[00:00:00] Aaron Goodman: You are listening to the Chemical Sensitivity Podcast. I'm podcast creator Aaron Goodman. There were years when I barely went anywhere. The Multiple Chemical Sensitivity or chemical intolerance was so severe I couldn't bring my kids anywhere. Whenever I did, I had to wear a bright pink mask that protected me from fragrances on people's clothes.

From air fresheners and cleaning products and a lot more, I stopped going to get my haircut because of all the chemicals and started buzzing it myself. Other times when I dropped my kids at school, I had to wear the pink mask again in open areas outside of their classrooms. The smell of laundry detergent and fabric softener is staggering and it would trigger a reaction that made it impossible for me to get any work done during the day, let alone have a clear thought.

I think a lot of other parents thought I was wearing the mask because of COVID, and I could tell by their expressions they thought I was over the top. Some stopped talking to me. Some have never looked at me since. They even stopped inviting our kids to play with their children into their birthday parties.

I'm talking about families we connected with. They felt like friends. I felt awkward, singled out. I wore the mask walking my kids to school one day, close to our house, a young boy ran out from his home and caught up with us. I didn't know him. My parents wanna know why you're wearing that thing, he shouted.

We kept going and I haven't been by that place since. I wonder what they were thinking inside our kids' judo club. I wore the mask too while I watched them. Some parents gave me the familiar strange looks. I got in the habit of holding the mask up to my face, taking a breath, and putting the mask aside, bringing it back.

Only after I exhaled. I told myself I might not stand out as much that way. Fortunately, the judo class moved to a space that has a lot less fragrance. I can be in there most of the time, and I even practice judo with my kids a few times a week. The classes are made up of kids, teenagers, and some other parents and adults, and most of the time, as I say, I can manage with the odd odor coming off of someone's judo clothes.

I just try not to go near them. Lately, some teenagers have been coming with fragrance recently. It filled up the whole space. It's a large room at the community center and everyone must have smelled it. I asked a few teenagers who were close to each other if they were wearing fragrance, and one said she was, and her mother leaned in from the sideline.

I've been trying to talk with her. She said, It's body spray. Of course. And since then, folks online who listen to the Chemical Sensitivity Podcast have told me about smell maxing, where people, often teenagers and preteens, wear potent body sprays and fragrances. It's even been written about in The New York Times and Business Insider, and a publication called Jing Daily came out with an article titled “Will Smell Maxing Take Off in China.”

I didn't plan on talking about smell maxing here, but I wanted to share a few thoughts about asking or not asking people if they'd be willing to not use fragrance in public spaces. Because of the way it impacts me, it impacts us so severely. I know everyone's reactions are different. Mine feel like I'm sent to another planet.

I hardly recognize myself. It can happen so quickly. My mood can go from positive to negative, and three hours after an exposure, whether I'm sleeping or standing, my ankles start tingling. Then my brain shifts. I go from alert to foggy. The backs of my eyes feel heavy. My tongue and lips swell. I get thirsty and nothing can help with each breath.

I long to get back to normal. After a recent exposure at the judo class to a sweet but deceptively powerful perfume, I had a reaction that lasted two days. If I could count all the 24-hour and two-day periods when I've been under due to this illness, it would probably add up to months, maybe years, but still each reaction catches me off guard.

I'm always surprised by the extent of the way my body responds. Maybe if it were one symptom, I don't know, would that be any easier? If it were migraines, I doubt it. Or difficulty breathing. I doubt it too. The cluster of effects—it almost flattens me. You know what I'm talking about. Who is the culprit?

I've considered asking folks who come smelling sweet or spicy if they'd consider changing their laundry products or using no fragrance. I recently brought a bottle of natural Scentry Washington detergent for one of the adults who practices judo. He was grateful and uses it. Uh, it was such a relief. It wasn't easy asking.

We all know that, and we all have our own places where we run into these things, where we're hit with walls of fragrance, whether it's family, friends, people at work, or with neighbors. These conversations are never easy, and if you're like me, I bet you mull over these decisions—the words to use, the timing to ask—for a long time.

I put up gently worded flyers where we used to live, asking people if they wouldn't mind using dryer balls instead of dryer sheets. The flyers were torn down and someone threatened to sue me. We all know people who've been threatened by neighbors for asking these things. It doesn't matter how polite we are, how we try to explain how much these toxic chemicals affect us.

Too often we're met with hostility. We're made to feel it's our problem. A recent guest on the Chemical Sensitivity Podcast said we're all interconnected. What we use doesn't just affect ourselves. Another guest on the podcast said, If people choose to wear fragrance to a shared workplace or place of leisure, the classroom, wherever, it's a political statement.

And I think about that sometimes. To me, that kind of choice signals a level of self-centeredness, a willful blindness, and asking for change can feel daunting. I wrestle with when and how. And with whom? Do I think the teenagers at judo will listen? Will they care enough to make a change? I wish I did, but I sense their negativity since I raised it the first time.

It's such a shame. Thankfully, the one mother asked her daughter to come fragrance free. Several years ago in a university classroom, I spoke up. I asked the 10 or 12 people around a table if they'd be willing to come to school without fragrance. There was one person whose fragrance was very strong, and I didn't wanna single them out.

I could have asked the instructors if they'd be willing to ask, but I felt it was my battle. I felt empowered. I needed something, and I asked clearly. Without apologizing. The request wasn't exactly heated, but the individual stopped attending class. I admit it. I'm not always strong. I don't always have faith that asking will change anything.

A family member visited us years ago, and even though I'd repeatedly communicated with them before they arrived, asking to come scent free, fragrance free, they chose to use their own fragrance products. It gave me brain fog. I reacted in a lot of other ways. I didn't say anything. I didn't think it would lead to a positive result.

And thankfully they haven't been back. And if they do, I'll try again. You are listening to the Chemical Sensitivity Podcast. I'm Aaron Goodman. I'm a journalist, documentary maker, and researcher, but I'm also someone who's lived with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity or MCS for years. MCS, also called chemical intolerance, Toxicant-Induced Loss of Tolerance, or TILT, and idiopathic environmental illness, affects millions around the world.

It’s a condition that makes everyday life extremely challenging and unpredictable. Fragrance, air freshener, fresh paint, scented laundry products on people's clothing, and a lot more trigger exhaustion, brain fog, muscle pain, rashes, and a wide range of symptoms. And yet, for all its impacts, MCS remains largely invisible. Doctors dismiss it. Employers rarely accommodate it. Even friends and family struggle to understand.

This podcast aims to change that. We dive into the latest research, share real stories, and explore how people navigate life with an illness many refuse to see.

This episode is called “Fragrance and Indoor Air Quality.” I'm speaking with Jeffrey Siegel, PhD, Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Toronto. Professor Siegel holds joint appointments at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences.

Professor Siegel is an expert on healthy and sustainable buildings, ventilation and indoor air quality, control of indoor particulate matter, and more.

[00:10:25] Jeffrey Siegel: We're fundamentally in this situation where there are new chemicals coming in all the time, new fragrances coming in all the time that are being added to the indoor environment, but it's like this constant whack-a-mole where even if a concern is associated with one chemical, it's simply replaced with the next cheapest chemical and.

I'm not so sure that people are even able to be protected.

[00:10:52] Aaron Goodman: You'll hear Professor Siegel explore the impacts of indoor pollutants, including from personal care, consumer products, and fragrance, toxins and cognitive function, the effectiveness of masking and air filtration, the hazards of essential oil, and how we might improve indoor air quality.

Professor Siegel, thanks so much for joining me. 

Jeffrey Siegel: Yeah, thanks for the invitation. 

Aaron Goodman: I wanted to start off by asking you a little bit about your motivation, perhaps. Was there a moment in your early life or in your studies when you thought, yeah, this is what I want to spend the rest of my career focusing on?
Why is indoor air quality. Of supreme importance for you?

[00:11:37] Jeffrey Siegel: It's a great question, and I think like a lot of people, I would have to say that I at least partially stumbled into it more than anything else. So basically when I was going to university, I was interested in environmental issues broadly. And in my early years in university, I was interested in both energy and in water.

And uh, one of my first kind of real summer jobs was at an organization called the Grassroots Alliance for a Solar Pennsylvania, which their name is and was a misnomer. But what we did that summer was measurements of indoor air quality and energy use in Philadelphia row houses. That got me really interested more in buildings and how buildings work.

It was mostly from an energy perspective actually, that I was interested. And then I got into my master's degree and I was studying energy use in buildings and I started to see a little bit more about indoor air quality. And one of the things I realized is there was lots of people studying energy and really few people studying indoor air quality.

And the problems were all really interesting. It is like the wild west. There's, everything's unexplored. We don't even know sometimes what questions to ask. And that was really interesting and exciting to me. I guess early in my career I did, let's say a little bit of energy work, but mostly indoor air quality work, and for the past, let's say 20 years, it's been all indoor air quality.

[00:13:03] Aaron Goodman: Yeah, and you mentioned the people who are living in, I think the word you used is row houses. So I assume this is some form of public housing.

[00:13:11] Jeffrey Siegel: Some of it was just the typical housing stocks. So if you've been to Philadelphia, it's a lot of three story homes where they're attached on both sides.

Unless you happen to be on an endy unit. From a building science perspective, they're very interesting because we share air. With our neighbors. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And attached buildings. Mm-hmm. And I think we'll probably get into some of those issues, but one of the really interesting things about indoor air quality in buildings is that you have to really understand the building, but you also have to really understand the neighboring buildings and the neighboring spaces and how they connect.

[00:13:44] Aaron Goodman: Yeah. And did you have in those early years, empathy for folks? Or you thought, yeah, there's a lot of people who are struggling here and I want my science to help

[00:13:54] Jeffrey Siegel: people. There's certainly a strong element of that in my work, but I think that also like coupled with that mm-hmm. There is this really important issue of traditionally people who study indoor air don't come from a building's perspective.

Mm-hmm. And so what I was seeing a lot of was. People doing brilliant indoor air quality work, but it was kind of divorced from the context in which it exists. Mm-hmm. And so many of the problems when I talked to people that they were having were because of the building. And so I felt like there was a really interesting opportunity here to take.

Knowledge of buildings, which is a relatively well developed science in a lot of the world. And then couple that with indoor air quality and really understand, like really be able to come up with solutions that actually worked for people.

[00:14:49] Aaron Goodman: Hmm. Let's talk about Multiple Chemical Sensitivity for a second.

'cause this is the Multiple Chemical Sensitivity podcast. I know you're not an expert in MCS, but you know, knowing the potency of chemicals, the harms that they cause, do you think it's plausible that people. React in the ways, the multiple severe ways that we do to chemicals and that it is really important that we address these.

[00:15:13] Jeffrey Siegel: Yeah, so of course it's not only plausible, it's quite likely. But the other piece that I think is really important to couple that with is just the complexity. These are not simple issues. The very seemingly same environment can have very different concentrations of things at different times. So you can see a variety of responses that an individual might have in that environment.

A lot of times we can't even measure the things that are relevant, not because they're not there, but we just don't have the technology or even know to ask the right questions sometimes. Mm-hmm. I think that's really how I see it, is that it's not so much a question of does this exist or not? I understand there is that debate, but from the science point of view, how do we actually understand this in a way that's helpful?

Uh, and then the second part of that is sometimes we need good understanding to solve problems, and sometimes we can solve problems with partial understanding. Mm-hmm. And I think that as always, even though I do research for a living and I love to do research, I do think that there is a practical piece here around problem solving that we mm-hmm.

Don't necessarily need to fully understand the problem to start talking about solutions.

[00:16:28] Aaron Goodman: Yeah. And in my work on this podcast, I talk to a lot of folks who talk about the unknowns of chemicals, consumer products, but also building chemicals. Right? Yep, absolutely. And now you're saying there's the same thing is happening with buildings in terms of chemical composition that we don't know what they are. The effects on the human body cognition. Health, et cetera.

[00:16:51] Jeffrey Siegel: Yeah, absolutely. And let me make one other point that I think is relevant at this point in the conversation, and that is that it's well accepted that we have people in our population who are immunocompromised for one of many reasons, right? And they have to think about what environments they go in and what activities they engage in.

And that's, there's no one who's gonna debate that that is a, a thing in the population. And I think that's the other real kind of issue we should be talking about, is that there can be people who have particular responses or sensitivities or other things that are not univers. They can be very individual or they can affect a relatively small part of the population, so they're not necessarily well understood.
Mm-hmm. 

And so I think that one of the things we'll have to get to today is, is there this concept of a universally safe Hmm. Environment? Mm-hmm. And I think the answer to that is I'm not sure that there is. I think that we might start having to think about in general what we can do to make. Environment safe for as much of the population as we can, and then how do we deal with the rest from an equity issue?

[00:18:08] Aaron Goodman: Do you think more people like you might be fielding a lot more emails or calls from folks like you accept it to come on? The Chemical Sensitivity Podcast, you get a lot of these calls, as we know that I think in the US is 15 to 37% of the population self. Or some level of, of multiple chemical density. So we're dealing with a growing number of people, millions of people around the world. I just spoke, someone in Norway yesterday said it's one in three or one in five in Scandinavia. These are not insignificant numbers. And when you think about that, do you think it's because the potency or the chemicals. In new builds or in homes or mold or what are you most concerned about?

[00:18:46] Jeffrey Siegel: So I want to respond to something you said first before I answer your question. There are many different aspects. Mm-hmm. And so a solution that might work for part of that population might not work broadly across the population. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and so I think that's really important too, is that I think it's well accepted that people have personalities and have individual differences and so on.

The way that I approach buildings is much the same way a building has individual things and it changes over time. Yeah. And so, um, I think that we really have to be thinking more about solutions that might work for some but not for others. And I think we really have to, as a society, start thinking about some of those bigger issues.

[00:19:28] Aaron Goodman: It's a really interesting point. Sometimes people talk anecdotally on social media in groups for people with MCs about creating like an intentional community where people might live together or next to another, and often the feedback is that won't work, right? Because person A is gonna react to something that person B.

So I take your point.

[00:19:47] Jeffrey Siegel: Yeah. Okay, but now let me answer your question. I don't know the answer about why what's causing this or what I suspect are major contributors, but what I will say, I think is probably an important part of the problem is that indoor environments are chemical soups and they're chemical soups because we get some stuff that comes from outside.

We get some stuff that's related to the activities inside. We get some stuff that comes from the building and its contents, and then we get some stuff that comes from the history. Of that building. Like I can tell when I go into a building, that smoking has occurred a long time ago, even if it hasn't occurred anytime recently, and I've been in households that don't currently have a pet, but I can tell that someone had a pet there at some time in the past, and there's probably a whole bunch of cues for those sorts of things.

Some of them are olfactory, some of them might be other things. And so all of these factors, and you had Nusrat and Brandon on the podcast, uh, a little while ago. I listened to their interview and they talked a lot about the chemistry that occurs. This is not static, right? It changes over time and there can be interactions, and so I think that the fundamental issue is we have.

All of these different contributors that are contributing differently in different buildings at different times. And so I wish that there was the kind of smoking gun, so to speak, but I don't think there is. I think it's a whole host of different factors, and I don't wanna make it seem like an impossible problem because it's not.
But I do think that is a really important concept. There's not a simple cause nor a simple solution.

[00:21:28] Aaron Goodman: I absolutely hear you. My wife and I have been recently looking for new, a new house, found one. But what you're saying completely resonates because every place we go into, you know, OLF, factory wise Oh yeah.

The pets, the carpet, the wallpaper, the potential mold, the moisture, and that's the reality that we live with. But I, I think for folks with CS, I can't speak for everyone, but fragrance. Is a big one. And you mentioned shared air. Mm-hmm. For example, where we live currently, mostly we have to keep the windows closed because dryer sheets, people's dryer sheets, scented dryer sheets that they use in their dryers.

Comes through the dry vent and pollutes the neighborhood and they react really strongly to those. Mm-hmm. So shared air, do you want to talk about your thoughts on fragrance?

[00:22:16] Jeffrey Siegel: Yeah, absolutely. I have to say, first of all, I'm not an expert in fragrance fragrances. Make it to the brain very quickly and have very specific responses, and that's different from a lot of pollutants that I study.
Several comments I'll make about fragrances. There is a ton of added fragrances to almost everything that we use. Just so many consumer products, personal care products. One of the things we learned in preparing to do some cognitive science research is that fragrances are added. To particularly retail environments for a variety of different purposes.

And so, you know, we normally think that we sometimes have control over our homes, and sometimes that's true to different extents, but fragrances, it's both an artificial and a natural kind of world of fragrances that are out there. So there's the fragrance itself and then there is the chemistry that happens with fragrance as well.

And fragrance is not at all. Most of the compounds that make fragrances are, you know, likely to have fragrances themselves. It might be a different fragrance, some of them, cause some people are sensitive to them and cause issues. And so there is like another. Layer there as well. And then the third comment I'll make is if you think about, and again, there's experts in this world on what I'm about to say, but I think it's a really important point.

If someone is adding a fragrance to something, if that fragrance was very volatile and went away right away, it would have very little benefit, right? Because it would not persist in the air. The chemical industry does a lot of things, adding fragrances to make them persist. In some things as well. So it's not just a instantaneous thing.
It's there and then it's done. It's designed like you think about a perfume or a cologne. It's designed to slowly release over time so that you get the effect beyond just when you apply it. And so not only is this an issue of instantaneous exposures, but it can be very persistent.

[00:24:23] Aaron Goodman: Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned it.
And we experience it on a daily basis, right? Laundry products, personal care products. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So where do we go from there? You mentioned the cognitive element, right? And I don't think you're talking about. Cognitive impact for people with MCS? You're talking about the general population, I believe.
Right? What do you know

[00:24:45] Jeffrey Siegel: about the cognitive impact of fragrances? Okay, so we know very little, but we've been doing some research on it. So I'll tell you a little bit about what weve been doing and why we're doing it and what we know so far. Starting about a little more than a decade ago, there started to be papers in the literature about the cognitive impacts of indoor air quality.
The typical study design is you would take individuals, you would put them in a chamber, so you would add carbon dioxide to the environment in some manner, and then people would perform some sort of cognitive battery. That measure different aspects of cognitive performance and what some studies, not universally, but what some studies observed is when CO2 was elevated, people would perform worse on cognitive tasks in about.

So five years ago, 2020 or so, uh, team that I was part of, including Bo and do a graduate student at the time, wrote a paper where we looked at all of the research on CO2 and cognitive function, and our conclusion was CO2 was not actually the issue. It was something else besides CO2 that was leading. It might co-occur with CO2, but it was something different from CO2 and carbon dioxide.

I think we all know about it because of climate change, but just to be very clear, there's very high carbon dioxide on our exhaled breath. That's the main source indoors of carbon dioxide, and it's odorless, it's colorless. It doesn't really have any health effects until you get to amazingly high concentrations that you would never get to in an indoor environment.

To my knowledge, I don't know anyone who's sensitive to it, but there might be some who are sensitive to it. I've just never heard of that. Okay, so we said it's not CO2. What else might it be? And so the first experiment we did was with an essential oil diffuser. An essential oil diffuser is like a small ultrasonic humidifier you put in your water.

And you put in a few drops of your favorite essential oil and it fills the space with a bunch of stuff in the air, and pleasurable scent elevates the humidity a little bit, and they're very widely used. And so we did a series of experiments, and by the way, an essential oil will produce. A fragrance based on the essential oil that's used in it, but it will also produce a whole lot of particles, very small particles that come from largely minerals in the water.

That's in the essential oil diffuser. So from our perspective, we said it's not CO2, let's try this. You know what we see as a very large source of indoor air pollution. And so we did an experiment where we had about 60 subjects who were exposed to, uh, either a placebo condition that is essentially a humidifier, but with very pure water in it.

And then. We had another group of people who we exposed to an essential oil diffuser with different types of essential oil in it, and I'll get to why and the connection to fragrance in a second. And basically we found that people who were exposed to the essential oil in the essential oil diffuser performed similarly on a lot of cognitive tasks.

One of the things they did is they exhibited more impulsive behavior, which is one of the things you measure in a cognitive battery. So that led to the retail research that I talked about. So one of the reason that many stores put a fragrance into the air. Is to make people act more impulsively, which of course translates to spending more money in the retail environment.

So fragrances are added for very specific reasons in a lot of environments. Okay. The interesting point I wanna make about that research, I think the overall research is interesting. The audience can judge that for themselves. But the specific point about fragrance I wanna make is we did, we had two different essential royals.
We used a lemon essential oil, which smells like cutting lemons and so on in the space. And we used grape seed oil to my nose. I can't detect an odor. Um, other people have told me that they can, I'm not particularly sensitive to odors, but I really can't tell. And when we tried to measure for VOCs, we didn't see much in the air, but again, every VOC measurement approach has limitations, and so there could have been things in the air that we weren't able to measure with the grape seed oil, but both the lemon scented oil and the grape seed oil had the same impact on impulsive decision making that I mentioned. And what we suspect is going on there is that there are things in the air.

That are happening no matter what the essential oil is that are having this impact on our brain. And I think that this gets at the kind of issues here that some individuals might be more or less sensitive to whatever it is in the air that's causing the impact on the brain. It might be, there are different things in the air, but there's definitely an effect there.

And if you look in the literature, there's all kinds of things about. Adding fragrance to air, mostly from the perspective of getting people to elicit certain behaviors. And so we know that those are real. One of the things we did is we gave a survey to people asking about their perception of the environment afterwards, and the really interesting to me thing to me that I still don't understand.

From those surveys, I think that many people would say Lemon scent is positive. I understand that's not universal or anything, but I think that's why people use lemon scented oil in their essential oil diffuser. But the pleasantness was actually the same, I think even a little bit higher. We use grape seed oil in the diffuser.
We did tell people what was going on in the experiment. So I assume someone with MCS probably would choose not to participate, so we can assume our population was not those with MCS, even among that population, there is something going on with odor and fragrance that we don't understand. Interesting.

[00:31:15] Aaron Goodman: So folks who don't rep self-report having MCs are still right.
Reacting to. Whatever it is. Right. In essential oil, right? What's in essential oil, that's dangerous.

[00:31:28] Jeffrey Siegel: Yeah. So I think in the world I have come across people who do a lot with fragrance, make perfumes, that sort of thing, and they always draw a distinction in their mind between natural and synthetic products.
To me, natural in synthetic, it's a molecule, and whether that molecule arises because of natural processes or in a factory, it's still a molecule. So I don't draw that distinction in my mind, but when we were doing those experiments, and we do a lot with essential oil diffusers because they turn out to be a really convenient way to make a really dirty indoor environment very rapidly, the thing I've noticed is that.

The oils really change quite rapidly over time, and so first of all, there's not really a ton of regulation. Essential oils aren't really regulated for purity or anything like that. How you use an essential oil is really important, so putting it in something that makes it into little particles that go deep into your lung, that is not a good thing from anyone's perspective, let alone someone who is sensitive to those chemicals.

[00:32:43] Aaron Goodman: question. It's so interesting that you're talking about essential oils. I didn't know that the conversation would go to this place. Mm-hmm. Because for folks like, like us with MCS mm-hmm. There's so much. Right? There's the air fresheners, the paints. You mentioned the chemical soup at the.
Essential has always been on my radar and it's on the radar for a lot of people. Why have you focused on essential oil? What, like why is it a priority for you? Or is it, and what's. In it that is hazardous to human health?

[00:33:18] Jeffrey Siegel: Yeah, it's a great question, and again, I'm only gonna be able to give you a partial answer at first.

Let's use the essential oil diffuser. I know that's gonna make a ton of particles, a ton of VOCs, depending on what essential oil you use, it's readily available. It's something that is used by people, so it's not like. We're studying something that doesn't have a practical application, so that's why I do it.

And why, what about essential oils? I think part of the answer is that fundamentally essential oils have compounds in them that are chemically very reactive. So I think a lot of what's going on with essential oil is maybe a little bit related to the oil itself. I think there's at least a big part of the story that comes from chemical reactions that happen, and I'm talking about chemical reactions in the air before someone might breathe it in.

I'm talking about chemical reactions that might happen on the skin as well as chemical reactions within our body. I think that the fact that essential oils are chemically reactive is probably part of the story.

[00:34:26] Aaron Goodman: So you're talking about essential oils, which is super fascinating. A Professor Siegel, what about the other products?

'Cause in my day to day I run into the others more frequently. Absolutely. Just to be totally honest with you, you run into the laundry products, the body sprays, and people listening will have their own kryptonites. Do you share the concern about all of these and maybe what is it about the fragrance that is so dangerous?

[00:34:55] Jeffrey Siegel: Yes, I share the concern, but my concern is it's an uncontrolled experiment, right? There are all these things that are in our environment that we're being exposed to. We know some individuals are more sensitive to these things. Some individuals are less sensitive. There's. Personal variation in sensitivity, and that's not even a subject that anyone is thinking about from a regulatory perspective.

For example, it's essentially the modern study of the indoor environment is not that old, and so. We're fundamentally in this situation where there are new chemicals coming in all the time, new fragrances coming in all the time that are being added to the indoor environment. Some of them are quite persistent, as we've talked about, and it's really it.

I don't you say this to be funny, but it's like this constant whack-a-mole where even if. A concern is associated with one chemical. It's simply replaced with the next cheapest chemical that has the properties that the individual is after who's manufacturing or selling the product. There's no way we can keep up with the things that are being introduced.

So I don't know if it's. There are these, you know, particular bad actor chemicals or if it's the fact that there is just like so many chemicals that some of them are bad actors and they're coming in more and more with all these new products. But to get back to a little bit earlier part of your question, do I have a concern about laundry products and so on?

I would say absolutely. But the comment I'll make is that. A lot of unscented products that I get and use on the laundry side of things. They're not unscented. They have things in them that I can detect and. I'm not so sure that people are even able to be protected.

[00:36:54] Aaron Goodman: You mentioned the regulation piece.
When it comes to fragrances and consumer products, corporations aren't required to disclose what is in a scented product. And if that's the case,

[00:37:08] Jeffrey Siegel: why? To my knowledge, there are not regulations. There is a patchwork of voluntary rules. There is. Some product manufacturers who do make a point to disclose what's in their products.

I mean, I think it would be great if every manufacturer of every product was required to list all the ingredients to that product. I can't comment on whether that's feasible or not, but I also think that would only be a partial solution because of. What happens over time and because of

[00:37:41] Aaron Goodman: chemistry? Maybe the last piece of this conversation could be about protecting ourselves even more.

For example, I wear a certain kind of mask, so I limit the amount of fragrance that I'm inhaling in outdoor environments and indoor environments. So do you wanna talk about that masking and perhaps air filtration? Are those going to make any difference in terms of indoor air quality?

[00:38:07] Jeffrey Siegel: I love to talk about filters.
I'll start by saying that filters have nothing to do with anyone's health or protecting anyone from anything. They were there to protect the equipment from big pieces of dust and that sort of thing. And so when we talk about filters, it's really important to be specific and to say that we have to be thinking about filters that.
We'll work for the things that we're interested in them working for. And at this point, we have a robust filtration industry. There's a variety of solutions, but I would say 95 plus percent of the market is targeted at particles in the air. And particles are very important for people's health, but they are, in general not particularly important from a fragrance point of view.

I would recommend everyone have a filter, either a good central filter, depending on your home or portable filter in the spaces you spend time. If you wanna remove fragrances from indoor air, there's basically one robust technology that's out there, and it doesn't work for everything, but it's called activated carbon.

So the idea is that almost all fragrances are associated with an indoor air and they pass through activated carbon. Some of them will be removed to the activated carbon and be removed from the air. It works better for some types of molecules than others, but certainly if it's a very easy thing to do to get an activated carbon filter for activated carbon to work, you have to have a fair amount of it.

So a lot of filters that you might buy for particles have a very thin layer of activated carbon that won't work for very long, for removing things from the air, like probably a matter of days or even less. So you really have to get a specialized activated carbon filter in many air cleaners. Come with a dedicated is often called like a VOC canister or an activated carbon canister that has a lot of activated carbon in it, and that's where people should be going practically on this.

It's really important for this community to know that filters have a fragrance. 

So some filters have a fragrance because it's added by the manufacturer. Avoid those filters for a variety of reasons. Even a filter that does not have any fragrance added captures all this stuff from the air so that we don't have to breathe it in, and then it sits there.

You do have to change your filter a lot, your particle filter, and if you do get a good activated carbon filter. The idea is you first filter your particles out of the air, and then if that produces any odors, they have a chance of being captured by the activated carbon. I think it's really important to talk about equity.

Issues in all of this. Someone has, let's say four or five rooms in their house that they wanna protect. Maybe they don't have a central system, or even if they do have a central system, it can't accommodate the kinds of filters they want to use. So you're looking at, uh, a portable filter in each of those rooms, and that portable filter has gotta have a good amount of activated carbon in it.

And so I wanna encourage people to, first of all. Think about how they are using those filters. For example, an occupancy sensor. So they're only on, but when someone is present in the room, many of them have a timer function, or you can add your own timer. So for example, if it's in your bedroom, you could have it come on for an hour or so before you go into your bedroom at night to help clean the air.

But it's not operating when you're not in your bedroom for most of the day. That's some of how you extend life. You can also do things like this sounds a little bit awkward, but people who do it. Can get good results from it. You can move and air filter around during the nighttime. You might have it in your bedroom and during the daytime you wheel it into the living room or the dining room.

And yes, that's not ideal. People shouldn't have to do that, but that is one way of making it, kind of making the economic pain a little bit less. Another thing I'll say about filters and the use of filters for protection is that. We saw during COVID the rise of do it yourself filters where people build their own filters.

And the idea is you take four filters like you would use in a heating and air conditioning system and make a box with them and put a box fan on top and you have a great filter actually that's quite effective. Um, and probably quite economical for someone who does want to use activated carbon is you can buy.

Two inch or four inch filters that are meant for buildings and do that, put a box fan on top, and you have quite a powerful filter that's probably quite effective for removing things from the air. We're still talking hundreds of dollars, but we're not talking thousands of dollars. There is this real equity issue across society.

There is differences in indoor environments that meaningfully impact people. And there is a disparity of impact from exposure to those different environments. There is a disparity of resources to address problems, and there is a disparity of knowledge and even knowing what to do or what issues might be.

Every individual is going to have a different set of concerns and resources and abilities and access. To information to address some of these issues, and I think that it's a very big problem. But speaking specifically about MCS, mm-hmm. I think we really want to think about actions that are contributing to reduction of some of the equity disparities.

[00:44:22] Aaron Goodman: I really appreciate you mentioning that and I'll just share that the start of this project, the genesis of this podcast, my aim was to, to really reach out to all kinds of people and diverse populations. And because in the research we see that racialized populations, black people, women are disproportionately impacted by exposures to toxic chemicals.

And quite frankly, I haven't had much success. Finding guests to talk about those particular and very important topics that you highlight as well as listeners. So if anyone's listening and wants to share feedback or suggest a guest, I'm really open to it. We will continue to take up that task. You've been listening to the Chemical Sensitivity Podcast.

I'm the host and podcast creator, Aaron Goodman. The Chemical Sensitivity podcast is by and for the MCS community. Podcast is generously supported by the Marilyn Brachman Hoffman Foundation and listeners like you. If you wish to support the podcast, please visit chemical sensitivity podcast.org. Your support will h us continue making the podcast available and creating greater awareness about MCS.

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