How The Environment Affects Our Health

What is the connection between being healthy, and having a place to be healthy in? Very few books about longevity talk about the environment, and even fewer studies on the environment talk about longevity. Truth is: no one has really put the two together.

Environmental specialist Douglas Mulhall has uncovered that there is much more than what meets the eye when it comes to how the environment affects our lives. Our environment plays a significant role which is often overlooked when talking about health factors.

“The environment is putting a hard stop on how long and well you live. Everybody calls it Mother Nature but actually the environment trains your immune system to turn against you in the long run. This happens due to something called epigenetics; changing how your genes behave without changing your DNA,” says Mulhall.

The environment affects our well-being in so many ways, and not all of them are beneficial. So, how do we fix this problem?

Mulhall goes on to say, “Everybody talks about our impact on the environment but what about its impacts on us? Everything from stealthy infection to toxic metals, radiation and chronic noise is triggering our immune system to try and fix us the wrong way. Tools like inflammation actually work against us in the long run by hardening our arteries. Instead of focusing on the symptoms of this problem like almost all standard therapies do, we should focus on reversing the damage that a misguided immune response wreaks. A few innovators have actually done this and as a result patient health is improving especially with cardiovascular conditions. More attention is required to scaling up those successes.”

If you are interested in learning more about the role our environment plays in keeping us sick or healthy I’d be happy to connect you with regular media contributor, Douglas Mulhal. Douglas has been featured on A&E's Modern Marvels series Future Tech, CNN, NBC News, CBS News.and more.