The cholesterol fix that sweeps forever chemicals away

PFAS are highly useful chemicals.

But they’re also poisoning us.

Because their use is so widespread, they’re practically impossible to avoid, and even harder to eliminate — hence their nickname, “forever chemicals.”

According to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, PFAS molecules have a chain of linked carbon and fluorine atoms. Because the carbon-fluorine bond is one of the strongest, these chemicals do not degrade easily in the environment, your home or your body.

“Every person in the United States, essentially, is walking around with PFAS in their body,” says Dr. Jennifer Schlezinger, a Boston University School of Public Health professor of environmental health.

Except now, purely by happenstance, Dr. Schlezinger may have found a ridiculously easy way to start ridding our bodies of these chemicals…

Lowering cholesterol and cleansing PFAS

Perfluoroalkyl substances, better known as PFAS, are used to make coats waterproof, pans nonstick and furniture stain-resistant.

You’ll also find PFAS in food wrap and containers, cosmetics and personal care products, increasing the ways we are exposed.

Some research shows PFAS are excreted in urine, but it takes nearly four years for levels to drop by half. So, they build up in concentration. Continuous exposure ensures a cycle in which they are never entirely removed from your body.

The damage they do to our health is linked to breast and testicular cancer, the death of our brain cells and the destruction of our immune systems.

Dr. Schlezinger has long studied the role of environmental toxins in disease development and adverse health effects. But it was a personal quest to lower her cholesterol levels that inadvertently led to a solution to remove forever chemicals from our bodies — and it’s something anyone can do.

Taking a drug-free approach, Dr. Schlezinger discovered that cholestyramine, a gel-forming dietary fiber, could help reduce her cholesterol.  

When taken with meals, cholestyramine binds to bile acids, eliminating them from the body through normal digestive processes. The body has to replace the lost bile acid, so it draws cholesterol from the blood to do so, thus reducing cholesterol levels.

Bile acid and PFAS are both surfactants. They are built to stick to fiber. Dr. Schlezinger wondered if gel-forming fibers could help expel PFAS just as they do with bile acids.

In clinical trials using an oat beta-glucan supplement (a gel-forming fiber), Dr. Schlezinger indeed found a statistically significant effect on PFAS levels.

She is continuing her work to find the optimal gel-forming fiber to decrease PFAS levels.

A healthy step in the right direction

Despite the success of her initial trials, Dr Schlezinger wants to be clear about a few things…

One, she is not recommending a high-fiber diet to lower cholesterol or to remove PFAS. A supplement is much more accessible. For example, she’s testing a fiber known as psyllium, the key ingredient in Metamucil.

Second, she’s not implying that taking a fiber supplement for a few months will eliminate PFAS from your body. It’s unclear how long it could take.

But it appears to be a step in the right direction. The vast majority of Americans consume nowhere near the recommended daily fiber intake.

Dr. Schlezinger has been taking a scoop of oat beta-glucan in pomegranate juice before meals, and her cholesterol is back to normal.

But if gelled fiber is not appealing to you, there is another option that holds promise…

Probiotics. Research has shown that some gut bacteria have a remarkably high capacity to soak up PFAS from the gut environment at a range of concentrations and store these in clumps inside their cells.

Mice with these bacteria had more PFAS in their stool, meaning they were able to help it exit their bodies.

Staying regular may also reduce the amount of time PFAS spend in the gut, where they can leak through the gut barrier into the bloodstream.

Regardless of how effective these methods are, they also offer other health benefits and may be our best chance to reduce our PFAS exposure somewhat.

Sources:

Supplement could help remove forever chemicals from the body — Futurity

An oat fiber intervention for reducing PFAS body burden: A pilot study in male C57Bl/6 J mice — Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology