How many Invisible Killers are in Your House?
In which cooking bacon helps me ascend Maslow's pyramid
As I age I am learning to rely more and more on what I think of as the underlying ‘pillars’ of my life: Sleep, Nutrition, and Exercise. These are like First Principles in science: inarguable, foundational things that make my life possible. I’m a mess without consistent, quality versions of each of these. And they are interrelated. Poor sleep upregulates hunger hormones and I make poor nutritional choices, eating poorly affects sleep quality, exercise suppresses hunger, if I get enough exercise I sleep like a puppy, all three improve mood and cognition. Those of you familiar with Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs will recognize that they all fall into the base category of ‘Physiological Needs’.
Occasionally I’ll try on a new pillar for size to see if I would get as much in return by giving it a similar level of focus: things like Purpose and Learning. While important and crucial parts of a life well-lived, those things never rise to the level of importance of The Big Three. The recent purchase of an air quality monitor is threatening to upset that balance.
Monitoring Air Quality. We’ve been in our new house in Loveland, CO for about a year and a half now, getting used to the seasons and random weather changes (think multiple ‘false’ Winters and Springs) and I’m finally in a place where I can start to tune it a little more.
I got caught up in the craziness in media and social media where there was a big push to get rid of gas ranges because of the danger of the nitrogen oxides they produce while cooking (commonly termed as ‘NOX’, it stands for NO or NO2). We have a gas fireplace with a pilot light that is always lit, and a gas range/oven that has the most useless vent system ever built. The microwave above it has a fan that blows outwards (i.e. in your face) and there is no range hood or even an exhaust pipe out of the house. I’m usually a little more resistant to what appear to be social media campaigns but this one made sense.
I bought an AirGradient One indoor air quality monitor that measures particulates, CO2, humidity, NOx, etc., mostly because I was worried about NOx. I loved this company immediately because the hardware and software are open source, and although I bought the preassembled unit you can also buy it as a DIY kit. After the customary ‘connect to wifi’ phase of all home devices it was immediately showing me high CO2 and particulates in my office, which is adjacent to the kitchen.
After cooking my breakfast there were no obvious NOX problems, but definitely more CO2 than I wanted while I think. For reference it was double the ambient level in nature which typically hovers around 450ppm. We have OKish airflow in the house - not excellent - and it shows. The CO2 level refused to back down after cooking short of opening up windows and doors to our freezing, blustery Colorado winter. It’s that persistence that is the most troubling.
Humans are robust in their ability to handle different conditions: heat, cold, dust, bad air, lack of water or food, light, dark, and so on. We are part of only 3% of Animalia that are omnivorous, able to leech nutrients away from Twinkies to Turnips to hard tack to pemmican. Our immune systems can heal burns from solar radiation and attacks from viral infections. All this robustness has been a great evolutionary tactic, but it eventually breaks down under constant pressure. Too much CO2 for 60 seconds? Sure. Too much CO2 over days, weeks, or a lifetime? Nope.
Down the rabbit hole. Of course it’s not just CO2, it’s also lead in the water, particles in the air, hormones and pesticides in food, excessive heat, noise, light, Fox News, microplastics, mold … you get the point. Our bodies eventually break down when our environment is outside of healthy levels for long periods of time. This is nothing new. Historians make the case that lead poisoning was a major factor in the decline of the Roman empire. Thousands of deaths occurred in just one event from coal smoke in London.
It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole trying to remove unnatural things from our bodies and environment, and many people do. How far down they go depends on a morass things like their trust in industry, government, and science, their level of scientific understanding, the availability of high quality and well-communicated science, the influence of social media on their lives, and fear. We need look no further than the antivax campaigns for how tough it can be to convince people of anything.
The speed with which we can be sucked into this is made starkly apparent by just showing interest in one of the potential problems on social media. I did just that on Twitter while researching this article: my feed is now full of sane-sounding posts about the problems with vaccines, dangers from phthalates in candles and perfume, endocrine disruption from cities moving to LED street lights, Listerine destroying your oral microbiome, oxalate content in nut milks, and the microplastics from plastic chopping boards that end up in your digestive system.
Many posts are simply anecdotal evidence and that’s enough to convince a decent percentage of the population. Even for the posts that take the time to quote scientific papers it is incredibly difficult for the layman to tell whether the science and evidence is good enough to warrant lifestyle changes. What was the sample size? What was the p-value? Did they even control for a specific, independent variable? Was it published in a major journal? Was the study duplicated by other scientists? Was the study funded by industry groups with a vested interest in a specific result?
Where my head is at.
I’m not worried about chemtrails (this one is about as silly as flat earth stuff), I’m worried about air pollution where I sleep and work. I want to avoid developing my own personal sick building syndrome.
I’m not worried about non-ionizing radiation from airpods, I am worried about UV when I go outside and blue light exposure after dark (and perhaps the sunscreen I wear).
I’m becoming convinced that I should decrease my long term exposure to plastics from cookware and food containers (this reddit post predicts that microplastics will be “this generation’s asbestos”).
I’m absolutely convinced of the long term dangers of sugars and processed foods in my diet (to say nothing of pesticides or hormones in the food chain).
I mostly avoid antibacterial products because I can’t resolve in my head whether they’re a net good or harm, balancing reduced germ exposure to damage to my skin, mouth and gut biomes.
I’m adding “Environment” to Sleep, Nutrition, and Exercise as a new pillar in my life. It’s impossible to ascend Maslow’s pyramid - hey, we’re all aiming at self-actualization and eventual transcendence - when the foundations are unstable.
The Invisible Killers. Carbon monoxide is commonly termed “the invisible killer”: poisonous, odorless, tasteless, and invisible to the human eye. It turns out that most problematic environmental conditions are that way, it’s just that some kill fast and others kill slowly. Sleep, Nutrition, and Exercise are tangible things in our lives. Things like odorless gases, food additives, or tiny pieces of plastic are less so. The old adage of “out of sight, out of mind” applies here: previously I couldn’t “see” CO2 levels and now I’m on a mission to improve them.
I’m privileged to be in a position to monitor even some of this stuff and there are many that can’t. Yet there are often simple things we can do like opening a window, filtering our water, turning on a fan, replacing HVAC filters, and replacing non-stick cookware with stainless or ceramic. Strong99 is about not just living longer but thriving longer: it’s a certainty that having the environment we live in be closer to Nature will help us do both. Except perhaps when it’s 19DegF with 40mph winds on the Colorado Front Range.
What are you doing to improve your living environment?