Microplastics Survival Guide
Last Updated: 16 December 2024

Plastics, as a material, has tremendous properties. It is lightweight, dirt cheap, insulates heat very well, high dielectric constant, easy to modify into any given shape or color. Probably only rivalled by concrete if you'd try to measure the footprint we have left upon the world. Just as we remember the Babylonians by their sun-dried clay bricks, the Egyptians & Inca empire by their stonework, the Scythians for their leather & woodcraft, we will be remebered by our polyethylene, our polypropylene, and our polyvinyl chloride.

Figure 1. Total Global Plastic Production in billion tons.

Plastic is very, very durable. The advantages are obvious, but it becomes problematic when it ends up inside our body. We can't break it down, our enzymes cannot affect the non-biological molecular structure. Your favorite Lego minifigures do not have to worry about being consumed by bacteria in the next thousand years.

Yet, the little yellow men are far from immortal. People often say that any plastic "will be around for a million years" and that is SORT OF true.. If we wait, let's say ten thousand years, even with near-zero environmental stress, the plastic would have become so brittle that it would turn into dust when you touched it. This dust is what we call.. microplastics.

It's still plastic. Just in the form of tiny particles. You can probably guess what happens next. The microplastics break down into even smaller pieces, into.. Yes, you got it right..

Nanoplastics.

To be precise, microplastics are particles smaller than 5 millimeters (0.2 inches) and nanoplastics are smaller than 1 micrometer (0.00004 inches) so please note that there's a pretty big gap between those two terms.

Plastic in itself is not a very potent toxin. For the very same reasons we can't break them down - it is chemically inert to us, we can't really interface with it. There's a huge catch, though.

When you produce plastics, you add more chemicals, to make the plastic flexible and durable. Plastic in itself is incredibly brittle, just like the ten thousand year old Lego man. These chemicals are called plasticizers, the most infamous example being the highly toxic phtalates.

It does not stop there.

More chemicals are added to prevent the plastic from being flammable. Bromine is commonly used for this purpose, which is highly damaging to us because it competes against iodine in our bodies, causing sharp decrease in metabolic function and energy.

It keeps going.

Artificial dyes are added to color the plastic materials, which are typically transparent by themselves, like a plastic bottle of water for instance. Historically, these dyes have been heavy metal-based: Cadmium, chromium, lead, cobalt, antimony. There has been a recent shift away from these highly dangerous metals towards less damaging ones like titanium and iron. Progress, but still unacceptable.

More chemicals left to add? Yep.

Sunlight, specifically the ultraviolet frequencies, is the greatest enemy of plastic. So, they add chemicals to try and counteract that. In the beginning, they used heavy metals: Lead and cadmium. The still use some heavy metals - Zinc, sometimes Barium (!) but often we are lucky to see them use water soluble toxins here, like benzotriazole. Being water soluble means we can get it out of our body quickly, unlike heavy metals which will accumulate over time, being one of the main drivers of aging.

Just one more type of chemical left now..

It is mainly added to food packaging.

When you read the reason why they add it, you may laugh.

The "antimicrobials" are chemicals that are added for the specific purpose of being toxic! To prevent the food from fermenting (sidenote: fermentation is always good if food is raw, and potentially dangerous for cooked/processed/toxic food) they make the plastic extra toxic so there is little chance of bacteria surviving on the plastic's surface.

These chemical adjuvants are the real enemy.

The plastics are the Trojan horses carrying them into our body.

The adjuvant chemicals are distributed across the entire plastic, so when the plastic breaks down into small particles, they will carry the adjuvants with them, coated on the outside, hidden inside, partially exposed, they will gradually float off from the plastic as it gets smaller. This process is more or less neverending, because the adjuvants are small enough small enough to attach even to the smallest nanoplastics.

There are two ways for plastic to get into our body.

Eating / Drinking

..and..

Inhaling

For the average person, the total plastic toxicity is split roughly 50/50 between these two pathways. When we breathe in plastics, or any other particles for that matter, we have a layer of mucus that catches almost all plastics before they can reach the lungs, so the particles end up in your digestive tract alongside the plastic that we eat. (Sidenote: If you do not produce enough mucus to protect your respiratory health, milkshakes fixes this with ease, raw milk/cream preferable)

If we did not have mucus in our lungs, people would have extreme breathing issues, because our lungs would be clogged with microplastics that can not be broken down or escorted away, virtually every little plastic particle inhaled would remain in the lungs forever.

Thank god for mucus. The largest factor in female fertility is the ability to produce mucus, to provide a good environment for the conception. Meanwhile, mainstream health information is advising people to reduce mucus, reduce dairy intake, all while the fertility rates is crashing and skyrocketing asthma rates (which is the result of less mucus and more air pollution).

Figure 2. Historical rates of Doctor-diagnosed asthma.

So, how bad has the global plastic threat gotten, how powerful is the enemy we are up against? Let us look at the total amount of plastic that has accumulated in the ocean, surely it can't be THAT bad, can it?

Figure 3. Total Plastic Accumulated in the Ocean.

If we change nothing then we are less than 30 years away from having more plastic than fish in the ocean.

Only 0.5% of plastic garbage end up in the ocean, but the inability of nature to break it down makes it accumulate quickly. This is obviously highly alarming, and far more impactful to all life on Earth than obsessing over (beneficial..) CO₂ emissions. It is hard to argue against plastic pollution being the number one issue.

It is quite shocking to see where the ocean's plastic waste comes from..

Figure 4. Annual Plastic Ocean Waste Emissions by Country.

Wars have been started for less. In fact, one could argue that MOST wars have been started for less. As technological power increases alongside short-termism (incentivized by inflationary fractional reserve banking), surely environmentally motivated warfare will become a thing sooner or later. We all want the same thing, and we pray that it can all get resolved diplomatically. But is HAS to be solved, and it must happen as soon possible.

Enough about the ocean, let's talk about our bodies now..

How bad is it?

You've probably heard that the average person ingests roughly a credit card worth of plastic every week. If you have heard it, you probably found it unreasonable, and you were right, it is a gross exaggeration. The average person consumes much less than that. There a few studies which foolishly tried to calculate how much microplastics we consume by aggregating measurements of microplastic levels in different types of food. This is foolish because microplastics are counted manually by microscope, measured in "particles per liter/kg", and since the size range of particles that can be detected varies enormously between studies (different types and quality of microscope), you get crazy numbers when you try to attach a "typical particle weight" to all those apples and oranges.

Basically, no one is eating a credit card per week, or even close to it.

Meanwhile, other researchers have done the same mistake in opposite direction, ending up with the conclusion that we are barely ingesting any microplastic at all. This is also wrong. We have found a sound way to estimate our plastic consumption, but first we need to discuss how microplastics behave in the body.

We are lucky that very little of the plastic we ingest or inhale actually gets absorbed into the body and bloodstream. Microplastics are simply too large. The plastic particles start to effectively get absorbed from the digestive tract when they are smaller than 5 micrometers (below is 1 micrometer is where we begin to call it nanoplastics).

This means that most of the plastic is in your digestive tract. In fact, a whole 90% of the plastic waste in your body are microplastics in your digestive tract. Too large to get absorbed, but will continually degrade from mechanical & chemical stress, leaching nanoplastics and toxic chemicals.

Meanwhile, a majority of the body's plastic waste that are outside the digestive tract is nanoplastics. The particles get so small that they are hard to detect scientifically, thus this is a highly understudied area, but we know that the smaller nanoplastics can even pass into our cells.

The nanoplastic particles floating around in our bodies are not evenly distributed. Most of the plastic in our body is hydrophobic, which essentially means that they don't like water, I am sure you have seen how water curls up at the surface area of plastic, you can see that the water and plastic "does not like each other".

Most of the plastic in the body is also lipophilic. This means that the plastic is attracted to fat.

This is quite typical of bodily toxins, if they are water soluble then they are quickly excreted as we have a high daily turnover of the fluids in our body, but comparatively extremely slow turnover of organ tissue, fat deposits, and other fatty parts of the body. Where there is fat, there is no water, as they are polar opposites. Thus, most of the nanoplastics in our body accumulate into our fatty tissue.

Much of the plastic in the ocean accumulates at the surface, because it is lighter than water. Our bodies are not immune to gravity, and just like heavy metals typically accumulate in feet since they are, well, heavy (Sidenote: Athlete's foot is fungal detox) most of the nanoplastics want to travel upwards.

So.. the plastic particles are so small they can go anywhere they want, they want to travel upwards, and are attracted to fatty tissue.. See where this is going? Our brains are 60% fat. It is a magnet for nanoplastics.

How much plastic do we have in our brains? How bad is it?

There was a study in 2024 where they looked at the brains of 16 deceased participants, to measure the amount of nanoplastics. It turned out that 0.5% of the average brain weight was plastic! This study was actually a repeat of a similar study made in 2016 which had 0.32% plastic in the average brain, so it has gone up +50% in 8 years which is incidentally how much plastic waste in the ocean has increased during that time.

74% of the plastic in the brain is polyethylene. All of it is nanoplastics, must be very small to pass the blood-brain barrier, under 100 nanometers, probably 50 nanometers or lower are most common in the brain.

In the kitchen, there are lots of plastic items that we use in our daily lives that can be cheaply replaced with natural materials. Do you need any of these, perhaps?

Did you know that chewing gum is plastic? They try to distract your from this fact in many ways, and no one is forcing the companies to admit it, but it is indeed plastic. This is a modern phenomenon, of course. Our ancestors have used chewing gum for millions of years, would you like to try doing it the right way? This is a little harder to chew than the modern fake gum, you should refrain from doing it if you have sensitive dental work done: Crown, bridge or denture. If you're not disqualified, you really ought to try this at least once.

When you extract salt, you are also concentrating microplastic particles. Salt is a significant source of microplastics for most people, and the best estimates is that somewhere between 0.2% and 2% of the microplastics you eat comes from salt. This can by reduced to zero by clicking the shiny red button below!

So, we know that whenever plastic is mechanically stressed, it will release micro- and nanoplastic particles, then you can consider what happens when you fill a plastic ice cube tray with water, put it in the freezer, and see the plastic get absolutely smashed up by the water growing +9% in size when it crystallizes into ice.. We have a better alternative.

Teabags are one of the most potent sources of microplastics. You may have seen the new, horrible plastic tea bags that look like fish nets, they will of course leach large amounts of chemicals and microplastics into the tea. The old, classic teabags that you are used to seeing, they are made from paper and not plastic. However, they fused them shut using plastics, so even paper teabags will leak millions if not billions of microplastic particles, stressed by the dramatic temperature change, heat and acidity from the tea. The solution is to buy loose leaf tea and use your own infuser. Stainless steel tea infusers are good to use, but if you really want to be optimized, your top choice is borosilicate glass, the same material they use in lab glassware, where purity truly matters.

The typical oral hygiene routine is pretty comical when you think about it from a perspective of evaluating microplastic exposure. Toothbrush is plastic bristles glued to a larger plastic stick that you mechanically stress inside your mouth. Until it was made illegal, toothpaste had microplastics AS A DELIBERATE INGREDIENT with the motivation "these microbeads increase the scrubbing power" and then you have floss which is typically Teflon coated with more than a handful of plastic-derived synthetic chemicals, feels like crayon because that is in fact the same family of chemicals, it is not unfair to say that floss is coated with white crayon. The irony of arch-example of an idiot being someone who eats crayons would humour us, if the whole situation did not make us so angry at dentistry.

9 out of 10 dentists..
..should go to jail.

We have something quite nice for you here, toothbrush with boar bristles. Remember to write your names on the handle, and enjoy another piece of your daily routine, completely free of plastic.

"Miswak" is a stick that you scrub away the ends off into something resembling a brush, which you then use pretty much as a toothbrush. It is a lot of fun to use, and it is very effective at removing plaque, without any of the disadvantages of a plastic toothbrush. It has been common practice for thousands of years in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The Muslim Prophet Muhammed said that if it were not too much to ask, he would tell every believer to use a miswak every time they prayed, which is five times a day, totalling 47 minutes..

And that sums up the disadvantage of a miswak, it takes more time. Other than that, they are great.

There are a few alternatives to plastic which are even more toxic, while being plagued by all the other problems of plastic. Synthetic rubber is one example, like the tires on a car, for instance. Another highly toxic alternative to plastic is PFAS, often referred to as a "forever chemical" and the helpful people at the car companies have made sure to cover almost the entire inside of their cars with PFAS. Car companies are seemingly run by number-improving engineers, only a complete lack of regard for human health would result in the cars we see today. "New car smell" is toxic off-gassing of the chemical adjuvants in the plastics and PFAS interiors. You should leave your car in the sun all day with the windows slightly opened so the toxic interior can release the gasses without any humans present.

The steering wheel of almost every car is completely covered in PFAS. This is true even for real leather steering wheels, because "it enhances the lifespan of the steering wheel", wow thank you very much, really helpful.

While we wait for at least ONE car manufacturer to start caring about health, the best we can do is to cover our steering wheel with sheepskin, because you deserve better than rubbing your hands against PFAS for hours and hours. Sheepskin is not only cozy, but also offers excellent triboelectric grounding against static electrical buildup from EMF.

It's common for hairbrushes and combs to be plastic. There are no measurements whether this is a significant source of microplastic exposure or not, we would guess no, but who knows? Either way, the electrical side of using natural materials like real boar bristles or goat hair instead of plastic is an improvement to health, since these materials are on the opposite end of the triboelectric series, that means that friction between your hair and the brush will either give you a positive or a negative static electrical charge. This will be explained in greater detail in a longer article about electricity and health. Anyway, here are some really excellent brushes and combs for you.

Almost all caps are 100% plastic.
Well, not this one!