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Hello, and welcome to the Own Your Health podcast, I'm Cyndi Lynne, and I can't wait to help you step into your health power. So what the heck is it with plastics? My clients often bemoan that there's a long list of things that are no longer good for us.
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And as the list gets longer and longer of these things that are supposedly dangerous to our health, it gets easier to kind of get frustrated and brush it all aside. And so today I want to talk about what's the deal with plastics and why we shouldn't brush that aside.
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Not good for our health, and how we can own our health by starting to make the transition with some of the more important changes to get plastics out of our life. So before you panic and think you have to toss out half of everything in your kitchen, we're going to take a real practical approach to this.
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So I always want you to be informed so you can make your own decisions. So the reason, one of the reasons that plastic is so bad for us as consumers, as users is that it interferes or interacts with our hormones.
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So you'll often hear the term hormone disruptor and that's because plastic can act basically in three different ways to inhibit or affect our hormones.
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So hormones can be simplistically thought of as messenger keys for our cells. These messenger keys hold instructions. They hold instructions like how much insulin we should release, how much melatonin for sleep we should release, how our bodies should heal.
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These hormone signaling keys, these messenger keys are super important. Plastic and some of the chemicals in plastic have an opportunity to interact three different ways. First of all, they can mimic the hormones, meaning they can cruise up to a cell and be the key, the messenger key that goes into the lock of the cell.
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Unfortunately, it's not our hormone message. It's a chemical message that's going into the cell. And that chemical message can be a dangerous signaling message. The second way is that these hormone disruptors, these chemicals can attach to our cells just like a hormone would, but then they block the attachment site, they block the keyhole for the actual hormones that we need.
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And then the third way is they can chemically interact with our body to alter how much and when we actually produce hormones that then go on to be these messenger keys. So they have a very significant effect at the cellular level.
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So, yes, plastics are one to pay attention to. But how do we start removing them? What's the most important part? Because for some people, seeing a plastic dish sitting on a counter doesn't seem like it can be a real big threat to health.
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Kind of always looks the same. It's there, you have it for years, and you don't necessarily think much about it. Some of the ways that plastic gets from its original form is by dissolving.
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So in that case, think about the plastic pods that some wash machine detergent comes in, or the plastic coating over the pods in the dishwasher when we use these products, and the plastic, of course, has to melt in order for the detergent to get out into our clothes or onto our dishes, that plastic gets dispersed and in fact, can coat our clothes and it can coat our dishes so that when we take the dishes out of the dishwasher and they look squeaky clean and dry, they actually can have a thin film of this plastic on it so that when we put our food on and we eat it, we're eating that plastic.
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So a real simple solution is to go with the powder, go with this squirtable liquid, find a product that you like, a product that actually works. Because, of course, that's the tricky part. It's real easy to say, swap out all of these products, but very often the ones that have fewer chemicals don't work quite as well.
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So you have to make sure you use hotter water or a little bit more of it or. Or kind of make adjustments. But in the case of clothes, in the case of dishes, those are two real good places to start, where that plastic dissolves and ends up immediately on your body, or worse yet, in your body.
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Plastic containers are another source. Very often we use plastic containers for leftovers. If we have something that's packing lunches, if we have something like a sandwich in a plastic container, there's going to be very little leaching between that piece of bread and that plastic.
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The bread is fairly inert. Not a whole lot's going to happen. If, on the other hand, you're fortunate enough to have leftover pasta with tomato sauce in your lunch, that tomato sauce is going to be acidic, and that's going to have the opportunity.
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It's also going to be moister than that bread. It's going to have an opportunity to allow those chemicals to leach out of the plastic. And in fact, if you've ever taken that lunch, you see that the tomato sauce also leaches into the plastic because you get staining.
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So there's an exchange there when it becomes even more active, the plastic and the interaction with the food ,is if we were to reheat it in the microwave, because then we're adding heat, which typically accelerates most interactions in science and in the kitchen, which is actually a lot of science.
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So think about not if you're still using a microwave, think about not heating in plastic. Transfer to a glass plate or a glass dish. And if you're going to store food, store food that isn't acidic or isn't real liquid.
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If you have to store in plastic. Now, some plastics are more interactive than others, but even the plastics now that are designed for food still have chemicals that can leach out given the right circumstances. It's important to look for where we use plastic and to be aware.
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Again, we don't want to throw out half of what's in our kitchen. We want to start making these transitions in a practical way, in a sensible way. Because plastics play an important role in our life. They are very useful.
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Plastics are useful in medical devices. Plastics are useful in everyday things like reading glasses. If you didn't have plastic, glasses tend to be very, very heavy, to wear them on your nose all the time. So plastics can absolutely make our life much easier, but they can present a health hazard.
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So I encourage you to take ownership of your health. Take a look at where you're using plastics and where you can maybe make other choices, where it makes sense for you so that you're making educated decisions.
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If you have questions about this or any of the other topics we cover, absolutely reach out to [email protected] and until next week, let's go out and own it.
