Office Air

As someone who does not like being cooped up in buildings with questionable air quality, I was intrigued by Allen et al.’s study involving office workers subjected to variations in air each day.  They described some of the history behind modern building standards, such as making buildings tighter with less outdoor air exchange in order to save on heating and cooling costs. They were interested in comparing the productivity of workers in one of these buildings, which they termed conventional, where there were also materials contributing volatile organic compounds (VOCs) to the air they were breathing, to the productivity of workers in so-called “green” buildings, where VOCs were lower.  They described the standards of the U.S. Green Building Council, and pointed out that while those standards do result in buildings with lower VOCs, they don’t require a higher air exchange than the conventional buildings.  The authors decided to also vary CO₂ levels in their study as a way to see if investing in equipment that can bring in more fresh air without losing heat could increase worker productivity.  They put 24 workers into a building that was designed for scientific tests, and gave them different air to breathe on different days.  They did their normal jobs from 9-3, and then from 3-5 they participated in scenarios scientifically designed to evaluate their ability to function at a high level in a challenging situation.  They found that the workers had statistically significant reductions in their performance in these scenarios when they had been exposed to either high VOCs or high CO₂ all day, and they did the best on the days when extra fresh air was provided.  They measured several different aspects of the workers’ performance in the scenarios, and interestingly, Strategy was the area that saw the biggest effect.  (Allen et al., 2016)

Guo, et al. studied an incredibly simple intervention –  giving women one gram of vitamin C every day for two months.  They measured organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the blood of 15 women, and then gave them either the vitamin C or a placebo for two months.  At the end of the two months they found that the levels of several of the different types of OCPs and PCBs were lower in the women who had taken the vitamin C, and this result was statistically significant.  They mention that OCPs and PCBs are endocrine disruptors, and they hypothesized that vitamin C catalyzes their detoxication.  They discussed the possibility that the vitamin C might be only stimulating phase I detoxification and thus be actually bioactivating the OCPs and PCBs into something even more dangerous until phase II is able to bioinactivate them.  They propose that vitamin C being an antioxidant could also help to mitigate this danger, but this study did not find any evidence that it was specifically doing that.  They want to do another study with 100 men and women since there were so few people in this study.  (Guo et al., 2016)

I think that they should try to measure the levels of the intermediate chemicals that are produced by the phase I reactions and see if those are higher in the vitamin C group.  Then they could try a second intervention intended to boost phase II, such as prescribing daily amounts of dietary protein.  They could see if the vitamin C and protein group ended up with lower levels of the intermediates.  Even though vitamin C is only one of many many nutrients found in fruits and vegetables, this study is a poignant demonstration of the way it can help us to process some pretty scary sounding chemicals.  If a single isolated nutrient can do so much, I believe the synergistic effects of the symphony of phytonutrients that our bodies have evolved to utilize must be capable of much much more, and I am definitely inspired to eat more fruits and vegetables.

References

Allen, J. G., MacNaughton, P., Satish, U., Santanam, S., Vallarino, J., & Spengler, J. D. (2016). Associations of Cognitive Function Scores with Carbon Dioxide, Ventilation, and Volatile Organic Compound Exposures in Office Workers: A Controlled Exposure Study of Green and Conventional Office Environments. Environmental Health Perspectives, 124(6), 805–812. 

Guo, W., Huen, K., Park, J.-S., Petreas, M., Crispo Smith, S., Block, G., & Holland, N. (2016). Vitamin C intervention may lower the levels of persistent organic pollutants in blood of healthy women – A pilot study. Food and Chemical Toxicology, 92, 197.