Is bad air quality slowly harming us? (with Richard Bruns)

Oct 11, 2023 1h 24m 13 insights Episode Page ↗
Spencer Greenberg speaks with Richard Bruns about cost-benefit analysis, improving air quality, and drug regulation. They discuss the health impacts of PM 2.5, practical air filtration methods, and how the FDA operates, including ideas for reform.
Actionable Insights

1. Upgrade Home Air Filters

Install Merv 13 or better filters in your home’s HVAC system. This is a cheap and easy way to significantly boost your health by trapping 95%+ of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) that can cause chronic damage, strokes, and heart attacks.

2. Investigate Home for Illness

If you experience a mysterious illness, investigate your home for subtle air quality issues like hidden mold, paint dust, gas leaks, or chemical outgassing. These factors can severely impact health for sensitive individuals, even without visible signs.

3. Avoid One-Size-Fits-All Diets

Be wary of any dietary advice that claims to be universally optimal. Individual nutritional needs vary greatly based on genetics, family history, and current diet, meaning what benefits one person could harm another.

4. Navigate Bureaucracy Mindfully

When working within a bureaucracy, understand its rules and purpose (producing predictable, repetitive actions) but actively resist getting ‘programmed’ by them. Cultivate mindfulness to pause and question automatic assumptions, maintaining your capacity for individual initiative and critical thinking.

5. Build DIY Air Purifier

Construct a Corsi-Rosenthal box using four Merv 13 (or better) filters and a box fan, especially for gatherings or during respiratory virus season. This setup moves significantly more air than standalone units, effectively clearing viruses and other particles from a room.

6. Run HVAC Fan Constantly

If you have good air filters, keep your HVAC fan setting on ‘on’ instead of ‘auto’. This continuously recirculates and filters the air in your home, even when not actively heating or cooling.

7. Open Windows for Airflow

Open windows as much as possible when the weather is good and there are no outdoor air quality events. This flushes out indoor pollutants from cooking, chemicals, and materials, and reduces CO2 levels, improving overall indoor air quality.

8. Improve School Air Quality

Advocate for or invest in better HVAC systems in schools. Improved ventilation rates in schools have been shown to significantly reduce sickness and absence among children, protecting their developing bodies from mold and particulate matter.

9. Optimize Within Bureaucratic Rules

View bureaucratic rules not as unchangeable reality, but as optimization constraints. This mindset can help you find innovative and more efficient ways to achieve important goals within the system, without violating the established guidelines.

10. Advocate Tiered Drug Approval

Support a tiered drug approval system that allows conditional access to drugs after earlier clinical phases, with increasing levels of evidence required for broader coverage (e.g., for insurance or mandatory coverage). This could accelerate access to beneficial treatments while maintaining safety standards.

11. Demand Clear Side Effect Labels

Advocate for more numerate and transparent side effect labeling on medicines. Current labels often list effects without indicating their frequency or severity, or whether they are more common than placebo, making informed patient decisions difficult.

12. Be Skeptical of Supplements

Maintain a general skepticism towards most dietary supplements. While some individuals may benefit from specific supplements, many people waste money or do themselves more harm than good, as many products are placebos or unnecessary for those with a healthy diet.

13. Counter Placebo Effect

Cultivate skepticism when trying new health interventions or self-experiments to counteract the placebo effect. Running numerous self-experiments can reveal that most interventions fail, helping to prevent misattributing positive fluctuations to ineffective treatments.