Is your seafood actually filled with microplastics or is it a brain food? Let’s get deep into the research and figure it out in this video. I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey. I’m a board certified psychiatrist. I’m an active clinician. That’s my couch. I’m also really interested in the impact of food on mental health. This is called nutritional psychiatry and I’m one of the leaders in this field.
When we think about the foods we want you to eat for mental health, I’ve been telling you a simple rhyme. And in this video, we’re going to get into the details why one of my top recommendations might actually be a problem and what to do about it. First of all, we’re talking about nutritional psychiatry. We think in food categories. These are the categories of food like nuts or seafood or leafy greens, where we find the most nutrients for our mental health.
Seafood has long-chained omega-3 fats, EPA and DHA. These are very rare in the natural world. Your brain is about 7% DHA. This is the longest-chained fat that you eat, and it’s the longest of the omega-3 fats. We find it in the seafood and a lot of you who are taking fish oil pills find it there too. The omega-3 fats are so interesting. This has led us to seafood and I’ve been encouraging you all according to my little rhyme, seafood, greens, nuts and beans, and a little dark chocolate. Seafood’s right there number one.
Now you’ve been seeing the headlines about microplastics and this really came to light when a 2025 study published in Nature showed that cadaver brains of deceased humans have massive amounts of microplastics in them, particularly the microplastics polyethylene. Polyethylene is in the brain. They think about a teaspoon per brain. And of course this leads to a question, what’s it doing in there? We’ll get into that research in just a few minutes, it’s quite interesting. But also how do we minimize our exposure and what do we do about the microplastics already in our brain?
So first, let’s get into it and you look at the recommendations of how to decrease microplastics. First of all, your food exposure is not your top source. And the worry that we have right now in nutritional psychiatry is that as people think about and we get the information about microplastics concerns, one of the first things that you’re going to do is stop eating the foods with microplastics. And it’s important to note, these are things like honey, sea salt, and lots and lots of ultra-processed foods. There are a lot of parts of the food processing stages that can introduce microplastics into our food. So thinking about seafood and what the data has said, it’s pretty clear. Seafood does have microplastics in it. However, the experts indicate this isn’t really one of our top exposures, even though it’s a more highly concentrated source. The reason for that is you don’t eat lots and lots of seafood. And even if you eat a fair amount of seafood, let’s say daily, you still really aren’t getting the same magnitude of exposure that you do in the air and that you do in plastic water bottles. These are the two top sources of microplastic exposures for humans. I go into some of the ways to avoid that in my book, Healing the Modern Brain, talking about things like an air filter in your bedroom is really one of the top things you can do and getting a metal water bottle. But besides that, we want to then look for food sources like seafood.
So first of all, let’s talk about the seafoods with the most because they’re my favorite, the bivalves: mussels, clams and oysters. And the reason for that is that you’re eating the entire organism. When you’re eating a filet of fish, you’re just eating the muscle, nice piece of salmon muscle. And while there are microplastics in there, there aren’t as much. In the stomach and intestinal tract of bivalves, because you’re eating the whole organism, there are more microplastics. One of the interesting pieces of data I found is how the industry is responding to this. In one study, they have a process where they let the mussels of sit in freshwater and they get rid of 50% of the microplastics that they have. So you can really reduce exposure through better processing of the muscles, or if you have some at home, let them sit in water for a little bit or a little salt water. So that’s one concern is that now people are just going to avoid pasta vongole, you’re going to avoid oyster date night, you’re going to avoid having mussels at home because of concerns of microplastics.
Let’s just think what are the benefits? Because we always want to weigh the risks and benefits. The benefits of these foods is they’re very good value, very nutrient dense. Oysters, clams, and mussels are all in the top five of the antidepressant food rating scale. And why is that? Because they have so much B12, and long chain omega-3 fats. They have iodine and they have iron. They have all these nutrients that are so critical for mental health. And so that’s one of the reasons I am really still on the lookout and trying to understand how we can minimize our microplastic exposure, but still consume bivalves in seafood.
Another category that pops up on the list, which again is the opposite of our recommendations, is that some of the small fish like anchovies and sardines actually have a lot of microplastics in them. And so do things like salmon and tuna. So really, if you look at all of the fish we tend to recommend in nutritional psychiatry, you are getting some microplastics.
It’s important to note you’re getting microplastics in the rest of your food, too, because they’re all around us. What happens if these plastics tend to degrade? They end up in our air. They end up in the dust in your house, and then they end up in your body and they accumulate in your organs like your liver, your kidneys and particularly in your brain.
Now, you’re probably wondering, what’s the big deal? What’s the problem with microplastics? I just want to quickly highlight a few of the ways they affect our body. First of all, the actual molecule, the polyethylene that gets in our brain, has been shown to activate some of the genes that regulate things like lipid storage and energy metabolism. So there’s some thought that plastics and microplastics are what are called obesogens. They’re molecules in the environment that can induce our body to store fat. There’s been a lot of research in this. They’re also endocrine disruptors, where they interfere with our body’s hormone systems. So the way they do that is often by activating or turning on and turning off genes. They also do this for inflammation. It’s very clearly illustrated and understood mechanism where they activate some of the PPAR genes, which regulate inflammation. So you have that part of the microplastic exposure that’s really bad for your brain.
The other part is that microplastics themselves, in the matrix of the plastic, there are things like heavy metals such as cadmium and lead. There are also these other endocrine disruptor molecules that are called plasticizers, things like phthalates or BPA. Those can have all kinds of different hormonal effects on people, interrupting sex development and interrupting sex hormones. So these are really concerning effects and I think this is one of the challenges.
When we hear all of this, it drives us to head towards, for example, processed foods that might claim to not have microplastics. Or we think, well, what’s a better, safer protein source than my wild salmon? Maybe a protein powder. Well, no protein powders are filled with heavy metals and microplastics.
So I really think this is one of the places we all have to use a lot of nuance. Seafood is really our only source of omega-3 fats. You can up your dose by augmenting with fish oil if you are on the supplement train. However, focusing on the fillets, things like salmon fillet, focusing on bivalves. Maybe you have a sense they’re local, if you live on the coast, for example, or I would really spend just a little bit of time looking into supplies of mussels, clams, and oysters with lower microplastics or think about some of these techniques where we can lower the microplastics.
Then probably the most important point everybody in terms of nuance is even if you eat a fair amount of seafood, which is great for your brain, great for your health you’re going to have a small exposure to microplastics in comparison to things like the air you’re breathing and if you’re drinking from plastic water bottles. I still think that those nutritional benefits of seafood outweigh the risks of microplastics. However, I appreciate everybody’s concern and my hope with this video is to help you see some of the nuance. Yes, there are lots of concerns about microplastics. I want to help you decrease your exposure to microplastics.
The main way we do this not microwaving or heating things in plastic, making sure there’s an air filter in your bedroom or if you have a place where you spend a lot of your time as well. For example I do all my work and all my writing in my office so I’ve got two air filters in here. It’s a way of really decreasing microplastics. Think about things in your house that are made with plastics, polyethylene, things like that. Polypropylene is another one where as these fibers degrade, they aerosolize and they turn into dust and we start to breathe them. So this is where some of those things that the hippies have been talking about forever, more natural fibers, more things like just simple cotton sheets, wool clothes and cotton clothes come into play. It’s a way that we decrease our microplastic exposure that is probably as important or more important than worrying about things like seafood.
Everyone, I hope this helps you make some decisions about seafood and think about which cuts of fish have fewer microplastics. Also, just to increase your awareness, there are a lot of ways to decrease your microplastic exposure. This is certainly one of the ways we want you to be using mental fitness and thinking more globally about your mental health. There is some emerging data already that more microplastics in your brain greatly increases your risk of dementia and also more microplastics seem to impair things like working memory. So again, a data signal we want to pay attention to. I hope in all my work, you’ve already seen this push to really get away from plastics and microplastics. You can do a lot to decrease your exposure. The other thing, and we’ll get into this in another video. If microplastics are already in there, what do we do to get them out? There’s some data that says sauna might help us. So that is something you can add to your mental fitness regimen. But most importantly, I still think you should be eating things like wild salmon. There are a lot of microplastics in things like shrimp and the bivalves, but with careful consideration, careful selection, and again, the knowledge, you’re not eating these foods every day, probably. We still want people getting a couple of seafood meals a week, at least.
Everybody, I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey. Please like, share, save this video, share it with somebody who is struggling with their mental health or struggling with all this information about microplastics. I’m still eating seafood, everybody. I’ll tell you if that stops. Please sign up for the newsletter and I’ll see you in the next video.
