How important to you is the quality of air you and your loved ones breathe?

Membership fees to all sorts of clubs range from a few hundred pounds a year to thousands of pounds. Good quality air monitoring devices cost upwards of £100 and for a bit more they are portable, reliable and accurate and there is nothing extra to pay. No monthly charges. So, when you’re on your favourite piece of exercise equipment try monitoring the air around you because you will be breathing hard and fast, scooping in a lot more than 460 litres per hour. As will the people sharing the class and space with you.

Babies, tell your parents that the air at ground level where you live is the worst air in the room. The more you cry the better you’ll be because mum will pick you up and hug you in that nicer air that she breathes at head height – you may want to avert your head if she’s been on the garlic. When she goes to put you down on the ground just squeal, kick, shout and cry cos you don’t want to breathe that crappy air at floor level.

Now baby, listen up – that air down there contains lots of dust mites and stuff – when you get hold of mums iPad check out the science, it’s scary and bewildering to parents so you’ll need to teach them that you don’t want to be living down there for hours on end, unless they clean up their act. Get them to check the air where you live and make lots of noise about it, you’re good at that so keep practicing.

Mums and Dads – pollutants are all around us but you can do things to protect your baby. Why is it a concern? Because babies and infant’s respiration rates are up to 6 times greater than adults. So instead of breathing 460 litres of air, what they breathe is equivalent to you, Mum and Dad, breathing 2,760 litres per hour 66,000 litres a day. They don’t breathe that much but that’s a comparison.

Those little people are also more susceptible to bad quality air – it affects their development because the little tiny particles in air, the tiniest ones, go deep into their lungs and damages their health in the long term.

This is about indoor air and the same applies to outdoor air, which carries all manner of pollutants.
The correlation may not as bad as it sounds because the air is diluted with fresh air and old air and polluted air, all mixed together in the big air blender some call fresh air. Or is it? Just how much of each are you breathing?

So now you know, here are more reasons why babies cry, that aren’t in the baby books…..yet.