Our environment is where we live, play, and work. It’s where we spend most of our time, so it significantly impacts the quality of our lives. If we live in a healthy environment that supports our lifestyle, then that’s a great environment. However, if our environment does not support our chosen lifestyle, then it’s not the environment we should spend time in.
I’ll offer two examples, both of which we have lived. And I have to say that while we were happy to change our current lifestyle and environment at the time, there are things we love about both lifestyles.
Example 1: The Urban Big-City Experience
The first example is just as the title states: we lived just outside of the Chicago city limits in a village called Oak Park. Our purposefully chosen lifestyle was to enjoy the culture and everything else a large city has to offer. We had easy access to public transportation, which took us to professional sporting events, theater showings, high-end shopping (we just window-shopped), fantastic museums, and the lakefront. Oak Park was very walkable and had more restaurants and shopping venues than we could ever take advantage of. At the time, it satisfied our chosen lifestyle.
Example 2: Our Current Healthy Environment
Once we retired from the corporate world, we wanted a lower-stress lifestyle with a high level of physical activity. To live that lifestyle, we needed a healthy environment with ample opportunities for physical activity. It needed to be walkable and be free of things that cause us stress. You can imagine such an environment as one that offers bike and hiking trails, public transportation, plenty of green space, and is nearly free of traffic congestion. Without these features, we wouldn’t be able to live our chosen lifestyle, which we modeled after the healthy content here.
If instead, our environment doesn’t have dedicated biking and hiking trails, then we aren’t likely to enjoy the physical activities we desire. And if traffic congestion is the norm and public transportation isn’t readily available, then our goal of a low-stress lifestyle isn’t achievable.
Change Is Hard
Changing our environment seems like a simple choice, but it’s not. We observe people who continue to live in an environment that isn’t safe or doesn’t support their chosen lifestyle. They would rather be somewhere else but can’t quite make the move. Why? Mostly, change is hard for people. Change is so difficult that there’s an entire industry around change management.
I worked at a Fortune 500 company for several years. We went through some tough times and needed to change our corporate culture. At first, we tried doing it ourselves, but failed. We then created a group that oversaw change management. And that group came up with things we never thought of to manage the change and create buy-in from the employees. We then found success.
Think, for a moment, about all the changes you’ve attempted in your life. It’s worth jotting a few of them down. How many of these changes persisted and became lifestyle changes? Examples are starting a healthier diet, bike riding, or jogging. Or you decided to learn to play a musical instrument. More to the point, maybe you changed your environment by moving to a new place because your previous environment didn’t support your chosen lifestyle. How many of these did you stick with? More importantly if they didn’t stick, why?
The number one reason changes fail to stick is because there wasn’t a good vision and execution plan to start with. To help you develop a vision of what a healthy environment is for you, the rest of this article focuses on environmental elements that support healthy lifestyles. You can then use these elements as the foundation for your potential move to a healthy environment.
Excellent Healthcare - A Critical Element of a Healthy Environment
We moved a lot during our lifetime. From college to a job in lower Michigan. Then to graduate school in upper Michigan. After graduation we moved to Indiana for a doctorate. Then to Kansas, back to Illinois (a couple of times in the Chicago area), and finally to Wisconsin. Except for the last move, I don’t think we considered the quality of available healthcare. We looked for shopping, restaurants, and entertainment opportunities. And, of course, a paycheck.
I would say that most of the places (except for the Michigan upper peninsula) had adequate healthcare. And we thought that adequate healthcare was acceptable. As we prepared for retirement, we looked for opportunities near the mountains of North Carolina. Healthcare, at best, would have been adequate.
Then we struggled through cancer. Chemo treatments once every three weeks, plus doctor checkups every few days in between treatments. The outcome was successful. Very successful. But that was only because we lived in an area where excellent healthcare was available. We not only had an oncologist, but an oncology team that specialized in the specific blood cancer I had.
Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center helped us not only survive stage 4 blood cancer but return to a normal life post-chemo. If we had still lived in almost any of the other places, the “adequate healthcare” available to us would have not offered the positive outcome we experienced.
From that moment, we understood the reason for excellent healthcare. It’s not for the common colds and fevers, sprained ankles, and other minor and non-life-threatening ailments. It’s for that diagnosis of a life-threatening disease – heart and lungs, cancers, brain disorders.
Healthy Air to Breathe
Substances you need to live, like air and water, are the next two priorities on this list of requirements for a healthy environment. Air is a bit complex because there are so many unhealthy toxins that can pollute the air we breathe. And then those toxins are in our lungs, which can then transfer into our bloodstream.
Air is one of the things we need to live. But if that air is polluted with toxins, then we are continually damaging our bodies. We think of air pollutants coming from exhaust pipes and factory chimneys. Those have become less toxic because of environmental regulations and pollution control technology, but if we live in a densely populated area we are continually exposed to unhealthy levels of pollutants in the air.
There are three primary pollutants we need to be aware. These are ozone, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter. A fourth pollutant is a group of toxic chemicals that we use in our homes.
Ozone Levels
If you decide you want to live in a densely populated region, then pay attention to ozone level warnings. Ozone isn’t a pollutant in the traditional sense in that it doesn’t come directly from a manufacturing or combustion process. Instead, it forms at ground level when sunlight hits pollutants from combustion engines (cars and trucks).
Ozone is one of the five pollutants included in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality Index (AQI). If the traffic level is high, then there are plenty of ground-level pollutants. Add in the sun and warmer temperatures, and you have the recipe for creating ozone and increasing the AQI to unhealthy levels.
Ozone, even at low levels, causes respiratory disease and is especially harmful to children and people with respiratory diseases like asthma.
Carbon Monoxide (CO)
Don’t confuse carbon monoxide (CO) with carbon dioxide (CO2). Many do, including news agencies. When we breathe air polluted with carbon monoxide, our body replaces the oxygen in our red blood cells with CO. This causes serious tissue damage that can lead to death.
Carbon monoxide is a pollutant that develops when burning hydrocarbon fuels. What in the world is hydrocarbon fuel? The short answer is almost anything that burns – charcoal, propane, wood, gasoline, diesel fuel, and natural gas.
For most of us, the CO poisoning risk is in our homes. For example, if your natural gas furnace has pinholes in the heat exchanger, then CO can leak into your house. You can’t smell it, taste it, or see it. The CO concentration builds up in your home until you don’t wake up in the morning.
Another example is using your natural gas or propane burner to heat your house without proper ventilation. Again, this is a combustion source that creates CO – it will again build up until it reaches a level that kills you.
And that happens to about 420 people each year. But the more compelling number is that over 100,000 people end up in the emergency room each year for CO poisoning.
Fortunately, there’s an easy step for prevention – install CO detectors on every level of your house near each sleeping area. If a CO detector sounds the alarm, leave the house immediately. Have the house ventilated and the problem identified and fixed before returning to the house.
Particulate Matter (PM)
Particulate matter is the one pollutant you can see. It’s formed from small particles in the air. So, if you see smoke or a yellow haze in the air, you’re seeing particulate matter. Particulate matter is categorized by the size of the particles. The larger particles are categorized as PM10 (10 microns in size) and the smaller particles are PM2.5 (2.5 microns in size). The smaller particles can find their way deeper into your lung tissues and, therefore, cause more damage.
Concerning levels of particulate matter used to come from diesel engines. But the pollution controls on trucks and buses have evolved to the point where they are very good. There’s no reason today to see a dark exhaust plume coming from a truck engine. If there is, then there’s either something wrong with the engine/pollution control system in that truck or it’s a very old truck.
But wildfires have become problematic for particulate matter. Last summer, 2023, forest fires in Canada spewed tons of PM into the air. The PM rode the wind patterns to various areas of the U.S. The levels were so high that it drove the AQI to unhealthy levels, even for healthy people.
High PM levels can cause a variety of cardiovascular illnesses, including heart attacks, irregular heart rates, and aggravated asthma attacks. We certainly didn’t need any of that, so we spent several days indoors with the furnace fan running to filter the air. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot you can do about it. Just stay indoors when the AQI is at unhealthy levels for you.
Toxic Chemicals in the Home
These are mostly under your control. The downside is there are going to be chemicals in your home. Most of these aren’t toxic, but you need to be aware of the toxic ones.
Do you have old non-stick cookware? Get rid of it. The chemicals used to make the coating, called PFCs, can disrupt the immune system and cause some types of cancer. I suggest replacing it with a cast iron skillet, which we use at least once a day.
The next item is fragrances. Fragrances are made from substances called phthalates, and some evidence suggests these cause developmental disorders. The better choice is to choose fragrance-free cleaners.
The next chemical you have some control over is flame retardants. These are chemicals added to clothing, furniture, and other materials to slow the spread of a fire. While that’s a good thing, the chemicals do have negative health effects. Try to avoid buying materials with polyurethane foam. Instead, buy materials that have cotton, polyester (oddly enough), and wool.
And then there are the day-to-day cleaners we use – ammonia and bleach are two that can cause havoc with our eyes, skin, and respiratory system. If your goal in using these is cleaning as opposed to disinfecting, then distilled white vinegar is a good option. Just know that it won’t kill viruses, although it is effective in killing E. coli, salmonella, and listeria.
By making a few wise choices (mopping the floor with a white vinegar solution instead of fragrant ammonia-based cleaners, for example), we can create and maintain a healthy environment in which we spend most of our time.
Carbon Dioxide – Is It Poisonous?
Even though many politicians would have you believe otherwise, carbon dioxide (or CO2) is not poisonous to the human body. At least at the levels we’re exposed to.
But it can cause asphyxiation at very high levels, and these are levels you won’t find in the air you breathe. Some fire suppression systems that protect electrical systems oftentimes use CO2 – when a fire is detected, the suppression system floods the area with CO2, which then asphyxiates the fire by pushing oxygen out of the area. If you happen to be in the room when CO2 floods the area, you’ll die from asphyxiation along with the fire.
Nerve sensors throughout our body detect CO2 in our blood. These sensors then provide feedback to our brain control systems to increase or decrease our breathing rate. And CO2 is a byproduct of our muscles working.
The point of this section is to dispel some of the false information out there – I’ve read articles that confuse carbon monoxide (poisonous) with carbon dioxide (definitely NOT poisonous). We don’t need (or have) CO2 detectors in our homes. But we should have CO detectors in our homes.
Notice that I’m specifically not discussing climate change – and that’s because this site isn’t about that.
Clean Water: A Crucial Component of a Safe Environment
If you’ve wondered about how clean your drinking water is, you’ve most likely heard of the debacle in Flint, Michigan. The crisis began when the city changed its water supply from Detroit’s supply system to the Flint River in an unfortunate cost-saving measure.
Switching water supplies wasn’t the disaster – but what was a disaster was the lack of treatment and testing of the water pumped to residents. City leaders dropped the ball on a critical component of a safe environment and a healthy life. The city leaders claimed the water was safe. Then, when unacceptable bacteria levels were found in the water supply, the city answered by adding more chlorine. Unfortunately, the overloaded chlorine levels created a cancer-causing chemical that was passed on to the residents. Not only that, but lead levels were also above the federal lead action level of 15 parts per billion.
That level doesn’t sound like a lot, but the EPA doesn’t publish a “safe” upper limit, because there is no safe upper limit. Lead is especially detrimental to developing brains, i.e., children. Health-related impacts include lower IQs, stunted physical growth, cardiovascular disease, and anemia. In adults, higher doses of lead have been linked to cardiovascular and kidney diseases.
If you live in an older home, you should have your water tested. Even if the water from the treatment plant is clean, lead may leech into it from the supply system, including the feed to your home.
Water from a Well
But what if your water comes from a well? Have it periodically tested. You have no idea what agricultural or other chemicals are leeching into the water supply. And, contrary to popular belief, the water isn’t filtered by the ground.
Our bodies are 60% water. We drink it every day of our lives. If that water is contaminated with lead and other toxins, then our body is contaminated with those same toxins. And those toxins can cause a host of health problems, including cancer.
What You Can (and Should) Do
What can you do? If the supply from your treatment plant or well is contaminated, then drink and cook with only bottled water until the issue is resolved. We use a Brita water filter for all our drinking water, just in case.
As a last resort, if you don’t see any hope of receiving clean water, then move.
Low Crime: Part of a Healthy Environment
Crime has become more of a hot-button topic since the pandemic. It seems crime is everywhere, and efforts to reduce or eliminate crime may not be as effective as some of us would like. So, it’s likely that wherever you live, there is at least some crime (robbery, carjackings, muggings, and, potentially, worse).
At this point, it’s not a matter of living somewhere with no crime. Because crime is everywhere. The real question is: do you feel safe living your life where you live? If the answer to that question is yes, then you’re in good shape. But if the answer is no, then, if you have the means, you should move to a place where you do feel safe.
If you don’t have the means to move, then you need to focus on your safety before you can even begin to focus on the healthy lifestyle discussed in this blog. Learn how to defend yourself, which usually includes running away.
The first self-defense lesson we teach in Tae Kwon Do is to run away if possible. You only engage the threat if there is no other choice. When you are confronted with a knife, gun, or other weapon, that’s not the time to be a hero. Comply and let the police deal with it after the fact. You can replace your phone and any other material object you have, but a knife to the gut can end your life.
Opportunities To Practice Your Skill/Trade
You’ve gone to college or a trade school and learned a skill. Now you’re ready to earn a living practicing that trade. But if there aren’t any opportunities where you live, then you cannot earn much of a living.
Or else you spend more time than you want to commute to a job site. I know of some people who spend 2 hours one way getting to work. That’s half a workday spent commuting. You might be able to do that in the short term, but can you continue that commute over the long term?
Hi, I’m Kirby Chapman, the creator behind The Healthy League. You can read about