A Simple Way to Eliminate Microplastics and "Forever Chemicals" from Your Body

Stop turning yourself into a human Tupperware bowl.

Let’s pretend your body, my body, all our bodies, were parcels of land, each with a pond on it. Everything seems to be fine but one day, a bunch of fish go belly up in your pond and the shoreline is peppered with the bodies of the loons that feasted on the fish. The EPA then swings into action. (Maybe not the EPA under the current administration, whose unofficial motto seems to be business uber alles, but yesterday’s EPA.) What they find is horrifying: “Land and water” simply teeming with microplastics and saturated with hundreds or even thousands of “forever chemicals.”

Why, if the EPA had any sense or duty or concern for the public, they’d issue fines and cease and desist orders so that the bastards would stop defiling the land.

But, of course, your body isn’t a parcel of land but it might as well be because it’s also horribly contaminated with those aforementioned microplastics and forever chemicals.

It’s almost too bad that the analogy isn’t true because it’d be a much easier fix. Hell, you could dredge your land to clean it, but doing that to your body would kill it and what with you having to drive your aunt to the chiropodist next Tuesday, would really mess things up.

There is, however, a way that you might be able to rid your body of some of those contaminants (without dredging) and it’s pretty damn simple.

What’s in Your Wallet?

You’ve all likely heard about the scourge of microplastics slowly making their way into our visceral organs and even our brain. What’s in your wallet? Hell if I know but you likely swallowed enough plastic to make a Capitol One credit card in the last week.

It’s an idea that’s not that hard to swallow, figuratively and literally. Once plastics are released into the environment, they’re subjected to wind, solar radiation, waves, even the chafing of spandex between a thicc girl’s thighs while walking to Pilates class, hell any kind of degradation you can think of.

These products gradually break down into ever small particles, usually ranging in size from 0.1 micrometers to 5 millimeters. The smallest of these particles can be ingested through diet, skin-to-skin contact, even breathing. Studies have shown that a wide variety of foods are contaminated with microplastics, including seafood, sea salt, honey and sugar, bottled water, cooking oil, fruit, cereals, vegetables and so on and so on, a regular cornucopia of contaminants.

Animal studies have shown that microplastics accumulate in the liver, kidney, and intestines and the extent of accumulation depends on particle size. While studies on humans and microplastic accumulation hasn’t caught up with animal studies, the studies that have been done in humans show similar accumulation sites, in addition to human brains.

So far, we’re not exactly sure about all the ways these microplastics might harm us. However, it’s certain that they muck up our intestinal biomes. People with inflammatory bowel disease (IBS) have been shown to have 1.5 times the microplastic accumulation as healthy people. Further, the amount of microplastics found in the stool of IBS patients correlates strongly with the severity of the disease.

It also doesn’t take a neuroscientist to plausibly theorize that the effects of these contaminants, short-term or long-term, aren’t benign and there may be a strong association with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, dementia, or a plain old reduction in cognitive abilities.

There’s another danger lurking in those microplastic particles, too. Microplastics, because of their large surface area and hydrophobicity (“fear of water”), absorb other harmful substances from the environment, most notably polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and phthalates. The former is a notorious carcinogen while the latter has been implicated in “endocrine disruption,” which is a fancy way of saying it mucks up your hormones, which can be especially damaging to children. Phthalates are also associated with cognitive and neurodevelopmental disorders in adults.

If only microplastics were the only things affecting our “lands.” You know those “forever chemicals” I mentioned in the opening paragraphs? In case you need a refresher course on them, forever chemicals are substances known as PFAS, a group of over 15,000 chemicals. They’re found in non-stick cookware, food packaging, firefighting foam, and a whole bunch of other stuff and they’ve been accumulating in our bodies for decades. At the very least, they’ve been implicated in causing certain types of cancer, kidney disease, birth defects, high cholesterol, and immune system suppression.

Well, it turns out there’s a way you can fight all of this back and it doesn’t take much money or effort.

Poop that Stuff Out!

You might remember me writing about psyllium before. It’s a soluble fiber that comes from the seeds (the outer layer or husk) of the Plantago ovata plant native to Asia and the Middle East, but its most familiar form is in Metamucil, the supplement for digestive health and inducing rock-star bowel movements.

As you likely know, some insoluble fiber supplements “cure” constipation by acting as stimulants or irritants of the colonic mucosa, thus causing the large bowel to expel the stubborn, dehydrated stool.

Psyllium, however, because of its gel-forming and fermentation resisting properties, resists dehydration so that it acts as a stool “normalizer,” softening hard, constipated stools while also adding firmness to liquid or loose stools. But it also does something else that’s way cool.

Psyllium also reduces cholesterol and it does this by trapping bile, which is a substance secreted by the liver to emulsify fat particles so that they can be more easily absorbed by enzymes. Bile is usually recycled several times in a single meal, but when the bile is trapped by fiber (like psyllium) and eliminated in the stool, the liver has to produce more bile. Cholesterol is also a component of bile, so by forcing the liver to make more bile, a de facto reduction of cholesterol occurs. LDL cholesterol goes down without affecting HDL cholesterol.

This same super power of psyllium also allows it to rid the body of some of its microplastics and forever chemicals. It turns out the bile that your liver produces contains both categories of those contaminants so as psyllium traps bile, it simultaneously ferries out the plastics and undesirable chemicals (along with cholesterol), thereby reducing the number of bad chemicals in serum.

Further, any microplastics or forever chemicals lying around in your digestive tract, courtesy of your last meal or swig from a soda bottle, are also kicked out of your body with the efficiency of an Irish barkeep at closing time.

This superpower isn’t unique to psyllium, though. Other fibers (insoluble, like those found in the skins of fruits and vegetables) also eliminate some of those same contaminants by latching onto bile, but not as efficiently or profoundly as psyllium.

Likewise, a component of bacteria, plants, and certain foods like oatmeal called beta glucan also does pretty much the same thing as psyllium. The only trouble is that you’d have to eat a lot of oatmeal to get the optimal result. True, you can buy a beta glucan supplement, but psyllium is a lot cheaper.

There is, however, a small problem with psyllium, kind of a Catch 22 situation. Like just about everything else, psyllium is alsocontaminated with microplastics. Oh, what cruel twist of fate! Nah, not really, because psyllium largely cleans up its own mess. In other words, it has the good manners to largely dispose of any microplastics it may introduce into your system.

General Recommendations

Think of yourself as Ukraine and microplastics and forever chemicals as Russia. Like Ukraine, you’re not likely to win the war or even earn a palatable victory, but by taking psyllium (and/or beta glucan) two or three times a day, you can win a few battles and feel just a little bit more secure about the plasticized world we live in.

One additional worrisome thought: The chemical onslaught is getting worse and worse. It’s likely that when you were a kid, things were only fractionally as bad as they are today. That brings us to today’s kids. At the rate that plastics are being produced, summarily dumped, and eventually degraded into microplastics, the average child of today is going to be more plastic than human by the time they reach adulthood. As such, it might be a good idea to start feeding kids psyllium when they’re young. Like right now.

It appears to be perfectly safe, but sure enough, a study conducted by Consumer Labs found that 9 out of 9 samples tested positive for lead, with 4 having amounts that exceeded safe levels. Those that exceeded safe levels are required to carry warning labels, but who knows if today’s FDA is “watching the hen house”?

Of course, it may be a moot point because it’s possible and even likely that psyllium cleans up after itself with lead, too.

Adults (or children over 12) can safely take 1 rounded teaspoon (about 5.8 grams) mixed in about 8 ounces of water up to 3 times a day). Children between 6 and 11 can take about 1.7 grams (half a rounded teaspoon) mixed in about 8 ounces of water up to 3 times a day. Children under 6 probably shouldn’t use it because it could conceivably cause choking (if not drunk quickly, the solution turns really thick).

Note that these instructions apply to Metamucil Premium Blend sweetened with stevia. Other formulations might have different instructions.

Oh, one additional note. Make sure you take any meds or supplements about two hours before or two hours after ingesting psyllium because, as you might have guessed, psyllium is sometimes indiscriminate in what it sweeps up and throws out the poop chute.

So please strongly consider employing a psyllium strategy. It’ll reduce cholesterol, improve gut health, lead to astounding regularity, and probably go a long way in making you less of a chemical dump.

###