it's a product of metabolism. But it's an intermediary one. It gets transformed into acetate, which is far less toxic as far as
your body's concerned. But for that brief time where the alcohol is in acetyl aldehyde form before it becomes acetate, it can do a lot of damage genetic damage to your cells that can get passed on and turn into tumors, or it can just damage the cells and the liver grows back kind of hardened or scarred, and that's where you get things like cirrhosis.
Yeah, exactly. And that half life you were talking about, you can't. It's not you know when you talk about the half life of like nuclear waste or something. Nuclear waste, is that a good example, Yeah, definitely, Like plutonium, Yeah, you can. You can be a little more specific. The conditions of the of the human that ingests something makes it really hard to get like a really precise half life on zenobiotics because of how old you are, how heavy you are, what kind of health you're in, all
kinds of stuff like that. So you're going to always see a range as far as a half life goes. In the case of xenobiotsey, yes, like a big range.
Yeah, like Alprazi lamb I think is an antidepressant or an anti anxiety drug has a half life of six to twelve hours.
Yeah, so either one thing or double it.
Right. So yeah, But the point of this and the point of knowing half lives and all that is if you know you know what route a zenobiotic takes and what it does in your body and how long it's around for, you can treat those things better. You can also design drugs better that can treat zenobiotics or do other things. You can make them much more targeted and personalized.
Yeah.
That's one of the reason I am understanding all this, aside from having your mind blown.
Right, we talked about ecosystems. You know, it's not just humans and animals that are affected by this stuff. The good news about ecosystems is that, and we've talked about this in different you know, Earth Science podcast over the years, they resemble the human body in a lot of ways,
and one way is how they process things. There are things in ecosystems that help move along these zenobiotics, sometimes unchanged just because it goes in like let's say a river and then doesn't really change much before it's washed down and evaporates into the air. Let's say.
Yeah, so that's kind of like our process of elimination. Yeah, there are other analogies too, and they're really found in wetlands. They call wetlands, as we've said many times before, Earth's kidneys because they're they're so good at filtering toxins out of water, and they do them a few different ways. One of the main ways is that they just trap them in the sediment. They lay on top of them, like a murderer in a hospital room with a pillow
over the victim's face. Yeah, for river hook exactly. And that's very similar to our method of absorption, where it just gets locked into our tissues.
Right.
They can also break them down chemically or biologically, like just exposure to the sun can break the chemical bonds of some things gasoline. There, there's algae and other kinds of microorganisms that are actually capable of eating gasoline, breaking it down into less harmful constituent parts. And that's basically the same thing is what our the enzymes in our bodies are doing with what's it called biotransformation. Yeah, pretty
neat stuff. I love that when there's just like really obvious analogies between us and other parts of Earth, because it's just such a reminder that like we're a part of this larger hole and it's a part of us too.
Yeah. Absolutely, And you know there's a half life in the environment as well. It's going to be different than it is in us, of course, but you know, sometimes it's like, you know, rain can wash stuff away. Of course, it might end up in the groundwater and it might react with something else along the way. So it's you know, the journey of the zenobiotic in the environment is is kind of like in humans, but kind of different and fraught with you know, meeting up with other things.
Yeah. I don't know if you said it or not, but the half life in our bodies has a lot to do with the state of our health, our diet, our weight, our age, our sex, all that stuff contributes to it. And then like a zenobiotic in the in the environment interacting with other zenobiotics, same thing in our bodies.
We're finding that zenobiotics interact with other zenobiotics, or say, and then they interact in different ways with the metabolites of a zenobiotic, and there's a bunch of different metabolites so as you start to kind of connect them, the whole web grows exponentially and you realize just how ridiculously complex this entire thing that we're starting to understand is, and just how daunting the idea of coming to fully understand it is. The break I think anytime you say I would be a fool to say.
No, that means I need to collect myself here. All right, I'm going to collect myself and we'll be right back to talk about how screwed we may or may not be right after this.
Okay, Chuck, you used them, maybe the more genteel term screwed. But again, we're not here to cause alarm or panic or anything like that. But there is a lot of cause for concern the more we realize what chemicals we're interacting with, and the more we realize how ubiquitous they.
Are, yeah, and very key in some cases, how long they last. Ye, Because we've been talking a lot about how these things break down. Some of them are very good at not breaking down, and some of them are so good at that that they're called forever cancles. The one example that was used in here was this woman that was found to have something called oxy chlordine in her body, which is a metabolite of a pesticide called chlordane, and they used that pesticide for many decades treating termites.
But it was a really bad thing that the world eventually said, oh, you know what, we shouldn't use this stuff anymore. So it was covered under the Stockholm Convention and hasn't been around since eighty eight in the State SIN since eighty one in the UK when this person, this woman was on a one year old baby, but that stuff was still in her body, you know, thirty plus years later.
Yeah, that woman was an environmental journalist named Anna Turns and she was writing on BBC and in this article she says like, I probably got this from my mom. It was probably passed through the womb ow And because the half life of chlordine is thirty years, that means there's still in me right that I probably passed it along to my kids as well. And that's a I mean,
that's a thing like there. If the half life of a chemical is longer than a human life, then for all intents and purposes, once it enters your body, it's it's never going to go away as far as you're concerned it will always be there. Yeah, although there are ways to get them out. We're starting to learn and that will be a huge field of inquiry in the coming.
Years of ridding your body of these. So another term for a zenobiotic that stays around for a long long time and that is pretty harmful, and we should mention that. Well, we're going to talk about them persistent organic pollutants or pops. These have been around since the nineteen forties. These aren't brand new either, and specifically one type of those p FASS p fas polyfloroalkal substances. You got it, and they are, thank you. They were great as far as being resistant
to like oil and heat and water. So you're going to find them in things like Scotch guard and gortex and teflon and flame retardants that firefighters use. These, Like I said, these have been around for a long time. They exist, and I think more than these pos pifass. Is that what you would say?
That's what I've been wanting to say, but I haven't seen it anywhere. There's no little Yeah. I think they just say p fast pfas. Okay, well it should be plural.
I think so. But there are more than I think twelve thousand forms and thousands of products. Yeah, and it's it's a big deal. This is the stuff that should cause some alarm.
So one of the things about those products that that pfoss are used in is that it can wash away. Right like if you if you have a fairly new washing machine and you look closely, you'll see that probably there's a weather proof or waterproof setting for your north face rain coat or something like that, and it's meant to very delicately wash it because you can very easily wash that coating. And when that coating washes off, no matter how delicate your washing machine is, some of it's
going to wash off. It drains out of your washing machine and it drains right into municipal wastewater system. And we have no idea how to get pifos says out of our water. So it's just introduced into water and it can go anywhere from that point.
Yeah, and it, like we said, it's the stuff stays around for a long long time, largely because one of the strongest chemical bonds there is the carbon fluorine bond, and there was a CDC report that said they could be found in the blood of ninety seven percent of Americans.
Yeah, so the National Institutes of Health here in the United States says, we don't one hundred percent know exactly what kind of harm this causes. So the NIH is being very courteous to big chemical and saying, like, you know, we don't know for sure that it does, but if you listen to the EPA or the CDC, they're willing to say p fosses have been linked to a whole suite of health problems from endocrine disruption, low birth weight,
lowered effectiveness of the immune system, tons of cancers. And yes, we haven't fully demonstrated that this does exactly this, but there's enough evidence, and most importantly, we're exposed to these things and enough people have it in their blood that it's really worth not waiting around to see exactly what mechanism gives you cancer from p foss before we start regular p fossis And this I think the EPA just
issued its first guideline as recently as twenty sixteen. And these things have been around since the forties, and there's a bunch of lawsuits that show that dupot in three am I known they were harmful since at least nineteen sixty one.
Yeah, and they're gonna they may end up paying out more than the tobacco companies did.
Yeah, that's what I saw.
In the end. And this stuff, you know, it's bad enough for adults, but this stuff, like the CDC also talked about babies and like learning and behavior and the growth of your baby can is you know, they have to be So it's a little frustrating because they have to say, you know, like could cause problems in infants and older children and stuff like that, because like you said, they haven't certifiably like proven the stuff. But it's just
such an obvious thing. I hop when people read warnings like that, they don't say, oh, well, they haven't absolutely prove so it's just fine.
Yeah. The thing is that science doesn't need to start adopting that. It's like total we totally know that this is it, because science never does. It's just the point of science. I think what the goal here is is to get the public aware that, like you said, when they see a warning like that, they know what that means, essentially, like steer clear of this. Not oh, I'm going to wait around twenty years for the field of toxicology to prove me to me conclusively that this gives me cancer.
And in the meantime, I'm going to keep licking my teflon coated frying pan all day long. Right.
And another thing is like, you can't get two populations and say, all right, this population, we're going to feed you and make you inhale microplastics, and this population we're not, so we can get a one to one comparison. Here they test the stuff on animals, but they can't literally do that to a human being. They can test it on seals and they have and it showed cell damage and cell death. But you know, you can't design a study where you just feed people microplastics and micropas.
Know, what you would have to do is take a part of the study population and sequester them away in a glass box for the length of the study and just let the rest of the study population go about their daily lives and just compare the two like that.
We did mention microplastics earlier, and a microplastic is defined technically is a plastic less than five millimeters. There are a couple of kinds. It can be the primary or secondary secondary means is broken down from a larger plastic, and this is like might be microplastics you find in the ocean from larger plastic that's just been out there forever, or the primary kind is the stuff that is manufactured and put purposely packaged and put into products.
Yeah, like the stuff that keeps like a cellophane wrapper or like a burger wrapper from sticking to the bun. That's teflon. There's teflon coding on there. Like that's what they use. It's used all around us and chuck. One of the things about microplastics that really kind of ties into pfas's is that when you wash that same gortex coat, that coat's made of microplastics, and some of those are going to come out, and just like the pfas's, they're
going to enter the water supply. And these little tiny plastic fibers are capable of actually evaporating from water into the air, which means they can be carried through the atmosphere and dumped down as snow. In the Arctic and with very little surprise, they've actually found microplastics and what is essentially pristine Arctic areas.
Yeah, well, I mean, if you've ever have you ever wondered like, oh, Why is it that when I shred cheese with a cheese shredder, it's all stuck together like cheese does, And when I buy the stuff in the package, none of that stuff's ever sticking together. It's just all like little individual strands of cheese. Well, it's because they coat this little shreds of cheese with stuff to keep
them from clumb together. I'm not sure what is in cheese if it's a zenobiotic, so I probably should have checked that, but it just came to me at the top of my head.
They if you know that they spray something onto the cheese to keep it from sticking. There's one hundred percent chances of zenobiotic.
Actually, here it is. It's cellulose.
Okay, so that would technically count because we don't like we eat cellulose, but it doesn't necessarily contribute to our normal physiological processes, so in that circumstance, it would be a zenobiotic.
Yeah, there's an article that I'm seeing now cellulose colon the woodpulp in your shreded cheese. So yeah, we don't get that stuff anymore. I mean, like you said, it's
hard to avoid. I mean, it's impossible to one hundred percent avoid this stuff if you're just walking around the planet, But you can do a good job at weeding out as much as you can, as far as like cosmetics and like this shred of cheese and just things that you know for sure that they're adding this stuff to to make your product a little whatever prettier or less clumpy or you know, less sticky.
So yeah, I think the one takeaway from this episode is steer clear of shredded cheese.
Right. Oh no, I like it when it clumps together. Man. This is the great thing about shredding your own.
It keeps you busy breaking it up.
Yeah.
So there's a lot of ways that microplastics PFASs zenobiotics in general can mess with our bodies as they're metabolized or as they just enter our bodies. But ultimately one of the one of the big problems that they cause is cancer. Yeah, And if you have like an acute
poisoning of a zenobiotic, you can be treated. Typically there's an antidote out there maybe that can help you metabolize it faster, that can block the same receptors that that zenobiotic would attached to and keep it from harming you. But with cancer, it's typically the result of a build up from repeated exposure of a zenobiotic that does not is not easily cleared from the body, and that the more time it spends in your body, the more chance
it has to do some genetic damage. And as again as we've seen, the basis of a tumor is a cell that has damaged replicating genes in your DNA strand and as those get back together, there's nothing stopping them from continuing to replicate and replicate and grow and grow and grow. And that's the basis of a tumor. So we don't know exactly what all zenobiotics can do that.
We just know that some can and we're starting to realize like that it's a frequent occurrence from exposure to zenobiotics, especially built up ones.
Yeah, and you know, studying that stuff is problematic. It's tough because there's so many of them, which is what we've been trying to hammer home. So I hope it's coming through. It's you know, they are studying that stuff, but if you're talking about long term exposure, you're talking about you know, multi year studies, and they're doing it but it's all that stuff is expensive, it takes a lot of time, and there are you know, tens of
millions of these chemicals. So a that's why classification helps, because you can group them into a class and study a class. But it's just, you know, it's a very daunting thing where they're doing great work in cancer research, but there's just so much out there.
Yeah, tough for sure. So a lot of people are saying, well, let's turn to AI. AI can figure this out. AI can grasp all this like galaxy of interactions between different zenobiotics and their metabolites, and that's probably a really great
path to be pursuing right now. One other thing that would be probably have AI applied to it is something called metabolomics, which the goal of metabolomics is measuring and quantifying every single metabolic process that happens in the body and then assigning like a sick nature to it, so that you can very quickly detect what your body's doing at any given point in time and you can say treated accordingly or adjusted accordingly, depending on what's going on.
I mean, that's a huge deal considering for you know, one hundred years or so, they were like pee in this thing and we'll test your pee. Yeah, and that was kind of from where the research ended.
Yeah, yeah, for sure, that was. I mean that's kind of still where it's at. Like metabolomics is so new that it's almost hypothetical right now. There's people working on it, for sure, but I think they still will generally have you pee and test you afterward or after your debt. They'll go dig into your bone or your fatty tissue and start testing and see what's there.
Yeah.
Wow, So that's zenobiotics for now. Do you think this is one that we would probably like visit maybe later on?
Oh maybe, Okay, we'll see kind of like birth order.
Yeah, but on purpose, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.
Yeah. By the way, people pointed out we did customs twice. I don't remember that, but I guess we did either. Man.
Okay, so let's see. Since Chuck said that he doesn't remember it, and I said I don't remember either doing customs twice, that means it's time for listener meal.
I'm going to call this it has been spanked on the bottle. Aloha, guys, and Jerry, I just wanted to share a bit of Sara and Dip. I like this already after having listened to the Magic Eye Illusions episode. My family and I just stayed in the cabin Mount Saint Helen's and I had an old school handheld stereo scop. Oh that is awesome, so cool. My kids really loved it. Included some pics and there some picks of these kids popping and they're little jammies. No, they're they're using this
thing and it's adorable. Look at those cute kids in it a little bit time jammies or as my daughter calls him, jommies.
Oh really, how British.
I don't know why my mom did it?
Well, you said our language learning episode that your mom, all right, kind of apes British people that is around them, so that's probably where that's what it was.
Put on your job it was. I've included some picks. Both kids are huge fans. My son loves all of the Animal and Earth Science episodes, and my daughter especially loves the episode on Pooh Aloha once again because as we know, that could mean hello and goodbye. That is from Baird and also any names of kids. So I'm going to also Mia and Luke. And this email has been spanked on the bottom, wrapped up and spanked on the bottom with consent.
Well Mahallow, Baird, Miya and Luke, we appreciate that big time. It was a great email. I agree, yeah, and thanks for the cute picks. If you want to be like Baird and Mia and Luke and say heloha or anything else, you can email it to us. Send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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