Dear Rob, In April 2026, one of the largest brain-aging studies ever conducted was published in The Journal of Nature Medicine. Researchers tracked 18,701 people across 34 countries and measured 73 separate environmental, social, and political factors: air pollution, climate, access to green space, water quality, inequality, and more. Then they compared each participant's combined environmental burden to their "brain age," meaning how old their brain looks on an MRI relative to their actual age. The finding: a person's combined environmental burden predicts accelerated brain aging 15.5 times more strongly than any single exposure studied on its own. (1) This isn't really a new idea to everyone. There is a small branch of medicine called environmental medicine that has been treating patients this way since the 1970s: looking at a person's whole accumulated burden instead of chasing one culprit at a time. My friend and colleague, citizen journalist Nick Pineault visited an environmental medicine clinic to see what they were doing differently, and to find out what toxins were lurking inside his own body. What he found was made into a documentary called Body Burden: The Toxins We Carry. He was so blown away by what he learned that he decided to make the entire film available to you, free of charge, from Oct 19 to 26: ==> WATCH NOW Body Burden: The Toxins We Carry (register at no cost)<== |
