How to Protect Your Brain from Air Pollution | Peter Spiegel & Jim Kwik

Indoor air is generally 5 to 6 times more polluted than outdoor air, and sometimes as much as 100 times more polluted.

It's all around us, but do you ever take the time to think about the air that you breathe and how it's affecting our brains? Unfortunately, air quality is worth paying our attention for all the wrong reasons.

The majority of candles are made out of a petroleum wax. You're essentially burning petroleum in your home.

Perfumes, candles, It kills mold, which is a big issue for a lot of people that people don't even realize.

These are things that you can do that don't require any effort or discipline.

In 2015, pollution in the air and water were a contributing factor to more than 9 million deaths, killing more people than war, road injuries, malaria, terrorism, drugs, alcohol.

The most dangerous particles to the human brain are very, very small particles.

If you've read Limitless, I talk about the 10 keys for a limitless brain, things like a good brain diet, like managing your stress, optimizing your sleep. And one of them that I've been talking about for 25+ years is a clean environment.

There was a 100% improvement in cognitive function in the green standard building versus just a normal building that people go to work in every day.

We're spending well over 90%, the average person, inside, but you can only go a few minutes without air, and that's The importance of this conversation?

Yeah, I think mattresses are one of the worst things because again, people don't think about it.

How air pollution could affect our brains?

The link between air quality and brain health is very, very well established.

Why is it important to pay attention to air quality now more than ever?

People who live in areas of higher pollution have much higher levels of memory problems and dementia.

What can somebody who's very concerned for their family, their team, What can they do to mitigate the harmful effects of air pollution?

The best solution is—

I want to welcome you back, Kwik Brains. I am your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik. Ensuring access to clean air, it used to be an afterthought for a lot of people, but our guest today has made it his life's purpose to raise awareness about the importance of optimal wellness foundations. And our guest today is Peter Spiegel. He is the founder and co-CEO of Ideal Living, and we'll talk about what that company is. It's a wellness company that's democratizing quality by sharing superior science-based products that provide clear air and pure water. So today, Peter joins us with a wealth of knowledge on managing indoor air quality for wellbeing. We'll be discussing the alarming air pollution statistics, impact on brain health, Your focus, your memory, the best plants potentially that could help filter your office, your home, indoor environments. And so that would be the focus, how air quality and a clean environment affect our brain health and our mental performance. Welcome to the show, Peter.

Thank you so much for having me, Jim. I'm very happy to be here.

I've been looking forward to this conversation because this is a topic that, especially in our Facebook group, many of you, if you could search my name on Facebook, we have a private group there for our podcast listeners about 150,000 people, and people are always asking when I talk about clean environment, you know, where do people start? And so what I wanted to ask you as a starting conversation is, first of all, why is it important to pay attention to air quality now more than ever? And how has it changed, you know, maybe over the past decade? And when I was listening to some of your videos, you talked about the Environmental Protection Agency talking about how there could be upwards of— am I getting this right? Upwards of 500 times more pollution indoors than outdoors?

You know, the EPA says on their website that indoor air is generally 5 to 6 times more polluted than outdoor air and sometimes as much as 100 times more polluted.

Wow.

That really surprises people. They think, oh, I'm going to go into my home. My home is, is a sanctuary and, and I don't have to worry about air quality once I'm inside my home. But unfortunately, you know, that just isn't the case for a variety of reasons. First of all, if it's outside your home, it's also coming inside your home. You open your windows, you open your doors, your HVAC systems are created, invented to recirculate not just indoor air, but to bring some outdoor air inside your home. So if it's outside your home, it's also gonna be inside your home unless you have a completely sealed home. And then unfortunately, on top of that, just through our daily living, we start adding things to the indoor air. I mean, if we have pets, many of us have pets and we love our pets, but then some of them shed and then that pet dander might get into the air. If we had a newer home, Construction materials, unfortunately, can have many, many chemicals in them, and then they outgas those volatile organic compounds into the air. We might use cleaning products. We might have a gas stove. We may have a gas dryer. We may have personal care products with artificial fragrances, which are made from petroleum products and are very dangerous chemical called phthalates are in artificial fragrances. And many of us love to burn candles in our home. I was on Dr. Gundry's podcast and I started talking about candles and they edited out that little clip and put it on Instagram. And now, 4 million people have heard me speak about candles.

Wow.

I don't want to spend too much time on that, but the majority of candles are made out of a petroleum wax. You're essentially burning petroleum in your home. They're scented with artificial fragrances. You're putting more synthetic chemicals into your home. So, that's the way our home becomes 5 or 6 or even 100 times more polluted than outdoor air.

Yeah. So, when we're thinking about it, I mean, it's ubiquitous, right? Perfumes, candles, mold, which is a big issue for a lot of people that people don't even realize that they're being affected, cleaning products, paint, personal care, the off-gassing from, you know, new— like your new mattress, or let's say, uh, you're getting carpet or furniture.

Yeah, I think mattresses are one of the, one of the worst things because again, people don't think about it, right? They buy a new mattress, uh, if it has an innerspring, the majority of those mattresses then are covered with polyurethane foam, which is made from petroleum, and now you're sleeping on And these off-gassing elements. And I always recommend to people, if you're going to buy a new bed, make sure it's a natural mattress. Natural latex, organic latex is a good choice. If you're going to paint your home, make sure you use zero VOC paint, not low VOC. And the same thing, carpeting, you can get wool carpeting. So, you can make choices. that create a better home environment. And then, you're not introducing these things. And, the best solution is prevention. It's better not to have these things in your home. And, you mentioned mold. Mold is a big topic for people. And, mold is something that grows naturally in nature outside of our homes. If there's a storm or the humidity is high, then mold is going to go up outside in the natural environment. That's going to get into your home. There are many people who have mold allergies. They'll find that they have itchy eyes or sneezing or itchy ears or their skin is itchy. These are normal allergic reactions to mold. Then, some people have this phenomenon called brain fog. You just feel foggy from mold. And maybe, Jim, you know more about that than I and you can comment on it.

Yeah.

Then, there's the mold inside of our home. And, this is something, again, if you discover mold in your home either growing in a wall or on a carpeted surface, you want to get that mold out of your home.

Yeah.

And, the other thing people often get confused about, it's we're not sensitive to the mold itself, it's the spores that the mold releases into the air that causes Problems. And, uh, you know, some are just, um, minorly irritating problems like the symptoms we talked about, these allergic symptoms. But for some people, uh, and some types of mold, they, these can cause very, very serious symptoms and even hospitalization. You wanna get the mold out of your home.

So some of these symptoms are kind of obvious. Uh, itchy eyes, uh, give, uh, sneezing, congestion, coughing, could affect your sleep, you know, on the extreme side. potentially contributing factors to, to lung disease or heart disease. You and I were talking before we started recording about some research you found on how air pollution could affect our brains.

Sure.

We could talk on that a little bit.

I have a company called Ideal Living. We make an air purifier called Air Doctor. Some people call me the Air Doctor, but I'm, I'm like an air doctor general practitioner. So I had to do some additional research to prepare for this podcast where we're going to do some more deep diving into cognitive health. But I'll just talk about some of the things that I speak about often, and then we can go into some of the more deep research as we get into this. There is a lot of published science on the impact of air pollution on cognitive health. In 2020, The Lancet, which is a prestigious medical journal in England, added air pollution to one of the risk factors for Alzheimer's. So the, the link between air quality and brain health is very, very well established. And it's well known that people who live in areas of higher pollution have much higher levels of memory problems and dementia. So, you know, that is kind of taking the older population into consideration. You know, shifting to the other end of the spectrum, there was a study done at UCLA here in Los Angeles where I live.

Hmm.

And it was done in conjunction with USC at their medical center. And they studied the impact on children, air pollution on children based on how far they live from a major thoroughfare or freeway. So that was like the factor that they were looking at. And what they discovered is the kids who lived within a half a mile of a major freeway and up to 2 miles away, that they had the related decreases in actual IQ on IQ tests.

Wow.

So they saw in children that air quality has a very, very significant impact on IQ. And then these kind of studies have been done, and I'm just going to check, I have some of these studies in front of me, Yeah, as you're looking at that, I would imagine because they're so close to traffic, right, there's these emissions that are coming from the automobiles.

There's the rubber from the tires that really build up.

The pollutants that generally happen near major roads, you have nitrogen dioxide.

Okay.

And they call it NOx, N-O-X. And this is known to have a very, very significant impact on cognition. It's a volatile organic compound or VOC. Then the other things that seem to have an impact on cognition are related to the things that you just mentioned. Like one is the tires. So as tires go on the road, and unfortunately it doesn't matter if this is a car with a gas engine or a diesel engine or an electric car, you have the same problem. You have these very, very tiny particles that are created. In gas and diesel cars, that's compounded by the burning of petroleum products. And the most dangerous particles to the human brain are very, very small particles. And we talk about them as PM2.5 particles. PM means particulate matter. 2.5 relates to particles smaller than 2.5 microns. And the problem with these particles is that they're so tiny, so they penetrate very deeply into the lungs. And then from the lungs, they get transported into our circulation system. And unfortunately, they're so tiny that they cross the blood-brain barrier and they go directly into the brain. And the same thing is with this nitrogen dioxide. It goes directly into the brain. So there are 2 types of contaminants that as an air doctor, I'm concerned about. One is these particulate matter, and the smaller the particles, the more dangerous. Larger particles are things like pet dander and pollen and dust, and the smaller particles are usually things from combustion. It could be smoke particles or burning petroleum products. And then also you have very, very small particles are bacteria and viruses. So that's kind of the range of things that we're worried about. And then we're also worried about volatile organic compounds, which are just gases that are In the air. These are the things that we're worried about. And it's all been— all these things have been studied. There was a study done in Barcelona, Spain on school children, and they were measuring the differences in children who attended school in areas with very low pollution to children who attended schools Not in very, very high pollution, but just like modestly worse air quality. And what they found is that there was an 18% delta, an 18% better performance in the low pollution schools. And they were specifically measuring working memory. So this was a study on working memory in children. So that's a very, very interesting finding about how even very subtle changes in air quality impacts cognition.

And I really want to present this to our listeners. We're talking about all the challenges indoors. We're spending well over 90%, the average person, inside. We're taking on average, what, 20,000 breaths a day on average? So it's, you know, And air quality, again, people could go— think about how long everybody could go without food, right? We could go weeks without food. You could go only a few days without water, but you can only go a few minutes without air. And that's, that's the importance of this conversation. I know, Peter, you mentioned nitrogen dioxide. I know it also aggravates problems like asthma.

That's right.

Which is an issue for a lot of people. Let's get to some of the solutions because I just want to talk about Sure, thank you. But before that, I know there are things that people could do. Like, in our office here, we have certain plants, you know, as an example. So what are some of the— so what can somebody who's very concerned for their family, their team, what can they do? Some of the simple things that they could do to mitigate, you know, the harmful effects of of air pollution? And, if plants happens to be one of them, are there certain air cleaning plants that you personally like?

So, we touched a little bit on this, which is the topic of prevention. So, as we talked about, if you get a new mattress, get a natural mattress. If you get new furniture, make sure that there's no synthetic materials, there's no synthetic foam in it. Same with carpeting. Use natural cleaners in your home. Don't use things with synthetic fragrances. If you have a gas stove, make sure it's properly vented to the outdoors. The same thing with a, you know, a gas dryer. You know, these are the kind of common sense things that we can do. Make sure the humidity in your home isn't too high, which is going to, you know, foster mold growth.

Hmm.

You know, in terms of plants, Plants are very uplifting and they're great to have in your home. Unfortunately, they don't have a big impact on getting these volatile compounds out of the air. And, they also certainly aren't going to do anything about particulate matter. So, I think there are a few plant varieties that might be better than others. And, the reason I don't talk about it is that the impact is not that significant. You'd have to have a— I mean, if you really love plants and you could have a greenhouse in your home and a forest of plants, I think that would be impactful. But, a pretty easy thing to do is to purchase a high-quality air purifier. We manufacture air purifiers. I can tell you kind of the things to look for in an air purifier. One thing that's very important is you want to get the particulate matter out of the air. And that could be larger particles like dust or pollen. And then even mold spores are fairly large particles. They're pretty easy to trap. But you also want to capture the most dangerous particles, the PM2.5 particles, the best way to do that is with a HEPA filter. So, there's a filter called standard called HEPA. It's a high-efficiently particulate filter. They were actually developed during the development of the atomic bomb to capture radioactive particles.

Yeah.

At that time, it was believed that the hardest size particle to capture was 0.3 microns. So there's a standard that says a HEPA filter has to capture 99.97% of particles down to 0.3 microns. But as I mentioned, there are particles much smaller than 0.3 microns, ultrafine dust, very small smoke particles, and of course viruses are 0.06 microns, much smaller than the HEPA standard. So, there are filters now that go beyond the HEPA standard. We call ours Ultra HEPA, Ultra HEPA filters, and they remove 99.99% of particles down to 0.003 microns. That's 100 times smaller than the HEPA standard. So, I suggest you look for an air purifier that has that type of The second thing about air purifiers, especially the ones you find in big box stores, is if you go to the store and just take the COVID off of them, you'll see that the filters are not sealed in the device. And so, the majority of the air actually goes around the filter and not through the filter. So, you want to make sure that the filter is a sealed system. Otherwise, you're paying a lot of money and you're just recirculating the air, you know, in your home. Another thing that you should look for, and I'm hitting on the big things, is I mentioned earlier that there's 2 types of contaminants in our air. There's particles and then there's gases. So gases are not removed by HEPA or Ultra HEPA filters. You need a carbon filter to do that. And, a lot of inexpensive air purifiers advertise that they have a carbon filter and then you look at it, take it apart, and you see there's a little piece of foam material or some fabric impregnated with a little bit of carbon. And, that carbon will get deactivated within 1 day of using it.

Hmm.

So, you need a very substantial carbon filter. And, In Air Doctor, in our air purifier, we also have a very substantial carbon filter. And there are other things that I call the extras. You also have your extras in the way you describe important things. So, some other extras include what is the quality of the motor and the fan in the air purifier? We use something that we call a WhisperJet fan. It's a DC motor. It's much, much quieter than the type of motors and fans that are in other air purifiers, because if it's too noisy, you're not going to use your air purifier. And then another very important thing is, is the air purifier the right size for your room? So the EPA and the Center for Disease Control recommends that you circulate the air in a room 5 times per hour. And in order to do that, you need a fairly significant size air purifier. And I can explain how to make— how do you do the calculation for your room size, but that may be a little bit too much information. So you need the right size air purifier for your room. We happen to make them in our Air Doctor in 3 different sizes. So one for big, large open spaces, one for Like a large master bedroom or one for a home office or a children's room.

This is in full disclosure. You know, I purchased one of your Air Doctor units, or actually multiple ones years ago.

Thank you.

And one I, I got at a retail. So I want people to know this is when we did our research consistently, Air Doctor, your units was always, was just the ones we trust. Right. And my family uses it. We have multiple different unit sizes. Like, you know, for our, for our baby, we have a small unit in his, in his bedroom and, you know, the larger unit in our living room. Many of our teammates, you know, have since over the past couple years have purchased your units. We orchestrated and put together a special deal with your team. So if people want more information and want to get a generous discount, people could go to airdoctorpro.com/kwik, K-W-I-K. That's airdoctorpro.com/kwik. And you'll save up to, I believe, $300. So I wanna thank your team for arranging that for our community.

Thank you.

You know, depending on which units people, and people could, well, again, we'll put the link to that and other resources, you know, at jimkwik.com/notes. So always go to the show notes. But this is an exclusive offer here For those of you listening to this would like to do your own research and have options because we always want to provide resources, you know, for our community. So again, airdoctorpro.com/kwik. So highly, highly encourage you to check that out for yourself and, you know, for your own health and brain health for you and your family. Do you have too much to read but too little time? Are your shelves full of books that you haven't read yet and become shelf help, not self-help. And that's why I created the Kwik Reading Course. 15 minutes a day, 21 days will absolutely transform your life. Just go to kwikbrain.com/reading, use the code PODCAST15, and you'll get instant access. Air conditioning, is that something that, um, does that contribute in any way to To air pollution, indoor air pollution, you know, depending on what the power source is or anything else like that? Does that have any effect on health?

That's a good question. And, uh, you know, air conditioning is something that most people have in their homes. Uh, you know, you can either have a portable unit that's in a window. They have these things now called split systems. Many people have central air conditioning. I'll just talk briefly about central air conditioning. You know, a central air conditioning system isn't going to contribute adversely to air pollution in your home. And in fact, it can help air pollution by keeping the humidity lower. The condenser is, you know, squeezing moisture out of the air and that goes outside of your home. And so the humidity in your home will stay at a lower level. The one thing sometimes people forget about is that every HVAC system, heat ventilation and air conditioning system, central system, has a filter, its own filter somewhere in your home. And, the purpose of that filter is actually to protect the equipment and prevent larger particles like bigger dust particles or animal hair from getting in the system and actually damaging the system. So, you need to change that filter.

Hmm.

And, you need to change it fairly regularly. So now, let's talk about what that filter is doing. It's not doing that much to improve the quality of your air, There's a separate system or nomenclature related to these whole-house HVAC filters. It's called MERV. So, a typical furnace filter has a MERV rating of 6. It's just a number, like a standardized number, but you can get a furnace filter with a MERV rating And so, I suggest in addition to having a portable air purifier in your home that you put the best quality HVAC filter in your home that you can. MERV 13 is the highest standard and that will contribute to improving the air in your home. The problem with these HVAC systems is they only change the air between 0.5 and 1 times per hour. And the filters, even though they will be more effective than a MERV 6 filter, they're still not going to get the volatile compounds out of the air and they're not very effective at these PM2.5 particles, but they will generally improve your air quality.

It's interesting. And I just want to stress for everybody, it's just like the air you breathe matters, especially for for your gray matter.

I just wanted to mention another study that was recently done. It was published by Harvard University. And I think this one tells the story of the impact of clean air, good air on cognitive health so well. They simulated the atmosphere in a typical office building. They standardized the amount of particulate matter, they standardized The standardized the amount of VOCs, and then they compared it to what they called like a green building, a really clean building. And they tested 7 cognitive factors, like pretty much everything you can measure, you know, in cognition they measured. And what they found is that there was a 100% improvement.

Wow.

100% in cognitive function in the clean room, in the green standard building versus just a normal building that people go to work in every day. This just shows how immediate and profound the effect of air and volatile compounds and particulate matter is on cognitive functioning. I'll mention one other thing. Which is this isn't something that is a contaminant in the air in a normal sense, but if you simply have too many people in a conference room and you don't have adequate ventilation in that conference room, then the CO2 levels start going up.

Right.

We had an incident once in our office. And I have a CO2 monitor in the office, and I'm getting an alert on the phone. And I'm seeing that the CO2 levels are increasing in that conference room, and now it's over 1,000, which actually directly impacts your cognitive health. You start feeling a little sleepy, you can't concentrate. And what had happened is that the HVAC had failed on that side of the building and it just wasn't circulating fresh air in the building. I mean, this is another thing that people can do, which is get a CO2 monitor and keep it in your space. And then, you can see if the CO2 levels are going up into dangerous areas. And, this is really important in office spaces and more important even then in your home. We've gotten so many requests for this at Ideal Living that within the next couple of months, we're coming out with a very sophisticated freestanding air sensor monitor that will measure VOCs, CO2, all different particulate matter in the air, humidity, temperature, what's going on outside, what's happening inside. So, You can stay tuned for that.

Amazing. Yeah, I was gonna ask you about future plans and trends. It's just, I wanna stress to everyone, I wanted to have this conversation because, you know, all transformation and improvement starts with awareness. And sometimes we're inside kind of like fish. They don't see the water cuz it's there all the time. And some of these invisible pollutants that are affecting our cognitive health, our mental performance, It could be the thing that's kind of holding you back. What I liked about this conversation, and I, again, go to the show notes at jimkwik.com/notes to get the summary of this conversation and the links to the resources. What I like about this conversation is specifically your units when I was doing the research is it's, we set it to forget it. You know, I want to make my life very easy and simple, right? Because Life is very complex. You know, at the very least, having something where you spend the most time, which for me happens to be in the bedroom, you know, for, for sleeping and where I work and having units there where it's just set. And it's just kind of, for me, it gives me peace, peace of mind knowing that, you know, my, my, my family, our, our team, friends that we've recommended your units to, they could, um, they could sleep better at night, literally sleep better at night. Because of it. And so again, I encourage people to check out this generous discount. It's at airdoctorpro.com/kwik. You could save upwards of $300 depending on which model you're looking at and the size of the room that you're in. And Peter Spiegel, I want to thank you so much for not only having this conversation with us and sharing it, but also the work that you do.

Thank you, Jim. You know, I've been interested in health and well-being my whole adult life. I think my life was very informed by the fact that my father, you know, he died when he was 54. His father died when he was 54. And I really wanted to discover what I could do to change my outcome in my own life. So, I studied natural medicine in my early 20s. I studied acupuncture at a time it was illegal to practice it in the United States. I have been practicing meditation since I've been 18 years old. It's like, this is a very important thing for me. It's not something that just happened recently. But one thing that happened to me when I was studying acupuncture, and I thought, you know, and I do admire people who dedicate their lives, you know, to being practitioners. For me, I wanted to be able to impact the lives of many, many more people.

Yeah.

And over time, you know, over my career, I developed certain skills in marketing and mass communication, and I had a certain degree of success. And then I reached a point in my life where I said, okay, I want to use these skills to positively impact people's health on a very foundational level. And that's why I focus on air and water. And, the thing, and you just said this, which is these are things that you can do that don't require any effort or discipline.

Yeah.

Right? It takes some effort to do meditation and some effort to eat a clean diet and avoid certain foods, but you can have clean air in your home and you can set an Air Doctor up and put it on the auto mode and then you can just forget about it.

Yeah.

And, the same thing if you drink pure water, we also have a business, then you're impacting foundational things that impact your health. And, that's really what my life purpose is about. And, I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about this. This is my passion and my purpose. I really appreciate it.

Amazing, amazing. I want to thank everybody who's tuned into this episode. Please Please share this with someone that you wish would benefit from it. You know, share it with a loved one. One of the most important things you could do. I think you learn something for 2 reasons. You learn it on how it could positively impact you and you learn it so you could share it with other people so they don't have to suffer and struggle. And so if this resonates with you, please make sure that you share it, that you take some kind of action on it. There is multitude of tips Here. Please re-listen to the episode if you need to, or go to the show notes to get a summary. We'll have links to all the resources. I encourage people to make the investment in themselves to get their own unit and test it themselves and see and feel the difference. And, you know, and make sure you subscribe, especially on YouTube. We put the extended version on YouTube. If you're not, if you're just listening to this, join our 1.5 million We're almost at a million subscribers there where we put beyond the 20 minutes that we do on the audio platforms. And, uh, just search my name and you can find us there. And, uh, Peter, again, thank you so much, uh, for your work, your time, and your talent. And, uh, everybody, we look forward to seeing you in the next episode. And until then, everyone be limitless.