Is Your Air Quality DESTROYING Your HEALTH?

I've been thinking a lot lately about air quality. My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm a biohacker, celebrity trainer, nutritionist, New York Times best selling author and world renowned speaker. I'm on a constant quest to uncover powerful and practical health hacks to awaken, unlock and unleash the full potential of the human body, mind and spirit.

I was traveling in India, I had a speaking tour in India, and the air quality over there was really bad. I mean that the hazard index literally was the equivalent of smoking like 20 cigarettes a day just by walking outside for a couple of hours. When I got back to the US I really started thinking a lot about both indoor air quality and also how to heal the body from the effects of air pollution, smoke exposure, and a lot of the toxins, including things like mold and mycotoxins that we're all exposed to on a regular basis. Not just to kind of heal up what happened to me in India, but also just to live healthier, to get more oxygen, to optimize the mitochondria and to dial in a lot of the things that are so important, but that we often don't think about, right? Like I've referred in my book Boundless to these so called invisible variables, right? Air, light, water, electricity, those things that go beyond just say exercising and eating healthy. And of course the air quality is a big, big part of that. So the first thing is your personal environment, right? Your home and your office. Anything that's in your home or your office is going to wind up in your lungs if it's generating any type of compound that's in the air that you breathe, right? That's just logical and makes sense. If you're looking at things like your cleaning supplies, right? You want those to be natural, non toxic cleaning supplies. If you're looking at the furniture and the carpet and the cabinets and the appliances, you want things that are generally low voc, right? Low volatile organic compounds. A lot of times we just don't think twice about the little, you know, Christmas tree shaped air freshener that's hanging in the car or the spray bottle that we bought at the grocery store that we didn't really check to see was totally natural before we spray down everything in the kitchen or the bathroom. And these are important things to think about. Now I actually have this book that I think is fantastic. This is called Prescriptions for a Healthy Home. I interviewed the gal who wrote this, Paula laporte, on my podcast. But the cool thing about it is this book goes into not only EMF and lighting and flooring and how to just build a completely non toxic house. But it also goes into a lot of things that are relevant to air quality, such as what type of furniture companies, flooring companies, cabinet companies, painting companies produce the type of compounds that will be better for you when it comes to the air. So what are a few good air quality tips? You have people take off their shoes before they come into your home, so you're not tracking a lot of dust and toxins from outdoors or say if someone's been walking, let's say an airport or a bathroom or somewhere else where they're going to track stuff into your house that you then breathe. That's a good idea, right? Shoes off policy for the home. Windows open. Right? We always have windows open for free. Fresh air coming into the greenfield home. And that also helps with say not having to run the AC during certain months or introducing fresh air that helps you sleep better at night. It just feels a lot better when you have open air and open windows in the home. Your nose is a filter. Of course, you've probably seen all the little pieces of hair in your nose and some of us got to pluck some of that out. But all of that acts as a filtration system, right? The nasal tissue can vasoconstrict and vasodilate and does a great job serving as a built in filter. Right? Your body was designed to be able to handle a lot of environmental toxins. If you use it properly and by nasal breathing versus mouth breathing, you're actually going to equip yourself to have your own filtration system. Last thing to think about that would be kind of like low hanging fruit. For easy hacks for air quality would be the use of an essential oil diffuser. Right? There's multiple essential oil diffusers scattered throughout my house in the same way that there's multiple air filtration systems. These standalone HEPA air filters spread throughout my house when you use essential oils, those are typically extracts from plants and a diffuser will take those oils and spread them throughout the room. When I got back from my trip to India, and I even did this the year before when there was a lot of wildfire and smoke exposure here in Washington, I began to use a certain supplement stack, a certain range of supplements that all have human research behind them for helping to heal the lungs, for helping to even manage things like copd, for helping you after you've been exposed to smoke, even helping you if you've been cigarette smoking for a period of years and you've stopped and you want to accelerate the healing of the lungs. So what are some of those things? Let's go through what my air pollution stack would be. So vitamin C is one. This is the the adrenal cocktail Whole Foods Vitamin C from Jigsaw Health. I do one of these each morning. Vitamin D, right? This is a form of vitamin D by a company called Developed. It's a form of vitamin D called calcifedol. Calcifedol can get your vitamin D levels up much, much faster than a normal vitamin D supplement. Now it is a little bit more expensive and it's not as though a typical vitamin D isn't going to work, but I went through a few of these gummies each day. So some form of vitamin D is really, really good and I like this develop as a way to get the levels up fast. The gummies are pretty tasty as well. N acetylcysteine and glycine. What's interesting about the combination of N acetylcysteine and glycine is not only is it fantastic for the type of antioxidant anti inflammatory effect you'd be looking for for helping to heal the lungs, but there's a really interesting study that showed that the combination of anti N acetylcysteine and glycine can be a fantastic hack for age reversal. It's a longevity stack. So the next one is glutathione. Now glutathione is interesting because it is something that you can take orally. But many people, especially people who are sulfur sensitive, find that they don't feel well, they get jittery or they'll have like a detox reaction or have some other kind of deleterious reaction to glutathione supplementation. And that's because oral glutathione. I have a fantastic interview about this that is all based on the difference between oral and transdermal glutathione on my podcast feed. But the idea is that oral glutathione can get broken down into cysteine and sulfur. And I believe the final one, it might be glutamine. I don't remember the top of my head. But anyways it's broken down into three compounds and your body has to deal with those sulfurous compounds compounds. Whereas something like a transdermal, meaning a skin absorbed glutathione bypasses all of that and directly increases glutathione availability in the bloodstream. And then the last two would be vitamin E and curcumin this study just came out probably a month and a half ago. It looked at curcumin for exposure to air pollution, its ability to fight a lot of the inflammation, lung damage that occurs in response to air pollution. And curcumin was very effective at that. And then the last one is vitamin E. And vitamin E is interesting because you normally get as much vitamin E in the form of tocopherols as you need from food. But the other form of vitamin E called tocotrienols is a lot more effective for lung health and air pollution exposure. And that one is difficult to get a high enough level of from food. So obviously, kind of a big stack here. But if you really want to care for the lungs, if you've been exposed to a lot of smoke, if you've been traveling in an air area that's polluted, if you're concerned about your lung health, this idea of vitamin C, vitamin D, glynac, glutathione, preferably transdermal vitamin E and curcumin is the best research proven range of supplements that help with lung health. Standalone HEPA air filtration systems. Now, if you walk through my house, you'll see many of these systems just set up. There's one called the Air doctor, there's another one called Jasper. And I like both of these units as units that are good HEPA air filtration units for cleaning the air in the home. If you don't have a central air filtration setup in your home or in your office, this becomes all the more important. Now, these standalone HEPA air filtration systems that I have set up in my house, I would typically use these if my wife's painting or, or if there has been wildfire outside. Like these are things I can turn on and use in addition to the central air cleaning system that I have set up. The other thing that you can think about is if you walk into my sauna, you'll see that there's this thing on the wall of my sauna. It's called a halo therapy unit. Halo therapy is salt therapy. You can breathe this salt while you're in your sauna doing breath work or meditation or yoga or whatever else. And that's a fantastic hack for helping to heal the lungs and helping to support lung health. This whole idea of halo therapy or salt therapy. I visited with this naturopathic doctor when I was in India and I asked her, what is it that you do with your patients and your clients who are traveling in a place like, let's say Delhi and getting exposed to lots of air pollution. She was a huge fan of nebulizing. And with a lot of her patients, she would use nebulized hydrogen peroxide, saline solution. And hydrogen peroxide is obviously very, very inexpensive. And you can literally just run that through a nebulizer, which is a machine that will take anything, any liquid that you put into the basin for the machine and nebulize that in tiny droplets that are then absorbed by the lungs. And you can only nebulize hydrogen peroxide and saline, but you can also nebulize glutathione, Right? The same transdermal glutathione I was talking about earlier. Well, there's one company I know of in Florida called Mitozen. They make something called Glutastat, and this is actually a glutathione that you can nebulize. They also have a nasal spray that's fantastic if you're just flying on an airplane or you're traveling and you want to get a little bit of extra glutathione into the nasal passages. But then the other thing, and this is like, top of the totem pole that you can nebulize. And I did a vial of this when I got back from India, is exosomes. And exosomes are these cell signaling molecules. They are pretty expensive, but you can nebulize exosomes. I got this tip from a regenerative medicine doctor, and I nebulized a vial of exosomes. The cool thing is that when you breathe in exosomes, it also clears brain fog. Helps to heal tissue. But exosomes would be something that are a little bit harder to get your hands on, a little more expensive, but you can nebulize not just hydrogen peroxide, not just glutathione, but finally exosomes. In my home, I have what's called an aller air central HEPA air filtration system. In my gym, I have an air recirculation system called the Life Breath, and that also works fantastically for humidification. There's different settings on it where you can set the airflow, you can set the humidity, and that's fantastic for cleaning the air. And then finally, the fanciest system out there, and I learned this again from Paul laporte's book, Healthy House, and we talked about it when I interviewed her on my podcast. I highly recommend you listen to that podcast. There's a unit called the Mino Air, and the Mino Air does heating, cooling, humidification, and hepa air filtration. It's spelled M I N O T. So that would be a really, really good system to look into if you're able to outfit your home home and if you really want the best of the best H Vac system that's healthy for your home. So I hope these tips have been helpful for you. Make sure you get out there breathe healthy air. A lot of these invisible variables, air, light, water, electricity, these are all the type of considerations that can take you from good to great. Thanks so much for watching.