The Environment and Your Health with Jon Mitchell

In this episode of The Functional Medicine Radio Show, Dr. Carri’s special guest Jon Mitchell talks about the relationship between the environment and your health.

Jon Mitchell is a certified Physician Assistant turned Functional Medicine Health Consultant who shows driven professionals how to get abundant and sustained energy, mental clarity, and resolve their chronic health issues.

Main Questions Asked about the Environment and Your Health:

• How does the external environment impact our health?
• When it comes to the environment and your health, is there one area that you typically get the most bang for your buck?
• Can you talk about the use of light boxes?
• What about blue light?
• What about water and the minerals? How do you test water?
• What about air quality?
• What about noise pollution?

Key Points made by Jon about the Environment and Your Health:

• The framework that I work people through begins with working on their environment, and then we start moving onto those other things like the gut, hormones, etc.
• Things like your air, water, light, sound, EMFs and food are all going to influence a lot of the different functions within your body and at very basic level.
• A lot of times once you correct those things, everything else downstream works itself out.
• When it comes to the environment and your health, everybody is a little bit different in what is affecting them most and what they need to work on. One thing I like to work on is light.
• In our technology-driven life, we’re constantly being bathed in artificial light and it’s not normal, it’s just common. It has biological effects that we don’t realize.
• Our cellphones, laptops, TVs, even LED lights all produce blue light. Blue light is stimulatory, it suppresses melatonin. Melatonin helps us get to sleep and helps set our circadian rhythms. It is also an important anabolic hormone and a very powerful antioxidant. I try to get my clients to think about their exposure to light and try to mitigate that exposure, put on some glasses that block the blue light.
• We do want to get out in the sun (just don’t burn). The first thing when you wake up, get outside in the sun, show as much skin as possible; then throughout the day you want to get some sun.
• It’s tough in the winter, especially up in Canada, because you’re typically not going to get the UVB light that will help with vitamin D production. However, getting outside or getting sunlight through the window is going to help entrain the circadian rhythm, which is going to be helpful in a lot of ways, e. g., serotonin is converted via UVA light, so light from the sun is actually going to make us happier.
• Light boxes can be very useful, especially people dealing with depression and seasonal affective disorder.
• It’s important to understand that there is no wavelength of light that is inherently bad, it depends on how much you’re getting and the full spectrum of light. Light boxes can be very useful for that type of thing.
• Using glasses at night will change the way everything looks; everything will look red and orange which is what you want to emphasize at nighttime.
• I usually want clients to avoid the blue light for two to three hours, minimum. It takes that long for your body to calibrate.
• Sleep is also triggered by a drop in temperature, so another tip for improving sleep is to drop the temperature in your home a little bit before getting ready for bed.
• There are apps that you can use to change the background light, I like them, but I think we tend to forget about all the other types of light that we’re getting. I think using the glasses makes the most sense because it’s very easy to do and you can still go about the evening without worrying too much about it.
• The reason I focus on all these different environmental factors, the air, the water, the light, is because these are things we’re exposed to day in and day out.
• On average, we should be drinking about three litres of water a day, but the question is, “What’s in your water?”
• In general, people don’t realize that there are a lot of contaminants in the water. We trust our municipalities, but when I actually test the water supply of my clients, it gives a whole different picture of what’s going on.
• It’s important to understand that just because you don’t notice something in your environment; it doesn’t mean that it’s not wearing you down.
• Just because you think your government is regulating these things, they usually aren’t doing a very good job.
• If we’re talking about filtering water, I like reverse osmosis, but it’s important that you ...