Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck.
Speaker 1: Chuck's here, Jerry's here, I'm here, We're all here. Are
Speaker 1: you here? Great? Well, then that makes this stuff show.
Speaker 2: You know what else is here? What? Microplastics?
Speaker 1: Yeah? What else? Uh?
Speaker 2: I don't know? All kinds of p fasts and xenobiotics.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe a little bit of bpds THCs.
Speaker 2: You can only say that if you sing it, like
Speaker 2: what's his face?
Speaker 1: Cars one?
Speaker 2: No, a little bit of.
Speaker 1: Lou Bega.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the guy who faked listened to our show, the
Speaker 2: fake lou Bega who listened to our show.
Speaker 1: What does he have to do with?
Speaker 2: Uh? Well, he said a little bit of And you
Speaker 2: can't start any size like that without singing it. Lou
Speaker 2: Vegas Doyle.
Speaker 1: Well, I love that joke that I just smashed all
Speaker 1: over the place.
Speaker 2: A little bit of plastic in your gut?
Speaker 1: That's about right, man. So you you mentioned what we're
Speaker 1: talking about xenobiotics, and just that word is a little unnerving,
Speaker 1: you know, So we're not talking about so zeno means foreign.
Speaker 1: You're a xenophobe, You're afraid of immigrants. If you're a xenophile,
Speaker 1: you really love immigrant immigrants. Yea. But zeno means foreign,
Speaker 1: biotic means body or life or something like that, and
Speaker 1: it's not to be confused. Ed helped us out with this,
Speaker 1: and I think he made a good point, since to
Speaker 1: be confused with xenobiology, that's the search for extraterrestrial life
Speaker 1: of any kind, not that this is xenobiotics, meaning substances
Speaker 1: that are foreign to life, foreign to the body, foreign
Speaker 1: to biology. And there's just such a mind boggling array
Speaker 1: of them, and they are so fully set into the
Speaker 1: global environment that it's we're just now becoming aware of
Speaker 1: how a wash we are in these things. And now
Speaker 1: we're saying, okay, just exactly how are these things going
Speaker 1: to kill all of us?
Speaker 2: Should we read that textbook definition now or did you
Speaker 2: want to hang on to that?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: Go ahead, all right. Xenobiotic is defined, oh here we go,
Speaker 2: elementary school style as a chemical that is not used
Speaker 2: And this is who's this from, By the way, do
Speaker 2: we even know?
Speaker 1: No, I don't know, all right.
Speaker 2: A xenobiotic is defined as a chemical that is not
Speaker 2: used by the reference organism. So in that case we're
Speaker 2: talking about, like could be human, could be an animal,
Speaker 2: could be a plant in a wetland. Not used as
Speaker 2: a nutrient chemical is not essential for maintenance of normal
Speaker 2: physiologic biochemical function, and homeostasis does not constitute a part
Speaker 2: of the conventional array of chemicals synthesized from nutrient chemicals
Speaker 2: normal intermediary metabolism. So, like you said, that's sort of
Speaker 2: a baggy way of saying it's a foreign thing that
Speaker 2: gets into our body or the body of an animal
Speaker 2: or a plant, like the plant body, whether on purpose
Speaker 2: or you know, like you drink booze. Technically that's a zenobiotic, Oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: for sure, or unknowingly, which is like microbeads in your lipstick.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And there are things that we put into our
Speaker 1: bodies that are technically foreign to our bodies, like essential
Speaker 1: amino acids like trip to fan. We don't make enough
Speaker 1: of that, so we can put that in our bodies
Speaker 1: through way like eating turkey or whatever, and that is
Speaker 1: used in the normal physiological processes of keeping you alive.
Speaker 1: It would not qualify as xenobiotics. Zenobiotics do things in
Speaker 1: your body that's beyond normal homeostatic physiological properties the normal
Speaker 1: stuff your body would be doing if none of these
Speaker 1: things were in your So that's another big key thing too.
Speaker 1: They typically have some effect or another on our body,
Speaker 1: and a lot of times it's because our bodies are
Speaker 1: responding to them or doing things to them and can
Speaker 1: actually make them worse in some cases.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I mean you can purposely or accidentally ingest it,
Speaker 2: like literally ingest it by eating it. You can inhale it,
Speaker 2: like I mentioned the cosmetics and stuff. You can come
Speaker 2: through your skin. There's all kinds of ways, and they're
Speaker 2: and they all are quite proficient at seemingly getting into
Speaker 2: the human body.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they'll get in basically anyway they can. If you
Speaker 1: stand there with your pants off, they're gonna find a
Speaker 1: way in.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And we should also say upfront, like a lot
Speaker 2: of this stuff is really kind of sad and scary.
Speaker 2: We should say there are like tens of millions of
Speaker 2: zenobiotics and they're not all dangerous necessarily. A lot of
Speaker 2: this stuff is, and we'll talk about why it's all
Speaker 2: you know, fairly new as far as really as far
Speaker 2: as really editing it. Sometimes they can even be beneficial.
Speaker 2: It seems like that's on the rare side than when
Speaker 2: they're harmful. But one example in here was the stuff
Speaker 2: in soy isoflavvones. They can help regulate the converted, of course,
Speaker 2: and they can help regulate estrogen.
Speaker 1: Yes, But there was a famous Renaissance Swiss physician named
Speaker 1: Paracelsus who's known as the father of toxicology, and he
Speaker 1: had a paraphrase quote that the dose makes the poison.
Speaker 1: So like you could take too many iso flavones, eat
Speaker 1: too much soy, and all of a sudden, your endocrine
Speaker 1: processes are going to be disrupted. So things can have
Speaker 1: beneficial effects for us at certain amounts, but beyond that
Speaker 1: it can be you know, terrible for us, or something
Speaker 1: can be terrible for us, but beneath a certain amount
Speaker 1: it'll have no effect whatsoever. So that's a really important
Speaker 1: thing to remember. They're not all necessarily dangerous, and they're
Speaker 1: not all necessarily even though they're foreign, they're not necessarily
Speaker 1: all synthetic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean people, and we've been guilty of throwing
Speaker 2: the word chemical around. Sometimes there's chemicals in this, and
Speaker 2: there's chemicals in that. I think using the word zenobiotics
Speaker 2: drills down a little more. But even then they're not
Speaker 2: all synthetic.
Speaker 1: No, and that doesn't necessarily mean like, oh, not all
Speaker 1: synthetics are harmful for you. We don't really know enough
Speaker 1: about that, and a lot of them are. What it's
Speaker 1: saying is just because something's natural and natural, naturally occurring
Speaker 1: chemical doesn't mean that it's necessarily good for you or
Speaker 1: isn't harmful.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Throughout some numbers like tens of millions. According to
Speaker 2: the Journal of Chemical Research in Toxicology, more than fifty
Speaker 2: two million organic and inorganic substances have been synthesized, and
Speaker 2: they're about thirty nine million that are commercially available and
Speaker 2: in your life, like the average person walking around will
Speaker 2: be exposed between one and three million different xenobiotic substances
Speaker 2: in their life. Yeah, one to three million different ones.
Speaker 1: Not one to three million times you're going to be
Speaker 1: exposed to zenobioty, Yeah, different different ones. That's remarkable, it is,
Speaker 1: and one of the other one of the big problems
Speaker 1: about this. So that just goes to show you like
Speaker 1: they're everywhere, and they get in our bodies really easily,
Speaker 1: and they do weird stuff that we're just starting to
Speaker 1: wrap our heads around. Frequently, very dangerous or harmful stuff
Speaker 1: to us, and that there's an NGO called ChemSec that
Speaker 1: pointed out that of the chemicals that are in use
Speaker 1: in European Union countries, sixty five percent of them are
Speaker 1: harmful to human health. Yeah, and I read a kind
Speaker 1: of a critique of toxicology by a toxicologist who said
Speaker 1: the field is basically obsessed with proving without a doubt
Speaker 1: that something is harmful, and that that prevents them from
Speaker 1: branching out and looking at new stuff because they're busy
Speaker 1: proving the original stuff is beyond doubt harmful for you
Speaker 1: or the effects that it has, and that that's just
Speaker 1: the ones that we know of that we've tested, sixty
Speaker 1: five percent of those are harmful. There are so many
Speaker 1: chemicals natural and synthetic in our world that we interact
Speaker 1: with that we ingest, that make their way into our
Speaker 1: body that we have no idea what they do right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. As far as what we're going to be
Speaker 2: talking about though, is xenobiotics, meaning the stuff that has
Speaker 2: we've come into contact with, it's in our bodies, and
Speaker 2: unusual things like happen after that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, beyond German.
Speaker 2: We're not talking. Yeah, we're not talking about the three
Speaker 2: million things. We can't.
Speaker 1: No, we're not going to go over each one if
Speaker 1: that's what you mean.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's no way. We don't have time. This is
Speaker 2: not a Xenobiotics lifetime show where we do this for
Speaker 2: the next thirty years. They talking about three million zenobiotics.
Speaker 1: It could be that'd be neat. So one other thing
Speaker 1: you mentioned when you came up with plant bodies, Yeah,
Speaker 1: this can affect not just humans but other animals and
Speaker 1: plants as well. And I mean, aside from concern for
Speaker 1: polluting the environment and affecting animals who have nothing to
Speaker 1: do with this, the moral quandary of that, we a lot,
Speaker 1: very frequently eat those animals and those plants, and so
Speaker 1: we ingest those things that get introduced to those environments
Speaker 1: in those animals, and so the whole thing scales up.
Speaker 1: And there's some really interesting analogy between ecosystems and zenobiotics
Speaker 1: entering ecosystems or becoming part of ecosystems, and how they
Speaker 1: enter and impact the human body as well. So it
Speaker 1: scales all the way up from the individual organism and
Speaker 1: even as far as their cells, all the way up
Speaker 1: to entire ecosystems, and now we're realizing the world, the
Speaker 1: entire world.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, and in the water we drink and stuff
Speaker 2: like that, the air we breathe.
Speaker 1: When we're talking about like polluted anything, food, soil, whatever,
Speaker 1: what we're saying is that those things have an excess
Speaker 1: of zenobiotics. Like that's what's polluting them. And it can
Speaker 1: come in all sorts of different forms of fashion and
Speaker 1: all sorts of stuff can be polluted. But that's what
Speaker 1: we mean. We're saying like polluted air or polluted water.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's easier to say than xenobiotics over and
Speaker 2: over and in fact this you know, we'll get to
Speaker 2: microplastics and specifically microbeads. But Obama and it actually got
Speaker 2: one hundred percent sentate support.
Speaker 1: On rotten tomatoes, which is.
Speaker 2: It broke the tomatometer when he signed the Microbead Free
Speaker 2: Water Act for Free Waters Act in twenty fifteen. Oh okay,
Speaker 2: so this is when they said, hey, no more microbeads,
Speaker 2: And I thought like, oh great, So there's not microbeads
Speaker 2: in cosmetics anymore. Not necessarily, there's no microbeads. What the
Speaker 2: act says is it can't be in a rinse off cosmetics.
Speaker 2: So what that's saying is because we want to protect
Speaker 2: the water. You know, like when you wash the exfoliant
Speaker 2: off your face, Yeah, it goes down the drain and
Speaker 2: into the water systems, but it can still be in
Speaker 2: like lipstick and mascara and stuff. So again, you know,
Speaker 2: it was a good thing, and it's and it's helped,
Speaker 2: but there are still microbeads and cosmetics, just not in
Speaker 2: stuff that goes down the sink.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and my friend, that's just microbeads, just microbeads. So
Speaker 1: one thing that I find just absolutely fascinating. I could
Speaker 1: talk about it all day is the trouble that lies
Speaker 1: in trying to categorize zenobiotics. Don't you find that fascinating?
Speaker 2: I do.
Speaker 1: So there's it's all over the place. And one of
Speaker 1: the reasons it's important is because it shows just how
Speaker 1: new this field of understanding xenobiotics is. We can't even
Speaker 1: figure out how to classify them yet.
Speaker 2: That's true because there's a lot of them. We talked
Speaker 2: about the mini millions, and there's a lot of overlap.
Speaker 2: So like it's it's kind of the case of where
Speaker 2: like if you classify, you're saying it's it's just this. Uh,
Speaker 2: but you know, if you want to say, well, it's
Speaker 2: this chemical family and but this is how it's used,
Speaker 2: and this is how the body responds to it, and
Speaker 2: this is what effect it has on the body. Like
Speaker 2: each of those could be its own classification. So it
Speaker 2: gets very unwieldy very quickly.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think the EU has seventeen groups of classifications
Speaker 1: for zenobiotics, and those are just the ones that they
Speaker 1: have listed as the ones of most concern. But because
Speaker 1: there's so many, there's so much overlap, there's so much
Speaker 1: well yeah, overlap, that it almost renders classifying them either.
Speaker 1: So you have to get so detailed that your your
Speaker 1: book of classifications would be like the universe wide, or
Speaker 1: it renders them basically useless because because some would just
Speaker 1: show up in every classification you.
Speaker 2: Have, right, and you might be thinking like big woop,
Speaker 2: who cares if you can classify and they're still out there.
Speaker 2: But classification is how you group things into, like getting
Speaker 2: funding to study something like you can't just write a
Speaker 2: very vague funding statement and say like we just want
Speaker 2: to study you know, microbiotics and yeah, or like how
Speaker 2: it's bad for you, Yeah, because I think there's like
Speaker 2: more than eighteen kinds of microbead even or maybe more
Speaker 2: than that. But you know, that's how you like get funding,
Speaker 2: that's how you science classify things. It's how they talk
Speaker 2: about things, and so it is an important deal.
Speaker 1: Yes, And so the other thing about the difficulty classifying
Speaker 1: these things is that it also shows just how ubiquitous
Speaker 1: they are. Yeah, Like they're everywhere, Like they're in our cosmetics,
Speaker 1: they're in our cooking pants, they're in our food packaging,
Speaker 1: they're in our shampoos like you were saying, And they're
Speaker 1: in the water we drink, the air we breathe. They're
Speaker 1: passed on through the womb, through breast milk, through blood donations.
Speaker 1: That it's in the Arctic, it's in the deep ocean.
Speaker 1: Like xenobiotics, especially synthetic ones, have settled all over the
Speaker 1: world in most human bodies.
Speaker 2: Boy, I think that is a great unsettling intro.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I want to just point out though, before
Speaker 1: we go to break, we're not trying to be alarmist
Speaker 1: or prompt any sort of hysteria or panic or anything
Speaker 1: like that. Like breastmolk is a great example. Yes, zenobiotics
Speaker 1: can be passed through breast milk, but if you read
Speaker 1: about breast milk, health organizations still say it like the
Speaker 1: benefits of breast milk so vastly outweigh the harm that
Speaker 1: zenobiotics do, at least as far as we know now
Speaker 1: that you definitely want to keep breastfeeding. So we're not
Speaker 1: trying to like scare anybody or prompt a panic, but
Speaker 1: this is the current state of the science right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and go read in any cosmetic companies mission statement
Speaker 2: on zenobiotics and microbeads, and they'll say it's really no
Speaker 2: big deal, that's right. I did that today and I
Speaker 2: was like, oh, okay, and since twenty fifteen, we've been
Speaker 2: doing this and this. It didn't say, well, because an
Speaker 2: entire Republican and Democratic Senate agreed right to make that illegal.
Speaker 2: It made it sound like it was some voluntary thing.
Speaker 1: And all of those posts always end with now, let's
Speaker 1: get back to being pretty right.
Speaker 2: It's just click on the link to go back to shopping,
Speaker 2: all right, So we'll take that break. Now, we'll come
Speaker 2: back and we'll talk about what the body can do
Speaker 2: with this stuff once it gets inside of us, all right, So,
Speaker 2: as promised, we're going to talk about what can happen
Speaker 2: once this goes in the body, and you shouldn't be
Speaker 2: surprised to learn that the body tries to do with
Speaker 2: it what it does with most things that it ingests.
Speaker 2: There's only a handful of things that the body can do.
Speaker 2: They can absorb it, which means it's going into your
Speaker 2: tissue or in your blood, or back and forth between
Speaker 2: the two. But basically it absorbs it and kind of
Speaker 2: stays there. They can distribute it, and that's when it's
Speaker 2: going back and forth between different parts of your body, like.
Speaker 1: A shuttle cock and a badminton game.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 1: Sorry, you've got shuttle cocks on the brink because I
Speaker 1: saw the Wham documentary last night.
Speaker 2: Oh is it good?
Speaker 1: It's great?
Speaker 2: Were they into badminton?
Speaker 1: There's one part with the shuttlecock and George Michael.
Speaker 2: It's very tantal here it is.
Speaker 1: It's as tantalizing as it sounds.
Speaker 2: Believed me, I gotta watch that. What's that on?
Speaker 1: I'd rather not say, I'm just kidding Netflix.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm about to drop them, so maybe I'll watch
Speaker 2: it and then drop them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's worth watching before you drop them, for sure.
Speaker 2: Okay. Biotransformation is when the body breaks it down into
Speaker 2: its you know, it's different parts, and then from there
Speaker 2: it can be metabolized, which of course means it's going
Speaker 2: to be converted into some new kind of chemical. And
Speaker 2: we'll talk more about metabolism in a minute, because it's
Speaker 2: pretty important. Or the last thing it could do is
Speaker 2: eliminate it. It could you know. The liver, of course,
Speaker 2: is where it's usually gonna go, is the first stop
Speaker 2: processing center of the body. And then it's gonna you're
Speaker 2: gonna pee it out or poop it out or sweat
Speaker 2: it out, or it'll be in your hair and it'll
Speaker 2: grow out through your hair and then you'll cut that hair.
Speaker 2: Like Britney Spears, Man, you're just dropping the funny rest today,
Speaker 2: thanks Shuttle Cocks, Britney Spears what else?
Speaker 1: Oh, just you wait, buddy, Okay. But sometimes that stuff's
Speaker 1: eliminated intact, like it had no impact or effect on
Speaker 1: the body. And one of the very famous examples of
Speaker 1: that chuck is when your pea trans bright yellow after
Speaker 1: taking a multi vitamin. Right, what you're seeing is the
Speaker 1: excess B six or twelve that your body didn't absorb
Speaker 1: that's being sent out intact vitamin B has a fluorescent
Speaker 1: look to it, so it's taking your yellow P and
Speaker 1: boosting it in a neon status.
Speaker 2: Like wham style.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but technically you could drink your P with that
Speaker 1: vitamin B and you would inguest some more. It's just
Speaker 1: that there was more than your body needed at the
Speaker 1: time in that vitamin. So it's just excreting it out
Speaker 1: just the same way it came in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and a lot of the stuff, you know, I
Speaker 2: mentioned those four ways, it's not just one or the other.
Speaker 2: Like a lot of these overlap as well. So a
Speaker 2: good example of that is you might ingest like, well THC.
Speaker 2: Let's say you let's see a puffed on a doobie. Okay,
Speaker 2: that THC is a xenobiotic, and THC is the most
Speaker 2: people know who know anything about it is absorbed in
Speaker 2: fat mainly. Yeah, it was called adipose.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's your fatty tissue.
Speaker 2: Yeah, adipose fat. And that's where a lot of that
Speaker 2: THHC goes, and it doesn't stay there forever anything, but
Speaker 2: a lot of different kinds of xenobiotics may go into
Speaker 2: that those fat deposits. Let's say, lose some weight, it's
Speaker 2: gonna burn that fat off and then sometimes those xenobiotics
Speaker 2: can be released back into the bloodstream and it may
Speaker 2: be kind of the same or it may be changed,
Speaker 2: but it's in your body again because you have burned
Speaker 2: fat that was storing that stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and just from it being present when you burn
Speaker 1: fat means that it could have been chemically changed into
Speaker 1: some new chemical compound, which is a frequent happenstance with
Speaker 1: zenobiotics in the human body, and that actually can be
Speaker 1: the fate of a lot of different xenobiotics. Your body
Speaker 1: takes them and turns them into entirely new things, so
Speaker 1: that that can happen to say THC that's part of
Speaker 1: a fat cell. Like it's burned for energy, it turns
Speaker 1: into PCP.
Speaker 2: It's amazing. By the way, the keen eared lister might
Speaker 2: have heard a little momo.
Speaker 1: Cameo, oh yeah, could you hear mo?
Speaker 2: I heard a little bit before you. You got up
Speaker 2: and said, mo, come on, you know in the red
Speaker 2: light's on? What that means?
Speaker 1: She's like, sorry, I know, but I just can't stand landscapers.
Speaker 2: There may have been a couple of barks in there, though,
Speaker 2: but I like that. I like a mumo cameoles leave.
Speaker 1: All right, cool, we will, She'll love it.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, so uh we're pcp oh he is what
Speaker 2: you're talking about.
Speaker 1: Pcp Oh. There was one other thing that happens too, Right.
Speaker 1: So when this, say, the THD gets released back into
Speaker 1: your system, chuck one of the things. As it enters
Speaker 1: the bloodstream, you're it might get taken finally to the liver.
Speaker 1: And this is where the fate of most xenobiotics. The
Speaker 1: vast majority of xenobiotics end up in the liver or liver,
Speaker 1: and the liver actually produces enzymes that seem to be
Speaker 1: dedicated to but babolizing xenobiotics. We have a whole class
Speaker 1: of genes called cytochrome four fifty genes. They express enzymes
Speaker 1: that convert zenobiotics into less harmful stuff in the body.
Speaker 1: Pretty cool, right, And it also shows that like, zenobiotics
Speaker 1: are nothing new as far as our bodies are concerned.
Speaker 2: I know, it's kind of awesome and sad all the
Speaker 2: same time.
Speaker 1: Right, So the liver's going to process what it can.
Speaker 1: When it renders it harmless enough, it will send it
Speaker 1: to the kidneys or to the intestine, where it's either
Speaker 1: pooped out or peed out or the intestines will reabsorb
Speaker 1: it and send it back to the liver, and it'll
Speaker 1: be processed further and broken down further, and eventually, over
Speaker 1: enough time they call them half lives. Just like with radioactivity,
Speaker 1: the thing has been basically rinsed and repeated so many
Speaker 1: times that enough it's just so little of it in
Speaker 1: your system that it's essentially gone, even if there might
Speaker 1: be little trace amounts left.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then I know we talked about this in
Speaker 2: our maybe an alcoholism or did you just do on
Speaker 2: on hangovers? Maybe sometimes it gets broken down into something
Speaker 2: that's worse for you, that's actually really bad. And alcohol
Speaker 2: is a great example. When it hits the liver, those
Speaker 2: enzymes go to work like they're trained to do, and
Speaker 2: it turns it into acetold hyde, and that's a metabolite
Speaker 2: of alcohol, and that is the carcinogen. That's the thing
Speaker 2: that is you know, if you're a severe alcoholic and
Speaker 2: you're dying from it, it's from that acetaldehyde which comes
Speaker 2: about because your liver is trying to break down that
Speaker 2: alcohol that you're just dumping on it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a metabolite of alcohol. So it's a product
Speaker 1: of metabolism. But it's an intermediary one. It gets transformed
Speaker 1: into acetate, which is far less toxic as far as
Speaker 1: your body's concerned. But for that brief time where the
Speaker 1: alcohol is in acetyl aldehyde form before it becomes acetate,
Speaker 1: it can do a lot of damage genetic damage to
Speaker 1: your cells that can get passed on and turn into tumors,
Speaker 1: or it can just damage the cells and the liver
Speaker 1: grows back kind of hardened or scarred, and that's where
Speaker 1: you get things like cirrhosis.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And that half life you were talking about,
Speaker 2: you can't. It's not you know when you talk about
Speaker 2: the half life of like nuclear waste or something. Nuclear waste,
Speaker 2: is that a good example, Yeah, definitely, Like plutonium, Yeah,
Speaker 2: you can. You can be a little more specific. The
Speaker 2: conditions of the of the human that ingests something makes
Speaker 2: it really hard to get like a really precise half
Speaker 2: life on zenobiotics because of how old you are, how
Speaker 2: heavy you are, what kind of health you're in, all
Speaker 2: kinds of stuff like that. So you're going to always
Speaker 2: see a range as far as a half life goes.
Speaker 2: In the case of xenobiotsey, yes, like a big range.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like Alprazi lamb I think is an antidepressant or
Speaker 1: an anti anxiety drug has a half life of six to
Speaker 1: twelve hours.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so either one thing or double it.
Speaker 1: Right. So yeah, But the point of this and the
Speaker 1: point of knowing half lives and all that is if
Speaker 1: you know you know what route a zenobiotic takes and
Speaker 1: what it does in your body and how long it's
Speaker 1: around for, you can treat those things better. You can
Speaker 1: also design drugs better that can treat zenobiotics or do
Speaker 1: other things. You can make them much more targeted and personalized.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: That's one of the reason I am understanding all this,
Speaker 1: aside from having your mind blown.
Speaker 2: Right, we talked about ecosystems. You know, it's not just
Speaker 2: humans and animals that are affected by this stuff. The
Speaker 2: good news about ecosystems is that, and we've talked about
Speaker 2: this in different you know, Earth Science podcast over the years,
Speaker 2: they resemble the human body in a lot of ways,
Speaker 2: and one way is how they process things. There are
Speaker 2: things in ecosystems that help move along these zenobiotics, sometimes
Speaker 2: unchanged just because it goes in like let's say a
Speaker 2: river and then doesn't really change much before it's washed
Speaker 2: down and evaporates into the air. Let's say.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's kind of like our process of elimination. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are other analogies too, and they're really found in wetlands.
Speaker 1: They call wetlands, as we've said many times before, Earth's
Speaker 1: kidneys because they're they're so good at filtering toxins out
Speaker 1: of water, and they do them a few different ways.
Speaker 1: One of the main ways is that they just trap
Speaker 1: them in the sediment. They lay on top of them,
Speaker 1: like a murderer in a hospital room with a pillow
Speaker 1: over the victim's face. Yeah, for river hook exactly. And
Speaker 1: that's very similar to our method of absorption, where it
Speaker 1: just gets locked into our tissues.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: They can also break them down chemically or biologically, like
Speaker 1: just exposure to the sun can break the chemical bonds
Speaker 1: of some things gasoline. There, there's algae and other kinds
Speaker 1: of microorganisms that are actually capable of eating gasoline, breaking
Speaker 1: it down into less harmful constituent parts. And that's basically
Speaker 1: the same thing is what our the enzymes in our
Speaker 1: bodies are doing with what's it called biotransformation. Yeah, pretty
Speaker 1: neat stuff. I love that when there's just like really
Speaker 1: obvious analogies between us and other parts of Earth, because
Speaker 1: it's just such a reminder that like we're a part
Speaker 1: of this larger hole and it's a part of us too.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, And you know there's a half life in
Speaker 2: the environment as well. It's going to be different than
Speaker 2: it is in us, of course, but you know, sometimes
Speaker 2: it's like, you know, rain can wash stuff away. Of course,
Speaker 2: it might end up in the groundwater and it might
Speaker 2: react with something else along the way. So it's you know,
Speaker 2: the journey of the zenobiotic in the environment is is
Speaker 2: kind of like in humans, but kind of different and
Speaker 2: fraught with you know, meeting up with other things.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I don't know if you said it or not,
Speaker 1: but the half life in our bodies has a lot
Speaker 1: to do with the state of our health, our diet,
Speaker 1: our weight, our age, our sex, all that stuff contributes
Speaker 1: to it. And then like a zenobiotic in the in
Speaker 1: the environment interacting with other zenobiotics, same thing in our bodies.
Speaker 1: We're finding that zenobiotics interact with other zenobiotics, or say,
Speaker 1: and then they interact in different ways with the metabolites
Speaker 1: of a zenobiotic, and there's a bunch of different metabolites
Speaker 1: so as you start to kind of connect them, the
Speaker 1: whole web grows exponentially and you realize just how ridiculously
Speaker 1: complex this entire thing that we're starting to understand is,
Speaker 1: and just how daunting the idea of coming to fully
Speaker 1: understand it is. The break I think anytime you say
Speaker 1: I would be a fool to say.
Speaker 2: No, that means I need to collect myself here. All right,
Speaker 2: I'm going to collect myself and we'll be right back
Speaker 2: to talk about how screwed we may or may not
Speaker 2: be right after this.
Speaker 1: Okay, Chuck, you used them, maybe the more genteel term screwed.
Speaker 1: But again, we're not here to cause alarm or panic
Speaker 1: or anything like that. But there is a lot of
Speaker 1: cause for concern the more we realize what chemicals we're
Speaker 1: interacting with, and the more we realize how ubiquitous they.
Speaker 2: Are, yeah, and very key in some cases, how long
Speaker 2: they last. Ye, Because we've been talking a lot about
Speaker 2: how these things break down. Some of them are very
Speaker 2: good at not breaking down, and some of them are
Speaker 2: so good at that that they're called forever cancles. The
Speaker 2: one example that was used in here was this woman
Speaker 2: that was found to have something called oxy chlordine in
Speaker 2: her body, which is a metabolite of a pesticide called chlordane,
Speaker 2: and they used that pesticide for many decades treating termites.
Speaker 2: But it was a really bad thing that the world
Speaker 2: eventually said, oh, you know what, we shouldn't use this
Speaker 2: stuff anymore. So it was covered under the Stockholm Convention
Speaker 2: and hasn't been around since eighty eight in the State
Speaker 2: SIN since eighty one in the UK when this person,
Speaker 2: this woman was on a one year old baby, but
Speaker 2: that stuff was still in her body, you know, thirty
Speaker 2: plus years later.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that woman was an environmental journalist named Anna Turns
Speaker 1: and she was writing on BBC and in this article
Speaker 1: she says like, I probably got this from my mom.
Speaker 1: It was probably passed through the womb ow And because
Speaker 1: the half life of chlordine is thirty years, that means
Speaker 1: there's still in me right that I probably passed it
Speaker 1: along to my kids as well. And that's a I mean,
Speaker 1: that's a thing like there. If the half life of
Speaker 1: a chemical is longer than a human life, then for
Speaker 1: all intents and purposes, once it enters your body, it's
Speaker 1: it's never going to go away as far as you're
Speaker 1: concerned it will always be there. Yeah, although there are
Speaker 1: ways to get them out. We're starting to learn and
Speaker 1: that will be a huge field of inquiry in the coming.
Speaker 2: Years of ridding your body of these. So another term
Speaker 2: for a zenobiotic that stays around for a long long
Speaker 2: time and that is pretty harmful, and we should mention that. Well,
Speaker 2: we're going to talk about them persistent organic pollutants or pops.
Speaker 2: These have been around since the nineteen forties. These aren't
Speaker 2: brand new either, and specifically one type of those p
Speaker 2: FASS p fas polyfloroalkal substances. You got it, and they are,
Speaker 2: thank you. They were great as far as being resistant
Speaker 2: to like oil and heat and water. So you're going
Speaker 2: to find them in things like Scotch guard and gortex
Speaker 2: and teflon and flame retardants that firefighters use. These, Like
Speaker 2: I said, these have been around for a long time.
Speaker 2: They exist, and I think more than these pos pifass.
Speaker 2: Is that what you would say?
Speaker 1: That's what I've been wanting to say, but I haven't
Speaker 1: seen it anywhere. There's no little Yeah. I think they
Speaker 1: just say p fast pfas. Okay, well it should be plural.
Speaker 2: I think so. But there are more than I think
Speaker 2: twelve thousand forms and thousands of products. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 2: it's a big deal. This is the stuff that should
Speaker 2: cause some alarm.
Speaker 1: So one of the things about those products that that
Speaker 1: pfoss are used in is that it can wash away.
Speaker 1: Right like if you if you have a fairly new
Speaker 1: washing machine and you look closely, you'll see that probably
Speaker 1: there's a weather proof or waterproof setting for your north
Speaker 1: face rain coat or something like that, and it's meant
Speaker 1: to very delicately wash it because you can very easily
Speaker 1: wash that coating. And when that coating washes off, no
Speaker 1: matter how delicate your washing machine is, some of it's
Speaker 1: going to wash off. It drains out of your washing
Speaker 1: machine and it drains right into municipal wastewater system. And
Speaker 1: we have no idea how to get pifos says out
Speaker 1: of our water. So it's just introduced into water and
Speaker 1: it can go anywhere from that point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it, like we said, it's the stuff stays
Speaker 2: around for a long long time, largely because one of
Speaker 2: the strongest chemical bonds there is the carbon fluorine bond,
Speaker 2: and there was a CDC report that said they could
Speaker 2: be found in the blood of ninety seven percent of Americans.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so the National Institutes of Health here in the
Speaker 1: United States says, we don't one hundred percent know exactly
Speaker 1: what kind of harm this causes. So the NIH is
Speaker 1: being very courteous to big chemical and saying, like, you know,
Speaker 1: we don't know for sure that it does, but if
Speaker 1: you listen to the EPA or the CDC, they're willing
Speaker 1: to say p fosses have been linked to a whole
Speaker 1: suite of health problems from endocrine disruption, low birth weight,
Speaker 1: lowered effectiveness of the immune system, tons of cancers. And yes,
Speaker 1: we haven't fully demonstrated that this does exactly this, but
Speaker 1: there's enough evidence, and most importantly, we're exposed to these
Speaker 1: things and enough people have it in their blood that
Speaker 1: it's really worth not waiting around to see exactly what
Speaker 1: mechanism gives you cancer from p foss before we start
Speaker 1: regular p fossis And this I think the EPA just
Speaker 1: issued its first guideline as recently as twenty sixteen. And
Speaker 1: these things have been around since the forties, and there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of lawsuits that show that dupot in three
Speaker 1: am I known they were harmful since at least nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they're gonna they may end up paying out
Speaker 2: more than the tobacco companies did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what I saw.
Speaker 2: In the end. And this stuff, you know, it's bad
Speaker 2: enough for adults, but this stuff, like the CDC also
Speaker 2: talked about babies and like learning and behavior and the
Speaker 2: growth of your baby can is you know, they have
Speaker 2: to be So it's a little frustrating because they have
Speaker 2: to say, you know, like could cause problems in infants
Speaker 2: and older children and stuff like that, because like you said,
Speaker 2: they haven't certifiably like proven the stuff. But it's just
Speaker 2: such an obvious thing. I hop when people read warnings
Speaker 2: like that, they don't say, oh, well, they haven't absolutely
Speaker 2: prove so it's just fine.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The thing is that science doesn't need to start
Speaker 1: adopting that. It's like total we totally know that this
Speaker 1: is it, because science never does. It's just the point
Speaker 1: of science. I think what the goal here is is
Speaker 1: to get the public aware that, like you said, when
Speaker 1: they see a warning like that, they know what that means, essentially,
Speaker 1: like steer clear of this. Not oh, I'm going to
Speaker 1: wait around twenty years for the field of toxicology to
Speaker 1: prove me to me conclusively that this gives me cancer.
Speaker 1: And in the meantime, I'm going to keep licking my
Speaker 1: teflon coated frying pan all day long. Right.
Speaker 2: And another thing is like, you can't get two populations
Speaker 2: and say, all right, this population, we're going to feed
Speaker 2: you and make you inhale microplastics, and this population we're not,
Speaker 2: so we can get a one to one comparison. Here
Speaker 2: they test the stuff on animals, but they can't literally
Speaker 2: do that to a human being. They can test it
Speaker 2: on seals and they have and it showed cell damage
Speaker 2: and cell death. But you know, you can't design a
Speaker 2: study where you just feed people microplastics and micropas.
Speaker 1: Know, what you would have to do is take a
Speaker 1: part of the study population and sequester them away in
Speaker 1: a glass box for the length of the study and
Speaker 1: just let the rest of the study population go about
Speaker 1: their daily lives and just compare the two like that.
Speaker 2: We did mention microplastics earlier, and a microplastic is defined
Speaker 2: technically is a plastic less than five millimeters. There are
Speaker 2: a couple of kinds. It can be the primary or
Speaker 2: secondary secondary means is broken down from a larger plastic,
Speaker 2: and this is like might be microplastics you find in
Speaker 2: the ocean from larger plastic that's just been out there forever,
Speaker 2: or the primary kind is the stuff that is manufactured
Speaker 2: and put purposely packaged and put into products.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like the stuff that keeps like a cellophane wrapper
Speaker 1: or like a burger wrapper from sticking to the bun.
Speaker 1: That's teflon. There's teflon coding on there. Like that's what
Speaker 1: they use. It's used all around us and chuck. One
Speaker 1: of the things about microplastics that really kind of ties
Speaker 1: into pfas's is that when you wash that same gortex coat,
Speaker 1: that coat's made of microplastics, and some of those are
Speaker 1: going to come out, and just like the pfas's, they're
Speaker 1: going to enter the water supply. And these little tiny
Speaker 1: plastic fibers are capable of actually evaporating from water into
Speaker 1: the air, which means they can be carried through the
Speaker 1: atmosphere and dumped down as snow. In the Arctic and
Speaker 1: with very little surprise, they've actually found microplastics and what
Speaker 1: is essentially pristine Arctic areas.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean, if you've ever have you ever
Speaker 2: wondered like, oh, Why is it that when I shred
Speaker 2: cheese with a cheese shredder, it's all stuck together like
Speaker 2: cheese does, And when I buy the stuff in the package,
Speaker 2: none of that stuff's ever sticking together. It's just all
Speaker 2: like little individual strands of cheese. Well, it's because they
Speaker 2: coat this little shreds of cheese with stuff to keep
Speaker 2: them from clumb together. I'm not sure what is in
Speaker 2: cheese if it's a zenobiotic, so I probably should have
Speaker 2: checked that, but it just came to me at the
Speaker 2: top of my head.
Speaker 1: They if you know that they spray something onto the
Speaker 1: cheese to keep it from sticking. There's one hundred percent
Speaker 1: chances of zenobiotic.
Speaker 2: Actually, here it is. It's cellulose.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that would technically count because we don't like
Speaker 1: we eat cellulose, but it doesn't necessarily contribute to our
Speaker 1: normal physiological processes, so in that circumstance, it would be
Speaker 1: a zenobiotic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's an article that I'm seeing now cellulose colon
Speaker 2: the woodpulp in your shreded cheese. So yeah, we don't
Speaker 2: get that stuff anymore. I mean, like you said, it's
Speaker 2: hard to avoid. I mean, it's impossible to one hundred
Speaker 2: percent avoid this stuff if you're just walking around the planet,
Speaker 2: But you can do a good job at weeding out
Speaker 2: as much as you can, as far as like cosmetics
Speaker 2: and like this shred of cheese and just things that
Speaker 2: you know for sure that they're adding this stuff to
Speaker 2: to make your product a little whatever prettier or less
Speaker 2: clumpy or you know, less sticky.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I think the one takeaway from this episode
Speaker 1: is steer clear of shredded cheese.
Speaker 2: Right. Oh no, I like it when it clumps together. Man.
Speaker 2: This is the great thing about shredding your own.
Speaker 1: It keeps you busy breaking it up.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of ways that microplastics PFASs zenobiotics
Speaker 1: in general can mess with our bodies as they're metabolized
Speaker 1: or as they just enter our bodies. But ultimately one
Speaker 1: of the one of the big problems that they cause
Speaker 1: is cancer. Yeah, And if you have like an acute
Speaker 1: poisoning of a zenobiotic, you can be treated. Typically there's
Speaker 1: an antidote out there maybe that can help you metabolize
Speaker 1: it faster, that can block the same receptors that that
Speaker 1: zenobiotic would attached to and keep it from harming you.
Speaker 1: But with cancer, it's typically the result of a build
Speaker 1: up from repeated exposure of a zenobiotic that does not
Speaker 1: is not easily cleared from the body, and that the
Speaker 1: more time it spends in your body, the more chance
Speaker 1: it has to do some genetic damage. And as again
Speaker 1: as we've seen, the basis of a tumor is a
Speaker 1: cell that has damaged replicating genes in your DNA strand
Speaker 1: and as those get back together, there's nothing stopping them
Speaker 1: from continuing to replicate and replicate and grow and grow
Speaker 1: and grow. And that's the basis of a tumor. So
Speaker 1: we don't know exactly what all zenobiotics can do that.
Speaker 1: We just know that some can and we're starting to
Speaker 1: realize like that it's a frequent occurrence from exposure to zenobiotics,
Speaker 1: especially built up ones.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, studying that stuff is problematic. It's
Speaker 2: tough because there's so many of them, which is what
Speaker 2: we've been trying to hammer home. So I hope it's
Speaker 2: coming through. It's you know, they are studying that stuff,
Speaker 2: but if you're talking about long term exposure, you're talking
Speaker 2: about you know, multi year studies, and they're doing it
Speaker 2: but it's all that stuff is expensive, it takes a
Speaker 2: lot of time, and there are you know, tens of
Speaker 2: millions of these chemicals. So a that's why classification helps,
Speaker 2: because you can group them into a class and study
Speaker 2: a class. But it's just, you know, it's a very
Speaker 2: daunting thing where they're doing great work in cancer research,
Speaker 2: but there's just so much out there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, tough for sure. So a lot of people are saying, well,
Speaker 1: let's turn to AI. AI can figure this out. AI
Speaker 1: can grasp all this like galaxy of interactions between different
Speaker 1: zenobiotics and their metabolites, and that's probably a really great
Speaker 1: path to be pursuing right now. One other thing that
Speaker 1: would be probably have AI applied to it is something
Speaker 1: called metabolomics, which the goal of metabolomics is measuring and
Speaker 1: quantifying every single metabolic process that happens in the body
Speaker 1: and then assigning like a sick nature to it, so
Speaker 1: that you can very quickly detect what your body's doing
Speaker 1: at any given point in time and you can say
Speaker 1: treated accordingly or adjusted accordingly, depending on what's going on.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's a huge deal considering for you know,
Speaker 2: one hundred years or so, they were like pee in
Speaker 2: this thing and we'll test your pee. Yeah, and that
Speaker 2: was kind of from where the research ended.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, for sure, that was. I mean that's kind
Speaker 1: of still where it's at. Like metabolomics is so new
Speaker 1: that it's almost hypothetical right now. There's people working on it,
Speaker 1: for sure, but I think they still will generally have
Speaker 1: you pee and test you afterward or after your debt.
Speaker 1: They'll go dig into your bone or your fatty tissue
Speaker 1: and start testing and see what's there.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Wow, So that's zenobiotics for now. Do you think this
Speaker 1: is one that we would probably like visit maybe later on?
Speaker 2: Oh maybe, Okay, we'll see kind of like birth order.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but on purpose, I guess, is what I'm trying
Speaker 1: to say.
Speaker 2: Yeah. By the way, people pointed out we did customs twice.
Speaker 2: I don't remember that, but I guess we did either. Man.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's see. Since Chuck said that he doesn't
Speaker 1: remember it, and I said I don't remember either doing
Speaker 1: customs twice, that means it's time for listener meal.
Speaker 2: I'm going to call this it has been spanked on
Speaker 2: the bottle. Aloha, guys, and Jerry, I just wanted to
Speaker 2: share a bit of Sara and Dip. I like this
Speaker 2: already after having listened to the Magic Eye Illusions episode.
Speaker 2: My family and I just stayed in the cabin Mount
Speaker 2: Saint Helen's and I had an old school handheld stereo scop.
Speaker 2: Oh that is awesome, so cool. My kids really loved it.
Speaker 2: Included some pics and there some picks of these kids
Speaker 2: popping and they're little jammies. No, they're they're using this
Speaker 2: thing and it's adorable. Look at those cute kids in
Speaker 2: it a little bit time jammies or as my daughter
Speaker 2: calls him, jommies.
Speaker 1: Oh really, how British.
Speaker 2: I don't know why my mom did it?
Speaker 1: Well, you said our language learning episode that your mom,
Speaker 1: all right, kind of apes British people that is around them,
Speaker 1: so that's probably where that's what it was.
Speaker 2: Put on your job it was. I've included some picks.
Speaker 2: Both kids are huge fans. My son loves all of
Speaker 2: the Animal and Earth Science episodes, and my daughter especially
Speaker 2: loves the episode on Pooh Aloha once again because as
Speaker 2: we know, that could mean hello and goodbye. That is
Speaker 2: from Baird and also any names of kids. So I'm
Speaker 2: going to also Mia and Luke. And this email has
Speaker 2: been spanked on the bottom, wrapped up and spanked on
Speaker 2: the bottom with consent.
Speaker 1: Well Mahallow, Baird, Miya and Luke, we appreciate that big time.
Speaker 1: It was a great email. I agree, yeah, and thanks
Speaker 1: for the cute picks. If you want to be like
Speaker 1: Baird and Mia and Luke and say heloha or anything else,
Speaker 1: you can email it to us. Send it off to
Speaker 1: stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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