How to Reduce Indoor Air Pollution: Dr. Karen Lee's Five Tips

As winter approaches, many of us are getting our home maintenance done to prepare for the cold weather. To prevent cold air from coming in and to save energy, you might seal holes or cracks, caulk around the window frame, place draft dodgers on the window sills, wrap window air conditioners, and replace old sealants around the door frames. Some of you may even keep the windows shut the entire winter in trying to keep your energy costs down.

If you’re like most Americans and spend over 90% of your time in your home and the car, you will be exposed to indoor air pollution. By sealing your home airtight for the winter, you just vacuum-sealed the pollutants inside too. Studies have shown an unfortunate connection between health problems – like asthma and cardiovascular problems – and indoor pollution. So what should you do? Here are five tips on how to reduce indoor air pollution. But first, some facts on indoor air pollution.

Indoor Pollution

While you might think pollution is worse outside — smog, ozone, or pollens, especially in summer – the truth is, indoor pollution in homes, offices, and buildings can be worse than the outside. Indoor air pollutants like lead, toxic gasses, chemicals, fire-retardants, radon, volatile chemicals, and carcinogens can be found in furniture, carpets, clothes, fragrances (health and beauty products), and cleaning solutions. Also, many pollutants are tracked from outside into the home on shoes, pet hair, and even our clothes. They can be in new mattresses or furniture, flooring materials, or a new coat of paint on walls.

On average, American people spend more than 90 percent of their time indoors in homes, offices, gyms, schools, and cars. Unfortunately, these indoor places are usually full of dust, dust mites, particles, chemicals, toxic gasses, mold, and microbiomes. You can read more about the 10 Common Toxic Chemicals to Avoid here, here, and here.

These toxins can enter our bodies from air and dust when we breathe and contaminated surfaces that we touch, and transfer them to our food or mouth with our dusty hands. According to the Endocrine Society’s study, some of these chemicals can contribute to health problems like reproductive problems, obesity, cancer, hormonal imbalance, thyroid problems, cardiovascular issues.

Furthermore, children are particularly affected by the indoor contamination because not only are they still developing but they are in close contact with the floor, crawling, playing on the floor, touching everything with their hands and putting them in their mouths. Even a little bit of exposure, if continued, can create health problems later on in life.

Microscopic dust mites (a major allergen) mold, and pet dander can create a highly allergic environment for those with allergies. So what should you do? Take these five easy steps and eliminate indoor air pollution as much as you can.

How To Reduce Indoor Air Pollution

1. Keep it out – don’t bring the outside pollutants in by wearing shoes inside. Leave the shoes outside the door. Use a Welcome mat for people to wipe their shoes clean before entering. Better yet, have your guests remove their shoes too. If you need to have workers come inside, offer them non-slip over-the-shoe booties to use and dispose of them after use.
   Circulate the air – open the window at least once a day to exchange the outside air and inside air. Opening the window also reduces moisture to prevent mold. You can also use a dehumidifier to reduce humidity. Opening the window also lets good microbiome in to counteract the bad microbiome for healthier air inside.
2. Keep out the smoke – no smoking inside the home. Period. Don’t burn food or use Teflon coated cookware that creates toxic fumes (PFOA). If you don’t have a vent, install a cooking vent that exhausts the air OUT and not just recirculates the air inside.
3. Purify the air – use a quality air purification system like Intellipure (see more info below) to filter out micro-fine particles.
4. Fragrance-Free – do not use artificial fragrance in ANY products that can potentially contain thousands of chemicals – some are carcinogenic and some endocrine disrupting. Use fragrance-free detergents and fabric softeners. Use furniture polish, air fresheners, and sprays that are natural and void of artificial fragrance.
5. Bring nature IN – use plants to filter the air. NASA studied how plants and what types of indoor plants can help filter the indoor air and found these helpful tips. So bring nature in and have indoor plants in your home. If you are sensitive to mold, though, be careful not to make the indoor air too humid as soil can contain mold.

My Families' Allergies And Intellipure

My children have allergies to dust and dust mites. They also suffer from food allergies and the one way they exhibit their symptoms is Eczema. My son also suffers from Asthma when an allergic reaction occurs to environmental allergens. Recently, we found out my son is allergic to wool - the carpet in his room is wool! Why did we install wool carpet? We thought it was better than synthetic fibers. We thought wool would repel dust mites. We thought it was naturally stain-resistant. Well, we had our reasons in the right places, but we had no idea he was allergic to wool….and we wondered why he kept having flare-ups. Obviously, the air filtration unit he had in his room wasn’t effective enough to filter out the fine particles from the wool carpet.

So when Intellipure asked me to do a review of their new fine particle air filtration machine, I was really excited to learn more. Their headquarters is located in Upstate NY, my home state! So of course, I said ‘YES!” and they sent me a unit for me to try. As you know about my reviews, my opinion is my own and of course, I’d only write about products I believe in.

Intellipure Ultrafine 468:

I will say right off the back, that this unit is not cheap. But, you get what you pay for. In the past, I spent way too much money buying various air filtration units that turned out to be junk or even toxic for our health.

I don’t even want to know how much money I’ve wasted on ALL the air filtration systems we had. So when you see a unit that’s at Bed Bath and Beyond or Brookstone, be careful what you read or hear. By just reading the product specs in the stores, you don’t know how effective they are. You have to talk to the manufacturer or a salesperson, and Intellipure answered every question I had.

Here is a list of reasons why I trust Intellipure.

• A patented Disinfecting Filtration System (DFS).
• Products are tested to meet or exceed HEPA standards.
• Combats all three pollutant categories – Micro-organisms, Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), and Particles
• Captures 99% of airborne particles down to 0.007 microns in size, this includes ultrafine particles, virus, bacteria, fungi, and mold.
• This machine has a 6-stage VOC adsorption filter that captures various sizes of particles. The filters need to be changed once or twice a year from the company’s website.
• Noise level – it has a “Sleep” mode option so you can sleep better.
• Products are energy-efficient
• Removal of airborne odors and gases
• This system is currently used in hospitals, medical clean rooms, government buildings, and military applications.
• And because the parent company has been around for decades in this industry, I trust their commitment to manufacturing safe and effective machines for our health.

So let me ask you. You eat organic food, take supplements, and possibly grow your own food. It’s time to take care of your indoor pollution too, as it’s an integral part of your overall holistic health. You need to check out Intellipure, a professional-grade air filtration system for better indoor air quality. No cheap knock offs will do because your family’s health depends on it.

Blog article written by Dr. Karen S. Lee

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