Aaron Hartman, MD, explains how building materials affect health. Italian stone homes breathe naturally, while cheap U.S. frame houses rely on HVAC and synthetics. He covers climate, materials, crawlspaces, and air systems as key factors.
Chapters
How your home is built actually will impact the health of people living in the home. So I've read an interesting book about building biology, building mechanics recently and I've studied chronic inflammatory response under molderly illness. And now I'm in Italy. This is the Tuscany area, back in the background. And it's amazing how the buildings here are made. They're all made out of solid block. It's interesting how the environment determined how they built the houses. So here, houses of thick block materials, windows are tight sealed right now actually there's no ac. Nothing on most of the environmental areas of the houses is actually coming from outdoors. And what you don't see in the buildings, you don't see water damage, you don't see air conditioning units, you don't see heating units with wool in them. And we're at about a thousand feet. So it's not a humidity issue. They still have humidity issues here. But it's interesting how throughout the United States we don't do the same thing. We don't actually change how we build our houses that much based on the environment. We tend to do the lower price thing. They call it frame housing where you basically throw up two by fours and put a case around it, wrap it with Tyvek or some kind of wrap, you seal up, make it super tight and then we expect the air conditioning unit to actually do the workforce to filter the air, do whatever. The reality is that your home building needs to reflect your environment. If you have a house that doesn't reflect it, the question is how do you immediate that? That's a good question. We'll talk about this a little bit later. But the concept is around the world. Whether it's here in Tuscany, Italy, whether it's in Rome, whether it's in Mexico. Interesting. I've traveled a lot in central South America. The buildings down there made a block. It's interesting how certain countries, even African countries, will use block earth materials to actually make the walls seal them off to block humidity flow, separate the house with some kind of seal from the bottom. And this is actually basic standard tenets in building biology. Prescription for a Healthy Home is a book that I've actually recommended on my website and it's actually written by a building biologist and architect. Nick walks through some of these concepts of how to build a healthy home. The point is that in beautiful areas like this around the world, people have innately, intuitively figured out these concepts. In the United States, we're looking at the cheapest way to build a home. And the other thing about it is when you build homes as cheaply as possible, they don't last as long as and so what are a couple few basic things you can do to help remediate? Remediate some of the just the bad building practices. I want to talk about that next. You can't change where you live. You can't change the building practices of the builders and the people who built your home. I get that. But you can do things to actually help remediate some of those practices and things you have to think about in regards to that one. What are the materials your house is made of? Are these natural materials? Are these earthen materials? Are they wood or are they synthetic materials? Where's your house made? Is it a humid area? Is it a dry area? Is it a hot area? Is it a cold area? You know, when you get in certain areas that are super cold, like Canada, you actually have to be really careful with how you build the houses because any air that gets in the gaps will condensate and you'll get more issues in colder areas. I've actually had a similar experience in Arizona where you're at places and you think it's like super dry, but air conditions are on 247 and every place I've stayed in Arizona for meetings we go there has had mold issues. So you have to respect the environment. You have to think about the crawl. What's your house built on top of? Is it over soil? Is it. Do you have a crawl space? If so, is your crawl space encapsulated? Do you have a slab? Grade to slab? And then what's underneath that? That? Is there gravel? Is this sealed off? And then you have to think about your materials in your home. What kind of materials do you have? You have materials that hold on humidity, you have natural materials, you have synthetic materials. And then last but not least, your air handler, your air conditioner, whatever heats or cools your air. What is that? Is that moving air? Is it on when it's not conditioning the air? Is it off? Does it have a HEPA filter built into the system? Does it use any kind of electrostatics thing to clean the air? A lot of these topics we've talked about on our CSRS blog post as well. If you want more information, take a deep dive. Prescription for Healthy Home is a great book that takes a deep dive into that. Next we'll talk about ways you can actually remediate your home, regardless of the environment, to help it to be safe and clean. Take care, we'll talk to you soon.
