Is the top of the New Year, twenty twenty six. New Year, Same me, same Shenanigans, same me, Same Dope Labs, same Zekiah, same Tt. Because hey, hey, we're doing all we can. We don't need to change change the environment, don't change me. Right, it's winter time, it's cold, people are traveling.
Did you travel over the holidays?
No, I'll travel right before the holidays. And I said, it's looking wild out here. Yes, I was traveling during the holidays and it was very wild. People were coffin, sneezing. It's a lot of shared air in these airports and cars, houses and houses. Everybody's gathering clothes.
Hey house, no more h words.
I'm TT and I'm Zakiyah And this is Dope Labs. Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes our core science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship.
Well, I'll speak for myself.
When I'm thinking about the air and travel and being in close proximity with people, I'm always just thinking about viruses. But the air has other things in it too, And people in Georgia right now are struggling with the flu. I'm like, hey, put those masks in here, Okay, it's
taking a lot of people out for real. And just like with viruses, all the other things in the air, like pollution, smoke, everything from cars, factories, wildfires, all of that stuff is also coming into our bodies with the viruses and also have an impact.
We're taking all of that in. That's what this episode is about.
We want to talk to somebody who studies this full time because I feel like when wildfires ramp up, I remember what's in the air. Then when flu season is at its peak, I remember that. But how do we take all of these things in? So we're talking to somebody who looks at how the environment, specifically the air and air pollution gets into our bodies, shapes our health and how it affects us in ways that we don't even think about. I think we should start with what
we know, which is what you've already said. TT winner means more sickness. We know people reading to heat, ventilation is worse, and we know mass work, but we're usually thinking about well, for me, I'm thinking about the biological threats and what masks protect us from. And we know that those air quality alerts pop up on our phones from time to time, talking about the ozone talking about wildfire, smoke and smog, and some days the air outside is
just literally not safe to breathe. And so as someone with asthma and allergies, I think about that, and I also think about the folks who have that and also heart issues and compromised immune systems, Like how are they moving through life with all of these other particles floating through the air.
Is this just confined to the lung?
Is what I think about, right, And so I think we have a lot of questions to uncover. Yes, I have a ton like can you have a bad air day?
And can you quickly recover? Are you down right?
Because yes, when I have a bad hair day, I'm not going anywhere. No, it's inside, It's inside.
Okay, let's jump into the dissection.
He's a good friend of ours. We have been friends since grad school. We are very happy to have him here. Introduce yourself.
Finance Cavin Ward cavinists. I'm currently the director of Environmental Science for the Price Slab at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. I'm also an adjunct faculty member for Duke University and the University of North Carolina. Chapel Hill, Go Blue devils don't test my allegiance.
Formerly, I was.
A senior computational biologist for the US Environmental Protection Agency. Across all these roles, my passion is really trying to utilize modern data resources, modern data tools, techniques to improve personalized environmental health and reduce health disparities for all communities.
The only pollution I know is the air quality index that the weather app tells me from Apple. But I know there's so much more because you've told it to us over the years. How should we even be thinking about air pollution?
Well, I say the first thing to do is just to start thinking about it. You know, I think one of the benefits we have here in the US is that we have generally pretty good air quality. Well, we don't think about the fact that, like, yeah, just because the skies are clear doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, those daily variations in air quality aren't impacting health for individuals. And then you have the days where the air isn't clear, you know, you have the smoke events that come down.
You know, we have the big Canadian wildfires where the skies of New York or Orange for days, and that's when people get reminded of it when your eyes are burning, you're coughing, and people are like, man, like, what's going on. And it's important that people think about their personal activities and their personal health. But what people don't think about it is like, hey, I'm in the winter, you know, let me start up that fireplace. You know, all of
a sudden the house gets a little smoky. Maybe I didn't clean that chimney. Those sorts of things, and so those types of things also contribute to what you breathe in and how what you breathe in impacts your health. So when you want to light that fireplace, or cooking being one of the big contributors to indoor air pollution, you know, frying foods.
Those oils we.
Think about, you know, particulates as like these little hard particles like sand, but it's really a lot more complex to that. A lot of them were composed of organics set of solidified in the atmosphere, and so the actual organics are a part of will be considered be particulate air pollution. And unfortunately, you know, the lungs were not
designed to be able to handle all of that. They were not designed to breathe in you know, oils aerosols, organic carbons, but things like that, and so the body reacts, the lungs reacts, inflammation goes up, and you start to get a whole host of you know, potential health issues. But the first step is just the awareness that it's always there, even when the skies are clear.
You said words like airsols and particulates. Can we talk about scale. I'm a material scientist and I specialize in nanomterials, so I can understand, I appreciate how small these things are, but I don't know if people really understand how small some of these particulates can get and when it becomes like something that interferes with your respiratory system.
So we cost like particulates by size typically, so we talk about PM ten that's particular matter of the sets and ten micrometers in diameter. And to give you a sense of what that scale is, a human hair is about forty micrometers in diameter cross there, so you can get about four PM ten particles across withid of a human hair. So you're already talking pretty smart for it tiny particles, but thanks to evolution, your body's evolved a lot of defenses. So PM ten particles actually a lot
of those are captured by your upper airway defenses. And so we go down to the finer particles, the things that are we call, you know, the PM two point five the fine particular matter. And now you're getting into the particular matter that can actually penetrate down to there. And so two point five micrometers and diameter. Okay, well, now you're talking about four of those fitting across every
PM ten particle as out there. And so now you're talking about, you know, particles that are much much smaller than the width of a human hair. And then you go down a step further and you get to the ultra fine particulates PM point one PM one.
We talk about one micrometer, one tenth of a.
Micrometer and diameter, and those are the particles that are small enough not only to get into your lungs, but actually to diffuse out of your lungs to become part of what's circulating through your body.
And so what falls into that category, yeah, you want to know.
So those are we called, you know, the ultra fine particulates. Those are the smallest of the small particles, or you know a lot of them are barely held together enough to be solid, but they are you know, together enough to be able to diffuse out of the lungs and get into the bloodstream. And you know, there are studies whether generate gold particles of these. So they're inert, but they're easily tracked and they're easily to be collected afterwards.
And you can have you know, animal models breathe us in and you'll find them in the lungs, you'll find them in the kidneys, you'll find them in the.
Tails, you know of these animals.
And so it really shows how what you breathe in becomes part of what's circulating all the way throughout you. And it's all these factors together the you know, what it does to your lungs, the way your lungs react, how it diffuses out of your lungs, and then the way it impacts other organ systems. That contributes to all the health effects that we can associate with particular matter.
And then you have the non particle part of it, the gases, you know, things like your ozone, your nitrogen dioxides, which you're really heavy around car traffic, and a lot of those never leave the lungs. You know, ozone reacts very well never leave, as in, they'll reach the cell lining and they'll react so quickly that they'll essentially split apart some lipid membranes, and the gas itself will be gone, but the effects of it linger far, far longer than that.
So hold your breath in traffic.
Hold your I want to say, hold your breath in traffic. You know, breathe, breathe in traffic.
But it does become you know thought, if you're ever you know, next to a busy road, you hear a big truck pass by, you know, people cough and all that, that reaction is immediate to that air pollution that you're breathing in. And even when the big truck's not passing by, every time a car passes by, there's gonna be an uptick in gaseous and exhaust and all that. And so think about that in the concept of your daily life.
Do you run along next to roads? You know, how do you feel when you run next to roads versus running.
In a park?
Do you want to think about how air pollution impacts daily behaviors. That's when you start to think about when you think about the fact that, like I said, just because the air is clear doesn't mean, it's not there.
My brain is all over the place right now because there's just so many things that I just are now being brought to my awareness because you said you got to think about it, and now I'm like, okay, Now I'm hyper aware. And I don't think about inside of my house having anything in the air. I run an air purifier now, but I don't. I don't think about how the things that I'm doing, like day to day, how that contributes.
And one thing that.
Zakia had brought up is like hair spray, our setting spray for makeup, the makeup itself like that because it's settling into the finest pores and that's what I want, that's what you want to do. But it's also settling. There is a makeup the setting spray tete, I know, you know it. It's pink. I have to hold my breath when I use that. It takes the air out of the room. You have to hold your breath for time. But it works so well. But I know this can't.
It has particles.
You know.
Is that aerosol tip you know that's what it is doing and is aerosolizing whatever is in the can so it comes out of this fine spray of drops, which, as you said, is great for a nice even distribution, but your body's letting you know. They're like, hey, I breathe this in and it's causing a reaction, so I don't want to breathe it in.
Well, I have a heat protected and this smells so good, and I'd be like, and then I love the smell, and then coffee. So you're telling me damage not good?
Yeah, not good.
And sometimes it's you know, just sensitization. You know, it doesn't always have to lead to long term damage, but it is something that you know, people should think about and be aware of how your body responds to it, because people are going to respond slightly differently, and you know, unfortunately, there's not a lot of tests we have right now to be able to say, Okay, you're going to respond really strongly to this type of pollutant, and you're going
to strong really respond to that type of pollutant, you should stay away from this setting spray. And that's part of the research work that's going on, part of what's
being called personalized environmental health. We're moving away from just general population and we'll risk where we say okay, the risk is this much for the entire US population and really drilling down to okay, well, what are your personalized risk what based on your life history, based on your genome, based on the other exposures that you've received, are you likely to respond to? How are you likely to respond? And hopefully once we get that information, what can you
do about it? And that's really the next step in environmental health is an increased personalization that allows the individual to respond to the risks that they're experiencing.
I like that something you said is like looking back at what have you been exposed to? And I think to understand why what you have been exposed to previously matters, I think you have to understand what long term exposure means. Can you explain some of those correlations and why they exist and what we see as long term effects?
Yeah? Absolutely so.
Really you can think about as the accumulation of as you said before, damage that happens so a lot of what we think about in the air polluting context. You know, it's linked to inflammation and sort of systemic damage to basic cellular prophecies. How your body functions on a cellular level gets disrupted by long term exposure.
Almost any injury for it.
And so when you get one day of say heavy air pollution for it, you might get, you know, some watery eyes, you might have a cough, a headache. But if that goes away after a couple of days, your body can recover from that. But what we know, and we know this, you know for a lot of different conditions, when you get that chronic systemic inflammation, when your body is just always responding, that becomes an issue that starts to break down how your body is going to react
to the next stimulus that you receive. It's almost like your body can't quite respond the way that they did before if it's received the same insult for day after day after day. When death by a thousand paper cuts, and when it comes to air pollution, those paper cuts can be very small, so small you don't even feel them then, So that long term chronic exposure can lead to increased risk of cardiovascular disease, increase risk of renal disease, increase risk of lung disease, renal de.
Renal disease, your kidneys.
I told you, these particles go everywhere, and so that contributes to this increased risk of these chronic diseases that just continual increased inflammation that your body's receiving from these long term exposures. But then there's also the aging aspect to it, and this has really come about in the last few years where we've been able to track aging
using these molecular biomarkers known as aging clocks. And what these clocks allow us to do is to take DNA methylation, the way that certain changes are applied to your DNA so that different cells can respond in different ways, and actually use those as a way to measure how you age at a cellular level, how you age at an organ system level, and how you age as an overall person.
And what's been clearly shown is that people who are exposed to high levels of poor air quality, or people who are exposed to moderate air quality but for a long period of time, have accelerated aging, so they might be three, four or five years older than what they should be. What we've also seen is that people who have accelerated aging are more likely to respond to future exposures, which helps explain why the elderly and other individuals are
more sensitive to environmental exposures. So there's really this feedback loop that happens over time, where you get chronically exposed and weakens your biological system's ability to respond to the next exposure. You respond ford to the next exposure, you get chronically exposed, so on and so forward.
And so that's why it's important to be able to.
Interrupt these cycles, both at policy levels where weset national standards, but also at individual levels, where individuals we're able to understand what am I being exposed to and how do I prevent future adverse exposures to be able to really start to improve environmental health.
Now I got a question. Okay, mm hm oh, what got too many?
Because I do want to talk about DNA methilation and those signatures, but I also want to know, because methilation is not always permanent to track aging, is there a case where you can reverse that? Like if I have five days in the city in two days outside the city, am I able to reverse my sensitivity to future insult in any way?
Like?
Is there any evidence of that? Because I wonder about people who live in cities like TT and I visited Brussels and we barely made it and everybody else was walking around fine. Now, why is that.
As good as you mentioned Brussels, because there is this idea people grow up in certain contexts and so they bodies are adjusted to different levels of all types of environmental exposures, air pollution included. Now, that doesn't mean that it isn't impacting them health wise.
It doesn't mean that it's you know, good.
For them or it's neutral for them, just because they were walking around the city fine and you and TT were not. But it does mean that they're more used to the levels that are there and they're not going to have some of those immediate responses that you had.
But is it reversible?
That's really one of these sort of wholly grail questions of environmental health is at what point does environmental damage become irreversible? At what point is it still in a reversible phase? And how do we reverse those? So, you know, you talked about how DNA methylation is reversible. There's an interesting study down on smoking years ago where they looked at people who were smokers and then quit smoking, people who were never smokers, and people who were smokers and
then continued smoking throughout the entire study period. And what they found is that compared to never smokers, people who are smokers and then quit smoking.
Some of their DNA methylation.
Sites would sort of go up with the current smokers and then level off. You could sort of almost see the point at which you know they're smoking sort of plateaued for it. Other DNA methilation sites continued on as if they had never stopped smoking. So clearly something had been reprogrammed within the cellar machinery to where it was like, I'm on a different path now, even if you stop smoking, I'm not necessarily going to return to that path now.
We believe that most of the is reversible most of the time, when you remove the environmental insult over time,
the body has an incredible ability to heal itself. Unfortunately, there are a few sort of threshold points oftentimes when you develop things like cardiovascular disease or kidney disease or COPD, where we know that those conditions are not necessarily reversible, and so a lot of personalized health, a lot of preventative health, is about understanding what the person's exposed to before you get to any of these irreversible steps and
giving them the options to reverse them. Number one by removing the exposure or reducing the exposure, and number two by taking interventions that might be able to act against that. And we're still working on the interventions phrase of it. But what we hope is that when we get to a more personalized state of environmental health, will really be able to say, Okay, here's what you were exposed to, here's where you are. We think this is still reversible,
here's what you should do. Come back in and we'll see if it's working.
Wow.
One part of what you said that stuck out to me was the policy and the regulations of it all.
In a formal life, I was a FED.
I worked for the National Institute of Standards Technology, which I have I was not allowed to say on this show, but now I can because I don't work there anymore.
So I know that standards and policy can be a really tricky place, you know, and creating national standards, creating national policy, it's a long road, and it takes a lot of really smart people like Ukavin to really push for these changes and explain to our representatives in government why this is so important, and leaning on places like the EPA and things like that to put these documents together and to stress the importance of this. So if
there's limit it to a certain point. How much are we talking about here and are they reducing the damage actually or should we keep pushing our policymakers to do more in that area.
Yeah, yeah, it's great as you break up that point.
I'm also a former FED you know, which I could say because I can say former in front of it, former EPA employee. And you're right, you know, the policy making process is slow. It is complex. It's not even multi year. It can be thought of as multi decade, you know, in some contexts. And you know, there's a lot of good reasons for that. The policies that we
set are based on the best science that's available. Currently, the National Ambient Air Quality Standard, the sort of policy that says ambient air standards for PM two point five, those fine particulates that can really get deep down into the lungs, is nine microgrounds for cubic meter and that was recently moved down from twelve microgrounds for comubic meter. And I know a lot of people that would argue it should go even lower than that, and there's good science I think to support that as well.
But because policy is so.
Slow, it's designed to be slow so that everybody has a chance to weigh in on it so that you get it right and you're not revising it the next year or the next month, hopefully, although we see policy revisions happening quite quickly. Now, there have to be other tools besides just national policy that can help people protect that.
And you know, there's state policies, there's local policies, but there also have to be better tools for individuals to start be able to protect their health as well, and those work in conjunction with those policies. You know, you can't put the onus all on the individual, but you can't only expect once in a decade, once in a multi decade setting of national policy to be the only thing that's going to pray able to protect us.
And especially to respond to changing landscapes. I don't see the set in the eighties. Doesn't see a data center coming.
On your block right right, It certainly doesn't, Mater.
So I'm thinking about this, and I like your answer about the owners not being in any one place. So let's move from government side to individual Because recently, because I'm pretty much off x in on threads now, I saw somebody talking about an indoor air quality monitor, and I think they were based in Europe, but he was saying, like, right now, if you've been heating stuff like older homes to have like stoves and stuff inside to warm them furnaces.
I remember I remember a kerosene heater as a kid and being like, this smell is strange. We shouldn't be using this inside good good instincts there things like closed windows, like are there health risks that people are taking to stay warm that they're not aware of? And what kind of tools should you be using? I just am curious, And then that's just a little bit of a question,
and the bigger question, this is my problem. The long question is thinking about what you said about those checkpoints that are irreversible, and thinking about accumulation of methylation that leads to worse outcomes and aging. We already are living longer lives than before, So what does it mean as you get older? What's the plan are you saving us?
Kevin?
I'm working on it, working on it daily.
Those are all really good questions, and I think part of what we have to balance is this idea of health risks versus living our lives to a certain degree. I personally I love burning my fireplace. It just brings me joy to sit inside with a nice roaring fire, glass of wine, relaxing.
You know, that makes me happy.
But I know that every year I get my chimney checked, make sure there's good ventilation.
Through there, all right, let me write that down.
If you can, you know, have good cross ventilation throughout your space to try and limit any particles.
You know, to come in there.
Part of that sort of defeats the purpose of getting that nice warmth off the fire. But the nice warmth is coming with a few additional things in the air for you.
And then if you.
Can get a good air quality monitor, you know, for inside and use it sort of see how is your home performing? What is the air quality inside of your home? Like I imagine a lot of people will be surprised. They'll be surprised at not just you know, whether it's higher or lower, but what are the activities that contribute to it going up.
When I'm installed one, I was really surprised.
I could see every time I was cooking something on the stove, especially if I was cooking in some oil, those air quality particulates tick up quite a bit higher. You can even see it with something as small as burning candles, especially if it's near your monitor. Those flames that are coming off there at the tip of that candles a lot of ultrafying particulates. It's not enough, necessarily, like I said, to harm you, unless it were a constant,
chronic exposure. Most people aren't burning wood in an unventilated home all day, but if you think back twenty thirty forty years ago, that was much more common.
And if you think.
About places that don't have common indoor heating, biomass heating inside the home with poor ventilation is really common. So you talk about, you know, we're living longer. A lot of that living longer is due to understanding and reducing our environmental risks. And that comes along just as we sort of understood that hand washing was important and with that sort of greatly improved hospital related outcomes, and then
we start to understand, okay, infectious disease is important. You know, I would say the last fifty years has really been a substantial improvement in reducing environmental solution, especially within developed nations in the United States, and you know, one of the biggest improvements is our improvement in air quality. But now it's about preserving those games. Now was about we've gotten here, how do we get more out of it?
How do we preserve what we got through fifty years of environmental regulation and fifty years of improvement and infectious disease responses. And that means costly evolving, costly pushing the signs on the low forward, and costly going to people new tools that can directly improve their health.
One of the things that I remember from back when we were in grad school and the research that you were doing that has always stuck with me is like, how depending on what your zip code is, that dictates
your exposure. We talked to somebody on the show who talked about like the highways and byways and how a lot of black communities were put that, Like those highways were built around black communities, through the neighborhood, through the neighborhoods, through the middle and there are just specific groups of people who are more impacted than others.
Can you talk about that a little bit?
Yeah? Absolutely. You talked about the zip codes.
You know, I say tell me your zip code, and I can tell you how long you're likely to live. It's really it can be that powerful of a predictor. So your zip code really is a very strong predictor of lifespan, how long you're going to live, and health span, how many healthy years are you going to get, what
chronic diseases are you most at risk from? And this is for a number of reasons, primarily the socio economic factors of it, understanding what your access to resources, what's likely your income, and then also what are you likely being exposed to.
We understand there's a huge.
Body of research showing that lower socio economics as communities have been impacted more by environmental exposures.
And that's not an accidental thing.
That is because you know, that's where the industry is put, that's where landfills are put, that's where highways cross. Oftentimes because those communities don't have the political power to protect themselves. And so I think that's part of where you set a beginning that awareness becomes such a big part of a tool that you can use to protect your environmental health.
The more of these communities are aware.
Of the factors that are going on in there, and a lot of them are very aware and gaining the
political power to push back. They're able to push back, and you're able to see industry close or move out of some of these areas, you're able to see highways not being built through the middle of minority communities, especially black communities here within the United States, And then what we're able to do then it starts to understand, Okay, well, how do we tackle the existing social economic disparities and
how they contribute to health. And what we've seen time and time again is that those who are the most sois economically disadvantaged, who have the least access to resources, including medical resources, but also community resources. People who don't have access to healthy foods, who live in these food deserts, they.
Are more responsive to air pollution.
Just going back to the ways that your body becomes sort of broken down over time by all the things that happen to it, those things influence what your next
response is going to be. And so if you're a person who's not been able to go to the doctor and get regular preventative health checks, and you're not somebody who's been able to eat healthy because you simply don't have access to those foods and you know you're working two jobs to make enough income, you know, to live, that stress contributes to say, a wildfire happening in your area and now as compared to somebody who's social economically advantage,
they might be having very similar profiles in a lot of ways, but those social economic differences added up over time mean that they might have a much better response or a much lower response to a wildfire episode or something like that than a more social economically disadvantaged person. And so there's no extracting environmental health from social economic health disparities. Been there, and so I feel those things
really as intricately linked. And I talked about part of my mission is to reduce health disparities, because I believe that if we can improve environmental health, you're going to directly improve health disparities because the people that are being most impacted by the environment are the people who have the least access to political resources, economic resources, and social resources.
This is making me. I'm just tying it together, especially with that example you just gave Cavian about you know, historically where you come from. These things accumulate and I'm like, oh, the first question was like, oh, this is it epigenetic, And I'm like, yes, girls, methylation. And then I'm like, well, is it inherited across generations? The same way that we think about like, what was this the Swedish potato? Was it Swedish or Irish?
Wait a minute before you get any deeper, please educate the sorry me epigenetic I need a refresher. So there are genetic changes, and so we think about mutations. We think about DNA having four nucleotized ATC and G and if they are changed, like we think about that's a genetic change, right, a mutation changing. Think of it as changing the letters in a book.
Okay.
We can think about epigenetic changes as changes that don't change materially what you read, but change access to different genes.
And so you may think of it as like a lock on a book, or you put a sticker over a page and I can't read what it says right there, right, So if that's an epigenetic change, and that's on your DNA, I'm asking if your mom grew up in a place, if she had low socioeconomic status and she was exposed to a lot of Pollutionis she grew up in a place where she didn't have central heat and so they ran kerosene heaters or they had fireplaces burning biomass like
Caven said, and she had early exposure if she's accumulating stickers and locks on that book, do you inherit those stickers in locks? Okay, so that's what I'm asking Cavino.
Air pollution.
Now, we know some of these things conditionally around other types of exposure. We know some of this stuff maybe even with like chemical exposure, but I guess air pollution is in some ways chemical exposure. Everything's chemicals.
Air pollution is absolutely a chemical exposure.
So is it clear that it is inherited?
I think there is.
Absolutely there is generational inheritance of DNA methylation patterns of there. Now the mechanisms by which that happens are still unknown, but absolutely we have seen in the literature that the methylation of the parent impacts the potential health and methylation
status of the child. There's a famous sort of a Goody mouse model that's sort of shown that where you can have different foods that are rich in methylation, and so if you eat these, you'll have just higher levels of DNA methylations.
There's more methylation in your body.
For you to have access to, and based on the foods that the mother eat, the children turn out completely differently genetically identical mice, but completely driven by their Methalaysia status within there and so as a referred to the Dutch famine studyes, which you studied die in the nineteen forty nineteen forty five sort of, or that's when the people that were part of the study were alive just of the World War two, and you have the severe
famine that happens, and they're what's interesting is that you you have the severe famine, you have the offspring of there, and then you have their grandchildren, and their grandchildren tended to have very different health effects as compared to the parents, and it was thought to be this type of epigenetic inheritance that the grandparents epigenomes were impacted by this famine in such a way that you saw increased risks of chronic diseases in the next generation and then especially in
the grandchildren that were born too. Yeah, so the grandchildren, actually, you know, some later studies had even stronger effects than you know, the parents had in some cases. So you know, it's one of those things where we're still trying to work out exactly how that information gets transmitted across generations. Is it just in the egg and the sperm, is
it something else? So you understand that methylation gets overwritten during the developmental process, but there's clearly some signatures that remain within there. And for me, what I more think about, even more than sort of the transgenerational inheritance of epigenetics, is just the early life exposures that happen, because your early life is the same from a exposure standpoint, It's
just the same life that your parents are living. So you don't even really have to look for the transgenerationalness of it. Just look at what life your parents are living. What are they exposed to when they're in their you know, twenties and thirties and they're raising the young child, and you think about, you know, the young child being much
more vulnerable just doing to be much smaller. The grams per kilogram of exposure is a lot less when you are a few kilograms, you know, heavy versus when you're an adult. Apologize, I don't know what children's sizes.
Are, and that's appropriate not involved.
So yeah, so you know, those early life exposures really matter. And there's this entire field, you know, the developmental origins of health.
And disease do had and sort of the acronym they use.
For it where they're seeing now that going from the end utero framework all the way through early life, you can see how exposures experience during they are predisposed individual to developing chronic diseases later on in life, including obesity and adolescence, metabolic disease and early adulthood, and even cardiovascua diseases later on in life.
Then wow, this is just making me think about our current state, where we're looking at people losing access to benefits, we're looking at a terrible health care system, we're looking at maternal care deserts during the most like important developmental time. Like I think we've talked about some of this on our show before in different labs, but it's just when we started stacking those facts up, it's sickning, you know.
Yeah, it's a accumulation.
And that's what we're starting to appreciate now is the cumulative nature of the exposures and how they stack up over time, and how they begin so early on in life, and why it's important to target those things early on in life so that you're giving everybody an equal chance to live a full, happy, healthy life. And that's really
the greatest disparity that we're trying to address. Where we talk about addressing environmental health disparities, is that simply because of where you live, because of your zip code, the zip code you were born into, the zip code your parents are born into, the exposures they received, some people have a better chance of having a long healthy life
than other people do from an early age. And that's a fundamental societal disparity that I think if you want to call yourself a good society, you have to be at least willing to address and address with the full weight of everything in your society.
And it is a full societal problem.
We've talked about transportation in here, We've talked about national policies and the vision policies for it.
It takes all of.
That working together to really address these big problems and to continually improve our environment because these changes are not always guaranteed to be better. Like it is certainly possible to regress in our environmental conditions.
And you know, we've seen.
Some of that in some particular communities that have been impacted by industry moving in, be it data centers, other things. You know, we've seen it in the past forty years or so with the p FoST story and that industrial chemical you know that was never present before now being produced, getting into our waterways, and now being a significant health concern for billions of people. There's almost nobody on this planet that has not been exposed to these forever chemicals
in one way or another. And we've got to figure out, okay, well what do we do with a society about this?
How do we address this? And it's no.
One, you know, places you can go to say, Okay, this is going to be you know, the silver bullet, this is going to be the magic bill that fixes everything. It takes a whole of government, whole society approach to address these, but it's what's needed.
If you did have a magic wand and you could make everything perfect, to change one thing that you feel like would have a massive impact on how we approach air pollution and how it affects us as a population.
What would you prioritize.
Oh, that's a great question.
A magic wand to fix how we approach air pollution and what the priority should be. It's difficult because there are so many different sources of air pollution, and some of them are natural. But what I would do is I would mandate that as part of the healthcare system, and environmental assessment be done, be available to everybody, maybe even mandated for early in life. And we do this
a little bit with light testing in there. You know, if you come in and there's you know, early signs of high lead exposure, they can do, you know, in home assessment, look at the dust around the home, is there a lead paint somewhere, because we understand how critical that is for early childhood mental development, not being exposed the high concentrations of lead. But you know, what we don't do is to provide that same service throughout the
entire lifespan. Lead's a problem for exposures even if you're an adult, or less so than if you're a child, but still there. So I think if we had a system nationwide that provided free environmental assessments, anybody could do them broad scaled. You can keep the information private, share it with your doctors so that they can understand, Okay, here's what you're being exposed to. And do this longitudinally because the environment changes every year. You can get an
updated assessment. I look at the water quality, the air quality, the soil quality, paints.
And dusts and other things.
I think if we had that information and then aggregated it so you can understand at the community level what communities are being exposed to, where are we seeing different problems scrap up that will completely change the landscape, and what enable us to do some really innovative environmental studies I could really start to address fundamental causes of disease.
Amazing.
Is there anything we didn't ask you that you feel like it's important that you want to say?
I would just say that you know, it's really a transformative time for environmental health. I think the tools and technologies you know that we're using are really going to push you on the look forward. Environment health up until now has been a cleaning problem. How do we clean the air, how do we clean the water? How do we clean the soil? And that absolutely is a bedrock foundation of the environmental health because the best way to prevent environmental exposures or it's just not to have the
average environment. But that's an impossible task everywhere. And so the ability to personalize and there's absolutely going to be a role for AI in this for it, and there's some new insights that we're able to gain from there and some new tools that we're able to make available to the individual where if you don't have access, you can't get to a doctor, and you've got this complex environmental assessment sitting in front of you.
Okay, well what can you do and the.
Ability to you know, have a AI based tool that's fed in validated scientific the grounded information to say, oh, we noticed that this is high.
This is higher than you know, the national average.
This is connected to that high cholesterol reading that you got from your doctor in there.
Here's what some of the recommendations are.
Those types of tools are really being developed, and I think people should be aware of them. I think people should be talking with their doctors and their healthcare providers about getting these things, maybe seeing if an air pusha monitor might be FSA eligible.
Some of these things you know might be, and if they're.
Not, push for them to be, because there absolutely are a part of your health.
I think this has revealed so many things to me. Tt same one. It's the inequalities across the board where it's just like people who live in certain zip codes are exposed to different things but don't have access to interventions to help improve their environment, and so that dictates your quality of life. And what we should want as global citizens is for everyone to have equal opportunity to a high quality life. Yeah, and so what Cavin has told us throughout this lab is that it's way more
complex than we're thinking about. Even inside of our house when we're cooking, being aware and just knowing that there are things floating around you is more than half the battle. Once you are aware, you can do something about it.
But we I mean, we've seen how information is buried or made difficult to obtain, and so I'm really excited about some of the technology, but hoping that the technology doesn't follow the systems we've always seen, which is once again another disparity and who has access to it, And so we'll have to keep our eye on this, like so many other things. Turn your eyeballs outward and everywhere. Okay, flip your eyelids back.
Okay did you do that as a kid? Flip your eyelids?
Yes?
It wasn't right. I was bad.
Ew I could never do it. I was always so scared. I was like, what if they get done?
Oh no? But yeah, knowing these things is empowerment.
So you can say, I know that I live in a high pollution area, or area with bad air quality, and you can take that information to your doctor and say, how is this affecting my health and what steps do I need to take to improve my overall health? So so key, so thank you Kathan for dropping that knowledge on us today. Stay tuned, next episode, next week, same time, same place. You can find us on X and Instagram at Dope Labs podcast.
Tt is on X and Instagram at dr Underscore t Sho, and you can find Zakiya at Z said So. Dope Labs is a production of Lemonada Media.
Our supervising producer is Keegan Zimma and our producer is Issara A SEVENZ. Dope Labs is sound designed, edited and mixed by James Farber. Leimonada Media's vice President of Partnerships and Production is Jackie Danziger. Executive producer from iHeart podcast is Katrina Norvil.
Marketing lead is Alison Canter.
Original music composed and produced by Takayasuzawa and Alex sugi Ura, with additional music by Elijah Harvey. Dope Labs is executive produced by us T T Show Dia and Zakiah Wattley.