E22: 7 Domains of Clean Air

Check, check. Now I have to cough and clear my throat. Well, welcome to the "7 Domains of Air Pollution" in and out. These are really tough days of breathing around the planet, especially in the northern hemisphere summer. There are big fires in California and Oregon and Canada, and spread smoke across the country everywhere. If you're attached to the NOAA Smoke Map, it's pretty frightening. And there are huge fires in Siberia spreading smoke across the world.

So bright summer sun and heat increase the production of ground level ozone in many places in the country. We are breathing really toxic air.

Now, anthropologists would say that humans evolved with fire, and using fire to cook vegetables and meat increased the calories in our food and improved the taste in our food. Or maybe we evolved to like the taste of cooked food because it was easier to digest.

Anyway, we sat around the fire to stay warm, we evolved speech as humans, we became the highly verbal and social creatures that we are. Many people say because of fire, but enough is enough already. Life was short and brutal for us as early smoky cave dwellers and we can do better and live longer and more healthy lives for ourselves and our children.

Now, let's lead into the physical domain. Air pollution has many components, but often we're most likely to see studies on the health effects of air pollution with respect to tiny particle portions of air pollution called PM2.5 and ozone.

The tiny particles are especially bad if they're incompletely burned fossil fuels and wood smoke, and they can cause other dangerous molecules to get stuck on them. So these particles actually end up being delivery devices of toxins and carcinogens throughout our body.

They're too small to be swept up and out of our lungs by the lungs' protective sweeping mechanism, and they can cross right into our bloodstream. They deposit themselves throughout the body in blood vessels, and lungs, and kidney, and brain, and the placenta of the growing fetus in the uterus. Then they cause inflammation, and that kills local cells, which can lead to decreased function of these organs, heart, lungs, brain, kidney. And it can increase the risk of cancer.

So ground level ozone is a toxic gas. It's a powerful oxidizing agent in the body, which leads to inflammation throughout the body. Again, inflammation is a primary cause of disease and early aging and cancer.

The good news is we do have some defense mechanisms that we evolved to deal with inflammation, and a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, diet that we evolved on, and omega-3 fatty acids in nuts and seeds and fish and maybe coffee and tea and chocolate, these can help us work as antioxidants to fight ozone and inflammation.

But the best thing is to try to clean up our air on the outside of our homes and the inside.

So we're going to dive into the inside in the social domain. And around the world, the number one cause of indoor air pollution is cooking over a stove. This could include wood smoke or other solid fuel, dung, coal, other stuff people burn. It's the number one cause of lung cancer in women worldwide.

And women also carry a larger burden of the consequences of home air pollution, because they're more likely to be doing the cooking. Not in all homes, of course. They're more likely to be doing the vacuuming. Not in all homes, of course. But that stirs up pollution in carpets and floors.

So to help us think about air pollution inside and out, we're joined in our virtual studio by Jonny Vasic. Jonny is the Executive Director of Utah Physicians for Healthy Environment and is a crusader for clean air in our community.

Dr. Jones: Welcome to the "7 Domains," Jonny. We're grateful to have you with us.

Jonny: Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be with you.

Dr. Jones: So as Jonny says, he's not a physician, but he's played one on movies. Yes?

Jonny: Yeah, as an extra. So when they need someone to jump in there, I'm happy to don the doctor's coat and stethoscope around the neck. Dr. Jones: Right. But Jonny lives deeply in the clean air issue inside and out. Jonny, can you talk a little bit about how toxic a wood smoke is?

Jonny: Yes, I'd be happy to. I mean, I grew up in Salt Lake City and I thought the air was pretty bad growing up. I moved away for a while, and when I came back about five or six years ago, I was shocked at how not only bad was the air, but how many people are still burning wood, whether it's in their house in the fireplace or a wood stove.

Wood smoke may smell good, but it's not good for you. It's something we say often. And the very small size of wood smoke particles, like you were just describing, Kirtly, the PM2.5, that makes them seven times more likely to be inhaled into our body than other types of particles. And in fact, there are over 200 dangerous chemicals and heavy metals in wood smoke, things like dioxins and benzene and mercury just to name a few. As we know, these chemicals are very unhealthy for you.

So some of the health impacts from wood smoke and inhaling wood smoke . . . for the heart, for example, it can increase your risk of a heart attack or irregular heartbeat. Heart failure or stroke and early death are all linked to increased wood smoke being inhaled.

And in the lungs, wood smoke can trigger asthma attacks. Damage to children's lungs is possible. It can lead to emphysema and chronic bronchitis. So all of these things that are pretty heavy to deal with.

On the lighter end, it can just be burning eyes and runny nose and things like that, which I've been experiencing lately because we've had a lot of wood smoke from fires in the west in our air in the last week or so.

Dr. Jones: Right. Well, I'm impressed that here in Utah, where we're very much anti-cigarette smoke, people still tolerate wood smoke. And they go to restaurants where they are very proudly talking about their wood-fired pizza oven. It can smoke up the entire restaurant, I think. Why do you have something against cigarette smoke, but I have to breathe all this stuff from your wood-fired pizza oven?

Jonny: Yeah, it's pretty surprising how many . . . it's kind of the new trend, isn't it? But I think if people knew the dangers of wood smoke, they'd be less likely to want to sit next to that wood-fire pizza oven in a restaurant.

Dr. Jones: Right. Well, we talked about how humans evolved with fire in front of them. And we like the colors of a fireplace. As a woman of a certain age, the color that comes from a fireplace makes my face look beautiful. You can't see my wrinkles, so we like fire. But what are the alternatives? People say, "I really need my fireplace because it keeps my house warm," or, "We like to get around the fireplace with my family." So what else can we do? What else can we offer?

Jonny: Yeah, a wood fire is mesmerizing, isn't it? You can kind of just stare at the glow and be carried away. And one of the challenges with the job I have at Utah Physicians for Healthy Environment is if I want to have a fire, which I grew up doing, camping or at my grandpa's fireplace, I have to feel really guilty about it now.

What I've learned is . . . I had a wood fireplace in the condo I lived in, in Sandy. Actually, it was kind of a pain. It was expensive. It was a pain to start it. And so just as a practicality purpose, there was already a natural gas line, so I exchanged that for a natural gas fireplace that resembles the wood burning. You don't hear the crackle and pop, but it still has a nice ambience. And it is much cleaner. So the EPA is saying one wood-burning device, like a wood-burning stove, if you replace that with a natural gas fireplace, it's 3,000 times less polluting.

Dr. Jones: Wow.

Jonny: That's a pretty amazing statistic. And there's also even better . . . because natural guests still puts off some things that we don't like, but even better is you could get an electric fireplace. It's amazing how they look now and they can be really beautiful. They can produce as much heat, or more heat. They're very controlled. My fireplace has a remote control I use to operate it now. So whether it's a natural gas, or propane, or even better is an electric fireplace or stove.

Dr. Jones: But you know what's even cooler? So you can go to your smart TV and go to YouTube and get a fireplace that'll just be continuous, beautiful, big fireplace on your TV. Except for the power that it uses, it's smoke free.

Jonny: Yes. And it's still beautiful and you get the crackle and pop from the audio.

Dr. Jones: Oh, yes. I love it.

I think when we talk about the social domain, you have a responsibility to your family to have clean indoor air, but what does a wood-fire do to the neighborhood's air quality? So when you pull it yourself, that's your choice and your kids don't have a choice, but your neighbors may not feel the same.

And in some communities, I can . . . my husband of course goes out and he knows exactly who is burning wood on the days that you actually can burn wood, because you can smell it. And if I can smell it, I know those particles are going into my lungs, and my heart, and my brain. So I think that actually being able to show that you are a good citizen to your community is a big deal.

Jonny: Absolutely. Smoke is smoke, right? And whether it's tobacco or wood smoke, we wouldn't want someone just to blow cigarette smoke in your face. And so with wood smoke, most of the intakes from a fireplace are from the outside and then it's pushing smoke outside. So you don't get the benefits of a green air day if your neighbor is burning wood smoke. It can be a hazard. And that's one reason we're monitoring outside.

Interestingly enough, even inside for your own sake, one of our participants in the program, his fireplace was operating totally normal, and when he would stoke the fireplace, the monitor would spike to four times the actual allowed EPA level of what's healthy.

Dr. Jones: Oh, he's over the hundreds. He's into the hundreds for PM2.5.

Jonny: Yes, way over.

Dr. Jones: Oh my God.

Jonny: Way over. And so then when we exchanged his fireplace, he went with a natural gas insert, it went and dropped below the detectable level. So he thought he had a totally normal operating . . . chimney sweep comes every year. Everything is good. But he was slowly poisoning himself with smoke. And not only that, but his neighbors were constantly complaining about the smoke coming from his chimney. And now his neighbors are like his best buds, because they're all so happy he exchanged that fireplace.

Dr. Jones: Okay. So let's get onto some really important things called barbecue. Now, I don't barbecue and my husband wouldn't even think about barbecuing, but I like barbecue food. And my brother is a great . . . the "grilla from Manila," I call him that. He's a great griller. We've put some PM2.5 meters or put the barbecue right next to our outdoor PurpleAir monitor, and it's pretty ugly.

Jonny: Yeah. My friend, Bob, loves his mesquite barbecue with these pellets. And he constantly tries to talk me into accepting that, because he knows I work in the clean air environmental world. He's like, "It should be okay just a few times a year." I'm like, "Bob, you're hurting yourself more than you need to."

Everyone loves a barbecue, but again you can go to propane or natural gases. Even though it's still going to put off some pollutants, it's much, much cleaner than an actual wood or pellet or mesquite barbecue is.

Dr. Jones: I'm not good enough to really cook anything on the barbecue without burning it. We have a gas barbecue, but I put the chicken on and it's at like 8,000 degrees and everything starts smoking up. And then my husband comes and gives me a dirty look and I'd say, "Well, this is the only time I'm barbecuing for this year."

How do you find out about your air quality? So of course, those of us who've been deep into the air quality issues for years know all the different sites, but you can certainly go to airnow.gov. That is the national air quality monitors throughout the country drilled down to your area, and they'll give you some probably pretty basic information about a large area. It won't drill down to your neighborhood. So you certainly can do airnow.gov. In Utah, you can do the Utah Air Quality Board's website, or if you're not in Utah, your own state air quality board has probably a website.

Jonny: I also like to look at the PurpleAir map. I mean, there are hundreds . . .

Dr. Jones: Me too. Thousands.

Jonny: There are hundreds of monitors, and thousands. Just in Salt Lake Valley area, the Wasatch Front, there are probably a thousand plus. So it's really interesting. And we know it's not the same all the way across the Valley. It can be very localized and certain areas can be much more polluted than others at a given time. So it's fun to look at all three and kind of compare and see what's up.

Dr. Jones: So you can go to purpleair.com. I guess Purple Haze was already spoken for, so we had to go with purple . . . Purpleair.com and it will give you a map of the world and, of course, with thousands of monitors. And these aren't a perfect, high-end, fancy pants monitors, but there's the one we have on our home. And you probably have one at your home, Jonny. Do you?

Jonny: Yes. Absolutely.

Dr. Jones: And it's very likely if you live in Denver, or if you live in California, or if you live in Salt Lake City that there's a PurpleAir monitor that's really close to you. So if it's not in your home, you probably can look in your neighborhood and you can see what the air quality is.

Some people like me have an indoor air quality monitor, which will give a number that's in a circle. And so you know that the numbers in the circle are indoor.

Now, here's my own little story. So I try not to cook that much outside of the microwave, and I really like my slow cooker, but I was trying to make some fried falafel in olive oil, because I thought, "Oh, this would be great. It's vegetarian, and they're yummy, and the olive oil is good for you." The whole house was polluted.

I didn't know this until I went to my desk, which is right where my indoor air quality monitor is, and it was glowing deep red. I had polluted the house. With PM2.5, over 30 is unhealthy, really. And I was in like 150. I had just polluted our house, and I got the dirty look from my husband.

I think as you're starting about thinking about knowing about your own air quality, you should know the smoke point for your cooking oils. So butter is good just to melt it on a really low temperature, but if you're frying with butter, it's going to get smoky. And the same thing is true for unrefined walnut oil or sesame oil. Those are just supposed to be . . . drizzle it after you cook. Drizzle it around.

And even extra virgin olive oil, cold-pressed oil, the smoke point is about 300 to 350 degrees. So if you're going to fry with it, you're going to have to fry on really, really low heat. It's good for baking, because almost all of our baking is done at 350. We're not talking about pizza now. We're talking about baking a casserole. So you can use extra virgin olive oil for that. But if you're going to fry, you need to use refined peanut oil, or you can use refined coconut oil. And of course, refined avocado oil is the champion with a smoke point of 520 degrees.

So if you're going to be doing any searing or frying, you should not pollute your whole house with some pretty dangerous, volatile organic compounds. Be smart about your cooking, because the person who's getting most polluted is you and then, of course, your family.

So I think you should also know in the intellectual domain about your filters. You probably have a filter in your furnace. Jonny, do you have a furnace, or how do you heat your house?

Jonny: Yeah, we have a central air, the furnace and AC. Although the units are separate, it's a combined duct system.

Dr. Jones: So do you have a filter in that or do you just run it?

Jonny: Yeah, we have a filter that I change frequently. And then we also supplement in the bedroom and the front room with a standalone HEPA filter.

Dr. Jones: So when you buy a filter for your furnace, often we'll say it's a MERV, and MERV stands for Minimum Efficiency Reporting Value. It's recommended you try to get a MERV 13 filter. So these aren't HEPA filters necessarily that go in your furnace, but they're still high efficiency filters. A MERV 13 will take out a lot of the PM2.5.

Now, if you really want to take out things like viruses and tiny little things, that's where you get a HEPA filter. But most furnaces are not really geared for using a HEPA filter. Some might be, but you can get very efficient furnace filters.

You should know what furnace filter you've got. You should replace it. If you don't know when the last time you replaced it, now would be a good time. They're not always cheap, but take your pencil and write down when you changed it so that you can tell. I thought we changed ours in 2020, but we just replaced ours and it was changed in 2019 and it wasn't looking so good.

So you should pay a little attention to when you changed it and put yourself a note so you change it pretty frequently. And you should try to get a filter that's MERV 13 or higher.

If you're like us and having some air quality issues, you may want an air purifier with a HEPA filter. HEPA stands for high-efficiency particulate air filter, and it will trap 99.97% of the particles that are 0.3 to 1 micron.

And also sometimes HEPA filters have been proven to decrease small particles like viruses. So in classrooms, if you're thinking about trying to send your kid to a classroom, it would be really important to know that your classroom has clean air from the HVAC system at the school, and maybe even putting a filter that would filter viruses too.

Jonny: Yeah, I think that's an important point. UPHE has been looking at some studies about that. And there are several studies out now that show that HEPA filters in the school not only can decrease transmission rate of viruses and can help with the COVID virus, but can also amazingly increase test scores. That was pretty interesting.

We've worked with Rep Doug Owens this last year to introduce legislation. Now, it didn't get as far as we had hoped, but it was a good starting point, where we would like to see all the classrooms in Utah have HEPA filters. And I think that would be good for the kids. It would be good for the teachers. It can also save money in an interesting way too, because you have less sick days. You have less kids out. You have less teachers out. They can be healthier, they can study better, and they can increase their test scores that way.

Dr. Jones: Right. Well, thinking about ozone, air purifiers or your air filter that you use may not filter ozone, because ozone is a gas. However, many of our filters, including my home furnace filter and my air purifier filter, have activated charcoal. Activated charcoal isn't perfect, but it traps volatile organic compounds like smells and smoke, and it also can trap some ozone.

And there are some suggestions from some research that you can actually trap as much as 70% of the ozone in your charcoal filter, but that has to be replaced as well.

This all costs a little bit of money, so financially, in the financial domain, you can make yourself a really cheap home air purifier by just getting a 20-inch window fan. You can get those for like $20. And you can either duct tape or just turn on the fan and it will suck a 20-inch air filter. You can get a MERV 13 20-inch air filter for like $10. So for less than $50, you can make your own home air purifier by sucking air through this fan and then blowing out cleaner air. So you can do it for cheap.

Jonny: I just made one of those for the office. And so when I get to the office, I turn it on full blast and let it run while I'm doing my office chores. And then once it's been running for a little while, I'm filling the bird feeder and different things, watering the plants, checking the mail, then I turn it down a little bit and let it run. It's been a great way to have a decent filter without spending hundreds of dollars.

Dr. Jones: And we've shown in our own home that using these 20-inch window fans within about 20 to 30 minutes can bring our whole inside air quality into normal, into a PM2.5 of 8 or 4, which is really, really good when the outside is 40 or 50.

Jonny: Yeah, and it's pretty surprising how . . . In this last week in Salt Lake, the air quality has been pretty terrible.

Dr. Jones: Worst in the world.

Jonny: Yeah, worst in the world. And it's pretty amazing you can see the filter just get so dirty within a week. It's like, "Oh, I'm going to have to change that again pretty soon." But it's pretty interesting all of that I would be breathing into my lungs. So I was like, "Oh, thank you, this artificial lung on the back of this box fan that's saving me."

Dr. Jones: It's cheap. And you can replace the filters for cheap. Home Depot has these filters, or you can get them however you want to get them. But they're 20-inch box filter and a 20-inch window fan. They were made for each other and they were made for your lungs.

I want to talk about one other source of home inside air pollution, and that's radon. And I am a radon daughter. That's an inside joke, in that radon is a byproduct . . . it's a gas. It's a byproduct of uranium degradation. And my father was a uranium miner and he worked underground before they ventilated the uranium mines. He died of lung cancer very young. It was estimated that about 15 years after working underground in uranium mines in the '50s, there was a spike in lung cancer deaths among geologists and miners.

So I'm kind of hyped about radon and my husband, who is my clean air guy, got a radon meter. We know in the West all of us are sitting on rocks that have uranium in it, just a tiny bit.

So radon is one of the top risks for lung cancer in women who don't smoke in this country. And you should know what your radon is in your home

It's going to be worse in your basement or any place that's close to the ground. If you have a well, then you're piping up water that may have radon gas in it. You can get a high quality radon test kit from your local health department for about $10. And treatment is usually inexpensive. So it can be as easy as just installing a little fan in your crawl space.

Jonny: That's just it. I mean, it's colorless, it's odorless, it's tasteless, so the only way you really know is to have a test and have a kit. When we moved into our condo, we did a radon test. But since then, as I've learned a bit more about it, I've bought one of the monitors so I can know if it, for some reason, builds back up. So it's a pretty simple and inexpensive way to make sure you're not getting overexposed to radon.

Dr. Jones: Right. And think about you. You spend a lot of time in your home. It's trapping the gas. Once again, it's off-gas from rocks. We live in a part of the country that has a lot of radon in places where we build our homes.

Well, at this point, I'm going to thank Jonny for joining us and giving us your expertise, and thank you for doing the good work that you're doing to help us all think about cleaner air.

Jonny: Well, thank you so much for having me, Kirtly. It's been a pleasure.

As women, we want to look nice, and in fact, guys like to look nice and they like to smell nice, and I like to smell nice. But if you can smell what you're putting on your hair or your skin, it's adding volatile organic compounds to your environment in your home. And in fact, it's adding to the pollution in your community.

According to NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, these compounds that we spray on our hair or put on our skin, including perfumes, are a primary source of ground level ozone, that's smog, which can trigger a lot of health problems in children, including asthma, and people who are older in terms of heart disease. It turns out that elevated ground level ozone has been associated with stillbirth and preterm birth.

In New York City, studies that were conducted in 2018 found that these fragrant personal care products we're responsible for about half of the volatile organic compounds, and we call them VOCs in the business, that were generated by humans and not vehicle exhaust.

And a recently published study shows that emissions from these volatile consumer products were found in big cities throughout the world and contribute up to half or more of the total human-caused emissions.

So when you're thinking about spraying your perfume, or you're spraying that stuff on your hair, or you're putting that really smelly stuff on you and your kids, if you can smell it, you can smell it because it's a volatile organic compound.

Volatile organic compounds are fundamental. They leak out of your home and into the environment outside. They get exposed to sunshine and heat, and that helps make ozone.

So think about how much you need to spray on yourself. Think about how much you need to put on your body. Does it need to be smelly? Make decisions carefully because everything you do has some consequences, and that's a big deal.

I know this whole "7 Domains" has been a little discouraging. I think about the spiritual domain, and it's not just me and my family and my kid and his wife and my future grandchild. It isn't just myself that I need to worry about. It's the creatures that we share the air shed of our planet with. It's about the future generations.

And feeling that you're part of the problem, which all of us are, and feeling helpless can take you away from your spiritual home and your spiritual health. But in fact, just knowing that I can cook with a different oil that doesn't smoke up the house, I can make some decisions about how I'm going to do my cooking, I can microwave or use a slow cooker, knowing that I can actually watch my air quality improve by using a fan or a filter, knowing that I'm not polluting my neighborhood with smoke, these few steps help me and my family and my community and engage me in something larger than myself. And every time I see a blue sky day, it makes me smile.

Okay. As we do with all of our "7 Domains," here is the "7 Domains" haiku on air pollution indoor and out.

Breathe in and breathe out
Clean air, clean heart, and clean mind
Plan for blue sky days

Thank you for joining us. You can find this podcast and other podcasts from The Scope and all of the "7 Domains" podcasts wherever you get their podcasts, or at womens7.com. Have a clean air day. Thank you all. Bye.