Welcome back to another episode of the talk. Today we are continuing our conversation with Dr. Gary

Miller, all about our environment and how it could potentially be making us sick. Let's start off.

You've used the term exposomics. How do you distinguish that from traditional environmental

health research? So environmental health is, we're looking at how the environment affects our health, especially

focused on human health. Exposomics to me is like a data intensive tool that environmental

health can use. We are now trying to get as much coverage as possible. And so the idea is that,

again, my laboratory uses a lot of mass spectrometry where we measure thousands

of things at a time because we don't want to dismeasure the one thing that people worry about.

We want to measure everything that's there.

And so Exposomics is really about trying to capture as much about our physical, biological,

chemical, and even social exposures that affect our health.

And so in some ways, exposomics can expand beyond many of the ways we think about environmental

health because we may not think about social determinants.

So what is a social exposure?

Maybe go down that path.

So this is getting into kind of social determinants

of health and the social factors that affect our health. So when we talk about things like

socioeconomic issues, you can look at like what the average salary is in a certain area. But I think

about, well, how does that translate into something that changes

something in our body? And so there's actually this index called the Neighborhood Deprivation

Index that looks at things like access to food and access to health care and air pollution

and things. And so you have this index that people use to study diseases in epidemiology.

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