If you want to be more environmentally friendly, and improve your health, reducing plastic is on your list. Not only is this chemical bad for the environment, it’s bad for you.
First, plastic stops the transfer of oxygen to food. This is good if you want to preserve things, but it’s also a really good condition to allow anaerobic bacteria to grow. It also allows viruses to survive long after their usual life expectancy. That means the flu virus could travel from California to PA and still make you sick.
Plastic also leeched into your food. The pasteurization process degrades the plastic and causes microscopic particles to settle on your food. When you eat it, you ingest these particles. If you eat 1 food with 100 plastic pieces per meal (about average) per day, that’s over 1,00,000 pieces, or about the size of a medium sized toy.
In the heat, like a normal car in the summer, this breakdown of the plastic can happen in hours. In fact, a recent study showed a hot car for 1 hour is equivalent to 3 months of normal conditions. A full day in the heat takes the plastic of water bottles to the end of their normal lifespan.
And they still want you to drink it. All of these pieces need to be broken down and filtered out by your liver and kidneys.
Detoxing cleans out your liver and kidneys, but detoxing won’t solve the problem. Reducing your toxic intake allows your body to naturally detox.
Here’s how I reduce my plastic:
- Don’t buy food in plastic – this eliminates processed foods, which you don’t want anyways
- Choose glass – it’s recyclable and doesn’t contaminate
- Reuse glass jars for storing things like rice, beans, and other foods you can’t get in any other container besides plastic
Every little thing you do to reduce your plastic intake improves your health. Choosing better allows you more control of your body and your environment.
Finally, if you find yourself needing to use plastic, follow basic rules. Don’t allow it to sit in the sun. Choose BPA-free plastic. And bring your own bottle. Newer bottles are better resistant to breaking down. You eliminate the waste of fresh water bottles and reduce the need for recycling.
If all else fails, demand companies start using smaller packages and less plastic. The more voiced that call out, the more they will listen.
https://youtu.be/QWlwas3xUn8
