Photo: Pétrin Express, Unsplash
The Desolation Of Smog. What You Can’t See Can Still Hurt You:
So one of the main concerns we’ve expressed here fits a theme called, “Stealth Health”.
Microplastics is one example. Both everywhere and easy to overlook
That’s the problem with Stealth Health. It’s the easiest thing in the world to miss.
To that end, there’s a joke about the type of things we take for-granted.
Two goldfish are in a bowl. One goldfish looks over and says to the other, “Man, I love the water in this bowl! It’s just great here!”
The second goldfish says, “THERE’S WATER IN THIS BOWL!???”
Interestingly enough, a guy named Pellegrino decided to find out what’s wrong not with your water, but your air…
The Short Answer:
- Some parts of your health picture are easy to overlook.
- Water is one, but air is even easier.
- David Oreck wasn’t crazy. Indoor air can be 2-5x as polluted as outdoor air.
- This is usually due to cleaning products, VOCs, or mold.
- Humans aren’t always great about keeping their environment clean.
- U.Conn researchers tested ~120 subjects aged 30-74 for the cognitive effects of air filtration.
- These were all people who lived in proximity to routes 93 & 28 in Massachusetts.
- After 1 month of filtered-air, subjects over 40 improved their test scores by 12%.
- The improvements included Executive-Function and Mental Flexibility.
- The filter wasn’t even some magic $10k unit. It was just a standard HEPA.
- The damage caused by pollutants mainly harms white matter.
- The particles from car engines, mostly diesels, are so small that they can get into your brain.
- From there, they wreak their havoc on the high-speed interconnects between regions.
- These depend on white matter to work.
- And the regions affected by this are the exact ones improving in the study.
- Pollution is associated with other problems, too.
- These include lung, cardiovascular, inflammation, and Dementia-like issues as well.
- So if people are willing to buy fancy filters for their water, why not their air as well?
- This could pay-off long-term, because avoiding problems in the first place is even better than fixing them.
- And it’s never too early to start good habits.
Read on to find out the details…
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Mankind Still Needs A Little Work On Keeping The Place Clean:
So even if we set aside the gigantic Oopsie of hard-to-recycle plastics and the microplastics they create,
Humanity has a pretty checkered past when it comes to not screwing up our own environment.
Whether it’s early American colonists dumping waste upstream and then drinking the water downstream.
Or the Bronte sisters drinking water that was essentially runoff from a graveyard.
There’s still room for improvement.
Interstate Love Song. What’s Fast For Cars Is Deadly For Your Brain:
So to test how far we’ve actually come from the 19th-century version of Liquid Death, a team from U.Conn ran a study.
Almost 120 adults, aged 30-74, were tested over the course of two months with and without indoor air-filters.
The key feature? They were all from an area with higher levels of traffic-related air pollution.
-Right near an Interstate, too.
The results? After the baseline was set, adults aged 40 or older increased their cognitive test-scores by 12% in one month!
-Just by using an air-filter.
-BOOM.
Important Mental Functions. Saved & Boosted By A Lowly Accordion:
Specifically, they took tests that measured executive-function, memory, mental flexibility, and processing speed.
The two areas where subjects improved the most were:
1) Executive function
1a) Ie: Working-memory, managing thoughts, emotions, decisions, inhibitions, & actions
2) Mental flexibility
And the Super-Genius air-purifier they used? -Just a garden-variety HEPA.
So how does this work?
Invisible Pollutants Could Be Closer And Nastier Than You Think!:
So there are some really sobering numbers about how invisible pollutants can affect you.
If you live within 300 feet of a major roadway, you will be much more vulnerable than others farther away.
Some of these particles that are emitted mostly (but not exclusively) by diesel engines are super-small.
They can be as small as 10% the diameter of a human hair, and fine-enough to travel right down nerves that connect to the brain.
Once there, they interfere negatively with a brain-substance called White Matter.
That’s the stuff that works like wire-insulation on brain-pathways.
It helps to connect different regions together with super-high-speed “cables”.
A Few Of The Problems Air-Pollution Causes, Even After 1970s LA:
And wouldn’t you know it, the brain-functions most affected by changes in White Matter were exactly the ones that showed improvement in this study!
In other research, problems that came from exposure to pollution included:
1) Increased brain inflammation
2) Increased problems with the cells that clean the brain
3) Disrupted nerve-connections at the growth-end of brain-cells
4) Rise of Alzheimer’s inflammation-chemicals in brains called TNF
But it doesn’t stop there, because it’s also associated with heart-disease, stroke, and even lung cancer.
Don’t Go Crazy, Just Go Run & Grab Yourself A Honeywell!:
Now, these results aren’t meant to turn people into nutty Eco-Mentalist alarmists.
But just to get them to consider a facet of their lives they may not have before.
I mean, people will spend all kinds of money to drink the right water,
Or buy fancy filters for the stuff they drink in their own home.
So why not filter the air, too?
And since sometimes, problems can start before they’re really noticeable,
There Seems To Be A Cutoff, But You Can Never Start Too Early!:
Why wait until you’re 40 to start fixing things?
Why not just get an air filter, keep your White Matter as strong as it can be as long as it can be,
And avoid problems for as long as possible?
Because not only do you want to preserve as much cognitive ability as you can.
Even small decreases in it have been correlated with higher rates of early-mortality.
So maybe something like an air filter could be a “tipping point” that works in your favor, before you even notice.
-Now that’s a great example of Stealth Health!
References & Links:
• Source: U.Conn
• More Coverage: Air Quality In Your Area | Even brief exposure hurts
• Source Study: Nature,SciRep – Effect of HEPA filtration air purifiers on cognitive function from a secondary outcome analysis of a pragmatic randomized crossover trial
