how do people who live in heavily polluted areas protect themselves? Is it possible their immune system could gradually gain the power against it?

[StringJunky]

@Is there a reason why you take it with a pinch of salt?

 

https://www.amazon.com/hepa-air-purifiers/b?ie=UTF8&node=510192

HEPA Air Purifiers

 

• True HEPA Filter captures 99.97% of dust and allergens as small as .3 microns such as household dust, pet dander, mold spores and plant pollens. Charcoal filter reduces common odors from pets, smoking and cooking.
• UV-C light technology works with Titanium Dioxide to kill airborne bacteria, viruses, germs and mold spores.

it doesn't mention SO2,CO,NO2,O3,PM2.5,PM10, if i am not misunderstand.

If you are serious about fitration it needs to be PM2.5 standard - 2.5 micron particles. N95, or FFP2, filters remove 95% and N99 or FFP3 fiters remove 99% of particles.

Edited January 21, 2017 by StringJunky

[Endy0816]

Possibly looking for a mask rather than a filter alone.

[StringJunky]

Possibly looking for a mask rather than a filter alone.

I got that info from a site about masks.

[Endy0816]

Was responding to OP's concern about gases. Some would be reduced by activated charcoal(pretty much standard anyways) but not sure to what degree.

Edited January 22, 2017 by Endy0816

[StringJunky]

Right, ok.

[jfoldbar]

i have an unusual  health condition where some of the bodies own mechanisms for dealing with pollution do not work for me. because of this i can be poisoned really easily by almost anything around me. this health problem hit me in my early 20s and took me about 10 years to diagnose and treat.while im not a doctor or anything, i have had to learn quite a lot about minimising toxins in my life. 

i wont go into details cause its way too long. but basically i often take various supplements to boost liver function and eat/drink various things high in antioxidants etc.

the only sure fire way to not be exposed to chemicals would be  to live in the jungle like a hermit. anything in our modern life has chemicals invading us all the time. the best we can hope for is to deal with them once in our body.

as others have said, the immune system does very little in defence of chemicals, it has to deal with them once they enter the body. (which is a whole story of its own). the first line of defence is our skin,lungs,and gut. so keeping the chemicals out of those 3 the best we can and then dealing with the fallout, is all we can do.

[Adamkins IV]

Nutritional metals go some way to counteract the effect of toxic-non nutritional metals.  e.g. selenium can bind to mercury rendering it non-toxic.  Consuming a diet rich in all vitamins and minerals as well as plenty of the essential metals such as calcium, selenium, iron, zinc, will do a lot to counteract the effect of toxic/unwanted metals we are exposed to such as aluminium, lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic.  Conversely a deficiency in nutritional metals greatly increases the damage toxic metals can do to us.  Vitamin D also helps with absorption of many metals, the nutritionally essential ones and the toxic ones too..  so worst case scenario is probably being very deficient in all dietary metals, being in the sun all day and exposed to lead and mercury all day.   

Plants do help as they process the air, they can extract some toxins from the air and produce cleaner air themselves which we can then breathe in.  Plants also excrete phytochemicals into the air some of which protect them from insects, bacteria etc. and these phytochemicals may also help us too.  Though their beneficial effect isn't related to pollution I think.  

We can wear face masks which help to filter out polluted air we breathe in whilst walking through the city, it's standard practise in some places now like Beijing.  

Switch out cooking pots for a different type e.g. clay cooking pots 

Filtering the water is also desirable to reduce things like lead in the tap water

Not eating dangerous fish or sea products as much of the sea is polluted.  That means generally sticking to small fish farmed in clean areas.  

Plastics are another concern of which what counters them I don't know too much about yet, though avoiding plastics in the first place is obviously the best start such as avoiding fizzy drinks in plastic bottles, the acidity of the drink will gradually cause plastic particles to leech into the drink.  Also UV degrades plastic so if drinking bottled water is should be stored out of the sun or else plastic particles will slowly leech into the water.   

Many products are also of concern as they may contain xenoestrogens and metals too sometimes e.g. most suncream contains titanium nanoparticles, most deodorant contains aluminium particles which will be absorbed into the body through skin.

There's a lot to avoid, but a lot you can do to avoid it all too.  

 

I don't think the immune system gains power against these toxins.  The problem is the immune system isn't designed to fight them in the first place.  The immune system is designed to kill cells which it thinks aren't supposed to be inside us.  The immune system will produce cells which will find and kill other cells, like a virus, a bacteria, they will kill the body's own cells if they find that cell has been infected and taken over by a virus.  They secrete chemicals which destroy these cells.  However when they encounter something like a particle of metal... they can't kill it!  They can't harm it.  They can't do anything to it!  They may however still try to kill it, and this can cause damage to surrounding cells as they keep on secreting chemicals trying to kill this foreign object, then some of the cells around it get damaged.   This is why we are told we need antioxidants!  Antioxidants help to calm down these cells of the immune system.  So they don't help at all to correct the original problem that we have this foreign particle inside us, but they help to stop our immune system from accidentally damaging our healthy cells due to these foreign particles.  
 

Edited October 17, 2019 by Adamkins IV

[CharonY]

On 10/16/2019 at 7:53 PM, Adamkins IV said:

They may however still try to kill it, and this can cause damage to surrounding cells as they keep on secreting chemicals trying to kill this foreign object, then some of the cells around it get damaged.   This is why we are told we need antioxidants!  Antioxidants help to calm down these cells of the immune system.  So they don't help at all to correct the original problem that we have this foreign particle inside us, but they help to stop our immune system from accidentally damaging our healthy cells due to these foreign particles.  

That part (especially regarding antioxidants) is quite incorrect. For starters, it is true that the immune system does not react to very small molecules (say metal ions) but it is not that they only react to cells (which would exclude viruses in any case). Rather they react mostly to antigens, which are generally somewhat large(ish) molecules. These can be proteins or lipopolysaccharides, for example. The immune system does play a role in combating toxins, too (especially the humoral immunity). For example, antidotes against venom are generally antibodies raised against a particular venom. Antioxidants themselves do not calm cells down, rather they react with free radicals.

While there is data out there that suggests that antioixidants may actually  increase immune functions (some suggest that they stabilize immune cells and/or prevent their aging) there is fairly little in terms of hard evidence that a diet rich in antioxidants has a significant impact on overall health (or at least whether the benefits are really from the antioxidants, but rather due to other aspects of such a diet). 

[Roamer]

On 1/10/2017 at 1:00 PM, Prometheus said:

I had hoped house plants would work. Unfortunately it appears to be a myth so i will have to find another excuse to convince the mrs. to have some.

To me those three studies suggest that plants work, just not as strong suspected, and that they are easily overwhelmed;

in the first one they used an outdoor air dampening ventilation system, which was apparently surprising to some to overwhelm a rather low concentration of plants.

The second and third studies are more interesting, as they suggest that another ecological factor would overwhelm plants in small concentrations, especially the third showing (random) increases and decreases at higher concentrations, suggesting even bacteria have a stronger impact on the air then plants in low concentration.

These were practical/in the field tests btw, not in-a-closed-lab-tests, and regarding the opening post @fresh, if i lived in a heavily polluted area, i would definately get a lot of plants and keep my windows closed.