Expert Interview with
Cathy Cooke of Whole Home & Body Health
I have never heard of “Building Biology”. What is that?
It is broad and it is basically looking at buildings, the built environment and how that built environment impacts the occupants and looks at ways that we can make those building environments more healthy.
And the creation of building biology is very interesting. It actually began in Germany after World War II.
Just like in the U.S., when soldiers came back from the war and they were all promised a new home. This same situation happened in Germany, and what happened was that these new houses were built with a lot of the chemicals that were left over from the war.
We had this completely new technology, these new building products that were chemically based,
when prior to that, we were using all natural materials, wood and stone and brick and materials that came from the earth.
Now we have these chemically based materials, and at the same time, we were starting to have some understanding about energy efficiency, so we were building our homes tighter.
This created the perfect situation for trapping chemicals inside the spaces where we live. And so these soldiers and the occupants of these homes began to get sick.
Physicians in the area started to get together and wonder “what’s going on with these people and people living in these houses” and long story short, they eventually identified that this was a sick building syndrome.
So the occupants were becoming ill from these chemicals, and that was basically the advent of building biology.
And then as time went on, later, 80s more or less, the EMF component was added because not only did the practitioners begin to understand that there was a chemical and air quality issue, but the electromagnetic environment was also contributing to occupant’s health.
It was brought over to the U.S. in the 80s. And then since then, they’ve been training here in the US practitioners in both air quality and in electromagnetic fields.
And some people do one or the other, some people do both.
With an increasingly accelerating implementation of the IoT (Internet of Things), can localized mitigation really make a difference for our health?
Yeah, so absolutely it can.
For what’s inside of our homes, for the most part, we have control over.
So we don’t have to buy a refrigerator that’s connected to the Internet.
We don’t have to buy a washing machine that’s connected to the Internet.
For all of these things we bring into our home, we have the choice.
I understand it is getting increasingly harder to find certain appliances or devices without connectivity, but by and large they do still exist and you can still get them.
If you are managing what’s inside your home, that’s the most important thing you can do because it’s all about distance and proximity.
And I get this question a lot when people say, it doesn’t make a difference if I have
Wi-Fi in my house because when I open my computer, I turn on my phone, I see 20 other signals from all of my neighbors around me. And while that is true, the antenna on your computer and your phone is much more sensitive than the signal that you’re actually getting.
So it’s a little bit deceiving.
Even though you see that you’re getting your neighbor’s signal, if I had a radio frequency meter right here and I was measuring the actual radio frequency level that is inside your home, it would be much, much less, much, much lower than you would expect.
So even though the antenna on your phone or computer might be picking that up, what you’re
getting from your neighbor because it’s further away from you is significantly lower than what you have inside your own home.
Because of the inverse square law, the radio frequency signals drop off dramatically with just a little bit of distance. So if I was to hold the phone to my ear, I would be getting extremely high levels of radio frequency, as opposed to if I was to put it on the table and use speaker phone, even though I’m still getting a lot, it’s dramatically less because of that distance.
It is 100% worth managing what’s inside of your own home because that’s where we spend the most amount of our time and those are the areas that we’re closest to.
It does make a big difference and it dramatically will reduce your exposure.
Listen to full interview below
To contact Cathy please visit her website at Whole Home & Body Health
(all images courtesy of Whole Home & Body Health)