The Truth About Indoor Air Quality: Why Your Air Isn't as Clean as You Think

All right, welcome back to my show, Dr. Robert Whitfield. Today I have Mike Feldstein. He's the founder of Jasper, an air quality expert. He's leveraged his experience in wildfire restoration and air quality consulting to start Jasper, a premium air purifier company to innovate in air science and technology. His mission is to improve air quality and boost human health using the latest in air quality science and tech. Welcome, Michael.

Thank you, Rob. Happy to be here. Top of the morning.

I know we've each got a very large amount of coffee and I don't.

Actually my coffee shop opens at 8am and I was considering it's only like a one minute drive from here. So I debated being set up there at 8 and either doing the pod from there or rushing here right after. So I'm actually drinking tea for the first time in a very long time. Rachel's like, it's like coffee but 10%.

That's egregious. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well for the audience who's listened to me for the past several years, I talked about air quality quite a bit. I feel that if you can't control the things you can control, it's going to lead to more toxicity in your life. So you can always improve your air quality, your fluid intake quality and your food quality. So with that Mike, we had discussions obviously when we've met at different times, but I look for and tried to provide my clients and team with a real a deeper understanding of how impactful air quality is on a day to day basis. I think people talk a lot about water quality and we hear, heard about water filtration essentially forever. And everybody talks about they have an H Vac and has this, that and the other. But can you break it down to like the kindergarten level of why a basic H vac system does not protect you against things like say mold or things that you have experienced when you've dealt with natural disasters?

Yeah, absolutely. So I like the analogies, the way you framed it of the food, the water and the air. And it's funny that we talk more about there's breath work is more popular than air. Nobody talks about eating or drinking. We talk about food and water. But literally air is so far behind in his awareness that we talk about breathing without even talking about the thing that we are breathing.

Right.

So I'm excited to see that flip where we talk more about air than we do about breath work. We can still talk about breathing, but let's not forget what we are breathing. We just like it Just shows how much we take air for granted. So with respect to the H vac stuff, so H vac systems haven't really been innovated in several decades. If you've had a house from the 90s or now, or even a little bit before that, furnaces and air conditioners have been pretty much the same for quite a long time. And they are designed to heat and cool cost effectively. That's basically what they're designed to do. And often they don't always even do that very good. There's cold spots, there's hot spots. They're not super well balanced unless you're building like a custom home with a super fancy custom H vac system. Most homes have pretty poorly balanced H vac systems. They already have. I would say the fans are like, it's not that they're undersized, but when you have one little one fan that's supposed to equally mix and distribute the air through the whole home, it's pretty difficult. If you think about speakers before Sonos, like you'd have one giant speaker with like a big subwoofer and either you'd be right beside the speaker and it's way too loud or you can't hear it at all from the other room. And then along came like distributed wireless full home speaker systems or wired for that matter. And an H vac system is just that for your house. It's like one big machine that stuck to it all throughout the home. And it's really designed to just do those two things. Heating cool. So when we attempt to accessorize it, there are some accessories that do like can work on there. It's not bad to add humidity to a whole home if you're in a dry climate and you can add a steam based humidifier. Those can be fairly effective as long as you're mitigating the humidity in the mold. But basically the furnace wasn't designed to be an air cleaning machine. So people now talk about especially during COVID MERV 40. Let's just put the most intense filter that we possibly can on our furnace. Well, what happens is it restricts the airflow a lot because the furnace wasn't originally designed for that filter. So you huge pressure drop, a huge decrease of airflow. Now not only is it not really cleaning your air, it's working harder. You kill the life expectancy. It hardly now it's hardly heating and cooling the home. It's more inefficient than ever before. And your furnace and air conditioner, you don't want that thing running 24 hours a day, it turns on and off throughout the day. So when it's not running, it's not heating, it's not cooling and it's not cleaning your air. So you would really want your air filtration system to be something that's passively running all the time, additionally with its own fan. So yeah, that to break it at its core, your H vac system filter, it's designed to keep your furnace safe and your furnace filtered. So if a big chunk of dust or debris or dog hair or a screw from a renovation falls into a vent, it's not going to get into the motor and the fan and break your furnace. That's why that furnace filter exists. It's not. No one is claiming that your furnace is supposed to be an air filtration system. And then some people just forgot that the furnace filter is really for the furnace. It's not for you.

Yeah, I think that's the misconception. Because when I speak to someone about air quality, because in my client consultations I do speak about those fundamental three things. Because you can live without food, you know, we'll say three weeks, you can live without water about three days, and you can live without air about four minutes. So obviously in the stratification of those, what's most important is the air. And the problem I have with patients is conceptually that's a huge leap for them to understand. They think falsely that they're protected because the system's in their house and that's what it's, it's for. But as you so eloquently explained, it is not. It's to protect the furnace, not the human. So in each space, like when I have somebody who's clearly suffering a lot from chronic inflammatory symptoms, one of the easiest ways I try to help them is explain to them improvement in their air quality. And just wherever that person goes, wherever that human ends up sleeping, it's next to them. And predominantly if they're at home, maybe you know, I'm talking about somebody who's a homemaker or for that matter, in their office. I'll tell you, I carry your filter with me to the surgery center. I've actually showed you that I do that because I won't tolerate poor air quality, poor water quality, and I won't eat bad food. So there's just, those things are baseline non starters for me. And I want it to be for our clients so they understand intimately, like you only have a certain amount of genetic ability. You can't pick Your parents and you can't outrun a bad diet. And if you have really poor air cooling, really poor fluid quality, you've put yourself exponentially behind what's preferably called the eight ball. You have to actually do everything you can to. And even though you think it doesn't really matter if, if Mike were as to show you a sophisticated diagram of the particles in the air in your house, it would really scare the shit out of you.

Yeah, I really enjoy, you know, I carry my CO2 detector with me to give people like CO2 awareness. And lately I started to carry my big fancy $5,000 particle counter with me as well just to show people. It's really awesome. Actually the coffee shop near me, they have a Jasper too. And it's on critical almost all day because they have almost no ventilation in their kitchen. And it's on so much that they got used to the red. But I brought them, they just think that's normal because I brought them a CO2 sensor. Whenever I'm there, I'm always opening doors and opening windows. But once I was able to show them the air with data and then connected to a feeling, now all of a sudden I go there and they're opening their doors and their windows. The solution that they really needed was just the air awareness of, oh, whoa, it is. The air does suck in here. And when it's a nice day outside and we open our doors and windows, it's a lot better. And yeah, I kind of think about air as, you know, it's the first thing we do when we're born, we take a breath. The last thing we do when we die, before we die, we take a breath. We literally can do it when we sleep. And I think because it's so like core to our existence, so fundamental that we do it multiple times every minute. I tell someone, even just try, try consciously taking a one minute break. Not very easy, in fact, you'll get in your head and it won't be very fun. But because it's just so abundant and frequent, we do a really good job at ignoring what it is we know. I like to say we live in air. We're not really separate from air, we live amongst it. Just like fish live in water. And if somebody who believes in, you know, eating good, clean, good food or drinking good water, if you think about like wearing a bad pair of shoes, they might be a little bit uncomfortable for a minute, then you might get used to it. But like stretch that out over a period of time and you start having all Kinds of issues. And I find breathing can kind of be both. If you're like in a seriously moldy environment, you may notice it, but it's more of just like a chronic chipping away, making you sicker and sicker every day. And you don't. A lot of people don't realize it. They're trying to. Often they're medicating or they're taking allergy shots and they're doing all this other stuff. Just realizing that all they had to do is clean up their air, their water and their food. And then a lot of it feels like the body, I mean the body stuff is a little bit out of my scope, but it feels like when we clean up our inputs, the body does a really good job at healing it's itself if we give it clean fuel.

Right. So I had a great client of mine, her and her husband were visiting us for a, a follow up appointment. And because I do so much genetic testing on my clients, I know when they have difficulty with detoxification and they'll typically ask me like, hey, can we do that testing for, you know, our child? And we do that for, you know, our, our clients. Because if a mom doesn't detoxify, well. Well, obviously like I said in the beginning, you can't pick your parents. So those traits have been passed on and they're genetic, they're not phenotypic. So when someone starts exhibiting at a very, very young age a lot of allergies that always like in my head I'm like, oh, that's an air problem, that's a food problem. You know, you got to change, as you just said, perfectly the input in order to get the output you want. So there's no. And life is a performance based sport and you don't do well in life. If garbage goes in, you'll get garbage performance. So the environment's not obviously getting better. The air quality overall is not getting better. So I always try to say like, think of like an eraser head, you know, that's about 4 millimeters. And then everybody's like, oh, okay, that's 4 millimeters. Okay, so you know, now think of like a millimeter. And then they're like, all right, so you know, all right, one millimeter. And then when we start talking about things like microns, which are the things that we're going to discuss, that gets to be a bit confusing because it takes a thousand microns to equal 1 millimeter. And then that. I think that is a hard thing for everyone to grasp. But you can't see it. These mold spores that really affect my clients and are part of the major problem that we run into. Both kind of anywhere in the northern states, on the coast, any old homes, I mean, you name it. Like, there is a huge problem with that. And a mold spore can be very, very small, three to 40 micron. I mean, it's a very complicated thing for, I think, people that every, you know, if it's not the size of a nickel, seems like it doesn't really matter. But if. If something that's, you know, one thousandth of a millimeter, that can cause a problem, an extreme problem, and get in your liver and just hang out and make you ill. Why don't you explain how Jasper deals with mold? Because I find that to be my most challenging group of issues for patients to deal with and understand and explain and get like a sense of, yeah, we're on the same page. Yeah, that's a problem.

Well, I like to first bring it back to something that is invisible, that we do understand, to kind of realize that we already sort of deal with this stuff all the time. So if you wash your counter after you're done cooking, or if you wash your hands after you touch something that's dirty, or if you think that if you would go to a pond and grab a cup of water and drink it, you know, we can go to a pond at the side of the road, hold it up, and, you know, this water will very likely make you sick. Even if you get water from the ocean, it can look clear. And you know that. That salt water, you can't drink. And if, you know, you clean your counter all the time because, you know, if you don't clean your counter, if you don't wash your hands, if you don't filtered water, there are invisible things that will make you very, very sick. And those exact same principles apply to air. And if you think about, like, washing your hands. So one thing I'll look at here is like UV light, for example. UV is really good for water, and it's good for surfaces. It's not very good for air, and there's a misconception that it is. And it's because the air typically passes through a filter so quickly that there's not enough contact exposure time. So I'm bringing that back because bacteria is pretty invisible to the human eye as well. But, you know, you have to have your soap on and wash your hands for 20 seconds. And, you know, like, when you scrub in and out of surgery, I don't think it's a one or two second wash. And like it takes a certain amount of time to clean and kill these invisible things that can make people very sick and cause really big infections. So air is no different. And yeah, most all the harmful particles are invisible. Like when people see wildfire smoke. I used to live in British Columbia and deal with a lot of wildfires in California. And people see the smoke and they smell the smoke. When they don't realize this, it was there likely days before they saw it and smelt it. And days, weeks or months after. It's mostly the stuff that you can't see and you can't smell that can harm you. Which is why I love carrying around various air quality gadgets and showing people, testing and getting people some samples so they can. It's really helpful when people can visualize this stuff and say, hey, here's the room. Before like the average bedroom is a good place to start. Between 0.3 and 10 microns. The average bedroom has like 7 or 800,000 particles floating around. And this is everything. When we collect an air sample, typically you'll have mold, pollen and dust bite and a lot of insect parts. And the neighbor across the street that had a contractor cutting drywall, that's in there too. Dead skin cells and hair cells and cleaning particles. Like there's a lot of stuff. If you can collect a sample of any, take a mason jar in your house and close it up and send that to the lab, you'd be shocked to find all these tiny things in there. And yeah, our bodies are pretty resilient. We can take a lot of stuff. But you know, I've been dealing with some psoriasis and other conditions like that, and the more I dial in my inputs, the more that the body tends to recover. So the way the filter works is when you look at most filters and you see like it filters 99.97 or 99.999%. Whenever you see that, that means that per pass of the filter, that's how many of the particles get captured. Basically, there's very, very, very tightly woven filters that are usually made out of either paper or a synthetic material like paper. And even with the filters themselves, you have to be very careful because certain fibrous filters actually have recently shown to contain a lot of chemicals in the filters themselves. So while, while filtering out all these other particles, you're letting the air pass through this nice little chemical membrane. The bottom line, yeah, that's how a filter works. It's, it's incredibly tightly woven and then as the air passes through it. The goal is to let the, the clean air pass through, which is carbon dioxide, nitrogen and oxygen primarily and filter out all those little particles that aren't supposed to be there.

Yeah, I think, you know, when I first, you know, was able to talk to you about it, I think you realize very quickly I'm a very specific person about air quickly. The thing that, you know, we've, we've learned is how damaging it is to patients who have really difficult baseline genetic ability to detoxify all sorts of toxins, whether they come from the environment, which is a lot of what you're describing, or food, glyphosates, things like that, that are on contaminated food, like the Dirty Dozen in terms of fruit and then heavy metals, of course. We already briefly discussed about water contamination. I grew up in a place where the groundwater was not good and I wasn't taught. I just mimicked what my dad did and we'd wash the car and he'd drink out of the hose. So that's what I did. And I had, you know, incredibly high levels of arsenic for that.

So I could taste the plastic. How do you say it?

Yeah, exactly. So you, you know, obviously, you know, these things are now as we learn more and more and more, I always, like I make this such a focal point. Like I'm sure people get annoyed by what I'm telling them but if you, and for everybody listening like this doesn't resonate with. You're destined to have a difficult time with me and you're probably just a little bit too far out in your journey for us because these are the concepts you have to embrace if you want to have a healthier life and you know, not to be cliche, just have a less toxic situation in your home for both yourself and your family. And if you have little ones that have, you know, weird allergies and you know, they're stuffy all the time and you know, fussy, etc. Might be worthwhile putting one of these Jaspers in their room because honestly once you change that and maybe look at a couple things that are the inputs as Michael's described, you'd be really surprised about what changes in the output.

I have two toddlers, two and four, and I gifted one to the kids to Aria's. The older, the four year old school, then they ended up getting five more. And it was crazy how it went from. It was honestly insane when my daughter started going to like two when she was two and a half. I guess that's daycare. School, something like that. And they really normalized that kids should be like, she was coming home sick almost always. Like half the class is always out. They started talking to more my sisters and other parents all over the place. And it was very normalized that your kids should be sick always for two or three years. Like, I don't know, I don't really believe this, and I don't think so. I'm sure they have to get a whole bunch of infections and build this immunity up and, and go through a bit of that. But being sick all the time, having a runny nose for three years and a chronic cough, I'm not sure about this. And then I look at the school. You know, their hygiene, surface cleaning practices were already quite poor. These half these kids are in like diapers, touching their nose, touching their eyes, touching their butt. And then. So their surface cleaning protocols were pretty bad. And if they were good, I mean, good. I'm using quotations right now. It's usually really aggressive, harmful chemicals in a little tight box. And generally schools don't have windows that open. Right. So they're, they're literally these tightly confined boxes. And the school's on a strict budget, so they're even not really changing the air very much. The CO2 in my daughter's school was crazy. And then I, it was fun because I talked to some kids, parents who were at these schools that spend like 30 to 40% of the time outside and have windows. Those kids weren't getting sick very much. Now my daughter is in one of those schools where it's like 50, 50. But even still, by putting air filtration in the class, a lot of that respiratory stuff is because you took like you have 12 to 15 little booger balls, plus their siblings, plus disgusting habits. So, you know, your kid might have this nice clean environment at home, but then they go to school and they're. If you're in a 10 by 10 or 20 by 20 room with someone, you're basically making out with everybody all day long. From a like sharing stuff standpoint, you're all breathing the same air. You're very quickly all sharing the same air. So if there's not adequate ventilation and there's not adequate filtration, no wonder these kids are sick all the time. And it was very frustrating that they normalize this because this was not that difficult of a problem to solve.

Yeah, I think you know the notion that. Well, I mean, that's why you see a sign up at every restaurant or. I think it's illegal not to have one of it says employees must wash their hands after.

Yeah.

You know, using the restroom, obviously, you know, and we've had this discussion. I think your idea is brilliant about putting Jaspers in bathrooms. One, to improve obviously the air quality in there, but to raise awareness about Jasper. I think that's a quality way to, to help. And you know, maybe you should just take them all to Austin Bergstrom too, because that is the most disgusting place. The airport is just truly a depressing. Like I can't wait to get off the plane and out of the airport. Like, there is zero chance I'm sitting anywhere and spending any time at the airport. I, I've almost been late for flights these days because I refuse to actually hang out at the airport because of the things that you're describing. I think from a patient centric standpoint, I think we've highlighted a lot of things that are important to me personally, you know, for my clients and for their journey for wellness. I think everybody can do more if they just stop and think about, like, like you said, I like that, you know, the inputs like what is the quality of the fluids that are going in and what is the quality of the food that we're taking in? Certainly I think you've, you've highlighted and if there's anything to add, you know what, what other aspects would you like to add about having a job?

A couple things.

Yeah, please. Yeah.

So I'm going to assume that a lot of your listeners slash patients have young children.

Right.

And what a really passionate point for me that I like to raise awareness to at all costs is leaving diapers in your little toddlers or your new baby's bedroom. There's these little things. One brand's called Diaper Genie. They're the most popular. It's nothing about the particular genie. I mean good, good marketing for them. They've Kleenex, this thing we literally use, that brand has a word for a thing that contains diapers in a bedroom. And I'd go into my daughter's bedroom a few years ago and it would stink like poo. And I'm like, well, if it smells like bacteria, if it smells like poo, it's because it is poo. You know, you bring in the particle counter and you look at the channel size that is bacteria. And hey, what a surprise. Levels are pretty high in here. Do a little culture sample. What a surprise. So I told Rachel, my wife's name. I was like, I really think we should start taking, taking these diapers directly outside. I don't Think like stashing. Having a poo stash for the week is really a great idea. And you know, everybody's trying to baby proof their homes and their nurseries, putting things on sharp corners and edges and all these little gizmos and gadgets so they can't open drawers. Meanwhile they have these brand new cribs, toxic paints, plastic toys for them to chew on all the time. It's like they're baby proofing for all these like 1% outcomes. But the 100% things that are all day long, they're completely no awareness on. And so I told Rachel, I said, hey, I think you should. She's like, yeah, that'd be so annoying. I have to go all the way down the hall every single time with the diaper. And I said, fine, how about this? The night I'll sleep in the spare room and you could bring the diaper genie in our bedroom and see how you like it. And she's like, ew, no, I'm not sleeping with that thing in my room. Like, got you. And all it needed was that moment for her to realize, oh, whoa, if I wouldn't sleep in this thing in my room, why am I putting it in my, my child's room? But I honestly think this is like a way bigger deal than anyone thinks about the idea. These things aren't airtight. They don't have air filtration. And no, Jasper is not the answer. Like Jasper will be helpful, but sometimes you have to just mitigate the source, right? I mean if you really can't get outside in the bathroom, how big of a bathroom fan running 24 hours a day is the minimum. But this should go outside.

Yeah. How big is your house? If you can't bother yourself to walk.

Outside, then you have someone who can. You have someone who can. And put that on there. If you have a cleaning lady put that on their daily to do list. Oh yeah, just add that to the.

SOP AI driven robot thing. That can do that shortly.

It's coming soon.

Put it on an RC car and make it a game.

Yeah, you got to get that thing out of your kid's room like people do. I was just telling you before we started recording how mostly everybody puts their kids like before them in almost every way. But it's funny that when people usually buy a Jasper they put it in their bedroom or the living room, not their kids room, which is a funny thing.

I'm glad you brought that up because currently we live in a condo and for everybody listening, I had a bad Toxic mold exposure that made me very sick. And it was not apparent, which most the time you have zero idea what's going on because just to Mike's point, you can't see, you can't smell this stuff. Obviously if I smell the moldy place, I'd be all bent to figure it out. But it took a crack in the wall for us to figure out what was going on. And it was near my home office at the time. And I would tell y', all, it's not easy to get rid of mold in your system once you test for it with a urine toxicity test and you have different toxins. Ochratoxin is the main one from Aspergillus, but there's a whole host of them and they're in foods, including things like peanut butter, which you probably shove down your kid's throat all the time. There's a lot of aflatoxin in that. So once that is the situation, like I became creeped out by it. So everywhere we go now, there's a filter on every level no matter what. So if someone lives at, you know, X, you know, floor in the house, there's a filter there. If someone's, you know, in a, like a more expanded single level ranch type, we're going to stick them at, you know, basic, either in the room or in the vicinities based on, you know, where you live, like everybody's house, you know, you have to arrange it in such a way that you take advantage of it because you know, by, by that. How many square feet does a Jasper really filter for you at a time and should you have, obviously one in each room is nice.

Yeah, that's so it's like a good, better, best situation for sure. And I always like to tell people, you know, there are other solutions. Like so Jasper used to be a $2,000 product that we only sold to doctors and dentists and medical offices. My background was in wildfire restoration, mold remediation and flood cleanup. So I wanted to create a product that was industrial grade but look good and was quiet for home use. There are like 500 and $600 options that clean the air almost as well as Jasper, if not as well. The downside is they're really loud and ugly and very intrusive to your home environment. And that's kind of what got started the journey in 2017 to create Jasper. I was restoring a home from a wildfire in northern Alberta, Canada and they had a sick kid and they were evacuated. They came home and I had these big air scrubbers running in their house to keep the air quality levels good. And they unplugged it. I'm like, angela, what are you doing? She's like, I know, I know, I know our hair is really bad, but it's so loud and it's so ugly. So really it's. It's partly getting into the square footage thing. Square footage is a tough metric because some people have seven and eight foot ceilings and some people have 16 foot ceilings. Some people have a forced air H Vacs, like a furnace system that's mixing the air all the time. Some people have heat pumps and baseboards. So I'll just assume we're talking about people who do have a furnace, because most homes in North America do. But in some parts of the world, they really don't. If you're using like heat pumps and stuff like that, you don't have a centralized air mixing machine. So the coverage is less because you don't have an additional fan mixing all the air. So in terms of like a good, better, best situation, the most important place to have one. There's two really important places. I think the bedroom is really important because you spend one third of your life there's Right. And I've seen a lot of people and I live in Austin, Texas, just like you, Rob, whose seasonal allergies have entirely gone away by putting a Jasper in their bedroom. And it's because. And in Austin, people literally talk about allergies. It's like if you live on the west coast and they talk about wildfires, or if you live in New York, they talk about the Yankees. People talk about allergies here. It's a thing.

And when someone around it too. There's a whole industry built around it.

Huge industry. A lot bigger than air filtration is the allergists and the allergy shots and the whole thing.

Right.

And almost everybody I know who takes allergy shots seems to have severe allergies. Still. It does not seem to be the silver bullet that people really hope it is. And they that they want it to be. And allergists, and I've spoke to a lot of them, they actually quite resist air filtration because it's a solution. And I was shocked. I never created Jasper. I thought we were making this thing for toxic wildfire smoke. Then came Covid and we got into helping doctors and dentists with their air filtration practices. And then patients started buying it for their kids and for their homes. But the often seasonal allergies will all go away. And it's because when we test a home, often the indoor mold levels, the indoor pollen levels are higher inside than outside because they come inside from the outside air and then they stay inside. At least the outdoor environment, it has wind, it has hydroxyl radicals from wind, it has the UV light from the sun, it has air filtration outside. It's called nature. We have air filtration outside. But when we build these airtight homes, all those particles and spores and allergens come in and they can't get out. So they get embedded into our carpets, our clothing, our furniture, our couches, all that, and then they're stuck there. If you're not filtering your air, that is. So when you go to bed at night and you lie on that pillow and you go on that memory foam mattress, you're still steeping in allergens. So unfortunately, it's a 24 hour a day situation. You don't get any relief at all. And then just, it's just a beat down. And then your body has a really hard time of entering like a parasympathetic state and recovering and resting and consolidating memories and repairing itself because it's under attack. It's playing defense 24 hours a day. So when you can turn your bedroom into a clean air sanctuary, and ideally your home at large, all of a sudden you get relief when you come inside. This is like your healthy home sanctuary. I would like to see the conversation change. Instead of people saying, let me go outside to get a breath of fresh air, because that's not fresh air, that's just regular air. I would like people to start saying, let me go inside for a breath of clean air. So if you could all of a sudden have super clean air at night in your bedroom, then all of a sudden during the day, that little bit of allergen exposure at the workplace or outside, you're way more resilient because you've had the time to rest and recover and heal. It's like if you go into the sauna 24 hours a day, well, you can't, because you'll die. You have to take a break to cool off. And then you can handle some exposure to extreme cold or extreme heat or other extreme events. So when you really can dial in the air quality in your bedroom and ideally your home, it just some people's allergies are just gone. And it's been an unexpected situation.

I'm glad you brought that up because I was told after being here for a few years that I had cedar fever. It's A very common thing that you're told here. And people get fevers. I will give you how this worked out for me. We were already pretty conscious of air and had air filters. So it's a combination of, like you said, you know, air and then food. So, you know, if you have certain food sensitivities, those can be expressed as what we would consider allergen, you know, symptoms. Whether it's like you're describing psoriasis on your skin or whether someone has hay fever type symptoms. If I eat eggs, I essentially get hay fever type symptoms. That's how I react to it. So it's basically the fundamental things, like you said, it's the input. So if you know more about what's going in and can control the. Some people have quantity control. That's a separate topic. We'll say the quality of everything. So, you know, not drinking out of a plastic, anything would be paramount because phthalates are in all the plastics. They're the hardeners that are in plastics and be transmitted and really affect endocrine systems of both women predominantly, but males as well. And then certainly if you don't know what foods really trigger you, because certain foods will trigger people. And it's not so much that magically you became allergic to a bunch of foods, it's how the processing of the food is happening. So things get attached to it, much like Mike's describing in terms of those things floating around in the air. There's lots of things in the processing of foods that get into the food that you're eating and ingesting and then you're immune system doesn't like it and reacts to it. So that's another way where you can just basically develop an allergic reaction to eating. So you get a lot of histamine release and you get a lot of. What I would get was hay fever type symptoms. I would eat eggs and then, you know, within like 30 minutes to an hour later, I'd have like a sneezing fit and my eyes would be itchy and watery. And I was like, what is going on? And we did a food sensitivity test at my clinic. And what do you know, eggs are a big problem for me. And then certainly we harp and harp and harp on improvement of air quality as it relates to things in Austin. So when I hear somebody develop magically allergies, all of a sudden I'm like, yeah, you moved into probably a house, that one older type home. You didn't have the, the place tested, which, I mean, you. Oh, please talk about that. So anytime you put. So I'll tell everybody, listen. Anytime I look at a home, if I put money down on a home, it's written in my contract that I will pay to have it tested for mold and other things. And if it's found, I get all my money back because it's just part of the contract. I think it's just part of being prudent because people won't disclose there's even a problem with that.

I'll give you a quick couple things on that. So I actually got certified as a home inspector just to see what the training was like when I was doing air Quality Consulting 10 years ago, and training was very minimal. Very, very, very minimal. A lot easier than even becoming a real estate, like realtor. And even that's quite easy. It's like a few days a week at most. And when we got certified in home inspecting, they basically told us, and if you look at most home inspection contracts, it says basically we're not looking at anything environmental. Often we don't go on the roof. Some do, but we don't look at mold. It's very clear, like, limitation of liabilities that, like, we're not checking for mold or asbestos or lead or bacteria or anything environmental. So how crazy is it that to make the biggest purchase of your life, you spend your 5, 6, 7, $800 and the home inspector comes to make sure there's not something that's going to put a hole in your pocketbook like an old water heater, an old furnace, or a crack in the foundation. But no one does an inspection to see if this house is going to make you and your family sick. I find that absolutely crazy. So I'm glad that you do and that you're bringing light to it, and I'm glad to see the whole home testing, mold testing industry evolving. It's taking some time. Two, there was a study very recently that the BBC featured that showed that humans breathe about one credit card worth of microplastics every week. So they tested like 100 homes at random. And 100% of homes had microplastics in the dust, 98% of all samples. So add that to the list of things to be concerned about these days is microplastics is basically in almost all dust because it has. It breaks down and decays. It also goes airborne. And then. Yeah, those were two things I wanted to bring. I'm glad that you are really bringing light to it from a medical perspective as well, because some, some people need to hear it from 10 different people in 10 different ways, in a bunch of different contexts for things to sort.

Of land well, it's really just because of how bad it can affect, you know, if someone, like I said, like, you don't know how that's going to affect someone if they can't detoxify things or.

First of all, what do you check for? I haven't heard about this, and you got my attention when you said that you do genetic testing to see how well people detoxify.

Yeah, there's basic things that everybody has genetically. Pathways for vitamin D synthesis, pathways for methylation, pathways for what's called gluten, thyroid, glutathione ization, and then our antioxidant pathways. So chronic mold exposure or toxic mold exposure, however we're going to term it, leads to a lot of mitochondrial dysfunction. So that'll affect your. Your oxidative stress pathways. So if your mitochondria are producing a lot of energy, which is. That's their role, they produce a lot of free radicals that has to be detoxified. But if you have limited capacity from just enzymatic activity, it is already a system that's not efficient, much like the filtration you're describing. So if you surpass that by adding more and more toxicity to it, you get more and more mitochondrial dysfunction because it's a balance. What you produce, what you detoxify, what you recycle, that allows the mitochondria to work more efficiently. If you're talking. Talking about glutathionization, that's the thing in your liver, that's the pathway in your liver that actually takes those mold spores, chemicals, whatever you're exposed to and binds, because your liver is basically what detoxifies you. And then you pee it out through your kidneys or you eliminate it through your GI tract. So bile salts are reclaimed in the colon. Many times mycotoxins, which are from molds, are bound to the bile salts. So they're simply reclaimed. So there can be lots of regimens prescribed for someone who is found to have on a toxicity test, a mold exposure, but it's not that easy to clear. And then a lot of people don't methylate. Well, everybody's heard of MTHFR at this point. It's very common in the nomenclature or the vernacular or whatever we're going to say. But that's only one of several genes that control methylation. So about half the population will say, doesn't methylate well. So if you take a B vitamin that is not methylated, it's not doing anything, your body's not going to be able to utilize it. And then for vitamin D and how it relates to immunity, if people don't convert from D2 to D3, which is typically sunlight, or they can't absorb it or transport it, we simply use just vitamin D3, K2, to optimize that pathway. So everything in inflammation you're trying to combat, what all these things lead to, which is chronic inflammatory processes in your body, and they manifest as, you know, in your instance, you're having a problem with your skin. Some people may wife's even worse.

Her eczema is, like, horrible. And for her whole life, she basically doesn't sweat. She can start running and she just turns red and overheats, right?

So the toxins out by sweating, pooping, and peeing. That's it. There are no other ways. Basically, you can say you respirate, but as you've highlighted, you're basically inhaling that you're not actually getting that out as part of your filtration system intrinsically. So when we look at genetics, which is a simple saliva test, we're looking at things to help control inflammation through supporting your immunity. So I know that my patients, who suffer from a lot of problems with chronic inflammatory processes associated with things like breast implant illness, you can have the same exact symptoms without having implants. And that just means your toxicity burden has exceeded your capacity to help, you know, work with that. Just like the filtration system, if there's too much in the environment you're trying to filter, the filter can't overcome it. Right? It just can't do that. So when we try to support immunity, and we have a lot of limitations in, say, absorption, because there's not one test that actually tells you how your gut absorbs something. So we use a lot of liposomal formulations, which are liquid, so they're basically absorbed orally. So I know that you're getting the nutrient. And then, you know, that is a way to level up every person's, you know, immune. If we want to say system or response, however you want to characterize that, I look at supporting that first and then using things like glycine or glucorate to help support just natural detox. And as you support those systems and then improve air quality, fluid intake quality, food quality, those are the ways to impact, you know, recovery. And that's basically our program. Sharp. So you look at genetic testing, toxicity testing, gut health, food sensitivities, and hormone balance to better characterize what's going on with the individual to give them the best wellness plan. So yours is going to be slightly different than your wife's. Obviously your kids will be probably similar because they'll share genetically what's going on and that, you know, is more precise or individualized therapy.

Interesting. Just something I got to dig into. We've been trying a whole bunch of stuff for her and we have the air, the water and the food dialed in.

Then it's more about like detoxification looking, you know, I look at genetics and a tox test and gut health food sensitivity, you can see what I'm doing. Like as, as soon as you start to whittle away at what those things are, then people can make strides. Because you know, the, the hardest thing to change is your behavior. But when you identify it, if someone's really engaged in it, which, you know, our clients are really engaged in getting better, most people want to, you know, really look at and be critical about helping their kids. So if you want to be around for your kids and you want your kids to do well looking at these things, identifying things that can affect them and really harm them developmentally from a neuro standpoint, a performance standpoint, you know, if the food you take in makes you jittery and nervous, then you probably should cut out sugar and caffeine. If you, you know, can't methylate well, which is we find on genetics, then taking methylated B vitamins will help you. You know, things like ACE are antioxidants. Everybody knows about vitamin C is an antioxidant. Most people don't know about the right type of vitamin D. So we do D3K2 and those are just starts to get you on the right.

Is gluten something that everybody should avoid, do you think, or. It depends on the person.

Yeah. So basically, you know, non celiac gluten sensitivity is what I have and you can look at that genetically. I think from an inflammatory standpoint. What I do simply to just level the plain food, plain feel for my patients intrinsically is I just put them on gluten free, dairy free diets because I need to really draw a line in the sand and help them get well as quickly as possible. Because many of them are going on to have a preparatory phase for surgery and then surgery and then recovery. So whatever I can do to optimize them on the front end is what we do. All right, Mike, thank you for hopping on my show today. I really appreciate it. For anybody listening, if you want to get a Jasper, you can use our code DrRob and visit Jasper.com&co co.

I've not been able to get the dot com.

I'm sorry Jasper co. That'll be in the show notes too.

Yeah. And for anybody who's wondering, I'll give you like the. The 45 second of what makes it different is basically we made it out of metal instead of out of plastic. For every 1 ton of plastic you create, it creates 3 tons of CO2. So it's incredibly polluting just to produce it. And it has a short lifespan. These are infinitely recyclable. So these Jasper should be around for decades and decades and we can infinitely recycle them and then they're just bigger. So one Jasper is about five Dyson and then they're just quiet and they're beautiful. So we made something that is really effective but also looks good in your home and works good. And something that's really important to me is the lifetime warranty. So if it ever has an issue. This is the, probably the thing I'm most excited about because I hate when I have a product with a warranty and they make me feel like a liar and jump through hoops to make a warranty claim. The new one's Jasper ever has a problem, we ship them a new one the next day. It has a prepaid shipping label already with it. You put the old one in the box, you take the new one out and then we schedule UPS to pick it up 9am the next day. So yeah, code Dr. Rob, if anybody's interested and if anybody has specific air questions, feel free to email us. Anyone on our team is air quality experts. We don't have like a customer service or a sales department, only air quality experts. People who have done thousands of healthy home assessments themselves. And we're happy to like walk you through things and discuss your situation with you. So we're here to serve.

Thank you very much.

Mike, I'm gonna have to message you about some tests later.

Okay?

All right, take care.