Speaker 1: Is the top of the New Year, twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1: New Year, Same me, same Shenanigans, same me, Same Dope Labs,
Speaker 1: same Zekiah, same Tt. Because hey, hey, we're doing all
Speaker 1: we can. We don't need to change change the environment,
Speaker 1: don't change me. Right, it's winter time, it's cold, people
Speaker 1: are traveling.
Speaker 2: Did you travel over the holidays?
Speaker 1: No, I'll travel right before the holidays. And I said,
Speaker 1: it's looking wild out here. Yes, I was traveling during
Speaker 1: the holidays and it was very wild. People were coffin, sneezing.
Speaker 1: It's a lot of shared air in these airports and cars,
Speaker 1: houses and houses. Everybody's gathering clothes.
Speaker 2: Hey house, no more h words.
Speaker 1: I'm TT and I'm Zakiyah And this is Dope Labs.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes our
Speaker 1: core science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship.
Speaker 2: Well, I'll speak for myself.
Speaker 1: When I'm thinking about the air and travel and being
Speaker 1: in close proximity with people, I'm always just thinking about viruses.
Speaker 1: But the air has other things in it too, And
Speaker 1: people in Georgia right now are struggling with the flu.
Speaker 1: I'm like, hey, put those masks in here, Okay, it's
Speaker 1: taking a lot of people out for real. And just
Speaker 1: like with viruses, all the other things in the air,
Speaker 1: like pollution, smoke, everything from cars, factories, wildfires, all of
Speaker 1: that stuff is also coming into our bodies with the
Speaker 1: viruses and also have an impact.
Speaker 2: We're taking all of that in. That's what this episode
Speaker 2: is about.
Speaker 1: We want to talk to somebody who studies this full
Speaker 1: time because I feel like when wildfires ramp up, I
Speaker 1: remember what's in the air. Then when flu season is
Speaker 1: at its peak, I remember that. But how do we
Speaker 1: take all of these things in? So we're talking to
Speaker 1: somebody who looks at how the environment, specifically the air
Speaker 1: and air pollution gets into our bodies, shapes our health
Speaker 1: and how it affects us in ways that we don't
Speaker 1: even think about. I think we should start with what
Speaker 1: we know, which is what you've already said. TT winner
Speaker 1: means more sickness. We know people reading to heat, ventilation
Speaker 1: is worse, and we know mass work, but we're usually
Speaker 1: thinking about well, for me, I'm thinking about the biological
Speaker 1: threats and what masks protect us from. And we know
Speaker 1: that those air quality alerts pop up on our phones
Speaker 1: from time to time, talking about the ozone talking about wildfire,
Speaker 1: smoke and smog, and some days the air outside is
Speaker 1: just literally not safe to breathe. And so as someone
Speaker 1: with asthma and allergies, I think about that, and I
Speaker 1: also think about the folks who have that and also
Speaker 1: heart issues and compromised immune systems, Like how are they
Speaker 1: moving through life with all of these other particles floating
Speaker 1: through the air.
Speaker 2: Is this just confined to the lung?
Speaker 1: Is what I think about, right, And so I think
Speaker 1: we have a lot of questions to uncover. Yes, I
Speaker 1: have a ton like can you have a bad air day?
Speaker 2: And can you quickly recover? Are you down right?
Speaker 1: Because yes, when I have a bad hair day, I'm
Speaker 1: not going anywhere. No, it's inside, It's inside.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's jump into the dissection.
Speaker 1: He's a good friend of ours. We have been friends
Speaker 1: since grad school. We are very happy to have him here.
Speaker 1: Introduce yourself.
Speaker 3: Finance Cavin Ward cavinists. I'm currently the director of Environmental
Speaker 3: Science for the Price Slab at the Buck Institute for
Speaker 3: Research on Aging. I'm also an adjunct faculty member for
Speaker 3: Duke University and the University of North Carolina. Chapel Hill,
Speaker 3: Go Blue devils don't test my allegiance.
Speaker 4: Formerly, I was.
Speaker 3: A senior computational biologist for the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Speaker 3: Across all these roles, my passion is really trying to
Speaker 3: utilize modern data resources, modern data tools, techniques to improve
Speaker 3: personalized environmental health and reduce health disparities for all communities.
Speaker 1: The only pollution I know is the air quality index
Speaker 1: that the weather app tells me from Apple. But I
Speaker 1: know there's so much more because you've told it to
Speaker 1: us over the years. How should we even be thinking
Speaker 1: about air pollution?
Speaker 3: Well, I say the first thing to do is just
Speaker 3: to start thinking about it. You know, I think one
Speaker 3: of the benefits we have here in the US is
Speaker 3: that we have generally pretty good air quality. Well, we
Speaker 3: don't think about the fact that, like, yeah, just because
Speaker 3: the skies are clear doesn't necessarily mean that, you know,
Speaker 3: those daily variations in air quality aren't impacting health for individuals.
Speaker 3: And then you have the days where the air isn't clear,
Speaker 3: you know, you have the smoke events that come down.
Speaker 3: You know, we have the big Canadian wildfires where the
Speaker 3: skies of New York or Orange for days, and that's
Speaker 3: when people get reminded of it when your eyes are burning,
Speaker 3: you're coughing, and people are like, man, like, what's going on.
Speaker 3: And it's important that people think about their personal activities
Speaker 3: and their personal health. But what people don't think about
Speaker 3: it is like, hey, I'm in the winter, you know,
Speaker 3: let me start up that fireplace. You know, all of
Speaker 3: a sudden the house gets a little smoky. Maybe I
Speaker 3: didn't clean that chimney. Those sorts of things, and so
Speaker 3: those types of things also contribute to what you breathe
Speaker 3: in and how what you breathe in impacts your health.
Speaker 3: So when you want to light that fireplace, or cooking
Speaker 3: being one of the big contributors to indoor air pollution,
Speaker 3: you know, frying foods.
Speaker 4: Those oils we.
Speaker 3: Think about, you know, particulates as like these little hard
Speaker 3: particles like sand, but it's really a lot more complex
Speaker 3: to that. A lot of them were composed of organics
Speaker 3: set of solidified in the atmosphere, and so the actual
Speaker 3: organics are a part of will be considered be particulate
Speaker 3: air pollution. And unfortunately, you know, the lungs were not
Speaker 3: designed to be able to handle all of that. They
Speaker 3: were not designed to breathe in you know, oils aerosols,
Speaker 3: organic carbons, but things like that, and so the body reacts,
Speaker 3: the lungs reacts, inflammation goes up, and you start to
Speaker 3: get a whole host of you know, potential health issues.
Speaker 3: But the first step is just the awareness that it's
Speaker 3: always there, even when the skies are clear.
Speaker 1: You said words like airsols and particulates. Can we talk
Speaker 1: about scale. I'm a material scientist and I specialize in nanomterials,
Speaker 1: so I can understand, I appreciate how small these things are,
Speaker 1: but I don't know if people really understand how small
Speaker 1: some of these particulates can get and when it becomes
Speaker 1: like something that interferes with your respiratory system.
Speaker 3: So we cost like particulates by size typically, so we
Speaker 3: talk about PM ten that's particular matter of the sets
Speaker 3: and ten micrometers in diameter. And to give you a
Speaker 3: sense of what that scale is, a human hair is
Speaker 3: about forty micrometers in diameter cross there, so you can
Speaker 3: get about four PM ten particles across withid of a
Speaker 3: human hair. So you're already talking pretty smart for it
Speaker 3: tiny particles, but thanks to evolution, your body's evolved a
Speaker 3: lot of defenses. So PM ten particles actually a lot
Speaker 3: of those are captured by your upper airway defenses. And
Speaker 3: so we go down to the finer particles, the things
Speaker 3: that are we call, you know, the PM two point
Speaker 3: five the fine particular matter. And now you're getting into
Speaker 3: the particular matter that can actually penetrate down to there.
Speaker 3: And so two point five micrometers and diameter. Okay, well,
Speaker 3: now you're talking about four of those fitting across every
Speaker 3: PM ten particle as out there. And so now you're
Speaker 3: talking about, you know, particles that are much much smaller
Speaker 3: than the width of a human hair. And then you
Speaker 3: go down a step further and you get to the
Speaker 3: ultra fine particulates PM point one PM one.
Speaker 4: We talk about one micrometer, one tenth of a.
Speaker 3: Micrometer and diameter, and those are the particles that are
Speaker 3: small enough not only to get into your lungs, but
Speaker 3: actually to diffuse out of your lungs to become part
Speaker 3: of what's circulating through your body.
Speaker 1: And so what falls into that category, yeah, you want
Speaker 1: to know.
Speaker 3: So those are we called, you know, the ultra fine particulates.
Speaker 3: Those are the smallest of the small particles, or you
Speaker 3: know a lot of them are barely held together enough
Speaker 3: to be solid, but they are you know, together enough
Speaker 3: to be able to diffuse out of the lungs and
Speaker 3: get into the bloodstream. And you know, there are studies
Speaker 3: whether generate gold particles of these. So they're inert, but
Speaker 3: they're easily tracked and they're easily to be collected afterwards.
Speaker 3: And you can have you know, animal models breathe us
Speaker 3: in and you'll find them in the lungs, you'll find
Speaker 3: them in the kidneys, you'll find them in the.
Speaker 4: Tails, you know of these animals.
Speaker 3: And so it really shows how what you breathe in
Speaker 3: becomes part of what's circulating all the way throughout you.
Speaker 3: And it's all these factors together the you know, what
Speaker 3: it does to your lungs, the way your lungs react,
Speaker 3: how it diffuses out of your lungs, and then the
Speaker 3: way it impacts other organ systems. That contributes to all
Speaker 3: the health effects that we can associate with particular matter.
Speaker 3: And then you have the non particle part of it,
Speaker 3: the gases, you know, things like your ozone, your nitrogen dioxides,
Speaker 3: which you're really heavy around car traffic, and a lot
Speaker 3: of those never leave the lungs. You know, ozone reacts
Speaker 3: very well never leave, as in, they'll reach the cell
Speaker 3: lining and they'll react so quickly that they'll essentially split
Speaker 3: apart some lipid membranes, and the gas itself will be gone,
Speaker 3: but the effects of it linger far, far longer than that.
Speaker 2: So hold your breath in traffic.
Speaker 4: Hold your I want to say, hold your breath in traffic.
Speaker 4: You know, breathe, breathe in traffic.
Speaker 3: But it does become you know thought, if you're ever
Speaker 3: you know, next to a busy road, you hear a
Speaker 3: big truck pass by, you know, people cough and all that,
Speaker 3: that reaction is immediate to that air pollution that you're
Speaker 3: breathing in. And even when the big truck's not passing by,
Speaker 3: every time a car passes by, there's gonna be an
Speaker 3: uptick in gaseous and exhaust and all that. And so
Speaker 3: think about that in the concept of your daily life.
Speaker 3: Do you run along next to roads? You know, how
Speaker 3: do you feel when you run next to roads versus running.
Speaker 4: In a park?
Speaker 3: Do you want to think about how air pollution impacts
Speaker 3: daily behaviors. That's when you start to think about when
Speaker 3: you think about the fact that, like I said, just
Speaker 3: because the air is clear doesn't mean, it's not there.
Speaker 1: My brain is all over the place right now because
Speaker 1: there's just so many things that I just are now
Speaker 1: being brought to my awareness because you said you got
Speaker 1: to think about it, and now I'm like, okay, Now
Speaker 1: I'm hyper aware. And I don't think about inside of
Speaker 1: my house having anything in the air. I run an
Speaker 1: air purifier now, but I don't. I don't think about
Speaker 1: how the things that I'm doing, like day to day,
Speaker 1: how that contributes.
Speaker 2: And one thing that.
Speaker 1: Zakia had brought up is like hair spray, our setting
Speaker 1: spray for makeup, the makeup itself like that because it's
Speaker 1: settling into the finest pores and that's what I want,
Speaker 1: that's what you want to do. But it's also settling.
Speaker 1: There is a makeup the setting spray tete, I know,
Speaker 1: you know it. It's pink. I have to hold my
Speaker 1: breath when I use that. It takes the air out
Speaker 1: of the room. You have to hold your breath for time.
Speaker 1: But it works so well. But I know this can't.
Speaker 2: It has particles.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: Is that aerosol tip you know that's what it is
Speaker 3: doing and is aerosolizing whatever is in the can so
Speaker 3: it comes out of this fine spray of drops, which,
Speaker 3: as you said, is great for a nice even distribution,
Speaker 3: but your body's letting you know. They're like, hey, I
Speaker 3: breathe this in and it's causing a reaction, so I
Speaker 3: don't want to breathe it in.
Speaker 1: Well, I have a heat protected and this smells so good,
Speaker 1: and I'd be like, and then I love the smell,
Speaker 1: and then coffee. So you're telling me damage not good?
Speaker 4: Yeah, not good.
Speaker 3: And sometimes it's you know, just sensitization. You know, it
Speaker 3: doesn't always have to lead to long term damage, but
Speaker 3: it is something that you know, people should think about
Speaker 3: and be aware of how your body responds to it,
Speaker 3: because people are going to respond slightly differently, and you know, unfortunately,
Speaker 3: there's not a lot of tests we have right now
Speaker 3: to be able to say, Okay, you're going to respond
Speaker 3: really strongly to this type of pollutant, and you're going
Speaker 3: to strong really respond to that type of pollutant, you
Speaker 3: should stay away from this setting spray. And that's part
Speaker 3: of the research work that's going on, part of what's
Speaker 3: being called personalized environmental health. We're moving away from just
Speaker 3: general population and we'll risk where we say okay, the
Speaker 3: risk is this much for the entire US population and
Speaker 3: really drilling down to okay, well, what are your personalized
Speaker 3: risk what based on your life history, based on your genome,
Speaker 3: based on the other exposures that you've received, are you
Speaker 3: likely to respond to? How are you likely to respond?
Speaker 3: And hopefully once we get that information, what can you
Speaker 3: do about it? And that's really the next step in
Speaker 3: environmental health is an increased personalization that allows the individual
Speaker 3: to respond to the risks that they're experiencing.
Speaker 1: I like that something you said is like looking back
Speaker 1: at what have you been exposed to? And I think
Speaker 1: to understand why what you have been exposed to previously matters,
Speaker 1: I think you have to understand what long term exposure means.
Speaker 1: Can you explain some of those correlations and why they
Speaker 1: exist and what we see as long term effects?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Absolutely so.
Speaker 3: Really you can think about as the accumulation of as
Speaker 3: you said before, damage that happens so a lot of
Speaker 3: what we think about in the air polluting context. You know,
Speaker 3: it's linked to inflammation and sort of systemic damage to
Speaker 3: basic cellular prophecies. How your body functions on a cellular
Speaker 3: level gets disrupted by long term exposure.
Speaker 4: Almost any injury for it.
Speaker 3: And so when you get one day of say heavy
Speaker 3: air pollution for it, you might get, you know, some
Speaker 3: watery eyes, you might have a cough, a headache. But
Speaker 3: if that goes away after a couple of days, your
Speaker 3: body can recover from that. But what we know, and
Speaker 3: we know this, you know for a lot of different conditions,
Speaker 3: when you get that chronic systemic inflammation, when your body
Speaker 3: is just always responding, that becomes an issue that starts
Speaker 3: to break down how your body is going to react
Speaker 3: to the next stimulus that you receive. It's almost like
Speaker 3: your body can't quite respond the way that they did
Speaker 3: before if it's received the same insult for day after
Speaker 3: day after day. When death by a thousand paper cuts,
Speaker 3: and when it comes to air pollution, those paper cuts
Speaker 3: can be very small, so small you don't even feel
Speaker 3: them then, So that long term chronic exposure can lead
Speaker 3: to increased risk of cardiovascular disease, increase risk of renal disease,
Speaker 3: increase risk of lung disease, renal de.
Speaker 4: Renal disease, your kidneys.
Speaker 3: I told you, these particles go everywhere, and so that
Speaker 3: contributes to this increased risk of these chronic diseases that
Speaker 3: just continual increased inflammation that your body's receiving from these
Speaker 3: long term exposures. But then there's also the aging aspect
Speaker 3: to it, and this has really come about in the
Speaker 3: last few years where we've been able to track aging
Speaker 3: using these molecular biomarkers known as aging clocks. And what
Speaker 3: these clocks allow us to do is to take DNA methylation,
Speaker 3: the way that certain changes are applied to your DNA
Speaker 3: so that different cells can respond in different ways, and
Speaker 3: actually use those as a way to measure how you
Speaker 3: age at a cellular level, how you age at an
Speaker 3: organ system level, and how you age as an overall person.
Speaker 3: And what's been clearly shown is that people who are
Speaker 3: exposed to high levels of poor air quality, or people
Speaker 3: who are exposed to moderate air quality but for a
Speaker 3: long period of time, have accelerated aging, so they might
Speaker 3: be three, four or five years older than what they
Speaker 3: should be. What we've also seen is that people who
Speaker 3: have accelerated aging are more likely to respond to future exposures,
Speaker 3: which helps explain why the elderly and other individuals are
Speaker 3: more sensitive to environmental exposures. So there's really this feedback
Speaker 3: loop that happens over time, where you get chronically exposed
Speaker 3: and weakens your biological system's ability to respond to the
Speaker 3: next exposure. You respond ford to the next exposure, you
Speaker 3: get chronically exposed, so on and so forward.
Speaker 4: And so that's why it's important to be able to.
Speaker 3: Interrupt these cycles, both at policy levels where weset national standards,
Speaker 3: but also at individual levels, where individuals we're able to
Speaker 3: understand what am I being exposed to and how do
Speaker 3: I prevent future adverse exposures to be able to really
Speaker 3: start to improve environmental health.
Speaker 2: Now I got a question. Okay, mm hm oh, what
Speaker 2: got too many?
Speaker 1: Because I do want to talk about DNA methilation and
Speaker 1: those signatures, but I also want to know, because methilation
Speaker 1: is not always permanent to track aging, is there a
Speaker 1: case where you can reverse that? Like if I have
Speaker 1: five days in the city in two days outside the city,
Speaker 1: am I able to reverse my sensitivity to future insult
Speaker 1: in any way?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: Is there any evidence of that? Because I wonder about
Speaker 1: people who live in cities like TT and I visited
Speaker 1: Brussels and we barely made it and everybody else was
Speaker 1: walking around fine. Now, why is that.
Speaker 3: As good as you mentioned Brussels, because there is this
Speaker 3: idea people grow up in certain contexts and so they
Speaker 3: bodies are adjusted to different levels of all types of
Speaker 3: environmental exposures, air pollution included. Now, that doesn't mean that
Speaker 3: it isn't impacting them health wise.
Speaker 4: It doesn't mean that it's you know, good.
Speaker 3: For them or it's neutral for them, just because they
Speaker 3: were walking around the city fine and you and TT
Speaker 3: were not. But it does mean that they're more used
Speaker 3: to the levels that are there and they're not going
Speaker 3: to have some of those immediate responses that you had.
Speaker 4: But is it reversible?
Speaker 3: That's really one of these sort of wholly grail questions
Speaker 3: of environmental health is at what point does environmental damage
Speaker 3: become irreversible? At what point is it still in a
Speaker 3: reversible phase? And how do we reverse those? So, you know,
Speaker 3: you talked about how DNA methylation is reversible. There's an
Speaker 3: interesting study down on smoking years ago where they looked
Speaker 3: at people who were smokers and then quit smoking, people
Speaker 3: who were never smokers, and people who were smokers and
Speaker 3: then continued smoking throughout the entire study period. And what
Speaker 3: they found is that compared to never smokers, people who
Speaker 3: are smokers and then quit smoking.
Speaker 4: Some of their DNA methylation.
Speaker 3: Sites would sort of go up with the current smokers
Speaker 3: and then level off. You could sort of almost see
Speaker 3: the point at which you know they're smoking sort of
Speaker 3: plateaued for it. Other DNA methilation sites continued on as
Speaker 3: if they had never stopped smoking. So clearly something had
Speaker 3: been reprogrammed within the cellar machinery to where it was like,
Speaker 3: I'm on a different path now, even if you stop smoking,
Speaker 3: I'm not necessarily going to return to that path now.
Speaker 3: We believe that most of the is reversible most of
Speaker 3: the time, when you remove the environmental insult over time,
Speaker 3: the body has an incredible ability to heal itself. Unfortunately,
Speaker 3: there are a few sort of threshold points oftentimes when
Speaker 3: you develop things like cardiovascular disease or kidney disease or COPD,
Speaker 3: where we know that those conditions are not necessarily reversible,
Speaker 3: and so a lot of personalized health, a lot of
Speaker 3: preventative health, is about understanding what the person's exposed to
Speaker 3: before you get to any of these irreversible steps and
Speaker 3: giving them the options to reverse them. Number one by
Speaker 3: removing the exposure or reducing the exposure, and number two
Speaker 3: by taking interventions that might be able to act against that.
Speaker 3: And we're still working on the interventions phrase of it.
Speaker 3: But what we hope is that when we get to
Speaker 3: a more personalized state of environmental health, will really be
Speaker 3: able to say, Okay, here's what you were exposed to,
Speaker 3: here's where you are. We think this is still reversible,
Speaker 3: here's what you should do. Come back in and we'll
Speaker 3: see if it's working.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: One part of what you said that stuck out to
Speaker 1: me was the policy and the regulations of it all.
Speaker 2: In a formal life, I was a FED.
Speaker 1: I worked for the National Institute of Standards Technology, which
Speaker 1: I have I was not allowed to say on this show,
Speaker 1: but now I can because I don't work there anymore.
Speaker 1: So I know that standards and policy can be a
Speaker 1: really tricky place, you know, and creating national standards, creating
Speaker 1: national policy, it's a long road, and it takes a
Speaker 1: lot of really smart people like Ukavin to really push
Speaker 1: for these changes and explain to our representatives in government
Speaker 1: why this is so important, and leaning on places like
Speaker 1: the EPA and things like that to put these documents
Speaker 1: together and to stress the importance of this. So if
Speaker 1: there's limit it to a certain point. How much are
Speaker 1: we talking about here and are they reducing the damage
Speaker 1: actually or should we keep pushing our policymakers to do
Speaker 1: more in that area.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it's great as you break up that point.
Speaker 3: I'm also a former FED you know, which I could
Speaker 3: say because I can say former in front of it,
Speaker 3: former EPA employee. And you're right, you know, the policy
Speaker 3: making process is slow. It is complex. It's not even
Speaker 3: multi year. It can be thought of as multi decade,
Speaker 3: you know, in some contexts. And you know, there's a
Speaker 3: lot of good reasons for that. The policies that we
Speaker 3: set are based on the best science that's available. Currently,
Speaker 3: the National Ambient Air Quality Standard, the sort of policy
Speaker 3: that says ambient air standards for PM two point five,
Speaker 3: those fine particulates that can really get deep down into
Speaker 3: the lungs, is nine microgrounds for cubic meter and that
Speaker 3: was recently moved down from twelve microgrounds for comubic meter.
Speaker 3: And I know a lot of people that would argue
Speaker 3: it should go even lower than that, and there's good
Speaker 3: science I think to support that as well.
Speaker 4: But because policy is so.
Speaker 3: Slow, it's designed to be slow so that everybody has
Speaker 3: a chance to weigh in on it so that you
Speaker 3: get it right and you're not revising it the next
Speaker 3: year or the next month, hopefully, although we see policy
Speaker 3: revisions happening quite quickly. Now, there have to be other
Speaker 3: tools besides just national policy that can help people protect that.
Speaker 3: And you know, there's state policies, there's local policies, but
Speaker 3: there also have to be better tools for individuals to
Speaker 3: start be able to protect their health as well, and
Speaker 3: those work in conjunction with those policies. You know, you
Speaker 3: can't put the onus all on the individual, but you
Speaker 3: can't only expect once in a decade, once in a
Speaker 3: multi decade setting of national policy to be the only
Speaker 3: thing that's going to pray able to protect us.
Speaker 1: And especially to respond to changing landscapes. I don't see
Speaker 1: the set in the eighties. Doesn't see a data center coming.
Speaker 4: On your block right right, It certainly doesn't, Mater.
Speaker 1: So I'm thinking about this, and I like your answer
Speaker 1: about the owners not being in any one place. So
Speaker 1: let's move from government side to individual Because recently, because
Speaker 1: I'm pretty much off x in on threads now, I
Speaker 1: saw somebody talking about an indoor air quality monitor, and
Speaker 1: I think they were based in Europe, but he was saying, like,
Speaker 1: right now, if you've been heating stuff like older homes
Speaker 1: to have like stoves and stuff inside to warm them furnaces.
Speaker 1: I remember I remember a kerosene heater as a kid
Speaker 1: and being like, this smell is strange. We shouldn't be
Speaker 1: using this inside good good instincts there things like closed windows,
Speaker 1: like are there health risks that people are taking to
Speaker 1: stay warm that they're not aware of? And what kind
Speaker 1: of tools should you be using? I just am curious,
Speaker 1: And then that's just a little bit of a question,
Speaker 1: and the bigger question, this is my problem. The long
Speaker 1: question is thinking about what you said about those checkpoints
Speaker 1: that are irreversible, and thinking about accumulation of methylation that
Speaker 1: leads to worse outcomes and aging. We already are living
Speaker 1: longer lives than before, So what does it mean as
Speaker 1: you get older? What's the plan are you saving us?
Speaker 2: Kevin?
Speaker 4: I'm working on it, working on it daily.
Speaker 3: Those are all really good questions, and I think part
Speaker 3: of what we have to balance is this idea of
Speaker 3: health risks versus living our lives to a certain degree.
Speaker 3: I personally I love burning my fireplace. It just brings
Speaker 3: me joy to sit inside with a nice roaring fire,
Speaker 3: glass of wine, relaxing.
Speaker 4: You know, that makes me happy.
Speaker 3: But I know that every year I get my chimney checked,
Speaker 3: make sure there's good ventilation.
Speaker 2: Through there, all right, let me write that down.
Speaker 3: If you can, you know, have good cross ventilation throughout
Speaker 3: your space to try and limit any particles.
Speaker 4: You know, to come in there.
Speaker 3: Part of that sort of defeats the purpose of getting
Speaker 3: that nice warmth off the fire. But the nice warmth
Speaker 3: is coming with a few additional things in the air
Speaker 3: for you.
Speaker 4: And then if you.
Speaker 3: Can get a good air quality monitor, you know, for
Speaker 3: inside and use it sort of see how is your
Speaker 3: home performing? What is the air quality inside of your home?
Speaker 3: Like I imagine a lot of people will be surprised. They'll
Speaker 3: be surprised at not just you know, whether it's higher
Speaker 3: or lower, but what are the activities that contribute to
Speaker 3: it going up.
Speaker 4: When I'm installed one, I was really surprised.
Speaker 3: I could see every time I was cooking something on
Speaker 3: the stove, especially if I was cooking in some oil,
Speaker 3: those air quality particulates tick up quite a bit higher.
Speaker 3: You can even see it with something as small as
Speaker 3: burning candles, especially if it's near your monitor. Those flames
Speaker 3: that are coming off there at the tip of that
Speaker 3: candles a lot of ultrafying particulates. It's not enough, necessarily,
Speaker 3: like I said, to harm you, unless it were a constant,
Speaker 3: chronic exposure. Most people aren't burning wood in an unventilated
Speaker 3: home all day, but if you think back twenty thirty
Speaker 3: forty years ago, that was much more common.
Speaker 4: And if you think.
Speaker 3: About places that don't have common indoor heating, biomass heating
Speaker 3: inside the home with poor ventilation is really common. So
Speaker 3: you talk about, you know, we're living longer. A lot
Speaker 3: of that living longer is due to understanding and reducing
Speaker 3: our environmental risks. And that comes along just as we
Speaker 3: sort of understood that hand washing was important and with
Speaker 3: that sort of greatly improved hospital related outcomes, and then
Speaker 3: we start to understand, okay, infectious disease is important. You know,
Speaker 3: I would say the last fifty years has really been
Speaker 3: a substantial improvement in reducing environmental solution, especially within developed
Speaker 3: nations in the United States, and you know, one of
Speaker 3: the biggest improvements is our improvement in air quality. But
Speaker 3: now it's about preserving those games. Now was about we've
Speaker 3: gotten here, how do we get more out of it?
Speaker 3: How do we preserve what we got through fifty years
Speaker 3: of environmental regulation and fifty years of improvement and infectious
Speaker 3: disease responses. And that means costly evolving, costly pushing the
Speaker 3: signs on the low forward, and costly going to people
Speaker 3: new tools that can directly improve their health.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I remember from back when
Speaker 1: we were in grad school and the research that you
Speaker 1: were doing that has always stuck with me is like,
Speaker 1: how depending on what your zip code is, that dictates
Speaker 1: your exposure. We talked to somebody on the show who
Speaker 1: talked about like the highways and byways and how a
Speaker 1: lot of black communities were put that, Like those highways
Speaker 1: were built around black communities, through the neighborhood, through the neighborhoods,
Speaker 1: through the middle and there are just specific groups of
Speaker 1: people who are more impacted than others.
Speaker 2: Can you talk about that a little bit?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Absolutely. You talked about the zip codes.
Speaker 3: You know, I say tell me your zip code, and
Speaker 3: I can tell you how long you're likely to live.
Speaker 3: It's really it can be that powerful of a predictor.
Speaker 3: So your zip code really is a very strong predictor
Speaker 3: of lifespan, how long you're going to live, and health span,
Speaker 3: how many healthy years are you going to get, what
Speaker 3: chronic diseases are you most at risk from? And this
Speaker 3: is for a number of reasons, primarily the socio economic
Speaker 3: factors of it, understanding what your access to resources, what's
Speaker 3: likely your income, and then also what are you likely
Speaker 3: being exposed to.
Speaker 4: We understand there's a huge.
Speaker 3: Body of research showing that lower socio economics as communities
Speaker 3: have been impacted more by environmental exposures.
Speaker 4: And that's not an accidental thing.
Speaker 3: That is because you know, that's where the industry is put,
Speaker 3: that's where landfills are put, that's where highways cross. Oftentimes
Speaker 3: because those communities don't have the political power to protect themselves.
Speaker 3: And so I think that's part of where you set
Speaker 3: a beginning that awareness becomes such a big part of
Speaker 3: a tool that you can use to protect your environmental health.
Speaker 4: The more of these communities are aware.
Speaker 3: Of the factors that are going on in there, and
Speaker 3: a lot of them are very aware and gaining the
Speaker 3: political power to push back. They're able to push back,
Speaker 3: and you're able to see industry close or move out
Speaker 3: of some of these areas, you're able to see highways
Speaker 3: not being built through the middle of minority communities, especially
Speaker 3: black communities here within the United States, And then what
Speaker 3: we're able to do then it starts to understand, Okay, well,
Speaker 3: how do we tackle the existing social economic disparities and
Speaker 3: how they contribute to health. And what we've seen time
Speaker 3: and time again is that those who are the most
Speaker 3: sois economically disadvantaged, who have the least access to resources,
Speaker 3: including medical resources, but also community resources. People who don't
Speaker 3: have access to healthy foods, who live in these food deserts, they.
Speaker 4: Are more responsive to air pollution.
Speaker 3: Just going back to the ways that your body becomes
Speaker 3: sort of broken down over time by all the things
Speaker 3: that happen to it, those things influence what your next
Speaker 3: response is going to be. And so if you're a
Speaker 3: person who's not been able to go to the doctor
Speaker 3: and get regular preventative health checks, and you're not somebody
Speaker 3: who's been able to eat healthy because you simply don't
Speaker 3: have access to those foods and you know you're working
Speaker 3: two jobs to make enough income, you know, to live,
Speaker 3: that stress contributes to say, a wildfire happening in your
Speaker 3: area and now as compared to somebody who's social economically advantage,
Speaker 3: they might be having very similar profiles in a lot
Speaker 3: of ways, but those social economic differences added up over
Speaker 3: time mean that they might have a much better response
Speaker 3: or a much lower response to a wildfire episode or
Speaker 3: something like that than a more social economically disadvantaged person.
Speaker 3: And so there's no extracting environmental health from social economic
Speaker 3: health disparities. Been there, and so I feel those things
Speaker 3: really as intricately linked. And I talked about part of
Speaker 3: my mission is to reduce health disparities, because I believe
Speaker 3: that if we can improve environmental health, you're going to
Speaker 3: directly improve health disparities because the people that are being
Speaker 3: most impacted by the environment are the people who have
Speaker 3: the least access to political resources, economic resources, and social resources.
Speaker 2: This is making me. I'm just tying it together, especially
Speaker 2: with that example you just gave Cavian about you know,
Speaker 2: historically where you come from. These things accumulate and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 2: the first question was like, oh, this is it epigenetic,
Speaker 2: And I'm like, yes, girls, methylation. And then I'm like, well,
Speaker 2: is it inherited across generations? The same way that we
Speaker 2: think about like, what was this the Swedish potato? Was
Speaker 2: it Swedish or Irish?
Speaker 1: Wait a minute before you get any deeper, please educate
Speaker 1: the sorry me epigenetic I need a refresher. So there
Speaker 1: are genetic changes, and so we think about mutations. We
Speaker 1: think about DNA having four nucleotized ATC and G and
Speaker 1: if they are changed, like we think about that's a
Speaker 1: genetic change, right, a mutation changing. Think of it as
Speaker 1: changing the letters in a book.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: We can think about epigenetic changes as changes that don't
Speaker 1: change materially what you read, but change access to different genes.
Speaker 1: And so you may think of it as like a
Speaker 1: lock on a book, or you put a sticker over
Speaker 1: a page and I can't read what it says right there, right,
Speaker 1: So if that's an epigenetic change, and that's on your DNA,
Speaker 1: I'm asking if your mom grew up in a place,
Speaker 1: if she had low socioeconomic status and she was exposed
Speaker 1: to a lot of Pollutionis she grew up in a
Speaker 1: place where she didn't have central heat and so they
Speaker 1: ran kerosene heaters or they had fireplaces burning biomass like
Speaker 1: Caven said, and she had early exposure if she's accumulating
Speaker 1: stickers and locks on that book, do you inherit those
Speaker 1: stickers in locks? Okay, so that's what I'm asking Cavino.
Speaker 2: Air pollution.
Speaker 1: Now, we know some of these things conditionally around other
Speaker 1: types of exposure. We know some of this stuff maybe
Speaker 1: even with like chemical exposure, but I guess air pollution
Speaker 1: is in some ways chemical exposure. Everything's chemicals.
Speaker 4: Air pollution is absolutely a chemical exposure.
Speaker 2: So is it clear that it is inherited?
Speaker 4: I think there is.
Speaker 3: Absolutely there is generational inheritance of DNA methylation patterns of there.
Speaker 3: Now the mechanisms by which that happens are still unknown,
Speaker 3: but absolutely we have seen in the literature that the
Speaker 3: methylation of the parent impacts the potential health and methylation
Speaker 3: status of the child. There's a famous sort of a
Speaker 3: Goody mouse model that's sort of shown that where you
Speaker 3: can have different foods that are rich in methylation, and
Speaker 3: so if you eat these, you'll have just higher levels
Speaker 3: of DNA methylations.
Speaker 4: There's more methylation in your body.
Speaker 3: For you to have access to, and based on the
Speaker 3: foods that the mother eat, the children turn out completely
Speaker 3: differently genetically identical mice, but completely driven by their Methalaysia
Speaker 3: status within there and so as a referred to the
Speaker 3: Dutch famine studyes, which you studied die in the nineteen
Speaker 3: forty nineteen forty five sort of, or that's when the
Speaker 3: people that were part of the study were alive just
Speaker 3: of the World War two, and you have the severe
Speaker 3: famine that happens, and they're what's interesting is that you
Speaker 3: you have the severe famine, you have the offspring of there,
Speaker 3: and then you have their grandchildren, and their grandchildren tended
Speaker 3: to have very different health effects as compared to the parents,
Speaker 3: and it was thought to be this type of epigenetic
Speaker 3: inheritance that the grandparents epigenomes were impacted by this famine
Speaker 3: in such a way that you saw increased risks of
Speaker 3: chronic diseases in the next generation and then especially in
Speaker 3: the grandchildren that were born too. Yeah, so the grandchildren, actually,
Speaker 3: you know, some later studies had even stronger effects than
Speaker 3: you know, the parents had in some cases. So you know,
Speaker 3: it's one of those things where we're still trying to
Speaker 3: work out exactly how that information gets transmitted across generations.
Speaker 3: Is it just in the egg and the sperm, is
Speaker 3: it something else? So you understand that methylation gets overwritten
Speaker 3: during the developmental process, but there's clearly some signatures that
Speaker 3: remain within there. And for me, what I more think about,
Speaker 3: even more than sort of the transgenerational inheritance of epigenetics,
Speaker 3: is just the early life exposures that happen, because your
Speaker 3: early life is the same from a exposure standpoint, It's
Speaker 3: just the same life that your parents are living. So
Speaker 3: you don't even really have to look for the transgenerationalness
Speaker 3: of it. Just look at what life your parents are living.
Speaker 3: What are they exposed to when they're in their you know,
Speaker 3: twenties and thirties and they're raising the young child, and
Speaker 3: you think about, you know, the young child being much
Speaker 3: more vulnerable just doing to be much smaller. The grams
Speaker 3: per kilogram of exposure is a lot less when you
Speaker 3: are a few kilograms, you know, heavy versus when you're
Speaker 3: an adult. Apologize, I don't know what children's sizes.
Speaker 2: Are, and that's appropriate not involved.
Speaker 3: So yeah, so you know, those early life exposures really matter.
Speaker 3: And there's this entire field, you know, the developmental origins
Speaker 3: of health.
Speaker 4: And disease do had and sort of the acronym they use.
Speaker 3: For it where they're seeing now that going from the
Speaker 3: end utero framework all the way through early life, you
Speaker 3: can see how exposures experience during they are predisposed individual
Speaker 3: to developing chronic diseases later on in life, including obesity
Speaker 3: and adolescence, metabolic disease and early adulthood, and even cardiovascua
Speaker 3: diseases later on in life.
Speaker 1: Then wow, this is just making me think about our
Speaker 1: current state, where we're looking at people losing access to benefits,
Speaker 1: we're looking at a terrible health care system, we're looking
Speaker 1: at maternal care deserts during the most like important developmental time.
Speaker 1: Like I think we've talked about some of this on
Speaker 1: our show before in different labs, but it's just when
Speaker 1: we started stacking those facts up, it's sickning, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a accumulation.
Speaker 3: And that's what we're starting to appreciate now is the
Speaker 3: cumulative nature of the exposures and how they stack up
Speaker 3: over time, and how they begin so early on in life,
Speaker 3: and why it's important to target those things early on
Speaker 3: in life so that you're giving everybody an equal chance
Speaker 3: to live a full, happy, healthy life. And that's really
Speaker 3: the greatest disparity that we're trying to address. Where we
Speaker 3: talk about addressing environmental health disparities, is that simply because
Speaker 3: of where you live, because of your zip code, the
Speaker 3: zip code you were born into, the zip code your
Speaker 3: parents are born into, the exposures they received, some people
Speaker 3: have a better chance of having a long healthy life
Speaker 3: than other people do from an early age. And that's
Speaker 3: a fundamental societal disparity that I think if you want
Speaker 3: to call yourself a good society, you have to be
Speaker 3: at least willing to address and address with the full
Speaker 3: weight of everything in your society.
Speaker 4: And it is a full societal problem.
Speaker 3: We've talked about transportation in here, We've talked about national
Speaker 3: policies and the vision policies for it.
Speaker 4: It takes all of.
Speaker 3: That working together to really address these big problems and
Speaker 3: to continually improve our environment because these changes are not
Speaker 3: always guaranteed to be better. Like it is certainly possible
Speaker 3: to regress in our environmental conditions.
Speaker 4: And you know, we've seen.
Speaker 3: Some of that in some particular communities that have been
Speaker 3: impacted by industry moving in, be it data centers, other things.
Speaker 3: You know, we've seen it in the past forty years
Speaker 3: or so with the p FoST story and that industrial
Speaker 3: chemical you know that was never present before now being produced,
Speaker 3: getting into our waterways, and now being a significant health
Speaker 3: concern for billions of people. There's almost nobody on this
Speaker 3: planet that has not been exposed to these forever chemicals
Speaker 3: in one way or another. And we've got to figure out, okay,
Speaker 3: well what do we do with a society about this?
Speaker 4: How do we address this? And it's no.
Speaker 3: One, you know, places you can go to say, Okay,
Speaker 3: this is going to be you know, the silver bullet,
Speaker 3: this is going to be the magic bill that fixes everything.
Speaker 3: It takes a whole of government, whole society approach to
Speaker 3: address these, but it's what's needed.
Speaker 1: If you did have a magic wand and you could
Speaker 1: make everything perfect, to change one thing that you feel
Speaker 1: like would have a massive impact on how we approach
Speaker 1: air pollution and how it affects us as a population.
Speaker 2: What would you prioritize.
Speaker 4: Oh, that's a great question.
Speaker 3: A magic wand to fix how we approach air pollution
Speaker 3: and what the priority should be. It's difficult because there
Speaker 3: are so many different sources of air pollution, and some
Speaker 3: of them are natural. But what I would do is
Speaker 3: I would mandate that as part of the healthcare system,
Speaker 3: and environmental assessment be done, be available to everybody, maybe
Speaker 3: even mandated for early in life. And we do this
Speaker 3: a little bit with light testing in there. You know,
Speaker 3: if you come in and there's you know, early signs
Speaker 3: of high lead exposure, they can do, you know, in
Speaker 3: home assessment, look at the dust around the home, is
Speaker 3: there a lead paint somewhere, because we understand how critical
Speaker 3: that is for early childhood mental development, not being exposed
Speaker 3: the high concentrations of lead. But you know, what we
Speaker 3: don't do is to provide that same service throughout the
Speaker 3: entire lifespan. Lead's a problem for exposures even if you're
Speaker 3: an adult, or less so than if you're a child,
Speaker 3: but still there. So I think if we had a
Speaker 3: system nationwide that provided free environmental assessments, anybody could do
Speaker 3: them broad scaled. You can keep the information private, share
Speaker 3: it with your doctors so that they can understand, Okay,
Speaker 3: here's what you're being exposed to. And do this longitudinally
Speaker 3: because the environment changes every year. You can get an
Speaker 3: updated assessment. I look at the water quality, the air quality,
Speaker 3: the soil quality, paints.
Speaker 4: And dusts and other things.
Speaker 3: I think if we had that information and then aggregated
Speaker 3: it so you can understand at the community level what
Speaker 3: communities are being exposed to, where are we seeing different
Speaker 3: problems scrap up that will completely change the landscape, and
Speaker 3: what enable us to do some really innovative environmental studies
Speaker 3: I could really start to address fundamental causes of disease.
Speaker 2: Amazing.
Speaker 1: Is there anything we didn't ask you that you feel
Speaker 1: like it's important that you want to say?
Speaker 3: I would just say that you know, it's really a
Speaker 3: transformative time for environmental health. I think the tools and
Speaker 3: technologies you know that we're using are really going to
Speaker 3: push you on the look forward. Environment health up until
Speaker 3: now has been a cleaning problem. How do we clean
Speaker 3: the air, how do we clean the water? How do
Speaker 3: we clean the soil? And that absolutely is a bedrock
Speaker 3: foundation of the environmental health because the best way to
Speaker 3: prevent environmental exposures or it's just not to have the
Speaker 3: average environment. But that's an impossible task everywhere. And so
Speaker 3: the ability to personalize and there's absolutely going to be
Speaker 3: a role for AI in this for it, and there's
Speaker 3: some new insights that we're able to gain from there
Speaker 3: and some new tools that we're able to make available
Speaker 3: to the individual where if you don't have access, you
Speaker 3: can't get to a doctor, and you've got this complex
Speaker 3: environmental assessment sitting in front of you.
Speaker 4: Okay, well what can you do and the.
Speaker 3: Ability to you know, have a AI based tool that's
Speaker 3: fed in validated scientific the grounded information to say, oh,
Speaker 3: we noticed that this is high.
Speaker 4: This is higher than you know, the national average.
Speaker 3: This is connected to that high cholesterol reading that you
Speaker 3: got from your doctor in there.
Speaker 4: Here's what some of the recommendations are.
Speaker 3: Those types of tools are really being developed, and I
Speaker 3: think people should be aware of them. I think people
Speaker 3: should be talking with their doctors and their healthcare providers
Speaker 3: about getting these things, maybe seeing if an air pusha
Speaker 3: monitor might be FSA eligible.
Speaker 4: Some of these things you know might be, and if they're.
Speaker 3: Not, push for them to be, because there absolutely are
Speaker 3: a part of your health.
Speaker 1: I think this has revealed so many things to me.
Speaker 1: Tt same one. It's the inequalities across the board where
Speaker 1: it's just like people who live in certain zip codes
Speaker 1: are exposed to different things but don't have access to
Speaker 1: interventions to help improve their environment, and so that dictates
Speaker 1: your quality of life. And what we should want as
Speaker 1: global citizens is for everyone to have equal opportunity to
Speaker 1: a high quality life. Yeah, and so what Cavin has
Speaker 1: told us throughout this lab is that it's way more
Speaker 1: complex than we're thinking about. Even inside of our house
Speaker 1: when we're cooking, being aware and just knowing that there
Speaker 1: are things floating around you is more than half the battle.
Speaker 1: Once you are aware, you can do something about it.
Speaker 1: But we I mean, we've seen how information is buried
Speaker 1: or made difficult to obtain, and so I'm really excited
Speaker 1: about some of the technology, but hoping that the technology
Speaker 1: doesn't follow the systems we've always seen, which is once
Speaker 1: again another disparity and who has access to it, And
Speaker 1: so we'll have to keep our eye on this, like
Speaker 1: so many other things. Turn your eyeballs outward and everywhere. Okay,
Speaker 1: flip your eyelids back.
Speaker 2: Okay did you do that as a kid? Flip your eyelids?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 2: It wasn't right. I was bad.
Speaker 1: Ew I could never do it. I was always so scared.
Speaker 1: I was like, what if they get done?
Speaker 2: Oh no? But yeah, knowing these things is empowerment.
Speaker 1: So you can say, I know that I live in
Speaker 1: a high pollution area, or area with bad air quality,
Speaker 1: and you can take that information to your doctor and say,
Speaker 1: how is this affecting my health and what steps do
Speaker 1: I need to take to improve my overall health? So
Speaker 1: so key, so thank you Kathan for dropping that knowledge
Speaker 1: on us today. Stay tuned, next episode, next week, same time,
Speaker 1: same place. You can find us on X and Instagram
Speaker 1: at Dope Labs podcast.
Speaker 2: Tt is on X and Instagram at dr Underscore t Sho,
Speaker 2: and you can find Zakiya at Z said So. Dope
Speaker 2: Labs is a production of Lemonada Media.
Speaker 1: Our supervising producer is Keegan Zimma and our producer is
Speaker 1: Issara A SEVENZ. Dope Labs is sound designed, edited and
Speaker 1: mixed by James Farber. Leimonada Media's vice President of Partnerships
Speaker 1: and Production is Jackie Danziger. Executive producer from iHeart podcast
Speaker 1: is Katrina Norvil.
Speaker 2: Marketing lead is Alison Canter.
Speaker 1: Original music composed and produced by Takayasuzawa and Alex sugi Ura,
Speaker 1: with additional music by Elijah Harvey. Dope Labs is executive
Speaker 1: produced by us T T Show Dia and Zakiah Wattley.