Hello and welcome to the Consistency Project podcast. My name is Patrick Cummings. As always, I'm here with E.C. Sinkowski. Every week on the show, we aim to simplify the science of nutrition, health, and fitness, cutting through the noise to focus on the principles and practices that will help you perform better, feel better, and live better. Thank you so very much for tuning into the show this week. Hello, how are you EC? Great. How are you doing?

Wonders. We're going to talk about microplastics. We're going to talk about what they are

and how they're entering our food, air and water, and the food part is probably why we're talking about it.

We're going to talk about the current scientific understanding of microplastics,

potential health and environmental risks, and then some practical strategies to reduce exposure

in everyday life.

Microplastics is one of those things that everybody talks about, and I doubt anybody

knows anything about. So let's start with the basics and what are microplastics.

Yeah, I mean, I don't really know that I should really be talking about it. I think it's probably a topic that's better. I know. And that was a good one. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a topic that's going to be better addressed by a toxicologist. I mean, somebody who's studied plastics and microplastics for some time. Not me. That's not me.

It does overlap a bit with nutrition because some of these microplastics, they're going to be in our food.

But when we look at various man-made chemicals, each of those chemicals has certain properties and certain roots of exposure.

Do we eat it?

Do we breathe it?

Do we drink it? And those different forums can often take on different toxicity potentials. Like, is it more harmful to breathe it than to drink it and all of that stuff? And where are we more likely to get it? So there are going to be legitimate experts in these different chemicals like plastics and microplastics. I mean, this was my past life in environmental consulting. I mean, there was experts on arsenic. There's experts on PCBs, right? So there's going to be experts on plastics. And I just like to give people that info, because this is sort of my cursory summary overlooking at, as I do understand, there is some overlap with diet, which is, of course, where I actually do have some expertise. But here we go with that disclaimer. Here we go.

So microplastics are these plastic particles that are less than five millimeters. And then there's

also nanoplastics, which would be even smaller, let's say less than one micrometer. And just for a

reference, a strand of hair is 80 micrometers. So like nanoplastics

are really, really small. They won't be able to be able to be seen by the human eye. But I'm going to

use the term microplastics to be an umbrella term for these really, really tiny small plastic molecules to include nanoplastics,

and of course to include different types of plastic.

Because when we look at plastic, it's not all made up of the same chemical composition.

There's varying types of plastics. So it's a big, broad umbrella term for these small plastic particles.

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