Stuff You Should Know - Xenobiotics

Episode Date: August 10, 2023

Science is just realizing the extent of the tiny pollutants that have entered ecosystems across Earth and inside all humans. We call them xenobiotics – substances foreign to our bodies – and what effects they have on us we’re only starting to learn.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We're all here. Are you here? Great. Well then that makes this stuff much we're all here. Are you here? Great. Well then that makes this stuff much easier. You know what else is here? What? Microplastics. Yeah, what else?

I don't know. All kinds of PFASs and Xenobiotics. Yeah, maybe a little bit of BPDs. THCs. You can only say that if you sing it like, what's his face? Karrus one. No. A little bit up.

Mm-hmm-hmm. Blue Vega? Yeah. The guy who, fate, listen to our show, the fake Blue Vega who listen to our show. What does he have to do with, um, uh, who you say a little bit of, and you can't start any sense, like that without singing it, Lou Vegas style. Wow.

I love that joke that I just smashed all over the place. A little bit of plastic in your gut. It's about right, man. So 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 Xeno means foreign. Your Xeno fob, you're afraid of immigrants. If you're a Xeno file, you really love immigrant immigrants.

Yeah. But Xeno 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 it'd 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're so fully set into the global environment that 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 gonna kill all of us? Should we read that textbook definition now or did you wanna hang on to that? Go ahead.

All right. Zienobiotic is defined. Oh, here we go. Elementary school style. As a chemical that is not used, and this is, who is this from, by the way? Do we even know? No, I don't know.

All right. Zienobiotic 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

in homeostasis. Does not constitute a part of the conventional array of chemicals synthesized from nutrient chemicals in normal intermediary metabolism. So, like you said, it'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 xenobiotic. Oh, yeah, for sure. on purpose or you drink booze, technically that's a xenobiotic.

Oh yeah, for sure. Or unknowingly, which is 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 chryptofan. We don't make enough of that, so we can put that in our bodies through eating turkey or whatever.

And that is used in the normal physiological processes of keeping you alive. It would not qualify as a xenobiotics. The xenobiotics 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 body. 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 purposefully 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 all are quite proficient at seemingly getting into the human body. Yeah, they'll get in basically any way they can. If you stand there with your pants off, they're going to find a way in. Yeah, and we should also say at front, like a lot of this stuff is really kind of sad and scary. We should say there are like tens of millions of xenobotics and they're not all dangerous necessarily.

A lot of this stuff is, and we'll talk about why it's all fairly new as far as really studying it. Sometimes they can even be beneficial. It seems like that's on the rare side then when they're harmful. But one example in here was the stuff in soy, isoflavones. They can help regulate the converted, of course, and they can help regulate estrogen. they can help regulate the convertit of course and they can help regulate estrogen. Yes, but there is 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 isoflavones, 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 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, like, there's chemicals in this, and there's chemicals in that. I think using the word xenobiotics 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, a naturally occurring chemical, doesn't mean that it's necessarily good for you or isn't harmful. Yeah. I threw out some numbers, like tens of millions, according to the Journal of Chemical Research and Toxicology, more than 52 million organic and inorganic substances have been synthesized. And there are about 39 million that are commercially available. And in your life, like the average person walking around will be exposed to between one and three million different xenobotic substances in their life. Yeah. One to three million.

Different ones. Not one to three million times you're gonna be exposed to xenobiles. Yeah, 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 head around, frequently very dangerous or harmful stuff to us. And there's an NGO called KEMSEC that pointed out that of the chemicals that are in use in European Union countries, 65% of them are harmful to human health. And I wrote 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 prevents them from branching out and looking at new stuff because they're busy proving the original stuff is beyond a doubt harmful for you or the effects that it has. And that's just the ones that we know of that we've tested. 65% 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 inner bodies and unusual things happen after that. Yeah, beyond your material. 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 30 years. It's talking about three million xenobiotics. It can be that beneath. So one other thing you mentioned when you came up with plant bodies, this can affect not

just humans, but other animals, they implant 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 very frequently eat those animals and those plants. And so we ingest those things to very frequently eat those animals and those plants. And so we ingest those things to get introduced to those environments and those animals. And so the whole thing scales up. And there's some really interesting analogy between ecosystems and xenobiotics 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 xenobiotics. 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, will get to microplastics and specifically microbeads, but Obama and it actually got a 100% Senate support. Unrotten tomatoes, which is a rate. It broke the tomato meter.

It broke into tomato meter. When he signed the Microbead Free Water Act, or Free Waters Act in 2015. Okay. So this is when they said, hey, no more microbeads. And I thought, like, oh great, so there's not microbeads and cosmetics anymore. Not necessarily, there's no microbeads. What the act says is it can't be in rinse off cosmetics. So ostensibly what that saying is because we want to protect the water You know like when you wash the 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, you know, biotics.

Don't you find that fascinating? I do. So, 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 many millions. And there's a lot of overlap. So, like the many millions. And there's a lot of overlap. So it's kind of the case of where,

if you classify what you're saying, it's just this. But if you want to say, well, it's this chemical family. 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. Each of those could be its own classification. So it gets very unwieldy very quickly. Yeah, I think that EU has 17 groups of classifications for xenobiotics, and those are just the ones

that they have listed as the ones of most concern. But because there's so much overlap, there's so much, well, yeah, overlap. That almost renders classifying them, either so, you have to get so detailed that your book of classifications would be like the universe wide or it renders them basically useless. Cause some would just show up in every classification you have.

Right, and you might be thinking like, big who cares if you can classify them, 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 some, you know, some of the topics and yeah, or like how it's bad for you. Yeah, because I think there's like more than 18 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 they're in our cosmetics, they're in our cooking pans, 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 room through breast milk, through blood donations. 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 the before we go to break, we're not trying to be alarmist or prompting sort of hysteria or panic or anything like that. Like breast milk is a great example. Yes, xenobics can be passed through breast milk, but if you read about breast milk, health organizations still say, like the benefits of breast milk so vastly outweigh the harm that xenobiotics do, at least as far as we know now, that you definitely want to keep breastfeeding.

So we're not trying to scare anybody or prompt a panic, but this is the current state of the science right now. Yeah, and go read any cosmetic companies, mission statement on xenobiotics 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 2015, we've been doing this in this and it didn't say, well, because an entire Republican and Democratic Senate agreed to make that illegal.

They leave that off. 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. Alright, 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 shuttlecock in a badminton game. Exactly. So you've got shuttlecock's on the brink because I saw the way I'm documentary last night. Oh, was it good?

Oh, it's great. Were they in a badminton? There's one part with the Shuttlecock and George Michael. It's very dangerous. It is. It's as tantalizing as it sounds, believe me. I gotta watch that. What's that on?

Hmm, I'd rather not say. I'm just kidding. Netflix. Okay, 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. Bio-transformation is when the body breaks it down into its 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 going to 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 cut that hair. Like Britney Spears. Man, you're just dropping the funny rest today. Oh, 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 p turns bright yellow after taking a multivitamin. What you're seeing is the the excess B six or 12 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 and if neon status. Like wham style. Yeah, but technically you could drink your pee with that vitamin B and you would ingest 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 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 puffed on a doobie. Okay. That THC is a xenobiotic, and THC is most people know who know anything about it is absorbed in fat mainly. It was called adipose. Yeah, that's your fatty tissue. Yeah, adipose fat.

And that's where a lot of that THC goes and it didn't stay there for everything, but a lot of different kinds of xenobiotics may go into those fat deposits. Let's say you 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 xenobiotics 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 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 got up and said, Mo, come on, you know when the red lights on, what that means. She's like, sorry, I know, but I just can't stay in landscape versus.

There may have been a couple of barks in there though, but I like that, I like a mum who can't meet up. Let's leave it. All right, cool, we will, she'll love it. Oh yeah. So we're, PCP, that's what you're talking about. We're at PCP.

Oh, there's one other thing that happens too, right? So when this, say the THC gets released back into your system chuck. One of the things, as it enters the bloodstream, you 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. And the liver actually produces enzymes

that seem to be dedicated to metabolizing xenobiotics. We have a whole class of genes called cytochrome 450 genes. They express enzymes that convert xenobiotics into less harmful stuff in the body. Pretty cool, right? And it also shows that xenobiotics 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 is 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 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 one? Hangover, hangover, 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 acetaldehyde. And that's a metabolite of alcohol and that is the carcinogen. That's the thing that is, you know, if you're severe alcoholic and you're dying from it,

it's from that acetaldehyde, which is, 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, they 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 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.

Plutonium. Yeah, you can be a little more specific. The conditions of the human that ingest something makes it really hard to get a really precise half life on xenobotics because you have 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 xenobiles. Like a big range. Yeah, like Al Prasalam, I think is an antidepressant or anti-anxiety drug, has a half-life of six to 12 hours.

Yeah, so you're there 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 azenobiotic 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 xenobiotics or do other things. You can make them much more targeted and personalized. That's one of the reasons for 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 xenobiotics, 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 said many times before Earth's kidneys Because they're so good at filtering toxins out of water and they do them in a few different ways One of the main ways is that they just trap them in the sediment Yeah, they lay on top of them like a Murderer in a hospital room with a pillow over the victim's face. Yeah, the forever hug. Exactly. And that's very similar to our method of absorption, where it just gets locked into our tissues.

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'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 bio-transformation? 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 whole 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 sometimes it's like, 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 the journey of the xenobiotic in the environment is kind of like inhumans, but kind of different

and fraught with 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 of that stuff contributes to it. And then, like as xenobiotic in the environment, interacting with other xenobiotics, same thing in our bodies. We're finding that xenobiotic in the environment, interacting with other xenobiotics. Same thing in our bodies.

We're finding that xenobiotics interact with other xenobiotics, and then they interact in different ways with the metabolites of xenobiotic, 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. I think anytime you say, I would be a fool to say no.

That means I need to collect myself. Sure. Alright, 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 maybe the more gentile 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.

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 chemicals. The one example that was used in here was this woman that was was found to have something called oxy-chloridane in her body, which is a metabolite of a pesticide called chloridane. And they use 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 88 in the state, since 81 in the UK, when this person, this woman was a one, a one year old baby, but that stuff was still in her body, you know, 30 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. Oh interesting. And because the half life of Claudeine is 30 years, that means there's still in me, right? And that means that I probably passed it along to my kids as well. And that's a, I mean, that's a, 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 xenobotic 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 1940s. These aren't brand new either. And specifically,

one type of those PFAS, PFAS, Polyfloreoalcal substances. Yeah, 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 Gore-Tex and Teflon and flame retardants that firefighters use. Like I said, these have been around for a long time. They exist, and I think more than these PFAS, PFAS is, was 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 ads. I think they just say PFAS or PFAS. PFAS. Okay. Well, it should be plural. I think so. But there are more than, I think, 12,000 forms in thousands of products. Yeah. And it's a big deal. This is the stuff that should cause some alarm. So one of the things about those products

that PFAS is are used in is that it can wash away, right? Like 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 raincoat or something like that. And it's meant to very delicately wash it because you can very easily wash that coating on. 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 your municipal wastewater system. And we have no idea how to get PFASs out of our water. So it's just introduced into water and it can go anywhere from that point. Yeah, and 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 97% of Americans. Yeah, so the National Institutes of Health here in the blood of 97% of Americans. Yeah, so the National Institutes of Health here in the United States says, we don't 100% know exactly what kind of harm this causes. So the NIH is being very courteous to big chemical and saying like, we don't know for sure that it does, but if you listen to the EPA or the CDC, they're willing to say PFAS has been linked to a whole suite of health

problems from endocrine disruption, low birth weight, lower 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 PFASAs before we start regulating PFAS'

and I think the EPA just issued its first guideline as recently as 2016. And these things have been around since the 40s and there's a bunch of lawsuits that do palm 3M have known they were harmful since at least 1961. Yeah and they're going, they're 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 is, you know, they have to be so, it's a little frustrating, cause they have to say, you know, like, could cause problems in infants and older children and stuff like that, cause like you said, they haven't certifiably like proven the stuff, but it's just such an obvious thing.

I hope when people read warnings like that, they don't say, oh well, they haven't absolutely proved it, so it's just fine. Yeah, the thing is, the science doesn't need to start adopting that. It's like, it's totally, 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, I'm going to

wait around 20 years to feel the toxicology to prove 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 were 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 cells and they have, and it showed cell damage and cell death. But you can't design a study where you just feed people microplastics and microplastics. No, 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 as a plastic less than five millimeters.

There are a couple of kinds. It can be the primary or your secondary. Secondary means it's broken down from a larger plastic. And this is like might be microplastics you find in the ocean from larger plastic. This has just been out there forever. Or the primary kind is the stuff that is manufactured and purposefully 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 coating 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 PFAES is that when you wash that same Gore-Tex coat, that coat's made of microplastics. And some of those are going to come out. And just like the PFAES, 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 in what is essentially pristine Arctic areas. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you've ever, you've ever wondered, like, why is it that when I shred cheese with a cheese shredder, it's all stuck together, like cheese does. And when I buy this 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, they coat

this little shreds of cheese with stuff to keep them from clumping together. I'm not sure what is in cheese if it's a xenobiotic. So I probably should have checked that, but it just like came to me at the top of my head. If you know that they spray something onto the cheese to keep it from sticking, there's a hundred percent chances of xenobiotic. Actually here it is, it's cellulose.

Okay, so that would technically count because we don't, like we eat cellulose, but it is, it's cellulose. Okay, so that would technically count because we eat cellulose, but it doesn't necessarily contribute to our normal physiological processes. So in that circumstance, it would be a xenobiotic. Yeah, there's an article that I'm seeing now, cellulose, colon, the wood pulp in your shred of 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 100% 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 shredded 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. That's the great thing about shredding your own cheese. It keeps you busy breaking it up.

Yeah. The great thing about shredding your own cheese keeps you busy breaking it up Yeah, so there's a lot of ways that microplastics PFA s is Zion bioxin 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 xenobiotic, you can be treated typically. There's an antidote out there maybe that can help you metabolize a faster, that can block the same receptors, that that xenobiotic would attach to and keep it from harming you.

But with cancer, it's typically the result of a build up from repeated exposure of a xenobiotic 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 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 xenobiotics 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 xenobotics, especially built-up ones. Yeah, and 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. I hope it's coming through.

They are studying that stuff, but if you're talking about long-term exposure, you're talking about multi-year studies, and they 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 they're you know tens of millions of these chemicals So, hey, 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 know, it's a very daunting thing. Where they're doing great working cancer research, but there's just so much out there. It's tough.

For sure. So a lot of people are saying, well, let's turn to AI. AI can figure this out. AI can grasp this, like, galaxy of interactions between different xenobiotics in 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 signature to it so that you can very quickly detect what your body is 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, 100 years or so they were like, for, you know, a hundred years or so, they were like, um, pee in this thing and we'll test your pee. Yeah. And that was kind of where the research ended. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And 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 you're dead, they'll go dig into your bone or your fatty tissue and start testing to see what's there. Wow, so that's, you know, biotics 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, 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 put it out, we did customs twice. I don't remember that, but I guess we did.

Oh, neither, 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 mail. I'm gonna call this it has been spanked on the bottom. Oh, yes. Aloha guys and Jerry. I just want to share a bit of serendip. I like this already. After having listened to the Magic Eye illusions episode of my family and I just stayed in the cabin Mount St. Helens and I had an old school handheld stereo scope. That is awesome, so cool.

My kids really loved it, included some pics and there are some pics of these kids. Popping out at your chest? In their little jammies? No, they're using this thing and it's adorable. Look at those cute kids in a little bedtime jammies. Or is my daughter called some jammies? Oh really? How British?

I don't know why. My mom did it. Well, you said in our language learning episode that your mom, right, kind of apes British people in the Brits around them. So that's probably where I mean. That's what it was. But don't your jammies.

That's right. That was think that's what it was. Put on your jaw, man. That's it. That was Tim Pich. That was Tim Pich. 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 Poo.

Yes. Aloha once again, because as we know, that can be a lowing goodbye. That is from Baird. And also, any name is, hello, and goodbye. That is from Baird, and also, any name's his kid, so I'm going to also Mia and Luke, and this email has been spanked on the bottom, wrapped up in spanked on the bottom with consent. Nice.

Well, Mahalo, Baird, Mia and Luke, we appreciate that big time, it was a great email. Agreed. And thanks for the cute pics. If you wanna be like Bairard and Mia and Luke and say, a low-ha or anything else, you can email it to us. Send it off to stuffpodcast.idhardradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio.

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