I know a lot of people say they don’t but based on what iv seen we consume LOTS of micro plastics iv even seen a study that says we eat a credit cards worth a week if that’s true then there must be some way for our body to remove them since otherwise we’d have too much plastic in us I also heard that there is plastic in our livers and testicles . How does our body remove all of that and how much would donating blood help?
In: Biology
> I know a lot of people say they don’t but based on what iv seen we consume LOTS of micro plastics iv even seen a study that says we eat a credit cards worth a week if that’s true then there must be some way for our body to remove them since otherwise we’d have too much plastic in us I also heard that there is plastic in our livers and testicles . How does our body remove all of that and how much would donating blood help?
This is spiders Georg all over again.
To put it simply:
1) We do not eat a “credit card’s worth of plastic” per week. The WWF lied about it. Why? Because the WWF lies about everything to promote itself.
2) Microplastics are mostly harmless. Toxicology studies have been done on them and we have determined that they are harmless in the quantities that we are exposed to them.
3) Donating blood won’t make any significant difference.
A credit card’s worth a week seems hard to believe. They’re called microplastics for a reason. We’re talking about microscopic materials that exist in trace elements in our food. But it does eventually break down. In a landfill it breaks down very slowly but your body is a much less hospital place so it does eventually break down.
Everything smaller than 5mm is “microplastic” by some definitions, in others it’s anything below 1mm. Anything that big will just get pooped out.
To pass through the walls of the digestive tract they have to be much smaller. The bits found in blood were 0.0007mm. So even if we ate a credit card a week (which we don’t) most won’t ever make it into the body (digestive tract counts as “outside”).
Anything odd that doesn’t belong into a tissue will be snatched up by macrophages (a type of white blood cell) which will try to digest it, and drag bits and pieces to the next nymph node where they show it to other types of white blood cells to see whether they recognize it as something the immune system needs to fight. Plastics aren’t interesting in that regard. So the debris just sits there in the lymph node doing nothing.
Macrophages can also throw garbage out the next best airlock, into lung mucus or out the gut or into breast milk. Or they just stay where they found stuff, shrink up and become a tidy, tiny garbage bag within the organ. Usually they’re meant to do that with debris from infections or “normal” dust, plastic is new. The macrophages in testicles don’t move f.ex. but they have a job in the whole sperm-production process and when they’re all used as garbage bins, they can’t do that job anymore. Not so good for fertility.
Donating blood helps significantly— there was a recent study on this. IIRC, it removed around 80% of detectable microplastics when donating blood once or twice a month. So…give those plastics to someone else and get a free cookie!
I was tracking with you up until the last question…I’m sorry what? Donating blood to remove microplastics is…not something you hear every day.
You most likely pass a lot of the larger pieces. We cannot filter plastic once it reaches the bloodstream. Our kidneys act like a filter, but it’s not like a Brita where someone comes along to dump it out. It gets caught wherever the capillaries terminate. Lungs, testicles, organs, subcutaneous tissue, brain… When it reaches a point where the blood vessels are too small to pass it it gets stuck. The immune system might activate cells to try to engulf it, like phagocytes, but there will still be nowhere for it to go. It reaches the lymphatic system and then back to the bloodstream if it doesn’t get stuck.They do not pass through the kidneys into the bladder. Donating blood can help, because the plastic likes to bind to cholesterol and red blood cells. Once the body starts to break those substances down, the plastic gets released into the body again.
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