Air Quality Equal to Food and Water Quality with Mike Feldstein
February 27, 2024 By
Leanne Vogel
March 9, 2024
In today’s episode of the Keto Diet Podcast, we’re bringing to light a topic as crucial as the food we eat and the water we drink – the air we breathe.
Mike Feldstein is an individual whose life journey has been profoundly shaped by his acute sense of environmental consciousness. From a young age, Mike developed a heightened awareness of his surroundings, particularly in relation to air quality. His sense of “air awareness” would come to define his career and passions.
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Transcript
Mike Feldstein
I wasn’t monitoring it right away, but I was sleeping 10 hours a night and waking up exhausted, like, so tired. And I’m like, let me measure the air in here. Anyway, the co2 was going from that 600 and 5700 to about 3000 every night. So I was just bathing in carbon dioxide at night.
Leanne Vogel
Hello, my friend. I am recording today’s episode from my new house. Oh, my goodness. If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you know that in 2017, my husband and I sold our house, moved into an rv, and we haven’t looked back. We then moved into a boat and then another boat. But then in 2020, Kevin decided he wanted to see if he could become a pilot. And now he’s flying as a commercial pilot in the private sector. And I was on the boat all the time.
Leanne Vogel
And so we decided a couple of months ago, hey, let’s take a little break from the boat stuff and move into a home for a hot minute and just kind of see where life takes us. And so today’s topic on air quality hits home on a bunch of different levels as I learn how to manage air quality in a new space. So air quality on a boat is going to be very different than air quality in a home. Boats are generally made to be super sealed so water doesn’t come in. So one of the bigger challenges that I had was co2 issues and also mold issues, because boats equal water, equal mold. And so that was a common issue that I had to deal with and just manage properly. And so now I’m moving into a space that’s two or three times the size of a boat, just learning how to manage air quality. And you might be wondering, like, why do we even care about air? Well, here’s a good way to think of it.
Leanne Vogel
We eat about three pounds of food per day. We drink about three liters of water per day. And both of those things, I think you kind of have been looking at your food quality. You’re probably not drinking tap water anymore. And if you are, that should be top priority to kind of look at that. But when we’re drinking this three liters of water, we’re eating three pounds of food. We’re caring about the quality, but we breathe in 20,000 liters of air per day. And so this can make a huge dent into our health.
Leanne Vogel
The biggest issues that I see when it comes to poor air quality have to do with how our mitochondria functions. So any mitochondrial symptoms and issues are generally going to show up when we are not breathing clean air. We’ve had a couple of episodes on the podcast talking about mitochondria. Some common symptoms include dizziness upon standing, unable to tolerate much exercise, decreased muscle stamina, lowered muscle tone, afternoon headaches, migraines, seizures, sinus pain, vision or hearing problems, blood sugar issues, breathing issues, being intolerant to heat, thyroid issues, specifically low thyroid, chronic inflammation, can’t fall asleep, can’t stay asleep. So if I’ve just listed a whole bunch of symptoms that you have, generally this has to do with mitochondrial function. Now, there are a bunch of root causes under the mitochondrial function issues, but a big one is air quality. And since we are moving into a home, I’m starting to think about air quality. I’m having to buy more filtration, thinking about opening up windows and managing the co2 a little bit differently.
Leanne Vogel
I wanted to have my friend Mike on to share what we should be thinking about when it comes to the air quality of our home. Now, there are a bunch of free solutions that you can do to manage your air quality, and it costs nothing. We are going to talk also about filtration because there are so many options. And having had mold illness a couple of years ago, when I was just living in a moldy house and didn’t know anything about mold and then didn’t know what I was doing, I spent a lot of money on products that didn’t work and was super frustrated and also went down the rabbit hole of spending money on testing where it didn’t need to be. And so I wanted to have Mike on to chat about what you should be looking for in a filter. Because if you just go onto Amazon and you purchase that $20 filter, it’s probably not going to make a big dent on things. And so we’re going to be talking about what to look for in proper filtration. So if you’re looking for filtration for your home, then today’s episode is right up your alley.
Leanne Vogel
Myself, personally, I have a Jasper unit. I also have an air doctor. I have a PCO now with the PCO. I wouldn’t recommend it. I spent a ton of money on it. Shouldn’t have done that. But we live and we learn, and that’s why I enjoy making podcast episodes. You don’t have to make the same mistake that I do when it comes to literally everything in my life.
Leanne Vogel
I will share and say, don’t do this. I did it. It was a bad call. So we’re talking about co2, mold, smoke, vocs, and how to recover properly by thinking about your air quality. We’re talking about humidity, whether it’s too high or too low, and when it’s too low, how that can lead to viral issues. We’re talking about the energy efficiency of a home and how it impacts air quality and your hvac system and the role that it has in the health of your home or not really helping the health of your home. We’re talking about HEPA filtration and so much more. If you have no idea about the air quality of your home, today’s episode is for you.
Leanne Vogel
And if you’re starting to dabble in some of these pieces and you’re not sure how to make it all fit together, today’s episode is for you. I’ve put together a resource also, and Mike is going to mention it there for you at the end of the episode. But if you go to healthfulpersuit.com Jasper, that’s healthfulpersuit.com Jaspr and you’re looking for a discount on one of my personal favorite air filtration units. You can use the code KDP for 20% off from now until next week. It’s only for the first seven days of today’s episode, so we’ll talk more about this as time goes on throughout the episode. But I wanted to put this at the front if you need a place to find it. So let’s talk with Mike. He has spent years in the wildfire and flood restoration sector as well as the air quality consulting sector, witnessing firsthand how much polluted air can damage people’s well being.
Leanne Vogel
Throughout his experience, he discovered that none of the conventional air purifiers on the market could make a meaningful dent in air quality in disaster situations or even everyday life conditions. The only thing that worked was commercial grade air scrubbers, and that’s why he started Jasper, let’s cut it over to our conversation with Mike. Enjoy it. Hey, my name is Leanne Vogel. I’m fascinated with helping women navigate how to eat, move and care for their bodies using a low carb diet. I’m a small town holistic nutritionist turned three time international bestselling author turned functional medicine practitioner, offering telemedicine services around the globe to women looking to better their health and stop second guessing themselves. I’m here to teach you how to wade through the wellness noise to get to the good stuff that’ll help you achieve your goals. We’re supporting your low carb life beyond the if it fits your macros, conversation, hormones, emotions, relationship to your body, workouts letdowns, motivation blood work, detoxing, metabolism.
Leanne Vogel
I’m providing the tools to put your motivation into action. Think of it like quality time with your bestie mixed with a little med school so you’re empowered at your next doctor visit. Get ready to be challenged and encouraged while you learn about your body and how to care for it better. This is the Keto diet podcast. Hey, Mike, how’s it going?
Mike Feldstein
It’s going great. How are you?
Leanne Vogel
Good. I’m so glad to have you on the show. I’m doing great. We have a good episode planned today. I would like to start off by asking you, why do you do what you do? What lights you up? Why do you love this topic?
Mike Feldstein
I feel very fortunate to have had these experiences that gave me air awareness. And I remember the first time I gained my water awareness. Growing up, water was just water. And once you realize that’s not the case and you start drinking really filtered, good water, and then you go to a restaurant and you try that tap water, and it tastes like chemicals, and you’re like, there’s a big difference here. I know. Now, most of us have had that awareness with water. A lot of us have had that awareness with food. Because of my background, which we could talk about later in air quality testing and environmental cleanup after fires and floods and hurricanes and things like that.
Mike Feldstein
I got to see kind of like, another big moment for me was when you get a blood test and the doctor’s like, we’ll call you if you’re not dying. At least that’s how it was in Canada. I assume it’s like that here now that I’m in the States, too, but nobody was striving for optimal. It’s like, if you’re not going to die this week or month, like, yeah, no big deal. Well, I had similar awareness with air quality. I also was very involved in construction and saw that builders, architects, developers, HVAC contractors, the same way doctors aren’t taught about nutrition and what you eat in medical school. All of these construction folks aren’t taught at all about air quality. And I’m very fortunate that I was able to gain my air awareness through cleaning up after fires, floods, mold, air consulting, and things like that.
Mike Feldstein
And there’s just a huge gap in water awareness and food awareness and air awareness, even though we breathe more air than we consume anything else. So I believe that because we live in air, we are very unaware of it. And I’ve now had the first hand experience of optimizing my sleep, my health, and seeing so many life changing scenarios when someone was able to dial in the air that they breathe, especially at home, even more so, especially where you sleep. So it’s very exciting for me to. The food and the water are very important, but I feel that there’s many great people serving that and bringing that forward with education solutions, products and all of the above, but that there’s a huge blind spot with air. So what excites me is being able to bring air awareness where it’s like I want to catch air up to water. So the same way we’re talking about water quality, I want to catch up air. And it’s exciting because I have had these unique insights and a lot of people haven’t.
Mike Feldstein
I feel it’s my duty to share them. I love it.
Leanne Vogel
And so when we’re thinking about water, a lot of people are talking about microplastics and aluminum in your water, and chlorine. What are the equivalents in air that we need to think about when it comes to toxicity or what are the components here?
Mike Feldstein
So there was a pretty big study that was conducted in London. I actually just shared it on my LinkedIn this week, if anybody wants to find it. It was quite a good source and a long, thorough, expensive study. This wasn’t just a little one off. But speaking of microplastics, they tested thousands of homes in London. 100% of homes tested positive for microplastics in the air. 98% of all samples were positive for microplastics in the air. When they did a little test in Antarctica for the water that was raining, that was positive for microplastics.
Mike Feldstein
So, very quickly, people have just tested water more than air. So the awareness is a little bit further. But what the test shows is the average person inhales one credit card worth of microplastics per week. Why are we still able to breathe? Because we have amazing bodies. We filter out most of those microplastics, but not all of them. So they started working with universities and hospitals when they were already doing biopsies for lung tissues. And everybody’s lung tissues had significant amounts of microplastics. What hasn’t been studied yet, because you need the awareness before you go deeper, is what’s the effect on the human body of microplastics in our lungs and in our bloodstream.
Mike Feldstein
My hunches is not good, though. So crazy, though, that microplastics, just now, as we’re all gaining awareness about our water, it’s equally prevalent in our air. Well, also, when plastic degrades, not just manufacturing and pollution and all that, but when plastics break down and it’s like, where do you think it goes? It doesn’t all just go into the soil. It goes into the air. It goes into the environment. So as that old plastic is breaking down, it’s quite prevalent in our environment as well. So, yeah, while you’re talking about microplastic, that is one of the newer things that wasn’t on the radar before. But other than that, I like to look at, air quality has two pollution buckets that we could put everything else inside, indoor pollution and outdoor pollution.
Mike Feldstein
We all think about pollution as outside, but there is equally as much, if not more pollution in our own homes. And indoors, your home is not a filter. We call it inside, but where do you think the air comes from? And we’ll talk about it later. But the filter in your furnace does not filter air. What it’s really designed to do is to keep big massive particles from clogging up your furnace, getting in the motor, the pet, the dust, the debris. Your HVAC system was designed to heat and cool your air, not to be a filtration system. So when you look at indoor and outdoor pollution, this will sort of set the stage here. Outdoor pollution is your smog.
Mike Feldstein
It’s your normal pollution. It’s your pollen and your cedar and your ragweed and your mold and your exhaust from cars and your salted roads in Canada during the winter. And the sand. It’s your barbecue, it’s your neighbor’s contractor on the driveway cutting two by fours. All that stuff that gets put, it’s your neighbor’s dryer vent with their toxic lint sheet. It’s their cooking, it’s their dishwasher. You live in a city, you’re breathing everybody’s stuff. So I call that outdoor.
Mike Feldstein
Even though some of that is originating from other people’s homes, it’s indoor for them, but they’re exhausting it outside. Then, of course, outside we also have wildfire smoke. Then we have industry, manufacturing, things like that. That kind of falls under pollution. And then indoor pollution is where we have things like personal care products, paint. I put dust in this category because dust, even though it’s naturally occurring, you’ll never find dust outside. There’s not enough. Outside is the world’s best air purifier.
Mike Feldstein
We have sun, uv light, which is from the sun. We have wind. So generally, outside is like the world’s best air purifier. But we trap that. So indoors, we got all the chemicals. We have cooking, we have more mold, we have off gassing from furniture. Pets are another huge one. So just like, everything in our home, and then our homes are, like, tupperware containers, so all the outdoor pollution comes inside and can’t get out.
Mike Feldstein
All the indoor pollution stays inside and can’t get out. So that leaves us just trapped in our little Tupperware boxes, freezing. And if you smell an old Tupperware box after several days of things living in it, it’s not a very pleasant thing, and we just get used to it in our home. So, yeah, those are, like, high level, the way that I’ll be talking about indoor and outdoor pollution, and broadly, the things will fall into those two buckets.
Leanne Vogel
There is a lady that I follow on Instagram that talks a lot about nose blindness. Could that be part of what’s going on? When we walk into our homes, we think everything’s okay, but it’s not actually okay. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Mike Feldstein
It’s a very powerful term. I’m keen to. Do you know this person? Should we give them a shout out?
Leanne Vogel
I don’t remember her name, but, yeah, I will put it in the show notes. She shares, like, really good cleaning tips. And she talks a lot about nose blindness, and that was the first time I’d heard of it. And when you were talking about the Tupperware container, I’m like, I wonder if this is the nose blindness situation.
Mike Feldstein
So, yeah, anyone who’s talking about nose blindness, I want to listen to them and pay attention, because most people don’t have that on their radar. So I’ll give you two examples of noseblindness that will kind of one back from my restoration days, and then one that everybody can relate to. So the one that everybody can relate to is nobody thinks they smell like smoke at the campfire, making those s’mores, you got that fire going. It’s all good. Having a good time, playing a little ukulele, singing some songs. Maybe you get that smoke in your eyes, and then you’re like, ow. And you move to the other. Is the smoke following me? What’s going on here? But then you go inside, maybe you shower.
Mike Feldstein
Maybe it’s even the next day. You’re like, I stink like smoke. And you don’t realize that you smell like smoke until you leave the campfire. And then even as you’re getting cleaner, you’re noticing it more. So a very prevalent example for people would be the campfire. Nobody smells the cigarette. The person who’s smelling it smoking it isn’t smelling it. It’s the folks who aren’t smoking it.
Mike Feldstein
Who are a little bit away. So when I was doing restoration, actually, I’ll give you two more. Another one is if you go to someone’s house and it stinks like cooking or maybe like a dog, within 1015 minutes, you don’t smell it anymore. Because how annoying would that be for our human existence if we couldn’t get used to bad smells? We’d be smelling bad things all the time. Nobody’s own house smells to them, especially not after being in there for a few minutes. So in wildfire smoke situations. So PM two, air quality. We have temperature, we have relative humidity, we have co2, which is carbon dioxide.
Mike Feldstein
We have PM 2.5, which is particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns in size. And a micron is a millionth of a meter. And those are the particles that are small enough to enter your lungs in your bloodstream. Our bodies are pretty good at filtering out the bigger stuff. Not great, but there seems to be a lot more health issues with particles. So you’ll see PM 2.5 as the way that often harmful particulates are discussed. And then we have voCs, which is volatile organic compounds. Think about this as all of the off gassing, the cooking stuff, the odors, the paints.
Mike Feldstein
A normal HEPa filter doesn’t really filter odors. And Vocs, that’s for a carbon filter. So with PM 2.5, your house right now is probably between a four and a ten. That’s pretty excellent. That’s good. Under 20 is reasonably good. But most homes, when you set up your Jasper and it calibrates or you have an air quality sensor, you can expect your air to be between a four and a ten. When you see wildfire smoke outside and they’re telling you air quality advisories, it’s anywhere from Los Angeles to British Columbia, the whole west coast, they know all about this.
Mike Feldstein
They say recess is canceled today, kids, or stay indoors, don’t exercise. They have the air quality advisories due to smoke. Outdoor air during a fire, you could be far from the fire, but when you see the smoke outside, that five to ten becomes like a 250. This is a very big number. You’re told to stay indoors. What people don’t know is even indoors is about a 150. But I lived in Kelowna, British Columbia for two years, so I got to see. Luckily I have all my air quality gadgets and I’m measuring stuff and I’ve been in a lot of toxic wildfire environments after fires and during fires.
Mike Feldstein
But 150 would normally feel like campfire levels of smoke. But because the outsides are 250, the insides are 150, people think their indoor air is perfect. They go outside, it smells like a campfire. They go inside, it smells fine. So that, to me, is the ultimate example of no splend. They’re literally like. Beijing on a regular day is a 50. Delhi is getting, like, over 100.
Mike Feldstein
So 150 would be one of the most polluted places on earth, but you don’t notice it relative to a 250. So these are a bunch of examples on nose blindness, where it’s situations where you can’t trust your sense of smell because it’s relative to something else. You walk in the house, you smell cooking because there wasn’t cooking outside. A few minutes later, you got used to it. So nose blindness is kind of like your inability to trust your nose because it can’t accurately give you the information that you need to make a good decision about where you put yourself.
Leanne Vogel
So what does give you accurate information? How do we know what we’re working with?
Mike Feldstein
Well, it depends. I’m very calibrated now because of all of the air that I’ve measured beside gadgets. So just for fun, actually, we’re not using video. I know, but I’ll keep my co2 sensor nearby because it’ll be helpful and we’ll share what we’re seeing. But basically, you want to calibrate the data to your body’s biosensors. So I have my door cracked, so I’m holding up my co2 sensor, and you can see it’s a 544. We’ll check it again in a couple of minutes, and I’ll show you what I mean. But basically at a glance, it’s difficult to know firsthand.
Mike Feldstein
But how did you know with water? You didn’t know until you started drinking filtered water. If you only had top water your whole life, you would never taste that funky taste. That’s just water. You would never taste it. You would never smell it. You would never notice it when you went to filtered water, and then you came back. That contrast is what gave you the awareness to be like, this tastes chemically, I’m not drinking it anymore. So without the contrast, you couldn’t really calibrate with air.
Mike Feldstein
If you go into a house and it smells musty or mildewy or something like that, we all kind of know what musty smells like. That’s just a cute word that we use for mold. If it smells musty, it’s moldy. And you need to learn to trust that the landlord is going to downplay it. Nobody wants to open up the can of worms. And sometimes it’s not as big of a problem as you think. But when you realize that the smell of mustiness is mold, another little word that we use is stuffy. The air feels stuffy.
Mike Feldstein
What stuffy means is high co2. So the oxygen is displaced. You’re breathing a bunch of carbon dioxide. So it’s like really kind of trusting and listening to your own body. We have amazing biosensors on board. Like critical. If you smell garbage really close, it’s going to stink and you’re going to get away from there. So you’ve trained yourself on that scale.
Mike Feldstein
This stinks very bad. It smells bad because your body knows it’s very unhealthy. It’s not like a random thing. Things that smell bad usually are bad. Now, things that smell really good can also be bad, like chemical fragrances and things like that. But once again, it’s a chemical fragrance. Why does it smell like scented lemon stuff in this uber or those glades and those fresheners and all that stuff? Basically, things shouldn’t have strong aromas. Wood can have a very natural smell.
Mike Feldstein
That’s fine. Usually things, though that smell bad are bad. So I would say that feeling when you’re like, I need to go outside and get a breath of fresh air, that just means the co2 is really high indoors, so you don’t have enough fresh air. And it’s funny how we talk about outside has fresh air. That’s just air. That’s not the magical air. Your indoor air is so bad that regular polluted outdoor air seems good. So with mold, it’s going to be a musty smell.
Mike Feldstein
With smoke, we all know what that smells like. Cooking odors. Like when you’re cooking, you want to crack your door, crack your windows. Range hoods don’t tend to do a very good job at all. And cooking particulate a little bit of a tangent here, but the particles when you cook, like cooking indoors is already like a new thing. We built these airtight boxes and we cook in it. And what ends up happening is anything in your home that can absorb water, like get wet, like a metal surface, a sealed wood surface, your tile floor, it gets wet, you wipe it, no harm, no foul. With a shirt, a couch, a bed.
Mike Feldstein
If you pour a bunch of orange juice on the couch, it’s never going to be the same. You could clean the surface, but it’s deep, it’s porous, it’s in there. So anything that you know can absorb water also absorbs air. So you really want to be getting a lot of fresh air in your home and venting out the stale air when you cook, because otherwise, all those cooking particulates, which aren’t healthy at all, you got the pan, you got the ph, which polysilic aromatic hydrocarbons, same thing we get from wildfire smokes is created by high heat and protein when we cook. That’s getting embedded in your bed, embedded in your couch, embedded in your clothes, and then it can’t get out. So, ideally, why do we clean our surfaces and our counters and we wash our hands when they look clean? Because we know there’s invisible stuff on there that will make us sick if we don’t. We wipe that counter after dinner, even though it looks fine. So really, for a hygienic home, you need a holistic cleaning strategy.
Mike Feldstein
That’s cleaning your air and cleaning your surfaces. And if you deal with things when they’re on the air level, they’ll never become a surface problem. Like, we don’t have dust at home. None. Never. Dust is a function of dirty air, otherwise you would never have it. And then air problems become surface problems. Surface problems become air problems.
Mike Feldstein
So my long winded answer is, trust your senses. And stuffy is not good. Musky is not good. Strong aromas if you can open it up and get fresh air. So more or less, yeah, just like, trust those senses. And I want to show you something. So, see, we’re at 529, and that’s because that little glass door on the porch is cracked about four inches. I’m going to close that.
Mike Feldstein
I’m going to do nothing more but close that and watch as we continue to chat. I will show you. The co2 is going to climb like crazy in this room. So that will be a good little visual demonstration for you.
Leanne Vogel
A big part of my job is trying out new products, using them for six plus months, and then deciding whether or not it’s good enough for you. And I’ll never forget the day that I made my first order on bioptimizers. This company didn’t know about me. I wanted to try a new magnesium supplement because I was finding that the one that I was taking was either causing a disaster pants situation or it was hurting my stomach and it was not working. I was dealing with some sleep issues, and I knew that magnesium could help it. And so I just ordered a one month supply of bioptimizers magnesium breakthrough. And it changed the game. But I kept taking it for another five months just to make sure that it was absolutely fantastic.
Leanne Vogel
Wonderful. And at that point, I reached out to bioptimizers and I said, I need to work with you guys. This is a fabulous product. I also really love their masszymes, which is a whole other conversation. But today I want to talk about sleep because there was a time where my body just could not fall asleep. And you know when you’re stressed out, when your mind is racing, you’re going to wake up exhausted the next day because you didn’t have a good sleep. And when I started taking magnesium breakthrough, my sleep completely changed. I actually have clients that I put on magnesium breakthrough, and they say if I take it even at nighttime, like at dinner time, I will fall asleep.
Leanne Vogel
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Leanne Vogel
And why would it climb like crazy versus where it was previously inside your home versus it looks like you’re in like a patio area. Why would it climb like crazy where you are right now? So we can understand?
Mike Feldstein
Yes. So I am in a patio area. We call it the inside outside room because it has glass doors to the main house and it has glass doors to outside. It’s not a screened in type of patio. So the HVAC is not circulating in this room. And right now I’m talking quite a lot and I’m breathing in oxygen. I’m breathing out carbon dioxide, and that carbon dioxide is going to increase and it has nowhere to go. So as I breathe, I’m going to continue to fill this room with co2.
Mike Feldstein
And co2 is interesting because an air filter doesn’t capture co2. Buildings, hotels, they all don’t have window like office buildings. They never have windows that open because that’s for energy efficiency and basically homes and offices are designed to be energy efficient. And energy efficiency is completely at odds with environmental health, because if you’re trapping everything in, you’re trapping in the heat in the winter, the cool, and in the summer with all the other stuff too. So 1000 co2 is when you start to get brain fog and fatigue and things like that. 600, 700 is kind of normal inside. Outside it’s 400, like, exactly. 400 is the outdoor co2, which I find it uncanny.
Mike Feldstein
That’s our, like, it’s 400 point. Apparently. A couple of hundred years ago it was like 180 or 200. And I could just only imagine how fresh a breath of air would have been when it was like even more oxygen rich and even less carbon dioxide outside. The lowest I’ve ever seen is like 385 in Vancouver island in the rainforest. So 1000 is when we start to have problems. 1000, 502,000, we start to have big problems. I’ve seen a home like my parents house.
Mike Feldstein
They had about 40 people over for a dinner several years ago, and it got about to 3500, which usually when you’re like, it’s stuffy, you’ll notice those moments when you’re looking for a breath of fresh air. You’re in a classroom, you’re in a house, you’re at a party, you’re at a dinner, there’s too many people in a room and you’ll never feel stuffiness outside. You’re going to feel it indoors when there’s too many people. Now, a really good advanced air system, like a modern building ideally would have a co2 system. And when the co2 is high, it would vent out the co2 and bring some more oxygen in. Homes don’t typically have that. But the crazy thing is, not only did it hit 3500, it will stay that high for three or four days, unless you then purge with the open the windows, open the doors after a lot of people are in your home, because your home’s HVAC system is likely designed for four people to live in that home at any given time. So when you have a bunch of people over, it’s staggering how much that co2 can increase.
Mike Feldstein
And they have done numerous studies on air quality, whether it’s the particulate or the co2, but basically the worse the air is, absenteeism gets worse. The quality of grandmaster chess moves get worse, SAT scores get worse. Like our cognitive function, our performance, our productivity is directly correlated. Just like an athlete. A good athlete has a nutritionist and they exercise. Our sleep quality and our ability to perform at a high level and stay energetic is very correlated to the air quality on a long drive. I know you’re from Canada. If you’re ever on a long drive and you get tired, I’ve seen co2 hit several thousand when you hit that recirculate button in a car.
Mike Feldstein
And when you’re heating and cooling, often it recirculates. And then what do you do to get you go, let me just open up my window to wake up. So that’s like the human base level thing is like open window, fresh air. The cold, it’ll wake me up. It’s very unlikely. The cold, it’s much more likely. You just purged all that co2 out of your car, you got some oxygen in your life again.
Leanne Vogel
Okay, so in places like Alberta, Canada in February, where you can’t really open, I mean, I used to sleep with the window open in that temperature. Or in Florida, where it’s so flipping hot in July, do we just keep our windows open? Like, do we just purge it once in a while? Or how do you manage that in those extreme highs and lows of temperature? Craziness?
Mike Feldstein
So I learned this through a firsthand experience, because when I lived in Kelowna, British Columbia, the temperatures didn’t used to be extreme. They didn’t used to get wildfires there. They sure do now. Now it gets, for your americans, well over 140 celsius and higher and pretty cold in the winter. So a lot of homes there because it used to be more temperate. They don’t have central air, they have baseboard heaters, they have heat pumps, things like that. So when me and my wife would go to bed, our co2 would be like 600 and 5700. I wasn’t monitoring it right away, but I was sleeping 10 hours a night and waking up exhausted, like so tired.
Mike Feldstein
And I’m like, let me measure the air in here. Anyway, the co2 was going from that 600 and 5700 to about 3000 every night. So I was just bathing in carbon dioxide at night. And this was a big problem. And we would keep our doors shut. If we didn’t, the cats would come in and then the cats would create their own set of air quality issues in our environment, especially because cats take on cat litter, which is very chemically, and then that rubs all over your bed. So the cats weren’t allowed in our room. The door was shut and the co2 was getting out of control.
Mike Feldstein
In my baby’s room, she was about one at the time. Her co2 would only go up to 800 because she was just one person with her little baby lungs. But with me and my wife breathing, that was probably mostly me. In reality, that was enough to get the co2 way up. So we had wildfire smoke and we had hot summers and cold winters. So much like what you’re saying, opening the doors and the windows wasn’t really a viable option. What ended up being a perfect solution. So when the temperature allowed for it, cracking the window is awesome.
Mike Feldstein
But when it ended up working, and thankfully I do like to sleep with white noise. My white noise I now get through my air purifier. It’s just more natural than a speaker. But all we had to do was we left the ensuite door open to our bedroom and we left the bathroom fan on and that was enough to keep the co2 under 900. So your bathroom fan, you already have ventilation in your home. People don’t realize this. When you use your dryer, it vents a ton of hot air outside. It creates heat blows outside, a ton of new air comes in.
Mike Feldstein
So like a little pro tip for folks is to use your dryer at night because that’s when energy is its cheapest. So not only is the dryer being used when energy is cheaper, but your home gets very inefficient when you’re blowing all that air outside. Because there’s a little principle. Basically it says one cfm out equals one cfm in. So if my bathroom fan is venting out for every liter or gallon of air that it’s pushing outside, the exact same amount of air is going to come back into my home through doors and vents and windows and all the leaky places. So by venting out the co2, I was able to bring in fresher air. On that topic, a range hood. So my range hood now is a little bit noisy in Kelowna, my range hood, the level one, was like silent, which was awesome.
Mike Feldstein
So whenever we would have anybody come over to our house and there’d be more than like six or seven people there, we would just leave the range hood on, fan speed one. And that was just enough to be constantly exhausting out and venting out our co2. And that was able to control it quite well. So we have these little tools in our home, our backing fans, our range hoods that can, it’s still not that energy efficient because it’s still going to blow out the climate control there and bring in the hot or cold air. Now there is something called an ERV or an HRV, which is energy recovery ventilator or ventilation or heat recovery ventilator. And what that’s designed to do is it’s designed to give you all the benefits of fresh air without losing the efficiency. So it has a core that gets the temperature of the air inside. So when the outdoor and indoor air are being exchanged, it’s warming or cooling the outdoor air to the inside temperature.
Mike Feldstein
Now, you can install these as a retrofit to any HVAC system. It’s not that effective. But if you are building a new home from scratch, in fact, Alberta now has erv, HRV and building code, and a lot of states do too, where you can’t build a home without one. So the best home design is a very tight home, very energy efficient with an ERV or an HRV and really good air filtration. So if the pollen is coming in, or the wildfire smoke is coming in, or the pollution is coming in, we want fresh air and we want it to be clean. So it’s difficult in a retrofit situation. And if you’re going to spend five, six grand on a system, you might just be better off cracking the window or using the bathroom fan and paying an extra couple of dollars a month in energy than making this large investment. So those are a couple of tools that I found.
Mike Feldstein
And then also you want to make sure the vents in your house work. So take a Kleenex or a toilet paper or a piece of paper, test your range hood, test your bathroom fans. Make sure they actually work.
Leanne Vogel
That’s a great tip. That is such a great tip. I’ve actually never done that and we just moved into a new house and I hadn’t thought of that. So I love that.
Mike Feldstein
And you’re in Florida, which is a moldy place.
Leanne Vogel
Yes. Which takes us to our next place. I want to talk a little bit about mold. We’ve talked about co2. Can we talk about mold and its impact on air quality and kind of how to manage and some tips around all of that, the concerns that you have, what you’ve seen.
Mike Feldstein
Yeah, mold is like one of those things that are so misunderstood because it’s like there’s thousands of species. Mold is kind of like pollen. And what I say that by that is I’ve consulted thousands of families where there’s a family of five and one or two of them are critically ill. Sick highs, rashes, respiratory asthma attacks, autoimmune condition flares up, one of them is a little sick and then one or two of them is fine. It’s like, just like allergens, just like alumni allergies, people are affected in different levels. Mold is kind of like that. However, it’s occurring indoors, whereas the pollen and stuff is occurring outside. Mold is inside and outside.
Mike Feldstein
It’s not really a problem outside because of the amount of fresh air that we have. Indoors is a big problem. And it’s also so misunderstood because the mold awareness has been growing faster than we can keep up with. And it’s all kind of motivated by. It’s usually being educated to you, by somebody who has a horse in the race. And I don’t think it’s actually malicious intent, but let’s just say naturopaths. For example, a lot of naturopaths now have became aware of how mold can impact their patients health. So they do a mycotoxin test or an ERMI test, or, like, there’s various tests that they use even in the environmental consulting space in a home.
Mike Feldstein
There are ermes, there are air cells. There are a bunch of different tests. Most tests are designed to skew false positive or skew false negative. So an ERMI, for example, is pretty much designed to skew false positive. I’ve never seen an ERMI that didn’t show extremely high levels of mold. I’ve never seen a mycotoxin urine test that didn’t show high levels of mold. Not to say that’s not an issue, but Ermi was really used by restoration contractors who would go into a house after a flood or a mold removal, do a test, and then get the insurance companies to pay for a big cleanup job. Well, if it was showing negative all the time, it would be very unhelpful for them.
Mike Feldstein
So it’s not that if you do a perfect remediation job, the ErMi won’t come back clean. But mold is everywhere. So if you take a test of dust for your mold, it’s more alarmist than it needs to be. So you have different practitioners who they were just taught about the mold test and trying to be as helpful as possible. You can’t be an expert in everything. It’s very overwhelming to try to do so. So it’s very difficult to navigate this. I’ve seen people who have been told to evacuate their homes and demolish their entire house that had less than average levels of mold.
Mike Feldstein
However, if you speak to a landlord who has a tenant moving out and there’s a black patch in the bathroom, their solution is going to be a little bit of white paint, cover it up. So, unfortunately, it’s hard to navigate because most people just have a sliver of truth and a sliver of diagnostics at your disposal with any of these air quality or water quality situations, we have to be practical and decide if we’re going to handle the source or if we’re going to treat the problem. So with water, for example, it’s impractical for most to find a spring and go get their water from the spring. And I know people who do it, depending on how close they live to a spring. Do you do it or you know people who do it?
Leanne Vogel
I do too. I know people who do it. And when we lived in our rv, we did it. We found all the natural springs where we were going, and we did that for two years. It’s a lot of work.
Mike Feldstein
It’s a lot of work, but it’s great. So that’s a time when dealing with source can be done. You could ideally find your food from the best farmers you can find controlling source. Even though you cook the chicken, you might clear up the salmonella and the bacteria off, but if you’re not going to get all the toxins and the hormones and stuff out of it. So you need to control your source with water. The fortunate thing is water filtration is pretty solid, and all of the water in your house comes from one pipe. So it’s very easy to put a whole home water filter on, or a shower filter, or a fridge filter, or a berkeley. It’s quite easy to deal with the bad water that we bring in, not the source.
Mike Feldstein
The city water is incredibly convenient. Maybe someone has a well, but because it’s like a single point of access, it’s fairly easy to deal with the water source and filter it to the level that you want to filter it. It’s very easy to test. It’s very easy to filter it. Air is a little different. We don’t get all of our air through a straw or through a pipe. It’s coming from everywhere at all times. It’s inside, it’s outside.
Mike Feldstein
We don’t have much control over the source. Our water gets, like, treated by the city. So basically they have water that would make you sick. They fill it with chemicals so it won’t kill you immediately. But those chemicals obviously have their own issues, and it makes it straightforward to filter it. And then with air, it’s a little bit more nuanced. And especially mold, because I’ve never tested a house in my life that doesn’t test positive for mold. How could you? It’s outside, it’s inside, it’s everywhere.
Mike Feldstein
So I like to change the conversation from not do you have mold? But what species of mold do you have? And how much? What is your mold load? What is your sensitivity to mold? So if it’s the same aspergillus penicillum that’s outside in the same quantities that are outside, you don’t really have a mold problem. That’s why when you test for mold, you take a control sample outside to compare the indoor air to the outdoor air. Now, generally, homes do have mold. By the way, a little bit of a co2 check. We’re up from 540 to 620. So it’s a large room and I’m one person, but we’re now seeing the co2 increase at 619. I’m still good. Starts to get over 901,000.
Mike Feldstein
If it gets up there, I will start to experience a little bit more difficulty in breathing. It will just a little more effort going into each breath. So I’ll keep my eye on that. I travel with one of those. I like to stay sharp and make sure my biosensors are calibrated. So with mold inside between the attic that most bathroom fans, they’re not there for poop smell, they’re there for humidity after your shower. And you want that to vent outside your house. More often than not, builders get lazy and they vent right into the attic.
Mike Feldstein
So all that humidity is dumping. You have fibrous porous insulation. Mold happens in the attic, there is going to be a mold problem. The attic is the least harmful place because it’s mostly designed to vent out, but that mold can still grow and spread. You also have bathrooms, you have toilet bowls, are very wet, damp environments. You got kitchen sinks, you got plumbing, you got showers. So usually somewhere along the way, there’s a leaky roof, there’s a leaky pipe in very small quantities behind the drywall somewhere that you can’t see it, you can’t find it. And it’s very difficult to have no leaks, no moisture problems.
Mike Feldstein
You’re going to be playing whack a mole and tearing your house apart all the time. I always tell friends, if you ever have a lease that you can’t break, tell me, I’ll find the mold. I can always find the mold. With a thermal camera boroscope, your sense of smell can almost always find mold. So you have to be practical. If there’s a visible black patch of mold, this is a problem. If it smells very musty, this is a problem. One of the biggest no no’s of all is hang dry in your clothes inside.
Mike Feldstein
This is one of the worst things you can do for mold. Think about when you take a towel or a shirt, it can absorb a lot of water. And then if you hang that inside, all that water goes in your air, especially if that door is shut. That is a surefire way to have a significant black mold problem. So the best way to approach that is ideally you do it outside or use a clothes dryer. If you do have to hang dry inside, ideally you can open a window in that room. If you can’t do that, have a bathroom fan on in your laundry room that’s always on. So I actually keep a bathroom fan in my laundry room that’s always on because laundry machines are kind of like a moldy environment anyway.
Mike Feldstein
There’s wet, there’s a bit of water in the drum. The water sits in there. So we keep our laundry room door shut always with that bathroom fan on, just so all the lot. We use the most least harmful chemicals and the most organic, natural products we can. But that’s a room that I like venting outside, just like an attic should be venting outside. So with mold, ideally, that’s why I think people should filter their water. I think they should clean their countertops, and I think they should filter their air. Because whether it’s to have a home that doesn’t have excessive levels of indoor mold.
Mike Feldstein
Footnote. Most homes have more pollen inside than outside, much more because the pollen gets in, but it can’t get out. Your home is not pollen proof. Your home is not smoke proof. Your home is not mold proof. So your house brings in all these things and they get trapped inside. So I like the dust test. Like, if your house has any dust, it means you have a big air problem.
Mike Feldstein
And the problem with dust is dust is not inherently the big problem, but dust mites are a big problem. And then dust becomes the vessel for everything else. So the mold and the mycotoxins hit your ride with the dust. So generally, though, with mold, if you have a leak, if there’s black stuff, that’s when you want to get a remediation contractor to remove it. But for most mold loads in most people’s homes, and I was once a tenant in a home before I bought my house that had a lot of mold. We tested a lot of mold. We set up a few hepa air purifiers, retested no mold. Luckily, air filters are incredibly effective for mold spores.
Mike Feldstein
They’re quite easily to filter. So mold, just like I believe drinking filtered water is table steaks nowadays. And it’s like the laziest way to be healthy. You don’t have to go to the gym. You don’t have to cook these elaborate meals. Filtered air and filtered water are absolute table stakes, I believe, when it comes to controlling your indoor environment and your environmental health.
Leanne Vogel
When I started eating a low carb diet in 2014, I had no idea the impacts that low electrolytes would have on my overall health. I started keto. I added a little bit of pink salt to my water, but really didn’t think that a lack of sodium, potassium, or magnesium would really throw me off. I can tell you after a couple of weeks of eating the ketogenic diet, it was very apparent that I needed electrolytes. Unfortunately, at the time, there was no element electrolytes. There was no such thing. I really had two different options. They weren’t the best.
Leanne Vogel
I went and added pink salt to my water that tasted not so great. Fast forward a whole bunch of years. Element came out with their first electrolyte powder, and I’ve been hooked ever since. In fact, little secret here, I actually add more salt to my element packet because I’m crazy. So my very favorite way to enjoy element electrolytes is to add it to my 24 ounce water bottle and add an additional quarter teaspoon of gray sea salt. Now, this isn’t for everybody, but for individuals that are massively lacking sodium, I do have this issue. Personally. It can display as allergies, apathy, abdominal bloating, depression, dizziness, fatigue, low blood pressure, low hydrochloric acid in your stomach, poor protein digestion, weakness, slow oxidation, and unfortunately, calcium supplements will make this even worse.
Leanne Vogel
And so if you think that maybe you need more sodium on your ketogenic diet, the best way to bump this up is with electrolyte packets. I’ve had many coaching friends and clients tell me that they’re taking anywhere between two to six packets a day. I know that it is. My most favorite way to prepare for a workout is doing my electrolytes about 30 minutes before I work out. If you haven’t tried element and you’re looking for a different type of electrolyte, or you’ve never tried them before and you’re curious if this is the missing ticket in your ketogenic diet, you can go to drinklmnt.com, grab a couple items, and get a free sample pack with your order. That’s eight single serving packets free with any element order. All you have to do is go to dri nklmnt.com kdp and you can get your free sample pack with any order. Now this is totally risk free.
Leanne Vogel
If you don’t like what you get contact them and they will give you your money back. No questions asked. You really have nothing to lose. It’s a fantastic product, and I can’t wait to hear which flavor is your favorite. So when it comes to filtration, just like there are different filters for water, there’s obviously different filters for air, there’s probably good and bad. And what should we be looking for when it comes to the proper filtration? Because a lot of the times you’ll just go on Amazon, you’ll look for whatever filter and you’ll think like, yeah, good to go. Good to go. And does dehumidification have something to do with this also? Like, should we also have a dehumidifier? Do those two play a role? Can you tell us more about those pieces?
Mike Feldstein
Yeah. Ervs and hrvs also do help with humidity as well as co2. So I’ll say that. But dehumidifiers can also be great, for sure. So can ventilation. So all those bathroom fans and those range hood techniques, those can also really help control humidity. Dehumidification can be great because it depends on your environment. So, I mean, having a relative humidity sensor in your life is helpful.
Mike Feldstein
So in addition to the now 654 co2, my relative humidity in this room is 36%. It’s Austin, and it’s winter. Funny that they even call this winter here, but that’s a little bit dry. So, in fact, I would actually be wanting to increase humidity a little bit. 45 to 55 is the sweet range. 40 to 60 is okay. But as you get over 60% humidity, that’s when you start to get into the mold zone. As you get below 35%, that’s when you start to get into the virus and the bacteria zone.
Mike Feldstein
So too dry is also very problematic. That’s why a lot of people get sick in the winter. It’s so dry. Your esophagus, your hair, your skin, like humans do need moisture. Another thing that our biosensors can tell us, if you go into the desert, you know what dry feels like. If you go into the desert or the dry sauna, you know what dry feels like. If you go into the steam room or into the rainforest or you go outside after a big rainstorm, you know what humidity feels like. So that’s another thing that your body can really tell you if you listen to it a little bit.
Mike Feldstein
If you find your throat getting dry a lot, it’s likely dry. But for things like sensing cheap Amazon products, like, I wouldn’t get like $1020 things, but like $50 to $200 items are pretty good. Aware. Aw A-I-R is pretty good. Air things is pretty good. I’m using an Aeronet four A-R-A net four get something with a lot of reviews. But those three products are pretty solid for generally testing the air. You don’t need a bunch of them.
Mike Feldstein
You can just get a couple and test them out. So if it’s humid, yeah, dehumidifiers can help. But also air conditioners are also dehumidifying in nature. So if it’s hot out and you run your ac, another added benefit is it does really control humidity. Air filters are very different, just like water filters are different. Just like a nonstick and a stainless steel and a cast iron pan are very different. They’re different. A golf cart and a sedan and a pickup truck are different.
Mike Feldstein
Air purifiers, same deal. So the spectrum kind of goes all the way from $99 Amazon little Honeywell Lavoiet thing that looks like a water bottle, all the way up to industrial air filters that I was using when I was doing mold, flood and fire. They’re actually called air scrubbers. The difference is pretty much golf cart to pickup truck. So the little guy was quiet, it was cute, it was small, it was cheap, but it couldn’t do very much. Couldn’t go very fast, it couldn’t pull anything, couldn’t carry people, couldn’t carry stuff. And the big truck can pull a lot of stuff. Probably think about like a big diesel truck, not like a nice f 150, big, loud diesel super duty situation.
Mike Feldstein
It’s loud, it’s aggressive, it’s crude. It’s not that nice to drive, but it can pull your stuff. So that’s the range. So when we were using air scrubbers, they were incredible to clean air. They could have as much as 1200 cfm for contact. Some of those little air purifiers could have as little as 20 or 30 cfm. So we’re talking about like a 40 x multiple factor of performance and effectiveness. Now, the stuff I was using for restoration, super effective.
Mike Feldstein
It cleaned the air so well, but it was very ugly, very heavy, and very loud. So we couldn’t have a conversation in this room. Right now it would sound like there’s a truck on in the room. So super good if it’s for three days after and you’re a molds contractor, like, great. That’s what we want for industrial use. That’s like the range. The range is like tiny, ineffective, and quiet to massive, loud and ugly. By the way, co2 check 715.
Leanne Vogel
Incredible. I’m so glad that intuitively, when I’m recording a podcast, I always open the window. Like, as soon as you got on, I opened up the window.
Mike Feldstein
Well, I’m talking so much and you’re not. So it’s probably not a big problem this time, I guess.
Leanne Vogel
I love it. I love it.
Mike Feldstein
But no, it’s a good habit. Obviously, you do it because you feel better when you do it.
Leanne Vogel
Yeah, exactly.
Mike Feldstein
So that’s the range. Now brands have started to inch in both directions. So the Dyson came out with a beautiful air purifier. 600 $700. It’s beautiful. It’s a very modern design, but it’s not very effective. Their hairdryer is awesome, their space heater is awesome. Their blow dryers are great.
Mike Feldstein
Their humidifier is not even too bad, but their air purifier is quite ineffective. Its primary feature is the design. It is beautiful. It’s like slightly functional. Art molecule, same deal, they made a beautiful thing. Not very effective. But there are some half decent brands in that two 3499 range. The issues with those guys, so, like, pretty much filtration is very simple.
Mike Feldstein
The best type of filter is a HEPA filter that’s designed to filter particles. So it’s not killing, it’s not changing their molecular structure or electrically charging them. It’s a mechanical filter. When the particles pass through, they get captured. So instead of going your air, they get stuck in the filter. Now, that’s when you hear, like filters down to 99.97%. Problem is, that’s per pass. But when you have those little $99 air purifiers that are the size of the water bottle, they don’t move very much air.
Mike Feldstein
So if you think about it analogy, I really love to paint this picture. You can’t heat your bathtub with a kettle. Kettles are great for heating water. For tea, awesome. But if you try to fill your bathtub with a kettle, the water is going to cool off faster than you could fill the tub. If you try to heat your swimming pool with your water heater, you need a pool heater. There’s different size water heaters for different size jobs. So if you have a nice little space heater and you put it in your bathroom, in your closet, in your little bedroom, it might heat the room nicely.
Mike Feldstein
Go put it in your living room. It doesn’t do a thing. So even if the heating element is the same, it doesn’t move enough air. So with those little small air purifiers that are being advertised for your home. Often, they’re just way too small to do the job. They’d be fine. Like, those little air purifiers would be good for a car or a closet, not for a bedroom. And if they’re going to move any amount of air, they’re going to be at the loudest possible setting then.
Mike Feldstein
So Hepa is the thing that captures particles. That’s your mold, that’s your smoke, that’s your pollen, that’s your bacteria, that’s your viruses. Then you have, like, a carbon filter. Carbon is great for activated. Charcoal is another word for it. This is what’s awesome for gases, vocs, odors. It’s going to absorb that stuff. It’s not going to filter it.
Mike Feldstein
It’s going to absorb that stuff. And at its core, the big difference is size. So I will also say there are other types of filtration technologies, like pico, like uv, like hydroxyl radicals, electronic cleaners. These generally suck uv light, for example. I’m a big fan of uv. I’m a big fan of the sun. I’m a big fan of vitamin D. Uv is awesome for cleaning, like a surface, a toothbrush, a wallet, really good for water.
Mike Feldstein
The best way I can describe uv, it’s like if you try to wash your hands with soap, we learned during COVID you need to wash your hands for 20 seconds or 15 seconds or whatever to have enough contact exposure time to clean and to kill the bacteria. Uv also needs contact exposure time to kill the bacteria. So if you put like, a uv in an ice maker or right in your furnace, it could prevent the furnace itself from going. Mold, no doubt. If there’s a humidity issue in there that it can do, but the air is passing through it way too fast that it doesn’t have any contact exposure time. So uv in an air purifier is quite a gimmick. It’s another consumable you have to replace. And uv emits ozone, three, which can also be damaging to your lungs.
Mike Feldstein
All those electronic cleaners, they make basically dust fall to the floor, in simple terms, but they also emit ozone. So they solve a problem, electronic cleaners. But they create a new problem. Like, if you ever have an electronic cleaner and you smell it, it stinks. It has that electronic smell and charge to it. Not good. So I like things that filter, not things that molecularly change things. I just want to capture the stuff just like my water filtration.
Mike Feldstein
Except for I do believe in uv, especially for lake water, well water. But with a water tank, you’d have like, a storage, a holding tank. A big uv light would sit in there. It would have a lot of time before you drink the water. The ozone and stuff would off gas and come out through the air bubbles. Great. Yeah. So with air electronic cleaners, I’m just really not a fan at all.
Mike Feldstein
Like a basic cleaner. So you want a basic hepa, you want a carbon filter, and then you want it to be big enough to do the job. So size does matter. It needs to be big enough, because if it’s big enough, it can be silent, because it’s got large enough fan blades to work silently. Ideally, it also has smart sensors and smart features, because that way it can be quiet. But if it detects cooking, smoking, the neighbor vaping, or using a lint dryer or wildfire smoke, it will increase its fan speed automatically and then decrease its speed and show you what’s in your air. You want an air purifier that vents upwards, because if it blows forward, what happens is it’s actually aerosolizing droplets. Think about it.
Mike Feldstein
If you have a bunch of dust and you blow on, it kicks it up, or if you, like, shake out a dirty, dusty, whatever, it shakes it up. So if the air purifier is blowing forwards, it actually disturbs things. Or if it blows up into the breathing zone, it doesn’t do that. You want an air purifier that has 360 degrees capture. So it’s capturing the air from the floor all the way around. That way you can put it in a corner, you can put it beside a piece of furniture. If you have an air purifier that’s only collecting the air from one side or two sides, you need to leave it in the middle of the room, because if you block one of the sides, it’s going to have its effectiveness very. It’d be like driving a car with two wheels or taking the air out of your tires.
Mike Feldstein
Not a good idea. So you want it to be cylindrical in 360. As it takes in the air, it needs to be large, so it’s moving enough air. Basically, it comes down to efficiency, is what percentage of particles get captured per pass, and then what amount of efficacy, how much air can it actually move, which is why it needs to be a decent size. And then lastly, is, like, the features that are relevant to the person. So I hated air purifiers that would have these bright lights on, and then it would have, like, a sleep button, and then you would push the sleep button, and it would turn off a light, but it would also turn the fan speed down to like 5%. So the only thing you’re putting to sleep is the air purifier. So I like an air purifier where it has one sleep button where you can turn off the light and have it on any fan speed.
Mike Feldstein
So you can actually turn it up at night but still not have any ambient light in your bedroom. So basically you want a high quality filter, a large fan, you want a few basic features and then hopefully you want it to look good because if it’s ugly you’re going to hide it and you’re never going to use it completely.
Leanne Vogel
All of those were such great tips. I guess where I want to take this conversation next as we kind of wrap up and understand our options, can you talk a little bit about your business and what you’ve created, why you created it and how it hits some of the points that you were talking about?
Mike Feldstein
I can and I created it. I have a chart like a table back six, seven years ago before I even started to dream this product up that it had three columns. What annoys me, why it matters and how we’re going to solve it. So that was the first principles thinking because I was a big prosumer and a consumer of air purifiers. I had the big industrial air scrubbers, I had the little useless ones, I had the gadgets. And there was a time when I wasn’t even going to launch this product or company. I just needed to make it for myself. But I originally designed Jasper specifically for wildfire smoke because my background was in going into wildfire zones and cleaning homes and restoring homes and fixing property after natural disasters.
Mike Feldstein
I wanted to create the air purifier for wildfire smoke because those little tiny air purifiers didn’t dent the smoke. You could have 20 of them in your home. When there’s wildfire smoke they don’t do anything. And then if you have these big ones they’re super and ugly so you end up turning them off. I remember a customer in Fort McMurray, Alberta named Angela. Had a child who was sick and the air was really bad and she unplugged it and I went to her house. I’m like, Angela, what are you? I know, I know, but it’s so like there’s no peace here. Like I can’t live with this loud machine.
Mike Feldstein
So I originally went on the path I thought I was only creating Jasper specifically for. Jasper is the name of the air purifier that I invented and it was specifically supposed to be for wildfire smoke. So I wasn’t thinking about allergies or asthma or sleep or mold, none of it. I just figured when it’s summertime, I would just like. I used to mobilize for natural disasters and all the purifiers were sold out. I figured we’d go and we’d give people in wildfire zones a beautiful, quiet, sleek product that could keep up with the ever increasing wildfire smoke. That was the vision. Then it took a few years to get there.
Mike Feldstein
And then Covid 2020, we are about to launch in the summer. Covid starts in the spring. And they mandated in Ontario that every dental office needed an air purifier in every single operatory, which I think in the States is called like a surgery. Basically every room where the hygienist cleans your teeth, each dental room, it was the loft to open up. And based on the performance of the air purifier, that would determine how many minutes between patients. So if they had no air purifier, it would be 2 hours between patients. So they’d basically be out of business. If they had like a Dyson or a honeywell or a lavoid or something like that, or a small air doctor or something like that, they would be like 45 minutes between patients.
Mike Feldstein
And if they had a Jasper, it would be like eight minutes between patients. So for the dentist, it was a money making investment. They couldn’t afford not to have it, and they wanted something that was beautiful, that was smart, that would make their patients and staff feel safe. So we’d realized if it’s ugly and if it’s loud, no one’s going to use it. So the criteria was it has to be quiet, it had to be beautiful, it had to be smart, and it had to have the power of an industrial machine that could actually keep up with the mold, with the smoke, with the allergens, with the pollen, because it’s just not practical to have 30 or 40 little air purifiers everywhere. A few, sure, but it has to be a little bit reasonable. And the filter had to be really easy to change, like 30 seconds or less. So it had to be simple and pretty and effective.
Mike Feldstein
And like I said, it was supposed to be for wildfire smoke. It ended up being for dentists. But then what happened was, and our price used to be $2,000 each because our shipping price during COVID was over 500 600 for us to ship them. The costs were so crazy. Luckily, all of the other ugly medical purifiers were like three, four five, $6,000. So we were 2000. We were cheaper than them and we were pretty and we were smart. So we were doing amazing in the dental market.
Mike Feldstein
And dentists have some of the worst air quality of any industry. The Department of Defense ranked dental and hygienists has the top five most dangerous jobs in America. More than cops, nuclear plant workers, firefighters, miners, because they’re taking a big aerosolizer and blasting into people’s gums. So when you test the air quality in a dental office, you’ve got saliva, blood, tooth particles, bacteria, everything you can imagine. And the dentist has a mask but the patient doesn’t. Your mouth is wide open. And even the masks that they’re using are not significant enough to filter up most of the stuff. There are so many studies on air and dental offices.
Mike Feldstein
Even the lobbies are heavily infected. I will never go to a dental office that doesn’t have significant air filtration if I go. It’s one of the first questions I ask when I’m vetting at a new dentist. I don’t want to breed that stuff and I don’t want my kids to breed that stuff. So we ended up being in dental and then the dentist would rave about the jaspers to their patients and their staff as part of their COVID protocol. So we’re the safest, healthiest, cleanest dental office in town. It’s even safer than staying home. So then the patients would say, whoa, my child has asthma.
Mike Feldstein
Do they sell these for the home? And the dentist is like, I don’t know, call then. And we had no online sales. Literally like everyone, if you wanted to buy a Jasper, you would call us. We would talk to you for an hour. Just like when I used to do restoration. We would talk to you about your mold, your allergies, your asthma. It was a very consultative approach. That’s how we did things for the first couple of years.
Mike Feldstein
At the beginning of 2023 we got the price down to 1399. At the beginning of 2024 down to 999. Which brings me so much joy because we were really unaffordable before. So people who really were dealing with like an air crisis would buy it and it was like a luxury item and that was never our intention. And everybody raised their prices during COVID and nobody’s put them back. So we’re really trying to like our prices are normal again. So it was time for us to reflect that in our price. So ultimately, basically the way I thought through Jasper was supposed to be the perfect blend of peak performance and peak design.
Mike Feldstein
Because if it’s going to be in your living room and it’s going to be in your bedroom, it should blend seamlessly into your decor. It shouldn’t be this ugly eyesore. It needs to be quiet. You should forget that you have it, except for when you’re cooking and when you’re cleaning and it goes up to red and the fan speed kicks up and you cannot forget that you have it. And then we have a lifetime warranty and something called the life changing guarantee. So if somebody buys one and they don’t love it in the first two months, like it’s not noticeably changing their life, their sleep, everything, we give them a prepaid shipping label, they slap it on and we take it back. And if the unit ever breaks, we do the same thing. We ship a new unit, we take the new one out, we put the old one in prepaid shipping label, take it back like that whole, treat people how you would want to be treated.
Mike Feldstein
I wanted to create a company. That is how I would want a brand to treat me. And if we do our job, we’ll have customers for life. If we don’t do our job, we’re going to have angry people immediately. So there’s a reason there’s no bad reviews online is because we hold ourselves to the highest standard and I am our biggest customer. So yeah, basically that’s kind of how Jasper came to be. And truth be told, I would love to tell people that one is enough. One helps a lot.
Mike Feldstein
One helps a lot. But with water, a whole home water filtration system is six, seven, eight, $9,000, $500 a year in filters. And people do that without blinking an eye. So the more Jasper, somebody buys, the cheaper it is and the cheaper the filters get. But truthfully, if this is a good, better, best situation, best is one per bedroom and one in your living room where you cook. But one is a great place to start. Like if somebody gets one and they test it in their bedroom, fan speed, two lights off, people who have used their aura and their WHOOP to track their sleep. I’ve seen aura scores go from 60 to 90 overnight because all of a sudden you’re not breathing mold and pollen and bacteria.
Mike Feldstein
And then if somebody wants to get more, email us, we’ll give them a big discount on it. But truthfully, you should really think about your air filtration system as a whole home system. So the air in your home is shared. It’s all one cohesive unit. When you cook, you’re going to notice the air quality in every bedroom gets compromised, not just in the kitchen, because your HVAC system and your furnace mixes the air throughout the whole home. So if you have, let’s say one Jasper in your bedroom, you’re going to have like 97% cleaner air in your bedroom. And that’s going to contribute to like 20% clean air in the whole home. If you have it in two bedrooms, it’s going to be like 40% clean air in the home.
Mike Feldstein
And then eventually, if you have three or four, your whole house is going to have filtered air. And then instead of saying, let me go outside for a breath of fresh air, you should be saying, let me go inside for a breath of clean air. So that is Jasper in a nutshell.
Leanne Vogel
I love the passion that you have and how much education you’ve shared with all of us. And so many feel. It’s not often that I feel like, okay, I need to listen to this episode again just for myself to learn more. So I hope that something that you shared in here, and I have a feeling there have been many little nuggets along the way that it has been so helpful in understanding our air. And I think that comparison between water and food and air quality, I know when I woke up to the food quality and then the water quality and the air quality, it really does make a difference. And I can attest to when I wear my aura ring and my air is clean, I can tell a difference between my HRV and those sorts of things. So thank you again for coming on the show today, Mike. I really appreciate you sharing all of your wisdom.
Leanne Vogel
Yeah, thanks for spending time with us today. 777 for the co2. Wow.
Mike Feldstein
We’re almost up to 800 on the co2. And something that I like to do because we don’t do Facebook ads, we don’t do Google Ads. We just try to make the product affordable. I’d love to make a code to give your listeners a big discount, please.
Leanne Vogel
Yes.
Mike Feldstein
What code would you like to use that I can set up for them?
Leanne Vogel
KDP. Keto diet podcast. KDP.
Mike Feldstein
That’s KDP.
Leanne Vogel
You got it.
Mike Feldstein
Do you know when the episode is going to drop yet?
Leanne Vogel
We know that today is February 27, episode 462.
Mike Feldstein
So here’s what we’re going to do. KDP will be the code for the first week after the episode. It’s going to be a 20% off discount code. And then for the rest of time, it will be a 10% off discount code. So KDP. And we don’t do discounts on our website. We just like to give exclusive discount to your listeners who made it to the end of the episode and obviously found these educational bits helpful to them. So code KDP will be live starting on the 27 February to give your listeners a discount and Leanne too, because.
Leanne Vogel
I plan on getting a couple. That’s amazing. Thank you again for coming on the show for this offer. Thank you Mike.
Mike Feldstein
Thanks for having me.
Leanne Vogel
I hope you really took a whole bunch away from today’s episode and you feel equipped and empowered and not drugged down. That’s really when we talk about new things that perhaps haven’t been on your radar, there can be this overwhelm. So please listen to today’s episode again. I know that after I interviewed Mike I had to listen again and there are just so many tips and tools that cost absolutely nothing to give you some really high quality air in your home. And if you are looking to get yourself a Jasper unit, I have one. I’ve been sharing my experience on Instagram over these last couple of weeks to kind of introduce you to the brand and the experience and oh man, I think I’m going to need to get another unit. Okay, so if you go to healthfulpersuit.com Jasper, that’s Jaspr, you can grab your unit for 20% off using the code KDp. I’ll also include links in the show notes today if you want to click over there.
Leanne Vogel
And if you have any questions about my experience with different air filtration or what I do personally, hit me up on Instagram. I’d love to chat with you over there at Leanne Vogel. Okay, this does it for another episode of the Keto Diet podcast. We’ll see you back here next week.
