Are We Just *Modern Zoo Animals*? The Ancestral Mismatch (Part 2)

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. Every week I release a quick podcast with some meaningful thoughts that hopefully make your life better. And this is it. If you would like these thoughts delivered straight into your email inbox, go to bengreenfieldlife.com/newsletter. And when you do that, you can also get access to leave comments, leave thoughts, leave your feedback because I love to hear what you think. Alright, let's dive in. Recently, in some videos that I'll link to in the caption of this video, I introduced to you the concept of the ancestral mismatch and talked about how to battle that mismatch via the weapon of strategically timed hormesis, little stressors to the body that add up over time to induce cellular resilience. So in this video, I want to focus on another easy-to-understand health optimization tool that could equip you to fight the uphill battle of living in a post-industrial era, namely your environment. And yes, your environment matters more than you might think. There are variables like air and light and electricity and water that have modernized and evolved in ways that can dramatically affect our health. For example, plummeting indoor and outdoor air quality, bright flickering overhead and screen LED lighting, polluted water, life immersed in a soup of high-intensity electromagnetic fields or EMFs unlike anything we've experienced for a lot of our existence as humans paired with less fresh air, less water, less sunshine, less nature can result in troubled sleep and early afternoon brain fog and an eventual accumulation of toxins. So, if you were to come visit my home in North Idaho, you would see an extreme example of a living and working environment transformed for optimal health. The HVAC system is equipped with recirculated air, HEPA air filtration, and air scrubbing technologies. The lights are a mix of incandescent and flicker-free LED bulbs for optimized daytime energy and nighttime relaxation. The water passes through a 14-stage reverse osmosis filtration system and is then oxygenized and remineralized because I'm an overachiever. There is no Wi-Fi in my house. Instead, every room in my house is hardwired with Cat 8 metal-shielded Ethernet cable, and you just plug it into a port when you want the internet. Right here, I'll include a link to a full video tour of my house with the building biologist who helped to design it. Ryan Hoyer. But before you put on a welder's bib and rent a jackhammer to upgrade your own living situation, you should know that there are simpler, budget-friendly steps that you can first take. For example, you could mitigate poor air quality with a standalone HEPA air filter for your bedroom. I mean, you can get a cheapo like Honeywell filter from your local, uh, your local store like a Walmart or Home Depot. You can get a Jasper filter, uh, or you There's, there's a lot of options out there. Air Doctor is another good one. You can use incandescent light bulbs and modified LED bulbs instead of standard fluorescent lights and introduce natural sunlight wherever you can. You can grab an affordable countertop reverse osmosis filter, again, like you can buy at Walmart or Home Depot, and a glass or stainless steel water bottle for daytime use. You can put your phone in airplane mode if it doesn't need to be on., and when it is on, you can disable the Wi-Fi and the Bluetooth if you aren't using those. You would be surprised at the host of health benefits you can reap from a basic environmental audit. I have this book, it's called Boundless, and in it I take a much deeper dive into these type of environmental considerations and modifications. But the list I just gave you gives you a handful of tactics to at least start making your environment more ancestral. So once again, you can fight that, that mismatch. So next week, I'm going to give you a third and final tip for battling the ancestral mismatch. Hint, it has to do with food. But in the meantime, leave your questions, leave your comments, leave your feedback right here. I love to read them. I love to hear what you think.