A hundred percent of placentas that were dissected had microplastics in them.

Dr. Casey Means: "Well, if you ask the New York Times, they'll write a headline that says, girls are going through puberty way earlier and no one has any idea why. And of course, that's because there's not a double-blind placebo-controlled peer-reviewed RCT in a journal that can exactly pinpoint the one reason why it's happening.

But again, if we put the dots together, which of course I'm going to be called like not evidence-based for saying that. What's happening in our environment right now? So what drives early puberty is excess estrogens, right? We're like, we're pushing estrogens to basically, you know, spark that whole process of puberty. Well look at our world.

Where are these ex- why would we be having extra estrogens? Well, let's look at our environment, the plastics. So we've got plastics, as you know, everywhere. I love you were talking about this, I think with Brigham, like you've got the metal cups and I love it. There have been eight billion metric tons of plastic produced on planet Earth since about 1907 when plastic was commercialized.

And the interesting thing about plastic is that when it breaks down, it acts like a xenoestrogen, an exogenous estrogen molecule that can literally bind to our estrogen receptors and act like estrogens. So now we've got, you know this, we've got plastic effing everywhere. It's literally in the air we're breathing, the nanoparticles, it's in our food, it's in our water, it's in everything.

And we've now found plastics in every human organ. So of course that's affecting our bodies and our young girls' bodies. It's actually affecting our bodies in utero. There was this recent study that was done that showed a hundred percent of placentas that were dissected had microplastics in them. So that's one. Number two, look at the pesticides.

So there are pesticides actually where their molecular activity is to increase aromatase, the enzyme that converts testosterone to estrogen. So atrazine, which is banned in Europe, but we spray 70 million pounds of it per year in the US, increases aromatase, which converts testosterone to estrogen.

Illegal overseas. And it is, we buy it from other countries. So China and Germany and other countries are selling us a chemical of which 70 million pounds are sprayed on our food, invisible and tasteless, which upregulates aromatase and converts testosterone to estrogen. So that's number two. And then you look at just the fat that we have on our bodies.

So fat, and especially visceral fat, the metabolically active fat around our midline, that is a metabolically active organ that actually converts testosterone to estrogen. So we are living in this wildly estrogenic environment that is created by humans. And it's all invisible. And again, it's like, how would you even do the study right, to show that.

And yet, if you put the pieces together, it's very clear. Now, go into later life and talking about estrogens. We've got a huge percentage of American women on birth control pills. That's, of course, hopefully post puberty. But we're putting women on exogenous estrogens for acne, for PCOS, for menstrual regularity, sometimes, of course, for actual birth control.

But it's very ubiquitous now in the environment. And it's like, it's like, when you kind of know this stuff, you're like, how are we allowing this to happen? And then of course it's affecting boys too, right? And so I kind of just think about this world we're living in where it's tons of estrogens.

It's not like there's a bunch of exogenous testosterone, right? It's not like the plastics are also stimulating testosterone. So you've got these estrogens, then we're barreled with sugar. And it's literally like it's in our kids' school lunches, there's sugar everywhere. Sugar is driving the visceral fat in kids, which is turning estrogen into testosterone.

So it's like, we live in a world that's basically feminizing us, which for women that's gonna make puberty early, for men it's gonna feminize them. And then we also have an entire food system that's driving visceral fat to make us more estrogen sort of rich. And what is this doing? I think in a lot of ways it's depleting American vigor. Like we're living in this estrogen stew that's hard to get away from."