HealthGoods Blog

Air quality is a big issue these days.  Outdoor air isn’t as pristine as it was when our forebears were alive, and neither is indoor air.  Due to the fact that we cannot control the chemicals outside, I’ll focus mainly on what we can do something about, and that’s indoor air.

Outside air

That being said, I do want to mention a few things you can do for yourself outdoors.  If you are a walker, jogger, runner, or biker, the air you breathe as you exercise can be considerably improved if you avoid major roads, as the fumes you are breathing in are counterproductive to health.  Ideally, go exercise in a park, forest, or somewhere off the beaten path where the air is cleaner!

Around the home, consider using an electric mower and weed eater, and axing the lighter fluid for the grill.  Use a charcoal chimney instead, which are easy to find at a hardware store and light easily using newspaper and a match.  Your food will taste better, too, as it won’t be laced with lighter fluid.

If you are really bothered by allergies or fumes when outside, you can try a personal air purifier around your neck, and you might invest in a car air filter.  On high pollen and ozone days, you might just want to stay inside.

Air inside our homes

If you’ve spent time reading about environmental issues, you know that many studies have indicated that the air quality inside our homes is vastly inferior even to the air outside.  How can that be?

A bit of history

From a historical perspective, most homes used to be efficient “breathing machines.”  Air would leak through the windows, under doors, and through the walls.  There was a continuous flow of air throughout the entire building structure.  Houses were also built out of natural building materials.  Indoor air quality was pretty good then, even if you had to bundle up during the cold winter months.

What happened?

After World War II, there was a big demand for new, relatively cheap housing.  To meet this need, many corporations devised new, less expensive building materials incorporating various chemicals, such as formaldehyde, into their products.  With this came an increased demand for tighter building envelopes in order to conserve energy and lower heating/cooling bills.  This led to the development of double and triple paned glass, storm windows and doors, and gaskets around doors.  Exterior walls also started to be insulated.

That’s good, right?

Yes and no.  Having a tight house has saved on energy costs, but indoor air quality has suffered as a result.  There is simply no escape route for all the chemicals that accumulate in our homes, and as a result we are constantly breathing in chemicals that we would be better off not breathing.

I live in that?  What can I do about it?

I can’t tell you everything about indoor air quality today, but I’ll go into it in greater detail over many blog posts.   I’ll also take a room-by-room tour in future blogs to help you clean up your home as best as possible.   However, there are two important things you can do right now to ease the situation.

1.  Open your windows for at least 10-20 minutes a day.  Not just one window, but many – preferably in enough rooms to allow for full-house air circulation.  If you have fans to blow around the air, that will help remove stagnant air and bring in fresh air.

2.  Buy yourself a top-notch air filtration system.  A whole house unit does the best job, but it’s pricey.  An alternative is to purchase a portable unit.  The smaller units can greatly alleviate the air quality concerns in your home, and can be moved if necessary.  The best places to put them are in the areas you frequent the most; the family room and the bedrooms.  Health Goods carries high quality Hepa filter models to choose from.

That’s it for today.  See you on the next blog!

What is Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS)?

Throughout this blog spot I will be mentioning MCS a lot, so a brief explanation is merited.  Multiple Chemical Sensitivity is generally thought to be an environmentally-driven illness caused by chemicals (in carpets, perfume, pesticides, clothes, auto exhaust, etc.), mold spores (MCS is often referred to as “sick building syndrome”) or other types of exposures, and may include foods.  It can happen as a result of a large exposure such as a toxic spill, from an unrelated occurrence (like after being treated for a parasitic infection or after a bad mold exposure), or from exposures that happened over time.  For some reason women are more likely to become chemically sensitive, but men are also affected.  For example, both men and women service personnel who have served in war environments, and the first responders to the 9/11 crisis in New York City, have suffered from MCS, cancer, and other environmentally-related diseases.

What’s it like to be chemically sensitive?

This is a hard question to answer, as people can respond in different ways, depending on their chemical and genetic makeup. For one person it means that walking down the soap aisle in a grocery store, or entering the chemical section of a hardware store, or walking through the perfume aisle in a department store may result in an asthma attack, a foggy brain that can’t think straight, a deterioration of motor function, or a combination of any of the above.  Another person might have a sneezing fit, and yet another may experience convulsions.  Someone else may break out in a rash.  One thing is certain:  It’s not a lot of fun, and it’s often difficult to pinpoint the cause of the problem.  MCS is not easy to treat, either, which complicates the situation.  In addition, the symptoms of MCS may be similar to symptoms of other medical conditions, so ruling out other causes is often necessary.

Why are some people chemically sensitive and others aren’t?

Most of us have some sort of chemical sensitivity but just don’t call it that.  You might be allergic to hay or trees – but not think of it as being a “sensitivity.”  Or you may get drowsy and tend to fall asleep in church – this may be due to some bad preaching, but it could also be your body’s reaction to the perfume your spouse or someone else at church put on that morning. Wool might make you itch.  You can’t use a particular soap because it causes a rash.  You catch my drift.

Considering the number of chemicals and pollutants that we are exposed to every day, it’s no wonder that people are experiencing more and more medical issues.  Today there is more asthma, cardiac issues, cancer, diabetes, and other concerns than ever before.  The air we breathe, the water we drink, and the homes we live in are potentially hazardous.  What will tip the scale for us individually?  It’s hard to tell, but we live in a sea of chemicals each day, and that’s not good.

Tell me a little more about how MCS happens.

Let me give you some visuals to help explain how we get sick, then we can start addressing how to get better.

All of us have some “contamination” in us, even as babies.  Because we need to eat, breathe, and live our lives, we are going to be exposed to toxins that begin to accumulate in our bodies.

As we age, the level of contaminants invariably increase in our bodies.  If our bodies are functioning well, this level will not increase to the point of our becoming chemically sensitive.  We become functioning filtering machines, able to process contaminants well enough to keep them from impacting our lives.

When our bodies fill up with contaminants, our load becomes critical, and if we can’t bring the load of contaminants down, things get messy.

An overload of contaminants means that we can’t process them effectively enough to keep them in control, and we get sick.  We become chemically sensitive, or we become more susceptible to diseases.  Some of us may exhibit overt symptoms of MCS, and others might not – they may have other issues, like cancer or asthma.  Are they chemically driven?  Possibly.  It’s hard to know for sure, but I’ll be willing to bet that chemicals and contaminants play a part in disease.  What is certain is that everyone can benefit from working to decrease the load of toxins in their bodies.  If you’re sick, it’s imperative to do so.

Some people who react to multiple triggers are often called the “canaries in the coal mine,” or harbingers of danger.  Back in the old days, miners used to take caged canaries into the mines.  If the canary started acting funny or suddenly died, the miners knew that toxic levels of chemicals were present and high-tailed it out of the mines as fast as they could. As a society, we need to be aware of the fact that those getting ill today may be our “canaries” signaling all of us to clean up our environments as best we can, so that we don’t succumb to the same fate.  So if you’re not visibly sick, I still encourage you to read the blog and learn ways to help keep your contaminant levels in check.

How do I know if I’m chemically sensitive or not?             

That’s a hard question to answer.  What you need to pay attention to is how you are feeling.  Are you having breathing problems?  Are you reacting to chemicals?  Are you reeling from walking down the street smelling “dryer sheet smell” from your neighbor’s dryer vents?  Are you falling asleep a lot when driving?  Do you seem to have more food or inhalant allergies than you used to?  Are you tired all the time?  None of these by itself may indicate an issue, but a combination of them may.  If you are questioning whether you’re chemically sensitive or not, contact your doctor, and start researching  chemical sensitivity on the internet.

Where can I get help if I’m chemically sensitive?

When I was dealing with this issue in the ’80′s, it wasn’t easy to find help.  Luckily, today there are many environmental medicine doctors in the U.S. ­­­­­­and around the world.  There are also centers where you can get specialized treatment.  It isn’t cheap but it works, and includes dietary control, sauna detox, specialized nutrients, allergy testing, and other treatments depending on your needs.

Will you guide me through this?

This blog series will focus on helping you learn how to lessen your chemical load, so hopefully if you aren’t sick you won’t get sick, and if you are sick you learn  how to decrease your load so you feel better.  For those of you who don’t think you have a problem, I encourage you to read the blog and consider the recommendations I make along the way.  You may never get sick or it may be a matter of time before you’re sick, but anything you can do to keep yourself healthy, no matter where you are on the wellness spectrum, is worth your effort!  For those of you who are sick, the blog will be a good place to find tips to help you return to health.  Health is a journey, and the more we pay attention to the journey, the better!

If you have specific questions about getting the treatment you need, I’d be happy to point you to any resources I may know about and help you try to find answers.  Post a comment on the blog post and provide your email.  We monitor for questions and will respond to you via email privately.  Your comment will not be made public without your permission.

My Next Post will Cover:  Air issues in the home