Today's Guest Hero is Dr. Tamsin Lewis. You can find her at curoseven.com or @sportiedoc on Twitter.

Hello, my cubicle conscious, open space surveyors, corner office respirators, home den inhalers, a nd coffee shop sighters. My name is Brock Armstrong, and I am… not the Workplace Hero. You see the reason the website for this podcast is www.workplacehero.me and not .com is because this podcast is about making you into a workplace hero and I want you to be reminded of that every time you visit the website, send me an email, or tell a friend about this podcast. And you will, right? Right?

Before we dive in, I want to thank everyone who, at the time of this recording, has left a review on iTunes for the podcast. On the Canadian side: Dean Dwyer, elllietown, mijustiin, cawood1 and Elliotonitunes. On the #murican side: alex arrick, tdubs530, MAR150 and ukaserex. From the bottom of my workplace casual heart, I thank you all for your support. And without sounding too needy, if your name wasn’t on the list I just read, it would really help me out if you took a minute or two to give the podcast an iTunes boost. It is a small but meaningful way to show your support for the show. Just go to workplacehero.me/itunes and you will be directed right there! Easy!

Ok, on with the topic at hand.

I was listening to a Scientific American podcast a while ago and was excited to hear that a new study (released Aug 2016) had been done on how effective plants can be at cleaning the Volatile Organic Compounds from the air. As someone who has worked in extremely tightly sealed office buildings most of my life (you gotta keep that -30 degree Alberta air out somehow) I have often had a plant or two near my desk — but was only going on a hope and a dream that they were actually providing any benefit beyond covering up some coffee stains or overzealous permanent marker manoeuvres.

The Scientific American podcast said, and I’m sure we can all agree, that Air pollution outside is easy to spot, hanging over the city, or puffing out of an exhaust pipe. But there's a lot of indoor air pollution, too, even if it's not as obvious. It's caused by volatile organic compounds or VOCs.

Vadoud Niri, an analytical chemist at the State University of New York, Oswego says that they can come from building materials like paints, carpet, adhesives, vinyl floors, varnishes, solvents, personal care products, cleaning chemicals, air freshener, and even cosmetics.

And that cosmetics part is what caught Niri's attention. One day he went to a nail salon with his wife and he noticed the smell of acetone and since he was doing air analysis at the time, he thought he might be able to do something about this issue.

Niri figured one friendly and efficient way to get rid of acetone might be with houseplants. So he reviewed decades of literature and ran his own experiment, using an airtight chamber, and eight VOCs, in concentrations similar to those found in nail salons, against five common houseplants: a jade plant, a spider plant, a bromeliad, a Caribbean tree cactus, and what’s known as a Dracaena plant.

Turns out, after a twelve-hour test, it was the bromeliad that gobbled up the most chemicals from the air. And the Dracaena beat out the others, sucking up a whopping 94 percent of the acetone. He presented the results at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, in Philadelphia.

The paper is titled: Monitoring volatile organic compound removal by common indoor plants using solid phase microextraction and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry — if you are interested in looking it up… but I will read you some of the abstract now:

Air pollution is one of the most important environmental threats to the health of the residents of all communities and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are among important air pollutants. These compounds are ubiquitous in the natural and industrialized world but are found in the highest concentrations in indoor environments. Some of the chemicals belonging to this group are benign to human health, or even necessary for normal physiological function. However, a substantial proportion of VOCs are detrimental to human health with effects ranging from dizziness and nausea to central nervous system damage, various forms of cancer, and even death. Because of the serious nature of VOCs as a health hazard, many remediation techniques are being developed. Phytoremediation, the use of plants to mitigate environmental pollution, offers one of the most practical solutions regarding cost and efficacy.

Five common plants were selected for this study. Three treatment conditions were applied to each plant to isolate active VOC uptake mechanisms; covering the base of the plant in foil, no foil, and the use of a light. Of the five plants; Guzmania lingulata showed the greatest overall VOC uptake in light treatment conditions with more than 80% removal of six of the eight target VOC compounds over a twelve-hour sampling period. All tested plants showed less than 50% removal of dichloromethane or trichloromethane over the twelve-hour sampling period.

My office now is literally littered with plants. Some of the plants from the study to clean my air and some that I just like looking at. Which in and of itself gives us some benefits as well. As the author of the study Biophilia: Does Visual Contact with Nature Impact on Health and Well-Being? said (in a rather lackluster scientific way) “It seems worthwhile to encourage interaction with plants, both outdoor and indoor, as this is likely to be a useful environmental initiative with a sound cost-benefit profile.”

Enter Dr. Tamsin Lewis (who asked me to tell you guys that she is fighting a bit of a cold so forgive her croakiness).

Yeah, I think this concept of indoor pollution is increasingly being recognized as a problem. There are two problems, the circulation of the air and the air conditioning which dries out the skin and the mucus membranes of the nose and the mouth. But it’s lack of air flow and lack of air quality, which can include things like a high content of carbon dioxide, which can effect even how we breathe, for example. So, there are lots of different parts there. It’s ventilation and really how strong the air conditioning would be in the office as well.

I am Dr. Tam, as I like to call myself, or otherwise known as @SportieDoc where you can find me on Twitter. I run a company called CuroSeven in the UK which will be relaunching as FIBR Health in a month. Essentially what I do is run a medical and wellness consultancy where we follow a functional medicine model. Where we take people’s information and data and make it meaningful and try to get people on a better path to health and longevity.

My background is a Medical Doctor “generalist” then I went into psychiatry and then after that I took time to become an elite triathlete - how that happened is a long story - but I took four years out and raced at the highest level of triathlon and Ironman. It taught me a lot about resilience, taught me a lot about physiology, taught me a lot about psychology and interpersonal relationships, and I have used all of that to change the way I approach my patient care today.

I asked Tamsin to sum up the biggest health issues that she sees arising directly from our office jobs.

So at the moment we see a lot of people that have... well the main things that I see are people with chronic low energy, I see a lot of people with low libido, I see people who just can’t stay awake in the afternoon, I see people with chronic mild pain issues, lower back pain, that sort of thing. And on a separate point many people with mood and anxiety issues which is compounded by the day to day environment in which most people, a lot of people, we have to be in an off...