Plastics were once hailed as a miracle product. They are cheap, durable, lightweight, and can be formed into any possible shape for an endless variety of purposes. Just look around your environment right now and you will surely see dozens of products that use plastics. While they have undoubtedly influenced our economy, have you considered what they are doing to our health?
There have been a growing number of reports highlighting several concerns about plastics in our environment. Perhaps you think you’re doing your part by filling up your recycling bin, but the reality is that only 5% of plastics actually get recycled. That’s it.
Plastics are also notoriously slow to decompose, which means that the amount that ends up in landfills continues to add up. Even when it does break down, we have to wonder how these chemicals are affecting groundwater, the health of the soil and future plant life.
However, soil and groundwater are a small concern considering what a recent report says about the effects of plastic in the ocean. By the year 2050, the amount of plastic in our oceans may be greater than the amount of fish!
Plastics have been found in the most remote places on earth including the tops of the highest mountains, and microplastics are even carried in the wind, literally raining down on us from the sky. As they continue to surround us from every angle, it should come as no surprise that plastics are beginning to become more and more of a problem for human health.
It goes without saying that there is no recommended daily amount of plastics in our diets and that we shouldn’t see any sort of plastics in our bodies. Despite these assumptions, plastics are found in nearly every living human.
Consider this: every week, the average American ingests an amount of plastic equal to the size of a credit card. Microplastics have even been found in 90% of umbilical cord blood samples, meaning that these plastic particles are affecting babies even before they officially enter the world, and plastics have been detected in the blood of 77% of adults. Plastics also make their way into our bodies through the cooking process, by using plastic cutting boards and even cooking on non-stick surfaces.
What are Plastics Doing to our Health?
Perhaps it will help to look back at what these products were originally developed to do. BPA (Bisphenol A, a common type of plastic) was originally developed in 1890 as a synthetic estrogen. It was specifically designed and researched as an artificial birth control drug. BPA is known to leach into food and drinks, giving you a dose of hormone-disrupting microplastic residue with every bite or sip.
Other types of plastic are not immune, either. Essentially all plastics will give off a little bit of itself when it touches your food or drink. I highly recommend reading this full article to get a deeper understanding of the issue: https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/living-in-the-plasticene-the-plastic-age/
More recent research has continued to back up this idea of microplastics and other toxins getting into our foods, even through the packaging that we find in the stores. How many packaged foods are in plastic bags, bottles or tubs? Even canned foods often have a plastic lining on the inside. They are everywhere!
How to Protect Yourself and Your Family
In order to protect yourself and your family from the negative health impacts of plastics, it starts with awareness of the issue. Because they are found in nearly every human and the most remote areas of the world, it is simply not an option to believe that you are somehow immune to the issue.
Keep the following in mind:
- Do not heat up foods in plastic containers
- Let hot foods cool down before putting them into plastic containers
- Use glass or metal containers if possible
- Avoid cooking or storing in aluminum or iron (also known to leach into foods)
- Avoid using plastic and non-stick coated cookware
- Use steel or titanium cookware
- Use wood cutting boards
These tips will help, but as you saw earlier in this article, these microplastics are already everywhere – even in your body! We are fans of taking high-quality nutritional supplements for our health, but you cannot out-nutrient a toxicity. To put that another way, vitamins and minerals are incredibly important and can enhance many functions of the body, but sometimes we have to roll up our sleeves and get dirty going after these toxins directly.
In our 14 years of clinical practice, we have seen a significant shift in this approach. It used to be sufficient to give someone a liver support supplement and this would help the body detox from a variety of stressors. Not anymore! The world is simply too full of toxins, and plastics are just one of them.
What we find works best now is a category of supplements that are relatively new to the scene that are simply referred to as “Binders”. These products assist the detox process by escorting the toxins out of the body safely and effectively. We have used different types of binders over the years, with the latest and greatest ones coming from CellCore.
By mixing fulvic and humic acids with their “BioActive Carbon® Technology” along with several other powerful herbs and nutrients, they have created a product that has been shown to remove environmental and industrial toxins, parabens, pesticides and herbicides, phthalates, radioactive elements, heavy metals, and volatile organic compounds. These binders are also good at handling byproducts from parasites, Lyme infections, candida and fungus, mycotoxins, and they even disrupt viruses and bacteria. Check out the full summary of this research here.
CellCore offers a variety of binders, and it is hard to go wrong. The only way to know which one is best for you is to see one of our Quantum Nutrition Testing practitioners, but our general recommendation is to take a few BioToxin Binder every day. They can be taken with or without food and at any time of day. By adding this to your daily regimen, you can give yourself a crucial layer of protection from the onslaught of environmental toxins that are degrading and destroying us all.
For more information about how these binders can improve your health, check our our Inflammation Drainage and Detox Guide which includes our powerful protocol for helping to rid your body of these unwanted toxins.
If you want more direct guidance on improving your health, check out Empowered Health Foundations. This is essentially a lifestyle bootcamp designed to improve your health by improving your daily actions. Join us for our free Masterclass to get more information on this course along with several free strategies that you can put into place immediately. If you know you need more specific help with more acute issues, our best option is to see one of our Quantum Nutrition Testing practitioners.
With all of these options, we recommend doing whatever you can relative to your needs and your ability to follow through. Please reach out if you have any questions.
-Dr. David Kolowski
