Microplastics Are Everywhere: How Bryan Johnson's Team Measures, Reduces, and Thinks About Them
Bryan Johnson
In this episode of the Bryan Johnson Podcast, Bryan Johnson, Blueprint co-founder Kate Tolo, and physician Dr. Mike Mallin take on a week of alarming microplastics news. The central question is how worried people should be, and what a person can actually do about particles that now show up in bottled drinks, IV bags, and human tissue. Their position is that the science is emerging rather than conclusive, that alarm is not warranted, and that measurement is the way forward. Johnson also reports that the microplastic count in his blood has fallen by 93%, and the hosts walk through the protocols that may have contributed.
A Week of Bad News, Framed as a Reason for Hope
The trigger for the episode was a French study reporting that drinks sold in glass bottles contained five to 50 times more microplastics than the same drinks in plastic bottles or cans. The hosts joke that this was the "last straw" for many people, who had been paying extra for glass as a safe option and now felt there was nothing left to trust.
Johnson says he understands the reaction but doesn't share the despair. His view is that science never arrives at a final answer; it is a process of continual discovery. If you trust that process to improve things step by step, a disappointing result becomes a reason for hope. He was encouraged that there is now a serious global effort to measure microplastics at all.
He recalls a dinner about a year earlier where one guest brought up microplastics roughly 15 times, tying every point back to the topic. Many people feel intense anxiety about this, he says, and his message to them is that it's okay. The episode aims to review the science, look at ways to reduce risk, and leave listeners with a more balanced view. Tolo adds that measurement cuts both ways: you can learn your own levels, and, as Johnson's results suggest, you can reduce them. She notes it isn't entirely clear which of Johnson's many interventions caused the drop.
What Microplastics Are, and What the Evidence Shows
Mallin defines microplastics as small pieces of plastic, ranging from nanometers to microns, that enter the body mainly by ingestion and also by inhalation. Some are small enough to need an electron microscope to see. They have increased sharply in the environment because of industrial use and clothing, and they are showing up more and more in water supplies.
There is evidence, Mallin says, that ingested microplastics enter the bloodstream, circulate, and deposit in tissues, where they may or may not stay permanently. Studies have found them in ovaries, testicles, arterial plaques, the brain, and the kidneys. He half-jokingly says we "may or may not be slowly turning into plastic creatures." He stresses, though, that no data yet definitively shows these particles cause harm. The evidence of possible downsides so far comes from animal studies and is correlational rather than causal.
Johnson brings up books whose authors paint a bleak picture. They cite changes in newborns' anatomy and hormones, altered puberty timing, and sperm health that has, by their account, declined by about 50% over recent decades. These authors link such trends to the growth of global plastics manufacturing. Johnson notes this is correlation, not causation, but says the authors are trying to explain fundamental shifts in human development.
Mallin separates two mechanisms. The first is the chemicals that leach out of plastics, especially when plastic is heated or food is eaten from it. These are the endocrine-disrupting chemicals he associates with hormonal effects. The second is microplastic particles themselves, which he thinks of mainly as a possible mechanical disruption of tissue. Some chemical leakage from the particles is possible, but he thinks mechanical effects are the bigger concern. Given this uncertain evidence, Johnson says the team simply concluded that microplastics are "not necessarily a longevity therapy." Nobody would sprinkle them on food or run a "micro-dosing" protocol, so the sensible goal is to reduce them.
The Glass Bottle Study: The Problem Was the Cap
Johnson goes through the details of the French study. Researchers measured particles per liter in cola, lemonade, iced tea, and beer, comparing glass bottles with plastic-bottled or canned equivalents. The glass itself turned out not to be the source. The contamination came from paint flaking off the metal crown caps. Untreated crowns shed about 287 particles per liter. A simple air blast plus an alcohol rinse cut that to about 87. Johnson's takeaway is that glass is still the right material, and the manufacturing process is the problem.
Tolo finds this encouraging. The headline is frustrating, but measurement identified the specific cause. If the manufacturing change had been measured right away, the problem would have been caught. Mallin is less cheerful. He says the result confirms what he already believed, that the only water he truly trusts is from his own stainless steel bottle filled at home. Johnson describes the practical dilemma: in an airport without his own bottle, glass, plastic, and aluminum all now look suspect, and he says nothing in the airport is something he would put in his body. Public refill stations, like the ones in San Francisco, seem fine in principle, but he has no idea what filtration they use or how often the filters get changed.
Trust, Institutions, and "Problems of the Commons"
Johnson widens the discussion. People are upset, he argues, because they expect a basic standard of safety in public life, and here is something that may be disrupting human biochemistry, is everywhere, and is outside anyone's control. He compares it to air and water pollution, calling it a problem of the commons. Regulators like the FDA are supposed to set safety standards, he says, but profit incentives pull the other way. The result is that people feel they must be on guard everywhere, because trust in institutions has collapsed.
His proposed answer is his "Don't Die" philosophy as the organizing principle of society, with systems built so that not dying is the default. He says he doesn't want to jump straight to regulation. The first step would be measurement, so everyone has the same information.
40,000 Particles in an IV Drip
The second piece of news that week came from the team's own testing. Many people get NAD or vitamin IV drips, and Johnson has been receiving IV drips for a therapy they haven't yet discussed publicly. The team tested a typical drip and found an average of about 40,000 microplastic particles. For comparison, Johnson says that drinking 2 liters a day of water from the glass bottles in the French study would amount to about 3,300 particles a year. The team has found a filter that attaches to the IV line and is now testing it, with results pending.
Mallin wasn't surprised by the presence of plastic, since an IV is a plastic bag feeding plastic tubing into a plastic catheter, and that was the reason they tested it. The quantity did surprise him. Tolo admits she had forgotten IV bags were plastic, and says that's typical of how people underestimate plastic in their surroundings. She points out that they tested only the bag. They haven't yet measured what the fluid picks up passing through the line.
Johnson offers a generational frame: "our grandparents are full of lead, our parents are full of asbestos, and we are full of microplastics." Each generation has its own materials crisis, and he says it remains open which one will prove worst.
Children, Industrial Toxins, and the Washing Machine
A producer shared a quote from a paper, which the hosts put on screen. It said that 100 million US children exposed to industrial developmental toxins showed a five-point drop in IQ, with a 3.6% decrease in intellectually gifted children and a 3.4% increase in challenged children compared with a matched unexposed cohort. Mallin reads this as epidemiological data: a signal rather than proof, though concerning and mechanistically plausible. He emphasizes that "industrial toxins" covers things like PFAS and phthalates, so it doesn't map one-to-one onto microplastics. It does support the broader worry that what we do to the environment affects our health.
Mallin then raises a point he thinks is neglected. Everyone discusses microplastics in water and food, but few ask where they come from. He says the data is fairly convincing that one of the largest sources of microplastics at the relevant sizes is washing machines. If the goal is to reduce microplastics in the environment, the most effective step would be to stop wearing and washing plastic clothing.
Johnson connects this to the full Don't Die framing: don't die individually, don't kill each other, don't destroy the planet, and align AI with Don't Die. He argues there is no real separation between an individual's body, other people, and the planet. By wearing and washing plastic, humanity has "bathed the world in plastic," which he calls very hard to fix. He wants a cultural shift away from pursuing wealth, power, and status at any cost, and he argues it starts with measurement: "science begins with counting."
Johnson's Own Numbers: From 15 Particles to One
Blueprint launched an at-home microplastics test last year, which Johnson describes as one of the first in the world. The idea was that even without good evidence on removal, a baseline is always the starting point. His latest blood sample contained one microplastic particle, down 93%. Tolo says the drop was from about 15 particles over roughly eight months. Johnson says only 1.6% of results in a dataset of nearly 3,000 tests were lower than his. Tolo notes that his semen has also been tested and contained microplastics, so the particles were not confined to his blood. That is part of why the near-zero blood result surprised her.
Plasma Exchange Versus Blood Donation
One earlier intervention was a total plasma exchange (TPE), done months before. Johnson says the IV findings leave him unsure how to think about it now, because the procedure might have been loading him with microplastics. Mallin explains that TPE removes a full plasma volume and replaces it with albumin, which comes in glass bottles. He would once have considered that fine, but after the crown-cap findings he isn't sure how those bottles are sealed. Patients are also often topped off with fluid from a plastic IV bag. So TPE may remove particles from the plasma while also adding some back.
Mallin points to blood donation as an alternative. He says it has been shown to reduce plasma particles, it is free, and it helps others. Each donation is roughly 300–500 cc, about a can of soda, but repeated donations gradually remove particles. He jokes about hosting "blood parties" as a way to heal yourself and help others.
Daily Protocols for Reducing Exposure
Johnson says trying to eliminate plastic was eye-opening. Just when he thinks he has cleaned up his life, he finds something he uses daily that is made of plastic. His current practices fall into a few areas.
Water. He drinks from a home reverse osmosis system that also remineralizes, stored in stainless steel containers. His system cost $1,300 to install and is listed under "protocol" on the Blueprint website. Cheaper reverse osmosis systems cost around $270–350. He says pitcher filters like Brita do not remove microplastics. While traveling, he said he would now probably drink from plastic bottles when nothing better is available. Mallin disagreed. The French study is one study, and others have found up to about 10,000 particles in some plastic bottles, so in his view the jury is still out. He would choose a water fountain.
The hosts then acknowledge that no option is perfect. Mallin notes that filtered stainless steel bottles have plastic straws and filters. Tolo describes buying such a bottle for a trip to India, noticing it was a plastic filter meant to remove plastic, filling it with bottled water anyway, and then being unable to suck any water through it. They laugh at how hard the problem is.
Storage and food. Johnson stores food in food-grade stainless steel, drinks from ceramic, avoids plastic containers, and eats no canned food. He cites studies showing BPA concentrations rising up to 20-fold after a week of eating canned soup compared with fresh soup. Tolo adds that women with higher BPA levels had fewer eggs retrieved during egg retrieval, which she says stayed with her.
Cooking. He recommends replacing plastic cutting boards with wood, not reheating food in plastic, and avoiding non-stick cookware with harmful chemicals.
Clothing and air. He has cleared out much of his closet in favor of natural fibers such as cotton, bamboo, hemp, and wool. He notes that most workout clothing in health culture is polyester-based. He also recommends vacuuming with a HEPA filter and using MERV-rated filters in home HVAC systems. He warns that he installed a filter rated higher than his system could handle, which caused problems, so filters should stay within the system's rating.
Other items. He recommends choosing digital receipts over paper; Mallin notes this is more about BPA than microplastics. Mallin adds plastic mesh tea bags, which he says can release thousands of particles into hot water, and disposable to-go coffee cups. Tolo tells how Mallin once confronted her about a takeaway coffee cup at Johnson's house. She bought her "emotional support mug" on Amazon the next day and now carries it everywhere.
Johnson admits he still catches himself doing "something really stupid" that slipped past his awareness, which he takes as evidence that society wasn't built health-first. Mallin argues for an 80/20 approach. A reusable mug, a stainless steel bottle, and home filtration cover most of it. Total elimination is impossible, so if you're dehydrated in an airport, buy the water. It isn't a big deal if you've reduced plastics in most of your life.
Sauna as the Top Toxin Reducer
Summing up, Johnson lists three strands: TPE, whose effect is now uncertain; eliminating plastic from daily life; and sauna. He suggests sauna may be the most effective thing the team has done to reduce toxins generally. After several sessions, his levels of other industrial-grade toxins dropped sharply, which he reads as making a microplastic drop plausible too. He cites a 65% drop in 2,4-D and a 100% drop in MEP, along with other figures he read out, such as 15%, 56%, and 100%, without naming each chemical.
Mallin agrees that sauna has been the top performer, ahead even of focused efforts to reduce environmental exposure, since some exposure can't be controlled. He says he expected a small change and was "blown away," with levels going from moderate to nearly zero in a short time. Johnson concludes that sauna was "probably a significant contributor" to the microplastic reduction; the hosts present this as a likely link, not a demonstrated one. Tolo notes Johnson's routine is a dry sauna at 200°F for 20 minutes daily, which she calls difficult.
Testing at Home and What Comes Next
Blueprint's test is an at-home finger prick. Blood goes onto a spot card, which is mailed for analysis of three size categories of microplastics. Mallin knows of no other commercially available method; there is no imaging option, so serum testing is essentially it. Johnson warns that the kit uses a metal lancet, which is harder to use than the plastic kind, ideally with someone else doing it. The team found that plastic lancets contaminate the sample and give inaccurate readings.
Upcoming tests include results from a PFAS "forever chemicals" test and a follow-up to Johnson's baseline semen microplastics test. Tolo also wants to test the sweat Johnson produces in the sauna to see how much comes out. Johnson says that with baselines across microplastics and industrial chemicals, plus aggressive reduction efforts and sauna, the team is starting to build a protocol for toxin exposure in general. Tolo hopes they can someday point to one "pocket on Earth" that is safe from microplastics, as an example of what the future could look like.
Closing: A Collective Problem Without a Final Answer
Johnson's summary is that plastics are everywhere and represent a problem of the commons, like air pollution and toxins in food, that no single person can solve. He argues that addressing it effectively requires "a new ideology, a new way of being," and that anything less amounts to chasing our tail. He is still optimistic. People are testing themselves and trying interventions, such as the blood donors who saw reductions, and more testing will yield more insight. He sees this as the typical path of a technology adopted before its harms were known, expects companies to pursue therapies to remove microplastics or offset their effects, and tells listeners not to lose hope.
Before signing off, Johnson and Tolo mention they are leaving for Washington, D.C. to "teach Congress how to sleep." Johnson has written an op-ed, "Go the … to Sleep, Dear Congress," pitched to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, along with an open letter on how sleep improves performance, and they plan a congressional "slumber party." Mallin says he'd happily tell members of Congress, in ER-doctor fashion, that their situation is "not okay."
Our parents are full of asbestos and we are full of microplastics. So it seems like it's a generational thing where each one has its own new materials crisis. We have basically bathed the world in plastic and that is just now a problem that is very, very hard to fix.
It's everywhere. It's in our drinking water. It's in our food. But nobody's really talking about where they're coming from.
Isn't it cool that it's actually measurement that leads us down this path?
This is what Don't Die is about.
Hi friends. Today we're going to talk about a topic you're well aware of, microplastics. We have some good news and some bad news. Bad news of course is microplastics are everywhere. We're going to talk through the evidence of what it means to each one of us. Also, I've dropped my microplastic levels by 93%. I'm going to walk you through the protocols I do to reduce my exposure. Let's go.
You guys, it's been a really big week for microplastics.
That's true. People are freaking out. So, what do we know? A big week for a small thing.
The big news is there was this French study that came out that said that water in glass bottles have five to 50 times the microplastics that plastic bottles have.
There's nothing sacred.
Exactly.
I feel like it tipped everyone over the edge. They were like, "What do you do?"
That's it. Last straw. Yeah. People basically just like, "I'm done. I'm done." Science out the window.
Which I understand. I mean, this is the thing, I guess, you really need to adopt a mentality that you know that things are always going to change and it's not a matter that you're going to be let down by your expectations, that science is never going to have it fully solved. Science is the process to continually discover. So, if you trust the process that we incrementally get better and you just understand that's how we do it, then it doesn't cause despair. Actually, gives hope. So, I saw this study. I thought that this is fantastic. I'm not discouraged. I feel hopeful that now there's this robust effort happening globally where people are actually measuring microplastics.
Yeah, agreed. We thought it'd be fun to go through this episode, what we do know about microplastics, and to level-set everyone's expectations listening. It's definitely nuanced. It's not like the science is really crystal clear. It's definitely emerging. So, yeah. What are we going to go through today, Bryan?
Yeah. Well, I'm reminded when we had a Don't Die dinner about a year ago and we had this one person attend and Kate, do you remember this? She was completely fixated on microplastics.
Oh, I think I skipped that. I wasn't there for that dinner.
I think she mentioned the topic. We were weaving in and out of multiple topics, but this was on her mind. And she mentioned it maybe 15 times. Every time she made a point, it was centered around microplastics. And I think that there's a lot of people who do feel intense anxiety around this topic. And I think so if that's you, you're listening, then the message we're going to give to you today is it's okay. We're going to walk through the science. We're going to evaluate how you can potentially mitigate your microplastic risk, but I don't think it's something that is cause for alarm. It's like we live in a modern world. We have very serious constraints. So just maybe to try to calm some anxiety, if you're a listener and you're experiencing that right now, it's okay. At the end of this episode, hopefully you'll have a much more balanced perspective on this and it might even give you some relief.
Yep, definitely. And through the power of measurement, you can find out for yourself what your levels are and also reduce them. Like Bryan, this week you released an announcement saying that you've reduced your microplastics by 93% in your blood. Now, it's not 100% clear exactly what's contributing to that because you're doing so many things, but that's really promising to people. So not only is it achievable to measure your microplastics in your blood, but you can also reduce it.
Yes. So that's a good point. And maybe before we get into the results, I guess what we will review today is that I have been measuring my microplastic exposure and concentrations in my blood and also in my semen. So we've been trying to evaluate how it accumulates in various parts of the body. Mike, can you set us up? What are microplastics? How do they get into our bodies? And what does the evidence say in terms of the potential harms of these in our bodies?
Oh, that's a lot. Let's start with what are microplastics? So microplastics are small pieces of plastic that can enter your body mostly through ingestion, but you can also inhale them. And when we say small, we're talking about nanometer to micron size. So really tiny, like hard to see with a microscope. Sometimes you need an electron microscope to see that small of a particle.
And the reason these are interesting is because one, they've been increasing pretty dramatically in our natural environment due to just all the plastic use through industry, through clothing, things like that. So, we're seeing an uptick in microplastics in general in our water supplies. And there is evidence to suggest that these microplastics when ingested get into our bloodstream, travel around in our bloodstream, deposit in our tissues, and may or may not stay there forever. And we may or may not be slowly turning into plastic creatures.
Not to be dramatic or anything, but that's literally kind of what's happening on a very small scale, right? There's been studies now showing that at least humans have microplastics in all types of tissues. Everything from ovaries, testicles to plaques in our arteries, to our brain, to our kidneys, really all throughout our body.
And that sounds super scary, but it's important to remember that we actually don't have data yet that definitively states that these plastics are doing harm. There is data to suggest that there may be downsides to having these extra plastics in your body, but it's all currently in animals and it's all sort of correlative but not causative. So, we're in a very emerging space with the science right now in terms of microplastics and what they're actually doing to our bodies. And we can go into that if you'd like to go into more detail, Bryan.
Yeah, I've read a few books on this topic and I mean there's a few people who paint a pretty bleak picture. You know, they talk about, for example, babies being born, the distance in between the anus and the genitalia and how the length of that has been dramatically changing, and how the hormones in these babies are dramatically changed, and how when they grow up their puberty cycles are very different. They present this case that humans are fundamentally changing in the womb, when they're born, and how they're developing, and they point back to chemicals and things like these microplastics.
So I guess several people have tried to basically say, look, over the past couple decades, sperm health has declined by 50%. They point to these very large trends as it relates to our hormonal and sexual health and they point to the same rise in the plastics manufacturing of the globe. Now, again, that's not causation, right? But you're looking at these trends, and they are trying to piece together this complicated puzzle: what is happening that is causing these fundamental changes around human development and human evolution, and they're pointing here as a potential culprit. How do you read that evidence?
Let's clarify exactly what we're talking about. So we're talking about microplastics, which are actual particles. There's another way that plastics can alter human biology and that's through the chemicals that are secreted by plastics, especially when we eat those plastics and especially when we heat them. That's typically how we think about the endocrine disrupting chemicals getting into our bodies, is actually through eating out of the plastic, heating the plastic, it leaches into the water, it leaches into the food that we're eating. That's what I think of when I think about endocrine disruption.
Whereas microplastics, I'm thinking about more like mechanical disruption of the tissues themselves. There could be some chemical leakage from these microplastics, but it's probably more a mechanical change or alteration to our body rather than chemicals leaching out of a Tupperware dish when we heat it in the microwave kind of thing, if that makes sense.
So, as our team, we've looked at the evidence and it's like Mike is saying, it's not conclusive, it's emergent. And therefore, we've just concluded ourselves that microplastics are not necessarily a longevity therapy. Like you would not be sprinkling microplastics on your food because you think it's going to give you a boost of energy or
Microdosing microplastics.
Yeah, exactly. A microdosing protocol. So, we have set out to reduce microplastics in my body. And we'll get to those recommendations. First, let's just baseline some of the data that we saw this week that I think have people emotionally aroused. And I think that's an appropriate response because we live in a society where we have certain expectations that when we go out and about, we expect certain standards of safety or reasonableness on how things are done. And I think people feel really rubbed wrong that this fundamental thing that is potentially disrupting our biochemistry is just omnipresent and nobody has any control over it at all. I mean in many ways this is just like air pollution, right, or water pollution. It's the same thing. These are problems of the commons.
So this study came out this week and this is the one I think that got a lot of headline news. So the French, thank you French, they did a study looking at particles per liter in cola, lemonade, iced tea and beer packed in glass. And what they found is that they had five to 50 times higher concentration of microplastics than their plastic bottled or canned twins. And so this is alarming because a lot of people thought that glass bottles were a safe haven. They thought that the plastic bottle itself was the problem. And so the glass is not the problem. It's the paint flakes on the metal crowns which is the problem. Glass is the correct option. It's just the way they were manufacturing that is the problem. So this is interesting. So the metal crown cleaning matters. So bottle caps with untreated crowns, they shed 287 particles per liter of water. But a simple air blast plus alcohol rinse cut that to 87 particles. So the process in which the crown is prepped and cleaned dramatically changed the number of microplastics you'd see in a glass bottle of fluid.
Man, this actually gives me so much hope because even though the headline sucks because we're all like, "God damn it, I've just been spending x amount more on glass and here we are debunking this." But isn't it cool that it's actually measurement that leads us down this path? Like if we had switched this manufacturing method then measured immediately, we would have been able to catch this. But it's not a totally unknown reason this came back the way it did; we were able to deduce what it is. That gives me hope.
You're such an optimist, Kate.
I'm like, screw it all. I'm out of here.
Can't handle. I mean, the one safe haven. So, I'm in an airport. I'm walking around an airport. I want some water. I forgot my water bottle, right? I need to purchase water in some way. And prior to this study, I'm looking for a glass bottle. Now, what do I do?
Right. Like, that's right.
So, glass bottle is not safe. Plastic bottle's not safe. Aluminum cans not safe. It's like, at some point, do I drink from the water fountain?
Like I guess, I guess that's what I'm left to. I mean at this point this sort of confirms for me the thing that I think I already knew. And that's really the only thing I trust is my stainless steel water bottle filled from my house. Other than that it's hard to really trust anything else.
Yeah. Mike, I have the same experience when I'm out and about, like walking through an airport. There's literally nothing in the entire airport which I would put into my body. And so maybe the filter, like in San Francisco they have those water refill stations where you can take your stainless steel container. Ostensibly that's okay, but I don't know what water filtration systems they have in place. Do they or not at all?
How frequently do they change the filter, actually?
Exactly. And so I guess what would be cool is, I think it'd be cool to live in a society where you didn't need to lock your doors. I think it'd also be cool to live in a society where we could just trust that our societal systems proactively cared for our well-being, like this microplastic thing. Conceptually, the FDA and other kinds of bodies, they kind of look at this thing, so we look at the government and say, can you help us create some safety standard for doing various things? That's of course great, but also you have this other capitalistic tendency where people are wanting to make profit at any cost and that leads to different incentives and also different systems. But just generally speaking, we're just in this time and place as humans where you really have to be on guard everywhere you go because you never know where you're going to encounter problems. And I think this is what people are feeling, is like we don't trust our institutions anymore. We've had this absolute collapse. And so when this happens, we're like, who do we trust? Who is going to keep society straight?
And so I really understand the desperation, and you guys, this is what Don't Die is. This is to bridge this. We are proposing that Don't Die is the overarching philosophy of our society, that we actually build systems where Don't Die is the default. And so in this case we would say microplastics are a potential threat to our health and wellness, we do not want them in. I don't want to jump to regulation, but we want to measure this so that everybody has the same information.
So I guess I'll cite the second thing we came out with this week, which is kind of making this microplastics week, is we shared that we did a test on an IV drip. So a lot of people get NAD drips and vitamin drips and we tested the microplastics in a typical drip and we found that it had on average 40,000 microplastics in a drip. Now to put that in context, this is going back to the water. So if you drank the 2 liters of water a day, as is recommended, from these glass bottles, you would swallow 3,300 microplastics a year. If you get one IV drip, it's 40,000 microplastics, to put that in context, and just give you some relative intuition building. And so I've been doing these IV drips for a therapy we haven't talked about yet publicly. And we found a filter that we are now testing that filters out microplastics. You just put it on the line. We're waiting for those results. But just to give you context, again, this is bad news. It's in the glass bottles. It's now in our IV drips. Mike, what was your take when you heard that?
I wasn't super surprised. I mean, when you think about what an IV drip is, it's plastic tubing connected to a plastic catheter coming from a plastic bag. So, I mean, we tested this because we were concerned that this was a possibility. So, at this point, I basically just assume that plastics are everywhere, that everything I'm ingesting has plastics in them in some manner. So, not super surprised. But a little bit surprised maybe by the amount. 40,000 is quite high.
Yeah. Kate, what was your reaction when you saw this evidence from our testing?
So, not to sprinkle some optimism in here, but
On the last study, it's like I would guess that it came about because there's a higher demand for measurement around microplastics, period. And so the way that we're starting to slowly shift society towards saying like, hey, we have these desires and demands and people are fulfilling them. And in a lot of ways, that's obviously what we're doing too. So sprinkling of optimism that actually this is what we asked for. We asked to have these results. The results aren't what we wanted, but that then allows us to make changes into our lifestyle and our manufacturing process and whatever else. So again, optimism.
Yeah, I'm also not surprised. I also completely forgot that IV bags are plastic. And I think that's like the common experience that I've seen is you don't realize how much plastic is everywhere you go. This study also that we did, this result we got was just the bag itself. So I was very curious to see what the liquid would be like once it runs through the line itself because it's obviously interacting then with additional plastic. So we didn't test that yet, but yeah. Scary.
Yeah. So I mean to put this in context, you know, our grandparents are full of lead, our parents are full of asbestos, and we are full of microplastics. So it seems like it's a generational thing where each one has its own new materials crisis, and I guess it'll be open on which one's the worst.
Ally just posted here on that previous discussion, Mike, on the consequences to children. We're going to post this on screen. This is a quote from this paper: 100 million US children exposed to industrial developmental toxins demonstrated a five-point drop in IQ, with a 3.6% decrease in intellectually gifted and 3.4% increase in challenged children compared to a matched cohort of unexposed children. Thoughts on that?
Epidemiologic data, so like signal but not positive, I think is like the first thing we always have to think about when we think about epidemiologic data. Yet concerning, right? I mean, there's mechanistic explanation here as to what's going on. This again, this may be, you know, we're talking about industrial toxins, which is different than microplastics, I think. So let's make sure we're just clarifying for the listener that we're not necessarily talking about the exact same thing here. This could be anything with industrial toxins from like PFAS chemicals to, you know, phthalates, things like that. So it's important to remember this is not one for one in terms of microplastics, but it certainly speaks to like this overarching concern that we have that the things that we're doing to our environment are directly impacting our health.
Which is like just like quick side note here, really interesting to me around microplastics. Like I think there's been a lot of conversation about there's microplastics in the water. It's everywhere. It's in our drinking water. It's in our food. But nobody's really talking about like where they're coming from. And the data is actually pretty convincing that like one of the largest sources of microplastics on the sizes that we're talking about is actually coming from our washing machines, which I think is really interesting. So like if we really wanted to impact microplastics in our environment, it's actually not to wear plastic and not to wash your plastic clothing. Like that's what's causing this environmental issue that we're not really discussing, which I just think is really interesting. Everybody's so focused on like am I ingesting microplastics, like well what can you do about it?
Yeah. Yep. And friends, this is what Don't Die is about: it's don't die individually, don't kill each other, don't destroy the planet, and align AI with Don't Die. What we're trying to observe here is that there is no difference between us and each other or us and our planet. We're the same thing. In the same way we treat our body in ways where we want to be healthy and exercising, sleeping well and eating a good diet, you can't do that in isolation. You have to contemplate that we are in coexistence with each other and also the planet. It's like Mike is saying, as we wear plastic and wash plastic, we have basically bathed the world in plastic, and that is just now a problem that is very, very hard to fix.
And so if you approach this problem and say the primary goal is existence and you build societal systems around that. Right now in the world we go after wealth, power and status at any expense. We martyr ourselves. And so as much as this podcast is about trying to be in ideal health and minimizing our individual exposure, it really is to try to say this is a moment for a zeitgeist shift, like a wholesale cultural shift as a species. We move to a different way of being. And we're trying to provide the examples that it really begins with measurement. That above all, when you measure things and you're aware, then you can build systems. But science begins with counting. And so that's what we've tried to do with the individual body. But it easily maps to our collective behaviors and also here on planet Earth.
If we're all full of microplastics, how about Bryan Johnson? How's he doing?
Yeah, we should put this graph up. I've been measuring. So Blueprint launched a microplastics test last year. It's one of the first in the world. And even though we don't have great evidence on what can be done to remove microplastics, we wanted to start the game. We've learned ourselves in going through our Blueprint protocols, measurement is always the starting point. You always want to know what your baseline is. And so we just assume that if you start measuring microplastics in yourself and others, you create this broader self-awareness. So I started measuring my microplastics and the latest result I got was really encouraging, where I've dropped my microplastics by 93%. This is from a sample of my blood. I had one microplastic particle in this sample of blood, which is down 93%. Only 1.6% of tests from this nearly 3,000 test data set is lower than what I've done. And so that was really surprising to us that we have been that successful in reducing my microplastic load. And I guess we can walk through the things I've been doing, but just jump in.
So this is like in an eight-month period you went from being like a lot of us, where you had 15 particles in your sample of blood, and we've also tested your semen and we know that there is microplastics in there too. So it's like you have had microplastics throughout your entire body. So to have this result come back at almost none in your blood sample was like mind-blowing to me.
Mike, I mean I guess we've done quite a few things. Like we did several things, like one is we did a total plasma exchange, and this was months ago, but you know, in doing that, and because we just got this result back, the one IV drip is 40,000 microplastics, TPE could have basically just been loading me up on microplastics, right? Like you're pushing it through this entire system. So I don't know if I'd point to TPE as, I'm not quite sure how I think about TPE in this context now.
So yeah, and it's a good question. Like the TPE, when you get TPE, you're basically taking your plasma out. It's a full total plasma exchange. So basically a full plasma volume is taken out and it's replaced with albumin. That albumin comes from glass bottles. So previously I would have said, "Oh, interesting. That should be fine." But now, like I'm not sure how exactly they're topping those albumin bottles. So there's a chance that you're just giving yourself plastic back from the albumin. Like, who knows? It's often also given with an IV bag as well. So you often top them off with a little bit of like fluid on top of the albumin, which is coming from a plastic bag, which could of course be causing some issues as well. So TPE is interesting because you're actively removing these particles from the serum, you know, from the plasma, but at the same time, we might be giving it back.
Blood donation, though, has been shown to reduce plasma particles and is way more affordable, in fact, free and good for humanity. So that's an interesting way to reduce it. Now you're only giving about, you know, I think when you give blood you give somewhere between like 300 and 500 cc's of blood. It's like a can of soda basically is the volume. But you know, over time you're slowly extracting plastic particles out of your blood as you do that.
It'd be cool if we started throwing like blood parties, cuz it's good for everyone involved, and we just all get together and we all just like blood lit. That'd be kind of cool. It's like heal yourself and heal the planet, you know.
But you've been doing more than just that, Bryan, right? I mean, you've been doing quite a few interventions to reduce plastic. What else has like found its way into your daily life?
So when we started this process, we basically said, okay, how can we possibly eliminate microplastics? That really is an eye-opening experience because when you start doing this, you realize everything is made of plastic. Everywhere you turn, you find plastic. And just when you think you've kind of got your life cleaned up, like something else that you do on a daily basis right in front of you is made of plastic. So it just really has permeated every part of our world.
So generally speaking, I do try to avoid drinking plastic water bottle water. I try to drink water from my reverse osmosis water system. It also remineralizes, in my stainless steel containers. Now when I travel, you know, I have the same limitations as everybody else. So I do my best, but when I travel, I am subject to those. So I think now I'll probably be drinking water from plastic bottles if I'm in a situation where I don't have my own water system or filtered water from, you know, a friend or someplace that does it.
I want to jump in right there. I'm not convinced about that yet, Bryan. Like just to play devil's advocate there. Although this one French study showed that there was more plastic in glass bottles than plastic bottles, there have been other studies that show that some plastic bottles have up to like 10,000 particles per bottle. So I think the jury is still out on what is better to be.
That's interesting. So you would flip a coin at this point between plastic and water, or you'd go for the fountain?
I'd go for the fountain, I think. Yeah, I go straight for the fountain because it's not in the plastic, presumably it's, you know, not as contaminated.
Yeah. Well, I guess what I'm saying is when no fountain is available, because like the number of places that have refillable stations is small, and when you're out and you just don't have, I mean you have to otherwise hunt down a watering hole, you know, but when you don't have that kind of time, right?
So I purchased a filtered metal bottle. So the filter is inside the bottle. So like it's connected to the straw that goes down into the stainless steel bottle.
Is the straw, which is plastic?
Yeah, that's the thing. Mike, that's the thing. So when we went to India, we researched this. We found this bottle. I bought this bottle. I took it to India, right? So the first thing I did is I open it up, I'm like, "Wait a second. This filters for microplastics and it's made of plastic." Okay. Second. So then I filled the can with bottled water and I'm thinking like, okay, now it's going to filter out these plastics. I couldn't even drink the water. I had to suck so hard and I couldn't get any water. So I literally couldn't even drink.
Oh my gosh. I'll admit this situation is not perfect.
That's what I'm saying. I know. So like you can hunt down a watering hole of pure spring water coming from volcanic water flow that's been in there for 10,000 years. Also, if you're on the border of dehydration, you have to drink something. Like, what do you do? Not everyone's got a reverse osmosis system in their house. It's just pretty challenging.
It's kind of funny. I'm glad that we're laughing about it because it is sort of hilarious, like how challenging this issue is, right?
It really is tough. Okay, so then other easy things. So we talked about water. So as best you can, filter water at your home. Filters like Brita do not filter out microplastics. The reverse osmosis water system I have in my house, it's on my website, on the Blueprint website under protocol. It's a reverse osmosis system. It was $1,300 to install and it also remineralizes. You can find systems that are, I think, a few hundred that are reverse osmosis. Is that right? 270 to 350, and do the same thing in terms of remineralization and managing microplastics. So get one of those if you can. Stainless steel as best you can. But then of course when you're out and about, I think just understand we have limited options on storage.
I store everything, all my food and things, in food-grade stainless steel. I'll drink out of ceramic, and so I try to avoid plastic as a material to store food or drink out of. I don't do any canned foods. So there were several studies that showed BPA concentration went dramatically up by 20-fold after a week of consuming canned soup as opposed to fresh soup. So this is up to a 20x increase.
Can I also just quickly add in there for people listening at home that women with higher levels of BPA had fewer eggs retrieved in the egg retrieval process. So this is presumably having an impact on our health, actually. So that one in particular stuck with me.
Cooking. So this is an easy one. Take out your plastic cutting boards. Use wood. Avoid reheating plastic containers. That's an obvious one. And do not use non-stick cookware that has, you know, bad chemicals. On clothing, I've had to clean up my closet quite a bit. Choose natural fiber clothing: cotton, bamboo, hemp, wool, and try to avoid plastics, you know, polyesters. Most of the workout clothing in like health culture is not that. It's polyester based. So try to do natural fibers.
And then you can vacuum with a HEPA filter to try to trap the microplastics that would otherwise be put into the air, and then having a MERV filter. Now, heads up on this. I put in a pretty robust MERV filter in my AC, my home system, and you can mistakenly put a higher MERV filter than your system is rated for. So I was right there borderline and it was causing some challenges with my system. So if you put a high MERV filter in your home to try to trap pollution in the air, just be mindful to only do what's up to your system rating. And then of course, avoid paper receipts. Opt for digital.
Yeah. And that's more of a BPA kind of thing than microplastic as well. I've got a couple more. Plastic tea bags, like thousands of microplastic particles per plastic tea bag, and you're dropping it into a hot glass of water or a cup of water, which is leaching chemicals from the plastic as well. So opt for paper.
You're saying the cup itself could also be lined with, so you're getting double exposure?
Right. Yeah. But I was actually talking about the actual tea bag itself. There's some companies that make a tea bag out of plastic. It's like a plastic mesh, and that's bad news, as well as the to-go coffee cups, which is what you were talking about, Bryan, which is also bad news.
Like two months ago, I came over to Bryan's house, I was there, and I was drinking a coffee out of a takeaway cup, and he was like, "Kate, what are you doing?" And it was like this wake-up call. And so the next day I went on Amazon and I got myself my emotional support mug that I take
everywhere. I highly recommend having this. Yeah, exactly. So, good job, Mike. I'm glad that my health shaming had a positive impact.
That was a pretty dramatic interaction. I saw that whole thing. It was pretty good.
Yeah. Yeah, it was. It was intense.
You came from a place of love, not
I needed it. I needed the intervention.
Well, the thing that's amazing around this is that as hard as we try to be aware, I do find myself being caught occasionally doing something really stupid, like, oh my god, how did that pass my self-awareness? It's just really remarkable how society was not built with a health-first mentality. Let's just say that.
It's not super hard. It's a couple of regular things that you do, like Kate's, you know, famous mug or a stainless steel water bottle and then a filtration system in your home. And beyond that, it's basics, right? And then I think this is one of those areas too where, because the plastic in our environment is so ubiquitous, you have to kind of take an 80/20 approach to it. You're not going to completely eliminate plastic from your life. So just do your best when you can, and if you're in an airport and you're dying of dehydration, just buy water, drink the water. It's gonna be okay. It's not that big of a deal if you're already eliminating the plastics in your home and the majority of your life. You're doing so much better than most people.
Can we cover the other thing that you've been doing, Bryan, that has had crazy results on toxins, sauna? Is this possibly related to microplastics?
Yeah, that's right, because we didn't really get to the things I've been doing. So, one is we did the TPE and we said we're not quite sure. That's complicated. Two is we said we've tried to eliminate plastic from my life. So, these are just the basic things that everybody can do. Use stainless steel. Don't drink out of disposable things.
Yeah, like we just went over.
And then, yes, sauna. So, sauna could be the most efficacious thing we've done to reduce toxins of all types. So, we did this test after several sessions of sauna. The reduction in my other toxin levels was pretty dramatic. So, it made sense that we'd also see a dramatic reduction in microplastics. So, we saw a reduction in other industrial-grade kind of toxins. So far, Mike, would that be fair to say that of the things we've done, sauna has been the top performer in toxin reduction?
Yes. Even more so than focused reduction in environmental exposure, because you've been doing that quite a bit and yet things still seep in, right? There are so many things that we can't control, like whether plastics are in the water that you're drinking or whether there's air pollution in your home or when you walk outside. You can't control those, right? You're going to get exposed to stuff, and sauna has been really impressive in terms of how dramatically it removed all of those toxic chemicals in a super short period of time. I was personally, like, I expected a little bit of change, but I was blown away by the reduction. It was almost like moderate to zero, almost completely zero.
A 65% drop in 2,4-D, 100% drop in MEP. So you'll look up the specific chemicals: 15% drop, 100% drop, 56, 100, and you'll look up the various things. These are industrial-grade chemicals. Suffice it to say that the sauna was probably a significant contributor to microplastic reduction.
Yeah. And we have a whole episode now on sauna on our podcast, so check that out. The TL;DR is Bryan's doing a dry sauna at 200 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes daily. It is very hot. He sweats a lot. So yeah, it's definitely not an easy therapy to do.
I think that's it for this week. The TL;DR is plastics are everywhere. This is a good challenge for the human race to take on, and it really represents a common of the problems. We have this in terms of air pollution. We have this in terms of toxins in our food. We have these in toxins and microplastics. This really is a global problem that no one person can solve. And I think it really requires a new ideology, a new way of being, in order for us to actually be efficacious in addressing this. Anything short of that, we're just going to be chasing our tail. We'll never make progress.
And so I'm very happy that we've been leading the charge on this front with measurement and giving people the option to measure themselves and to start doing these experiments. Like Mike said, some people have done this, they've given blood, they've seen a reduction. So we're starting to see people trial various therapies and get some data. And as more people test, as more people do these various therapies, we'll get more and more insight. So I think we're on a good path. I think we'll wrestle this. It's like a typical growth path of humans developing new technologies, doing things without knowing the harm, and so we'll solve this. And I think also a lot of companies will be motivated to try to find therapies that could potentially remove them and/or offset the effects. So do not lose hope.
Yeah. Actually, just really quickly before we end, if people want to test their microplastic levels, is that pretty much the only way they can do it? So, we offer a test. It's at home. It's a finger prick. You put it on a little blood spot card, you mail it away, and then they analyze the amount of microplastics at three different sizes of microplastics. But besides that, do you guys know, is there any other way to measure microplastics? I remember when we came to market with this, it was the first on market.
Not that I'm aware of. No. And there's no imaging or anything that's commercially available that allows you to measure them. So really, serum testing is about all we have.
A heads up that when you do the test, it is a metal lancet. So it is not a plastic thing. The plastic things are very easy. You just hit the fingertip and then you're done. With this, it's a metal sword or metal spear. It's hard to stick that in your finger; if someone else can do it for you, that helps. But just a heads up, we've tested a metal lancet versus a plastic one, and the plastic lancet does cause a lot of plastic exposure in the test. So you get an inaccurate reading. So you need to use the metal lancet in order to get accurate results.
And then can you share what you're testing upcoming? So you did a PFAS test, forever chemicals test. We'll share those results. You've tested your baseline semen microplastics and you're doing a follow-up. Is that right?
That's right.
Okay. Anything else that we're testing that we want to share? I really want to test your sweat if we can figure out a way to do that. So, when you're in the sauna, collect your sweat and see how much is coming out.
Yeah.
I agree. I agree. We've got some good baselines across all kinds of things, microplastics, industrial-grade chemicals. And now that we're making these pretty aggressive moves on trying to remove plaques, toxins from the environment, plus doing sauna plus other things, I think we're really starting to craft a good protocol on how to approach toxin exposure generally and how to minimize the concentration in the body.
Yeah, it'd be really cool if we could say something to the effect that this one pocket on Earth is a safe zone for microplastics, and that might be literally, because the studies show it's everywhere. And yeah, it'd be cool to be an example of what the future could look like.
I'm just really excited for the blood party.
There really is a gigantic opening of what is the format of a Don't Die culture kind of party.
Totally.
That kind of breaks all conventions and norms and veers into some interesting territory. I think that's a good opportunity.
Olive oil baths.
All right, you guys. Should we wrap?
Yeah. Kate and I are off to Washington DC in an hour. We're going to teach Congress how to sleep. I wrote an op-ed that we pitched to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. It was 'Go the to sleep, dear Congress,' and then an open letter about how sleep improves performance and sleep deprivation causes all kinds of problems that nobody wants.
We're having a Congress slumber party.
Mike, you need to jump in there. You should go in there and do emergency ER doc stuff.
Oh, that'd be interesting.
You guys are not okay. This is... Yeah, this is not an okay situation.
Yeah, I'd be happy to talk to them.
All right, you guys, be well. Talk soon. Bye bye.
This is the Bryan Johnson podcast. Special thanks to my co-hosts Kate Tolo and Dr. Mike Mallin. For more science breakdowns and protocols, subscribe to my YouTube channel, follow the podcast on your favorite platform, or follow me on Instagram or X, Bryan
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