The average person consumes 39 000 to 52 000 microplastic particles per year through food and drink. This number doubles when taking into account how many microplastics we might inhale. Microplastics have been found in blood samples and almost every organ in the human body. In this episode, we discuss what are microplastics, how they get into your body, how they affect your health and how to avoid being exposed to them.

References cited in this podcast:

Human Consumption of Microplastics: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b01517

Polypropylene microplastics promote metastatic features in human breast cancer: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-33393-8

Microplastics and Nanaoplastics in Atheromas and Cardiovascular Events: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2309822

The average person sits for more than 6-8 hours. While we can't avoid sitting (and sometimes it's necessary), most of us do too much and continuous sitting can increase your risk for disases such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer and dementia, and early death. In this episode we discuss the problems with sitting, how it affects your metabolism, can your exercise counteract sitting and provide you with tips on how to reduce your sitting.

References cited in this podcast:

Association of Sitting Time with Mortality and Cardiovascular Events in High-Income, Middle-Income and Low-Income Countries: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/article-abstract/2793521

Device-measured physical activity, sedentary time, and risk of all-cause mortality: An individual participant analysis of four prospective cohort studies: https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/57/22/1457

Breaking Up Prolonged Sitting Reduces Postprandial Glucose and Insulin Responses: https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/35/5/976/38374/Breaking-Up-Prolonged-Sitting-Reduces-Postprandial

From frozen vegetables to heat-and-serve burritos, processed foods are all around us and make up a large portion of most people’s diet. Ultra-processed foods, such soda pop, frozen meals and soup, have been associated with heart disease, cancer, diabetes and early death, but can all these foods be grouped together, and can processed foods be part of a healthy diet? In this episode, we discuss what makes a food a processed food, how processed foods affect your health and whether you should be concerned if they’re in your diet.

Some references cited in the podcast:

Ultra-processed food exposure and adverse health outcomes: umbrella review of epidemiological meta-analyses: https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2023-077310

NOVA classification of foods: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova

Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain: An Inpatient Randomized Controlled Trial of Ad Libitum Food Intake: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1550413119302487