Microplastics In Tea & Coffee, Olive Medicine & Longevity Hot Tips | Josephine Musco

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I didn't know what I was walking into with this conversation. I thought I was going to talk about tea. I ended up rethinking my entire morning routine.

Josephine Musco is one of those people who is living approximately five lives at once — jewelry designer (her pieces have been on Beyoncé and Madonna), biodynamic winemaker (Chateau Bellevue in Livermore, California, from 1881 heritage buildings, carried at Spago and Giorgio Baldi), longevity researcher, and founder of Olyxir, which makes the Tea Strip. She's also from Lebanon, a certified Demeter biodynamic farmer, and came to all of this because her father was diagnosed with cancer when she was 15 years old. He was a man who believed every human ailment had a remedy in nature. He boiled olive leaf to clean wounds and stabilize her grandmother's blood sugar. She set out to prove whether he was right — or if it was, as she puts it, just witchcraft.

Eleven years of research at the USDA in Berkeley later, she had studied 72 varietals of olive trees, identified which ones had the highest antimicrobial, antiviral, and antioxidant activity at peak harvest, and developed a patented process to stimulate and stabilize the antioxidants before they deteriorated. Her olive leaf killed listeria three times in a row under the microscope. It kills herpes. And she wanted to deliver it in a way that honored the medicine — which meant she couldn't use a tea bag.

Here's the thing about tea bags that most people haven't heard yet: a single tea bag steeped in one cup of boiling water releases 11.6 billion microplastics and 3.4 billion nanoplastics. Those silky pyramid bags? Pure polythene. And nanoplastics — the ones too small to see, too small to disclose on any ingredient label — are now being found crossing the blood-brain barrier, the testicular barrier, and the follicular barrier. The three systems the body most aggressively protects. Josephine has known about this for over a decade. She invented the Tea Strip because she had no other choice.

We also talked about K-Cups as petroleum juice, canned soup and BPA, what plastic and heat do when you combine them in a yoga studio, and why paper cups aren't what they look like. None of it is meant to terrify. All of it is meant to help you make a different choice. The solutions are simple. And in this case, one of them actually tastes good.

A few of my favorite things we cover in this episode: 

• Your tea bag releases 11.6 billion microplastics and 3.4 billion nanoplastics per cup — and tea drinkers think they're making the healthier choice
• 240,000 plastic fragments per liter from plastic water bottles; 25,000 microplastics from a single paper cup with hot liquid; 1,221% BPA increase from eating one canned soup per day for five days
• K-Cups are plastic juice: the same petroleum you put in your car is being heated and poured into your coffee
• Nanoplastics are crossing the blood-brain barrier, the testicular barrier, and the follicular barrier — the three most protected systems in the body
• Plastic + heat is the most dangerous combination, and most people are doing it multiple times a day
• Josephine's origin story: father diagnosed with cancer at 15, died the day she graduated with her master's — and how his obsession with olive leaf became her life's work
  • The Tea Strip invention: ground tea leaves pressed into a dissolvable strip with zero plastic, zero bleach, zero carrier materials — designed to deliver olive leaf extract safely
• 11 years of research at the USDA in Berkeley studying 72 olive varietals — and a patented process to stimulate and stabilize antioxidants at peak potency
• Olive leaf kills herpes and killed listeria three times in a row under the microscope
• Epigenetics: 70–91% of how long and how healthily we live is determined by lifestyle, not genes — and trauma, healing, and habits are all heritable
• Biodynamic farming and winemaking in Livermore, CA (Chateau Bellevue) — from 1881 heritage buildings, dry-farmed heirloom grapes, and a grandfather's example
• Beyoncé's Oshun crown and Coachella Nefertiti headpiece; Madonna's Met Gala armor with Jean Paul Gaultier — the jewelry line (House of Malakai) that nobody expected
• Selenium as the "holy grail of anti-aging" from a USDA scientist — and why one Brazil nut a day might be the simplest longevity protocol
• Stem cells with ReHealth in Cancun: running at speeds she'd never hit before, hair growing "like crazy," skin visibly changed — and why not all stem cell companies are created equally

Products Mentioned:  

• Olyxir Tea Strips — olyxir.com / @olyxir on Instagram
  • Lymphatic AM (guarana, yerba mate, lemon balm, ginger, peppermint)
  • Olive Leaf (for fasting and blood sugar)
  • Cordyceps (caffeine-free pre-workout energy)
  • Lymphatic PM
  • Kids Tea (butterfly pea flower, strawberry lemonade — designed by Antoinette, age 7)
  • Matcha Latte Strip (third-party tested for heavy metals)
  • Olyxir Electrolytes (optimized for women — lower sodium, higher potassium + magnesium)
• Chateau Bellevue (Josephine's biodynamic wine — available at Spago, Giorgio Baldi, Madeo, Il Pastaio, Peninsula Hotel, Los Angeles)
• ReHealth — exosome and stem cell protocols (listen to a previous episode with Dr. Rafael Gonzalez for reference)
• Force of Nature bison ancestral blend (Josephine's organ meat source)
• Holi (mane) by Agent Nateur x Dr. Will Cole (marine collagen + pearl powder)
• Huberman Lab podcast (Josephine's recommendation in lieu of a book)

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Happy listening, and we hope you learned a little bit more on the art of being well!

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In Health,

Dr. Will Cole