What do you think of my solution for the microplastics issue?
A request for feedback
Short post today: If you’ve been reading my blog for a bit, you’ll know that I’ve become interested in the issue of microplastics and plasticizers in our food, as evidenced by the two long posts I wrote that were inspired by Nat Friedman’s PlasticList project. My conclusions can be summarized as follows:
1. Microplastics are essentially everywhere—in our food, water, and ultimately in our bodies.
2. The plasticizers that make plastics soft and flexible are likely harmful to human health.
3. Because microplastics are so widespread, it’s nearly impossible to avoid ingesting them entirely.
Recently, I started exploring a potential safe, food-grade supplement (based on oat fiber) to bind and remove plasticizers in the digestive tract to address that third point.
Now, I’d love your help to see if there’s real demand for such a product. Would you mind checking out this landing page and filing out the form on the bottom?
Please feel free to reply to this post to give me your thoughts as well. Thanks!
P.S. I’m still working on my cat drug projects—this is just a side project.
How specific a binder could it be? What good or ambiguous compounds are at risk of being captured too? Fat-soluble vitamins? Flavonoids? Hormones with enterohepatic circulation? How much might those overlaps matter?
There are probably better solutions to the actual problem, but this could certainly be highly commercially remunerative if marketed correctly.
It would obviously only partially mitigate dietary plastics/plasticizers/etc absorption, not extant compounds deep in tissue. In addition to the solubility of hydrophic miconutrients in this supplement, I'd also be concerned with a potentially high phytic acid concentrations in a daily supplement needed to be taken in probably 20-100g amounts. PA will invariably chelate divalent and trivalent cations, particularly iron (Fe²⁺, Fe³⁺), zinc (Zn²⁺), magnesium (Mg²⁺), and calcium (Ca²⁺), for excretion in the digestive tract.