Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Exploring both interstellar and interpersonal space-time continuums. The Last Show with David Cooper. It's everything you wanted to know and maybe some things you didn't about the latest science news. We are joined by Professor Jesse Rogerson from York University. We asked the question, if you want to avoid microplastics, should you drink bottled water that comes in plastic?
I would think the answer to this question is obviously no. Welcome, Jesse.
David, let's talk about microplastics in water. Yeah, you would have thought that the answer would be obviously no, but there's the misconception or maybe the good perception that bottled water would be safer, right? You'd think, okay, this water is like pristine, you know, it's in the bottle, it's in a plant, it's not the stuff coming out of my taps.
You know, you open up your tap, you don't know what your pipes are like, you know, like... That can be different all over the country, but you get like a quality product from a bottle of water. Maybe, you know, this is a perception I even I had.
And so this study was like, okay, well, let's look at the water coming out of taps across the United States and the water in bottling plants and see how they compare, specifically with microplastics and nanoplastics. And they found in this study that, in particular in the Lake Erie area, that bottled water contains three times as many nanoplastics than regular tap water.
And the author of the study says, quote, for the average person, Who is thirsty? The best way to do that would be drinking water straight out of the tap. So you heard that straight from the scientist.
You heard that straight from the source and how eerie that finding is. I had to, you know, microplastics. How bad are they for you?
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Chapter 2: What are the dangers of microplastics in bottled water?
I remember there was a plastic called BPA that they kind of like phased out and.
the plastics could like leach to your like hormone receptors it was like demonstrably kind of bad for you it probably shouldn't have been on the market in the first place but that's been taken off the market what do these microplastics do or is it a big just like we don't know some people worry some people don't the evidence doesn't look great but there's no conclusive findings
So I guess that's a good summary of it. There's some nuance there. First, with this study, the reason this one was able to be so successful in finding so much as two is they were really focusing on nanoplastics, which is smaller than microplastics. So you wouldn't be able to see them in other earlier studies. But then they had a couple of different ways of finding them.
They were using scanning electromicroscopes and they were using chemical inducers. And they were able to dig in deeper and smaller and find more plastics. And it seems to be leaching from the plastic bottles themselves. And there's a lot of studies that are showing that microplastics and nanoplastics can cross biological barriers. So they end up in the liver, in the kidneys, in the brain.
Chapter 3: What misconceptions exist about bottled water safety?
Now, I was looking into this very question that you just asked. know what is the biological impact here and the short answer is it's unknown at the moment though there is some scary initial findings that are that you might want to put in the category of we really need to pay attention and one was that there was a study showing from 2016 comparing water from 2016 to 2024
significantly like exponentially higher plastic so we're talking like over the last 10 years things have dramatically changed in our water in our drinking water and they found in this in this study that there was a higher concentration of plastics in the brains of 12 people with documented diagnosis of dementia So now hold on. I don't want to overstep this. It was 12 people.
They had diagnoses of dementia and they had more microplastics in their brains than people who didn't have dementia diagnoses.
And causation and correlation. It's just it's startling, but we don't know.
Yeah, exactly. It's startling, but we don't know. And but here's the thing, though, is, you know, if you compare it like the existential threats to humanity, climate change is a big one. But climate change is one I feel that we can mitigate with technology. So we can manage things, even if we should be, we need to manage climate change, of course, because it has huge implications.
But here, this is one where it's, once the plastics are in your brain, this is, I don't know how we can manage that with technology, or at least at the moment, we have nothing for it. So we have this existential threat to our biology. We don't understand the implications from it. And it's only getting worse, not better. So I, as a scientist, I look at all this data and I say, this is scary.
Now, and don't drink bottled water, I guess, is the finding. But I don't know. It's so wild to me, people who only drink bottled water, who live in cities with perfectly good water. People move to North America, to Canada, the US, to Europe, from all parts of the world. And they're like, wow. Clean drinking water like that is remarkable.
It's one of the greatest achievements of the places where it's figured out. And then for people to be like, no, I'd rather actually buy wasteful water bottles, disposable water bottles, less that is of worse quality and drink that than this amazing thing that comes from my tap. I literally pull a lever in my kitchen. Yeah. I can drink as much clean water as I want.
It's amazing when you think about it. Like a thousand years, a hundred years ago, you had to go with a bucket to get some dirty water out of a well, you know? So drink from the tap, I guess is what I'm saying.
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