For the next 24 hours, I'll be on this tiny island, in a house made of only wood and stone, eating only avocados and bananas, drinking only distilled water, and spending my time sorting through salt under a microscope. There will be no coffee. This is serious. Why am I doing this? Well, scientists recently looked for microscopic plastics in human poo, and they found them in every single sample they looked at from people around the world. We swallow tiny little bits of plastic every single day, and it adds up. Each week, we ingest something like a credit card worth of plastic. Every single week! So, to show you where all of that is coming from, I'm going to spend the next 24 hours doing everything I can to avoid ingesting plastic.

And honestly, it's pretty messed up just how difficult that is. Let's start with what you eat. If your food is packaged in plastic, then little bits of that will rub off or leach their way into your meal. And even if they aren't wrapped, bottled, or bagged, plastic might be in the foods themselves. There's so much plastic in the ocean that scientists have found it in the guts of shrimp, fish, and clams, so we know that it can make its way through the food chain—and eventually to us. So just to be safe for this project, I'm turning to the very bottom of the food chain: plants. And just to make sure that no plastic has rubbed off on those foods before they get to me, I'm only eating things that have a peal or a shell. So what I'm left with are avocados, oranges, bananas, and uncracked nuts. I'm sick of playing avocados. Salt is also a problem since our bodies need it in small quantities, but again, since the ocean is so full of plastic, sea salt is just out of the question for me. So, I've got Himalayan salt that was mined from rock deposits that predate the plastic age. And just to be sure that no plastic has gotten into it along the way, I am looking through each individual grain with a microscope.

I found one here that has a little blue fiber in it that's probably plastic. That one gets rejected. Water is a whole additional problem; if you drink bottled water, you're sipping thousands of microplastics a year, and even tap water has trace amounts. So, the only option for me is distilled water, which I had to get at a special facility, and it's actually unhealthy since our bodies need the minerals in water. But I should be okay for a day. It's early afternoon, and I have a caffeine withdrawal headache, so... that sucks. The last question is, Why am I here? And while this place is lovely, the answer to that question is the scariest part of all. I'm here in this Cobb house made entirely of clay, sand, straw, wood, and stone on a remote island because plastic is in the air we breathe. Since our houses are so often carpeted and painted with plastic, there were probably little bits of plastic dust in the breath you just took since we so often burn it to get rid of it, and since there's just so much of it lying around, it's been collected in air samples in remote parts of the world, like the Alps. So I'm still probably reading some of it.

Sings: 'Its been 24 hours, dear coffee; I'll never leave you again.' Aside from growing to dislike avocados a little bit, this actually wasn't that bad. However, I've got some good news and some bad news. First, the bad news. The bad news is that we don't yet know what this means for human health. The plastic crisis is just so recent that researchers haven't had a chance to get answers yet, but preliminary studies suggest that it's probably pretty unhealthy for us. The good news is that going to these extremes is completely unnecessary. If you want to drastically reduce your plastic intake, you can get most of the way here just by eating less seafood and buying fewer things in plastic packaging, especially bottled water and other plastic bottle beverages. And the cool thing about that is that you'll be doing something good for your health while helping to save the planet. In order to do my part to help out, I have disabled YouTube ads from this channel because they are promoting a lot of plastic things that no one really needs. So with that, I have to say a huge thanks to my patrons over on Patreon for helping make projects like this possible. Thank you.

I originally planned to do this project over four days because I really wanted to send a sample of my poo to a lab and get it analyzed for microplastics, but for some reason, I couldn't find anyone that was willing to look at my poo. So if they do return my call, be prepared for video number two, and for now, thanks for watching!