Mary Minno is a Founding Partner at Treehub.
When the Palisades fire tore through Los Angeles in January 2025, it offered a stark reminder that the environment around us can have an immediate and profound impact on our health. It also raised a broader question. Why has consumer health become so sophisticated at measuring what happens inside our bodies while paying comparatively little attention to the environment in which we spend most of our lives?
Over the last decade, billions of dollars have been invested in digital health technologies designed to give people more information about their bodies. Wearables, at-home diagnostics and other tools have made information that was once difficult or expensive to access available to millions. We can track our sleep and heart rate, monitor our glucose, order blood panels and learn more about our bodies than ever before.
But we know far less about the air we breathe every night, the water coming out of our taps or the other environmental factors we’re exposed to every day.
This has created a gap in consumer health. The industry has become increasingly sophisticated at measuring downstream outcomes while paying far less attention to the upstream environmental factors that can influence them.
The Home Is Part Of The Health Equation
The connection between our environment and our health isn’t new. The World Health Organization estimates that nearly a quarter of deaths globally are attributable to modifiable environmental factors. Air pollution, unsafe water and other environmental risks contribute to heart and respiratory disease, cancer and other health problems.
What is surprising is how little most people know about their own exposure.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Americans spend roughly 90% of their time indoors, where concentrations of some pollutants can be two to five times higher than typical outdoor concentrations.
Ask someone when their home was last tested for radon, what’s in their drinking water or what they’re breathing while they sleep, and there’s a good chance they don’t know.
For many people, the closest thing their home gets to a physical is an inspection when they buy it—and that inspection doesn’t answer all of these questions. A traditional inspection is designed to assess the condition of a property, not necessarily the environmental exposures that could affect the people living in it.
Why Has Environmental Health Lagged Behind?
Part of the answer is practical. It’s easy to buy a wearable and start collecting data. Understanding the environmental health of a home is more fragmented.
There are individual tests for water, radon, mold, air quality and other concerns. There are inspectors, laboratories and contractors specializing in different pieces of the problem. Even when you find something, the next question is often, “Now what?”
That experience looks a lot like consumer health did before a new generation of companies made complex health information easier to access and understand.
The opportunity in environmental health is similar. People don’t need another dashboard full of numbers; they need to know what is worth paying attention to and what they can actually do about it.
The Timing Has Changed
The Palisades fire brought this issue into sharper focus, but the broader shift is becoming harder to miss.
Wildfire smoke can travel hundreds or thousands of miles from the communities where fires are burning. Smoke from Canadian and Pacific Northwest wildfires has affected air quality far beyond the immediate areas of the flames.
Then there are the less visible issues, such as water contamination, radon, mold after flooding and everyday indoor pollution. Environmental exposure isn’t limited to people living next to a wildfire or industrial site. It can be part of the everyday environment of an ordinary home.
At the same time, consumer behavior has moved in exactly the opposite direction. In a 2026 Pew Research Center survey, 78% of U.S. adults said lowering their risk of developing health problems was a major reason they put effort into their health.
Prevention Should Include Where We Live
None of this diminishes the value of the tools that have driven the health boom. They have helped millions of people pay closer attention to their health and ask questions they might not have asked before. But there is a limit to how much we can understand by looking only at the body.
Health is shaped by genetics, behavior, medical care and other factors. The physical environment is one of them, and importantly, there are environmental risks people can do something about. If a home has elevated radon, it can be mitigated. If a water test identifies a contaminant, there may be filtration or remediation options. If an indoor air issue has an identifiable source, it can potentially be addressed.
The point isn’t that improving a home will solve every health problem. It’s that people should know more about the exposures they can identify and change.
For entrepreneurs and investors, that’s what makes environmental health interesting right now. Consumer health has created a population that is comfortable collecting data, paying for preventive tools and taking a more active role in its health. Environmental health hasn’t yet had the same consumer moment.
One such entrepreneur, Ben Parens, a former Treehub residency participant, saw an opportunity firsthand when he was one of thousands to evacuate the Palisades fire. Now, entrepreneurs and organizations are building tools that help consumers better understand and address environmental health risks. Home health platforms like Parens’ Nestwell are one example, bringing together information about a home’s environmental conditions and helping people understand what they can do about them. Other approaches include the Environmental Working Group’s consumer resources on environmental exposures, Angi’s network for finding professionals who can address home-related issues, and companies like MoldCo that specialize in identifying and addressing mold concerns. Together, these efforts point to the broader shift that environmental health is becoming easier for consumers to understand, navigate and act on.
For business leaders, the opportunity goes beyond environmental testing to building infrastructure that turns fragmented data into clear, actionable steps. That means making testing easier to access, results easier to understand and remediation easier to navigate, while fitting naturally into how consumers already approach preventive health.
The challenge is earning trust without creating unnecessary fear. Companies will need to translate complex science accurately, communicate uncertainty responsibly and connect information to practical action. Those that do can help make environmental health a more integrated part of preventive care.
Final Thoughts
We spent the last decade getting much better at understanding what’s happening inside our bodies. The next step is understanding more about what’s happening around them.
For most of us, that starts at home.
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