Environmental pollution and longevity: air pollution, noise, light, EMFs, & more (AMA 87 sneak peek)

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Aia. [music]

>> Peter, welcome to another AMA. How you doing? >> Good, thank you. >> Good. So, today we're going to be talking about environmental pollution and all things related to that. So before we do, I think it might be helpful for you to first explain to the listener what exactly do we mean by

environmental pollution and also why does that even belong in a conversation around longevity? >> Um I mean look I think at a at a literal level environmental pollution is the introduction of you know harmful substances or harmful forms of energy which we'll talk about into the environment. Um and I think the word

harmful is doing a lot of work there. We're not just talking about something being unnatural, man-made, or detectable. That wouldn't kind of rise to the level um that we're talking about an exposure that can negatively affect a living system. And I'm going to just pause it for the moment that we are the system of

interest for the purpose of this podcast. So, um the obvious examples which we will discuss uh are things like air pollution u but also things like water pollution, soil contamination. Um, but other things that we're going to touch on are uh forms of pollution that can refer to forms of energy uh or

sensory disruption such as noise and artificial light. Um, now we already did an AMA on chemical pollutants like microplastics, PAS, uh, phalates. Um, and we'll obviously link to that for folks um, so they can go back and hear that. Um, so I'm not going to obviously repeat that stuff. Instead, I want to

focus more on the physical environment um and the exposures that people encounter every day uh in their life.

And I think the big ones here is basically the air that you're breathing, the noise you're hearing, the light that you're exposed to, and the electromagnetic fields around us. Again, the reason I'm not covering water and uh and even soil right now is a lot of that was captured through uh uh

microplastics, PAS and phalates which is generally the vehicle through which those travel. Okay. Then to your second question like why why does this belong in a discussion around longevity? Um well, it it really comes down to again the definition of of what harmful is.

And um you know, some of these exposures are clearly linked to things that we care about, right? Cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, cancer, sleep disruptions, uh even cognitive effects, and and outright mortality.

Again, air pollution is probably the clearest example of this. If you've um ever been to a city with very heavy air pollution um or somewhere during a wildfire event, you don't need a randomized trial to explain to you that breathing there is horrible. Um and and the epidemiology will very quickly

demonstrate that even over a short period of time. Um but I think the more interesting question is what happens well below the obvious threshold, right? And I think that's the area where most people, myself included, are interested to understand this. Um, you know, again, I I don't need to know what happens when