In The Plastic Detox, a new documentary on Netflix, six couples with unexplained infertility work to rid their lives of plastic in the hopes that doing so will improve their chances of having a baby. They toss out air fresheners and cutting boards, and try adopting bamboo toothbrushes and deodorant packaged in paperboard. “Will we get pregnant because of it?” one participant asks. “I have no idea.” Their guide on this journey is Shanna Swan, an 89-year-old researcher who has spent much of her career studying the effects of environmental chemicals on reproductive health.
In the film, Swan, a professor of environmental medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, inventories the sources of plastic in the participants’ daily lives and identifies alternatives. Over a three-month “intervention period”, she measures concentrations of chemicals in their urine and sperm counts. The premise of the documentary is appealing: cut plastic chemicals out of your life, and improve your fertility. But it is not that straightforward. “It’s not a quote-unquote ‘scientific study’,” Swan acknowledged in the film. “We have no control group, it’s very small,” she said. And it is not clear that reducing daily exposure to such chemicals the way these participants did, can increase an individual adult’s fertility.
In the film, Swan said she did not want to scare people but instead educate them. “This is also something we have to pay attention to,” she said. If you want to take a hard look at the plastics in your life, it helps first to understand what exactly you need to worry about. It is important to distinguish between microplastics and “plasticizers,” said Matthew Campen, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of New Mexico. Microplastics are tiny pieces of plastic, commonly shed through wear and tear on larger plastics; for example, single-use plastic bags or clothes made from synthetic fabric. Plasticizers are chemicals like bisphenols and phthalates that are often added to plastics, such as reusable bottles or bath toys, to make them rigid or flexible.
Based on the research, plasticizers are the bigger concern for reproductive health. Bisphenols (including BPA) and phthalates are part of a class of chemicals called endocrine disrupters because they interfere with hormones, said Andrea Gore, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Texas at Austin. Is it possible to cut out plastic entirely? Probably not, Swan said. Plastic is everywhere; in our coffee makers, clothes, couches and the materials used to build our homes. But you can make changes that lower your exposure.
Three of the couples in the film did have babies. But it is nearly impossible to ascribe cause and effect because of the small sample and the fact that the intervention was not a controlled experiment. Swan does not want to stop there. She is now planning to apply for a grant to run a larger randomized trial that she hopes will provide more definitive answers.
The New York Times