From The Heart #28: Why We Fear Microplastics More Than Heart Disease

Your brain is not broken, it’s doing what it was designed to do: panic over vivid, rare threats and ignore the slow, familiar ones. That’s the risk perception gap, and it’s why a headline about hantavirus can feel more urgent than the everyday drivers of cardiovascular disease, even though heart disease remains a top killer worldwide. We get candid about how fear gets “calibrated” online, why viral health content often misses the point, and how to stop stepping over dollars to pick up pennies.

We walk through the real-world risk factors that actually move the needle: high LDL cholesterol, high blood pressure, uncontrolled blood sugar, smoking, sedentary living, excess alcohol, low fiber intake, and diets heavy in saturated fat and ultra-processed foods. Then we make the stats feel human. Using a Framingham-style risk score and a simple projection exercise, we explain how “25% risk in 10 years” changes when it becomes “a one in four chance you miss the trip you’ve been dreaming about” or “you’re not there for the moments that matter.”

You’ll also hear a string of common examples where people fear the wrong thing, from microwaving plastic while eating processed, saturated-fat-heavy meals, to worrying about medication side effects while underestimating the risks of untreated obesity, sleep apnea, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes. We close with why clinicians need a voice online, how lifestyle medicine helps cut through misinformation, and how to prioritize the essentials before chasing accessory “health hacks.” If this helped you rethink your risk radar, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs it, and leave a quick review.

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Transcript

From The Heart Format

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Yo, Plan Base Buddies, welcome to a new segment that I'm calling from the heart. These are bonus episodes. There's no script, no plan, just honest conversations and lessons that come straight from real patience and real life. And most of the time I just hit record and I speak. So what you're hearing is raw, it's unscripted, and it's intentional. But if you're ready for something a little bit more spontaneous, this is from the heart.

The Post That Sparked This

SPEAKER_01 0:46

Yo, happy buddy. Happy Monday. I am on my lunch break. I wanted to come talk about a subject that I find very, very fascinating and that seemed to inspire a certain person to make a video about one of my posts that I posted on a Saturday. And it was all great and all very positive. So it's good to have good news once in a while because the internet is unfortunately tends to focus on fear, right? So Saturday I wanted to post about people kind of I always talk about stepping over dollars to pick up pennies, something that we called the risk perception gap. Now, humans are very poor predictors of risks. So when I tell a patient that he has a 20% risk of heart attacks in the next 10 years, people don't seem to be faced by that. Now I'm legit telling you that you are you have a one out of five chance of having a stroke or a heart attack in the next 10 years, knowing that almost a third to one half of these patients will die after one of these episodes, but yet people don't change, right? People don't change their behaviors. So if I tell you that you are at risk for cardiovascular

Headlines vs Real Odds

SPEAKER_01 2:10

disease, the top killer in the world, and you asked me how do I address or reduce my risk of cardiovascular disease, I will tell you, well, you get cardiovascular disease through its risk factors. And its risk factors are simple. There are high cholesterol, high blood pressure, uh, uncontrolled glucose or blood sugar. There are things that could cause inflammation in the artery wall, like for example, smoking, drinking alcohol, being sedentary. So if someone says, Oh, all right, how do I lower my cholesterol? Well, the main predictor of cholesterol is the main controllable factor is the amount of saturated fat that you eat in your diet, right? But I tell patients all the time that there are high risk for cardiovascular disease, and they don't change. People don't change, people don't fear something that is not a headline, and heart disease being the top killer in the world, and cholesterol being the main risk factor, and the main risk factor for high cholesterol uh controllable risk factor is high saturated fat in your diet. People don't care, right? People are not afraid of that. It's like we've been desensitized and we've we've downregulated our calibration to fear these things, right? But people hear about the hentavirus on a cruise, and all of a sudden people are canceling their trips. Now, when what I posted about on Saturday is that if I really wanted to go viral, I would comment on the Huntavirus. I would tell patients that never touch rat poop because you can catch the hentivirus, and one person died after contracting it. And that would be very trendy, it would align with what a lot of the influencers are posting about online. But honestly, henta virus is not something that you really probably need to fear, right? I don't want to catch hentivirus, it is quite dangerous, but the probability of anyone here being affected by that is very low. I I would even go as far as saying we're probably in the 0.01, maybe even another zero, 0.01% right risk. But what people need to understand is that 30% of those listening to this video right now will die from cardiovascular disease. 20% of people listening to this video right now will die from cancer. And if you remember your grade four fractions, a third plus a fifth equals a half. Half of people listening to this video will die from one of these two causes. Yet people don't seem to fear that that much, right? And if we count all chronic diseases, about 70% of people will die from complications of their chronic diseases. Now, if you're looking at our top killer, let's just single out cardiovascular disease and talk about what causes that. Well, it's just risk factors: hypertension, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, sedentary lifestyles, smoking, alcohol, not eating enough fruits and veggies, low fiber diets, high saturated fat diets. I mean, all of these things are the major risk factors. But I don't see anyone fearing ultra-processed foods and red-in-processed meats and high saturated fat foods, even though the probability of dying from one of these things is exponentially higher than dying from something like the hentavirus. Yet it seems like the wrong type of post go viral. So I posted about that Saturday, and it seemed like I inspired a few people, and one person in particular decided to make a full video talking about how that post really kind of sparked an idea inside of him. So he made a full video, and I give all of the credit to that person that I'm not going to name here in case he doesn't want to be named. But that person talked about this. He was talking about how people fear the wrong things, and I agree, and the term is called the risk perception gap. Since we are really bad at predicting risks, people can't really feel or really sense, get a sense

Making Risk Feel Personal

SPEAKER_01 7:20

of what it means to have a 20% chance of dying from a heart attack within 10 years. So very often we need to take these statistics and make them more real. For example, when someone comes in with heart disease or cardiovascular risk factors, we can calculate something called a Framingham risk score. So we put in your data in an equation and it spits out a number. And that number is the percentage of people who will have a cardiovascular event, heart attack or stroke within the next 10 years. So let's say your score and I put your cholesterol, your blood sugar, your blood pressure, whether you smoke, whether you have family history, I put all of these things in a calculator and it spits out 25%. That means that you have a 25% or a one out of four chance of having a heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years. And that is very vague for people. So I asked them, where do you see yourself in 10 years? That's called projection. Now, projecting yourself into the future and seeing yourself in 10 years, these statistics they now have a different life. Instead of telling you you have a one out of four chance of having a stroke or heart attack, maybe you have a one out of four chance of not seeing your kids grow, not seeing your child graduate, not walking your daughter down the aisle. Or, for example, an example I had this morning was a patient that has been planning a trip to Europe. The trip is in two years, and every morning they take their cup of coffee and they lay down a map and they talk about the different islands they want to visit. They're going to be gone for I think six weeks. Now, if I tell that patient, there's a one out of four chance that you're not going to be able to live out your dream vacation, your dream tour of Europe. That statistic of 25% changes everything, right?

Microplastics And Other Misdirected Fears

SPEAKER_01 9:28

Now, this risk perception gap, we see it everywhere. I had a patient recently that told me that they didn't want to microwave their food in plastic containers because they feared microplastics. Now, microplastics do leach into your food, and I agree that we should be reheating foods in glass containers. But if you are reheating bacon or ultra-processed TV dinners or junk food in a plastic container, I will tell you the plastic is the least of your worries. Now, example I would give to you is that saturated fat is the main risk factor for having high cholesterol, main dietary risk factor for having high cholesterol, which is the main predictor of having cardiovascular disease, the most potent risk factor for our top killer. So if you're reheating ultra-processed, saturated, fat-rich foods in plastic in your microwave, the plastic is the least of your problems. Now, I'm not saying that you should reheat foods in plastic, I'm just saying you are focusing and fearing the wrong thing. I have a full list of examples here that I wrote that I would just want to reference. I have women fearing hormone replacement therapy in postmenopause, but not fearing the obesity that they carry that increases the risk of cancer much more than hormone replacement therapy. I have patients that fear processed plant-based burgers and don't want to cook with them while they're charring their red meat on their barbecue. Cooking red meat increases the formation of carcinogenic compounds called advanced glycation end products. And charring your meat on a barbecue over an open flame increases it tenfold. And so you're fearing the wrong thing, right? If you're fearing a processed plant-based burger made out of soy or pea protein, and you're not fearing red meat, which is a class 2a carcinogen, which you then char on your barbecue and increases exponentially the amount of advanced glycation in project products, a known carcinogen, then you are still fearing the wrong thing. I have patients that fear statins. They fear cholesterol medications because of the side effects. Where the first side effect of not taking a statin is having high cholesterol, the main risk factor and predictor of our world's top killer. I have patients that fear taking GLP1 agonists like Azempic or Manjaro or Wigovi or ZEP bound, but they do not fear the risk associated with their sleep apnea, their obesity, their high blood pressure, and their type 2 diabetes. The risk of remaining obese is a lot higher than the risk of the medication that may help reduce it. This is the perfect example of the risk perception gap and of stepping over dollars to pick up pennies. So I'm super happy that I could inspire someone local to make a video about us fearing the wrong things, but it's quite common in my line of work. One of my patients said that he feared drinking dairy soda because of the artificial sweeteners. I much rather you drink water, but he was going to keep drinking regular soda, which has the amount of sugar that you should be consuming in days packed in one can, right? So we're fearing sweeteners, but we're not fearing excess intake of added sugar. We're fearing processing in foods, but we're we're not fearing the saturated fat that contributes to the first risk factor of our top killer in the world, right? It's weird. We don't fear the risk factors that increase cancer, but we fear heating our foods in a microwave. It seems that we are fearing the wrong things, and it's

Fighting Misinformation With Lifestyle Medicine

SPEAKER_01 14:28

not your fault. We try to navigate on for information online, especially health and wellness information. We are bombarded with contradictory claims, and everything is toxic, and everything can cause cancer. People forget that we need to refer to the dose, we need to refer to the alternative. I agree, I'd much rather everyone do everything they can with their lifestyle to reduce their cholesterol. But the thing is, is that I make a full-time living out of seeing people who do not change, who do not want to change, or who do not have the support to help them navigate change. I don't want to blame anyone. I think our environment is highly processed from the foods that we eat to the information that we consume online. We live in a different world than our grandparents grew up in, but we just have to deal with that. And we have to take it upon ourselves and advocate for ourselves. Now, I can't imagine being a patient trying to navigate this information online without getting confused. People make claims at an exponentially higher rate than we are able to debunk them. And so patients and the public in general will always be bombarded with information that contradicts, but also with information that aligns to what people want to hear. People love hearing great news about their bad habits. So we our brain tends to align with people and influencers that say what we want to hear. I always want to try to be respectful because I will support patients in the clinic regardless of what they believe. I will try to meet them halfway, but the most important thing is to make sure that they have good, reliable information that is based in high-quality science. And unfortunately, online everyone seems to have a voice. And lately, people have been asking me why are you trying to be an influencer when you're a doctor? And to that I answer, because influencers are trying to be doctors online. So our profession needs to speak up, and we need to have a voice online to fight misinformation, but also to set the records straight and to give reliable information on what really moves the needle when it comes to health. And that's exactly the specialty that I have expertise in lifestyle medicine, which is a study of nutrition, exercise, sleep management, stress management, social connections, and the avoidance of toxins, which include microplastics. But we need to make sure to focus on the essential things before we try to hack the accessory things. So we're fearing microplastics, but not fearing the saturated fat that we eat at a super high dose. People are busting their budgets for saturated fat, for eating way too much protein, they're eating way too much added sugar, too much processed foods, but no one seems to be talking about the fact that no one is hitting their fiber goals. Things we're just we're just focusing on the wrong things. Cool. I hope I met my point. Uh, and I just wanted to say thanks to the person who made that video, giving examples of how we are very bad at predicting risk. And this is called the risk perception gap. And I've talked about it many times on this page. Hope this helps. Happy Monday. Focus on the wrong. Don't focus on the wrong things. Stop stepping over dollars to pick up pennies.

SPEAKER_00 18:39

Cool.

Final Takeaways And Where To Find Me

SPEAKER_00 18:45

Everyone, go check out my website, plantbase doctorjoules.com, to find free downloadable resources. And remember that you can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Dr. Jewels Cormier, and on YouTube at Plantbased Doctor Jewels.