MicroPlastics In Bottled Water DESTROY Your Body

Hello Health Champions. Did you know that  there are hundreds of millions of tons  

of plastic in the ocean today? And if you  don't live in or on or even near the ocean  

that may not seem like a super urgent problem,  but I want you to take this very personally  

because some of that plastic it's making its  way into every living thing on the planet  

every day, and some of those living things are  you and your loved ones. Plastics are only about  

a hundred years old or so, but in that time  period they have been life-changing today  

they're used in almost every product you use  like phones, cars, computers, medical devices,  

storage, insulation for temperature,  electrical insulation, trash bags, trash cans,  

storage. And every continent on the planet and  all that plastic has made life very convenient,  

but it's that very convenience that  also creates the biggest problem because  

most of that plastic is for single use.  Forty percent of all the plastic produced  

we use once, and we throw it away. So if you're  thirsty you open up a bottle of water, you drink  

for five minutes, and then it takes 500 years  or so to break it down and it's even worse than  

that 500 years because it doesn't really break  down and we'll come back and talk about that.  

And when we talk about the garbage in the ocean  it is mostly the single-use containers single-use  

products that make their way into the ocean  and the beaches and the rivers now there's a  

lot of talk about saving the oceans and it is for  good reason we use 1.3 billion bottles of water  

every day in the world we have created 8.3  billion tons of plastic between 1950 and 2018  

and half of that is in the last 13 years so this  growth the production of plastic is increasing  

exponentially only nine percent of all this  plastic has been recycled and less than one  

percent gets recycled twice twelve percent of that  plastic has been burned and 79 is still sitting in  

landfills or have spilled into the environment and  into the ocean so right now ongoing more than 10  

million tons of plastic is ending up in the oceans  every year and you may be wondering how does it  

get there I recycle my plastic bottles well 93  of it ends up in rivers and it's only 10 rivers  

primarily in Asia and Africa that is putting all  that plastic in the ocean and that's because they  

have most of the people but also because their  industrial age is much much younger than the rest  

of the world so what this tells us is this is a  much much bigger problem than just recycling your  

plastic bottle so how does this affect our health  well we have to take a few steps to get there  

what's the mechanism of harm well it kills  wildlife more than one million animals per  

year are killed and the ones that we can count  and notice they're the ones who get entangled in  

old fishing nets who suffocate from eating plastic  bags and who starve to death like this albatross  

because they ate so much plastic they couldn't  digest food or they just weren't hungry because  

their feeding signals were turned off by all that  plastic but that's just the big stuff those are  

just the big pieces that you can see the obnoxious  ugly thing then there is microplastics and these  

are when the plastic breaks down into smaller  particles now they're five millimeters or less  

meaning they look like grains of sand or they're  so small we can't even see them and this probably  

kills many many times more animals but also humans  because now we have impaired breathing we have  

impaired kidney function it clogs up the kidneys  because they're a filter and when they get even  

smaller to the point where we can maybe not  even see them with a microscope now they're  

nanoplastics and now they have found that they  can even cross the blood brain barrier and once  

we get even smaller we're down to the molecular  level and now we start talking about hormone or  

endocrine disruptors and i'll come back and cover  that in some detail but in humans as well as other  

animals this can result in impaired reproduction  now here's maybe the biggest question we have to  

get answered and that is where does it go where  does all this plastic eventually go and the  

general idea that we're told is that it takes 500  maybe a thousand years for this to biodegrade and  

break down but that's not really true and here's  why because plastics are something called polymers  

and that's a chemical term it simply basically  means many units so you start off with one unit  

and then you link it together through a chemical  process and you get a polymer which is just  

a hugely long molecule where you've basically  fused these smaller molecules into larger ones  

the interesting thing is that these are still  only made up primarily of carbon hydrogen  

and oxygen the same stuff that we're made up of  the same stuff our food is made up of because  

it comes from petroleum products now the  difference is that everything else in nature  

at some point will decompose but plastic doesn't  so our bodies and food and trees everything in  

nature eventually gets broken down by enzymes and  it turns out to nothing more than carbon dioxide  

and water but this doesn't happen to polymers  because even though they're the same stuff  

we don't have enzymes there are no things  that have enzymes except one little exception  

and we'll get there that's some good news but  because of this the bottles don't really go away  

they don't really biodegrade they don't really  break down they just become invisible they get  

smaller and smaller until they're all  nanoparticles but we still have hundreds  

of billions of tons of nanoparticles so in other  words it's all still there and where do we get it  

we get it from air food and water when they  examined water samples around the world  

they found plastic in 80 of all the drinking  water in the world and in the united states  

that number was 94 so what that means is that we  all consume about 5 grams of nanoparticle plastics  

every week it's about a credit card worth of  plastic and if you take that over a longer  

period it's 250 grams a year about half a pound  of plastic a year that you're eating and this is  

a substance that is foreign to the human genome we  never experienced this until a hundred years ago  

and now basically every living being on the planet  is eating plastic every day but now let's go one  

step beyond the nanoparticles let's talk about the  molecular level how does this actually do damage  

well when they make plastics they also use  additives and this is to give the plastic  

different properties so plastic can be soft or  hard or flexible or elastic and it's the additives  

that help give the plastic those properties so the  even bigger problem is that these additives are  

known as endocrine disruptors endocrine has to do  with your hormones your hormone system and these  

chemicals they disrupt and here's how that works  they mimic hormones primarily estrogen so in your  

body you have a signaling system your body makes  you do things it controls behavior and metabolism  

and all these different things because you have  receptors your body produces a hormone and this  

hormone fits into the receptor and when that is  filled it's like a key in a lock it turns on a  

function it changes something and it has an effect  this is on purpose this is what the body wants to  

do to make things happen but if we have endocrine  disruptors now we have foreign substances that  

look close enough to estrogen to actually fit  into the lock and to create that same effect  

when it's not supposed to so now what it's doing  these endocrine disruptors are basically hijacking  

your signals this precious delicate system  that your body has set up to get things done  

it's being hijacked creating metabolic  changes immune changes reproductive changes  

and even behavioral changes now there are  hundreds of different additives like that but  

you've probably heard of two of them bpa and pvc  so pvc has to do with plastic pipes and industrial  

products and things like that bpa has to do with  things we consume water bottles canned food things  

like that and there's lots of data linking these  to reproductive problems neurological problems  

decreased immunity Alzheimer's disease childhood  asthma and metabolic disease we talk a lot about  

that on this channel here's one more way that  our modern lifestyle creates problems we have  

type 2 diabetes cardiovascular disease and when  something has been around long enough and creates  

a bunch of problems it gets a bad rap so now  manufacturers are very eager to find something  

else so now they just take this bpa they replace  one little sub unit and it's called bps or bpf  

so now they can sell you a product and call it bpa  free but now it has bps in it which is essentially  

the same thing so there's some simple things that  you can do right now to help and that is instead  

of buying water bottles you get a water filter you  use reusable containers you drink from glass and  

steel and ceramics and again this is both going to  help your health and that of the planet also you  

never want to heat any food in plastics i cringe  when i buy all these new products where everything  

is neatly packaged and you can get your broccoli  and your cauliflower and your brussels sprouts  

in little bags that are ready to boil and they say  for your convenience boil it in the plastic bag no  

you don't want to do that that's like asking for a  dose of these endocrine disruptors and if you use  

ziploc bags for food storage then only use those  for dry items and try to reuse them as much as  

possible because it's the liquids and especially  acidic liquids that interact with the plastic like  

tomato sauce and things like that so you never  want to put that in a plastic bag for storage  

now after all that let's have some good news that  the world is becoming more and more aware of this  

that there are things being done to change this in  2017 193 countries came together and signed a u.n  

resolution to start reducing and eventually stop  the plastic pollution in the world now obviously  

that's not going to happen overnight so the more  you do to help the more you help the planet and  

yourself and here is maybe the biggest piece of  hope that we've had yet in 2016 some japanese  

researchers discovered a plastic eating bacteria  i'm not kidding you this is the real thing that  

while we've never had anything on the planet that  could digest these polymers there was a favorable  

mutation somewhere and this bacteria actually  learned to make something called a polymerase  

that's an enzyme that can actually break down  polymers now we didn't have that enzyme before  

because polymers never existed until 100 years  ago but now there's bacteria that can actually eat  

plastic as its primary source of energy and  the end result is just carbon dioxide and water  

just like when you eat vegetables now we're  not quite home free yet because the bacteria  

only knows how to consume one type of plastic  called pet or pet and also these bacteria were  

consuming plastic rather slowly so it's not on an  industrial scale yet but there is hope and right  

now there's researchers around the world racing  to work and develop other organisms other bacteria  

that can consume other types of plastic and  they can do it much faster and on a scale that  

we they could actually consume billions of tons  of this plastic and turn it into carbon dioxide  

and water but there's more good news because  there's something you can do right now that's  

because there's a group of youtube influencers  video creators just like myself who has created  

team c's and their goal is to raise 30  million dollars in the next couple of months  

and for every dollar they raise they have a  guarantee from other organizations they work  

with to remove one pound of trash from the ocean  so if they succeed with their goal that means  

that there will be 30 million pounds less trash in  the ocean in the near future so i urge you to give  

whatever amount you can if you can spare twenty  dollars and donate it then there will be twenty  

pounds less garbage thanks to you if you can give  a hundred dollars there will be a hundred pounds  

less garbage because you cared if you enjoyed  this video you're going to love that one and if  

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