Getting rid of obesogens and endocrine-disruptors by (usefully) bleeding

One of the things that people are starting to worry about, at least a little bit, are endocrine disruptors. In a nutshell, endocrine disruptors mess with your hormones. Since your hormones get your body to do all sorts of different things, endocrine disruptors can have wide-ranging, if subtle, effects.

There are also obesogens — things that make you fat. When I say “make you fat” here, I’m specifically claiming that they’ll get your body to generate fat with the food you eat instead of doing something useful with it, like making your mitochondria generate more energy for you to use.

Brad Marshall, of Fire in a Bottle fame, has a page listing a number of obesogens:

“PUFA as an obesogen; How Seed Oils Cause Reductive Stress, Part VI”

Of the five, you’ve probably heard of BPA (Bisphenol A). It’s used in plastic bottles, and avoiding BPA is one of the reasons why people switch to glass or metal water bottles.

Some of these disruptors are in the bloodstream. If you’d like to get rid of them, you could try bleeding.

No, I don’t recommend you punch yourself on the nose. If you can, donate your blood. Someone else could use it, and you’ll get some junk out of your system that nobody knows how to filter out otherwise.

Now, at this point you may wonder — what blood products should I donate? If your blood-collection facilities are like the ones around me, there’ll be a choice of:

whole-blood donations (the most common choice)

double red-cell donations (more desired if your blood type is closer to the O− pole)

platelet apheresis (more desired if your blood type is closer to the AB+ pole)

plasma apheresis (more desired if AB+ or AB−)

“more desired” above refers to how useful the blood is to the people drawing the blood.

On the other hand, it’s not obvious what’s most useful to you. Whole blood is the obvious choice, but at least in some cases, plasma donation may be markedly more effective. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) seem pretty nasty, and dealing with them seems to be a hazard of being a firefighter. However, one study found that plasma donations were significantly more effective than whole-blood donations to get PFASs out of one’s system:

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (on Wikipedia)

Effect of Plasma and Blood Donations on Levels of Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances in Firefighters in Australia: A Randomized Clinical Trial

The Red Cross doesn’t want my plasma (I’m pretty far from the AB+ pole), so I just squeeze out a bag of whole blood and call it a day. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any studies that compare red-blood-cell or platelets donations to whole-blood or plasma donations.

⏚

Home

Hi! I’m a one-pixel invisible tracking image! View me to let my webmaster know you’ve scrolled through the entire page!