Why Your Air Is Probably Worse Quality Than You Think

…and other items from this week’s health news:

Half of the US has dangerously polluted air

The American Lung Association has published its annual report, and well, it’s not good. In fact, it’s the worst it’s been in over 50 years (since the Clean Air Act became law in 1970).

The worst places of all were listed as follows:

1. Bakersfield-Delano, Calif.
2. Visalia, Calif.
3. Fresno-Hanford-Corcoran, Calif.
4. Eugene-Springfield, Ore.
5. Los Angeles-Long Beach, Calif.
6. Detroit-Warren-Ann Arbor, Mich.
7. San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, Calif.
8. Houston-Pasadena, Texas
9. Cleveland-Akron-Canton, Ohio
10. Fairbanks-College, Ark.

…but the air pollution is far from being isolated to those places, with 156,000,000 people, nearly half of the US’s population, living in places with dangerously polluted air. While in principle, living in rural areas will mean less immediate pollution from traffic and industry, the far-reaching effects of wildfire smokes (spreading upwards from California or down from Canada) have affected a large area of the US.

To make matters worse, the new government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently announced it will remove 31 important environmental regulations:

❝The EPA is at risk—the agency that is protecting our health—through staff cuts, funding cuts. The regulations that have cleaned up our air over time are at risk of being cut. If we see all those cuts become reality, it’s gonna have a real impact on people’s health by making the air they breathe dirtier.❞

Read in full: Nearly half of Americans breathe unhealthy air, new report finds

Related: You May Have More Air Pollution In Your Home Than In The Street

Don’t let your life go to waist

Why do we have a metabolic slump in middle age? Research shows how it has to do with aging stem cells doing their best to try to keep up with the demands placed upon them, and ends up triggering a new type of adult stem cell, which enhances the body’s production of new fat cells, especially around the belly.

❝While it’s well-known that fat cells grow larger with age, the scientists suspected that white adipose tissue also expanded by producing new fat cells, meaning it may have an unlimited potential to grow.❞

Understanding this may be key to new therapies to prevent or reverse that:

Read in full: Why our waistlines expand in middle age—aging stem cells shift into overdrive

Related: Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It

Kelpieburger, anyone?

It’s well-established that most people would do well to eat more plants and less meat. While it’s certainly not necessary for good health to go all-vegan or even all-vegetarian, as a general rule of thumb: we must eat more plants, and ideally limit animal products to avoid red and/or processed meat, and unfermented dairy, while keeping any remaining animal products to a moderate intake.

So, there’s been a rise in recent years of meat substitutes, and to say that some of them are more/less healthy than others is an understatement; some are high-quality nutrient-dense superfoods, and others are highly-processed often-allergenic frankenfoods that contain a day’s recommended amount of sodium in a bite or two.

We’ve written before about seaweed (link below), and how certain seaweeds have nutrients that are usually only found in animal products—including vitamin B12, and including EPA, the most readily-usable form of omega-3 (most plants have only ALA, which is versatile and can be converted by our body, but it’s nice to have the EPA ready-made).

So, with this in mind, it’s great to see that kelp (one such seaweed) is now being used to make lab-grown meat!

PS: about that kelpieburger, that’s just this writer being silly; whereas kelp is a kind of seaweed, a kelpie is a creature from Scottish mythology, and is traditionally more likely to eat humans than be eaten by us, and is unrelated to the seaweed, the creature’s name being instead derived from the Scottish Gaelic “cailpeach“.

Read in full: Turning to kelp for sustainable lab-grown meat

Related: A Deeper Dive Into Seaweed

Take care!