For decades, environmental risk focused on the visible and catastrophic: spills, smokestacks, contaminated properties, while doling out punishments after the damage was done.

Now a quieter and potentially far more consequential ‘ecological meets human health’ issue is moving to the center of scientific and commercial attention: exposomics.

Businesses should pay attention because exposomics changes the question. It is no longer simply whether a company discharged a regulated pollutant. Increasingly, the question is whether the cumulative environmental conditions surrounding employees, tenants, customers, and communities contribute to disease, and whether those exposures can be measured, reduced, and ultimately connected to economic and legal consequences.

What Is Exposomics?

The exposome is the totality of environmental influences an individual experiences over a lifetime, together with the body’s biological responses to them. Exposomics is the science of studying those exposures.

It encompasses chemicals and pollutants, diet, physical activity, infections, medications, socioeconomic conditions, and other environmental influences.

Think of it as the environmental counterpart to genomics.

That matters because genetics alone does not explain most human disease. A 2025 Oxford study of nearly half a million UK Biobank participants found that environmental factors explained about 17% of variation in mortality risk, compared with less than 2% attributable to genetic predisposition.

The business lesson is simple: where people live, work and spend their time matters.

Parkinson’s Is a Warning

Parkinson’s disease illustrates why exposomics deserves attention.

Researchers are investigating environmental contributions to Parkinson’s, including air pollution, pesticides, and solvents. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences identifies trichloroethylene, a solvent historically used for industrial degreasing, as a potential Parkinson’s risk factor. TCE is already recognized as a human carcinogen.

Studies have also associated exposure to pesticides such as paraquat with Parkinson’s risk.

This does not mean that any particular exposure inevitably causes disease. That distinction matters. Exposomics is not a license to declare that every chemical is dangerous. It seeks to determine which exposures, at what concentrations, for how long, and in combination with what other exposures, alter biological risk.

That is a much more sophisticated question.

The Building Becomes Part of the Equation

And that question has immediate implications for real estate.

A building is not merely an asset measured by rent, occupancy, and capitalization rate. It is also an exposure environment.

Indoor air quality, radon, particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, formaldehyde, cleaning chemicals, building materials, drinking water, and ventilation can all contribute to an occupant’s exposome.

The green building industry has already moved in this direction. LEED, for example, incorporates indoor air quality strategies, low emitting materials, air quality testing, and construction IAQ management.

The next step may be more demanding: verified drinking water quality, better ventilation and filtration, pollutant monitoring, radon testing and mitigation, low emitting materials, and healthier operating practices.

These are not simply amenities. In real estate they can become risk management tools and sources of competitive differentiation.

Radon Shows the Way

Radon is perhaps the clearest example of an environmental exposure real estate owners should already understand.

EPA estimates that radon causes approximately 21,000 lung cancer deaths in the United States each year. It is the second leading cause of lung cancer overall and the leading cause among nonsmokers.

A property owner does not need to wait for a new regulation to recognize the value of testing and, where necessary, mitigation.

The same principle may increasingly apply to other environmental exposures.

From the Building to the Breakfast Bowl

The exposomics conversation is also reaching the food aisle.

Artificial food colors provide an interesting example. Consumer demand for “clean label” products, scientific questions about the lifetime effects of food ingredients and political pressure, including HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again initiative, are pushing manufacturers to reconsider ingredients that have been commonplace for decades.

General Mills has announced the removal of petroleum-based certified artificial colors from its U.S. cereal portfolio, including products such as Lucky Charms, Trix and Cheerios. WK Kellogg has said it will eliminate artificial colors from its U.S. cereal manufacturing portfolio by the end of 2026.

The point is not whether artificial colors are dangerous. The larger point is how markets respond when science, consumer preferences and public policy converge around questions of cumulative exposure.

That same dynamic can affect real estate.

Exposomics Will Change Environmental Liability

The legal significance may ultimately be greater than the science itself.

Environmental litigation has historically confronted an evidentiary problem: identify the contaminant, prove exposure, and establish causation between that exposure and an individual’s disease.

Exposomics may narrow that evidentiary gap.

Sensors, biomonitoring, analytical chemistry and data science are making it increasingly possible to measure exposures and biological responses in real time and through blood, urine, hair, tissue, and other samples. The science is already here and AI is making it affordable to search large data sets.

Today’s uncertain association is fast becoming tomorrow’s quantifiable risk.

For businesses, the question therefore should not be limited to:

“Is this required by law?”

It should also be:

“What will the science say about this exposure ten (.. okay, two) years from now?”

That question has implications for due diligence, acquisitions, building design, employee health, product selection, insurance, disclosure and litigation.

The Business Takeaway

Exposomics is not about panic. It is whether it is quantifiable.

Businesses should identify and reduce unnecessary environmental exposures in their workplaces, buildings, products and operations. That means taking indoor air and water quality seriously, testing for radon where appropriate, selecting low emitting materials, improving ventilation and filtration, evaluating chemical use and documenting environmental health decisions.

Green buildings, whether certified under LEED, Green Globes or another standard, can be a good part of that strategy.

The environmental issue of the future may not be the spectacular spill that makes the evening news. It may be the invisible exposure that occurs every day, for years, inside a building, or in a bowl of breakfast cereal. And whether you see this as a health and wellness movement, a MAHA political movement, or a social media aesthetic, exposonics is here and now. And AI is putting it in the hands of everyone.

Exposomics matters because it is turning environmental health from a generalized concern into something increasingly individual, quantifiable, and actionable.

And what can be measured can become a market differentiator, a business risk, and potentially a legal liability.

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Join us for the next in our webinar series at the Intersection of Business, Science, and Law, “Exposomics – The New Environmental Challenge And Opportunity You Have Not Heard About,” on Tues, October 13 15 at 9 am. The webinar is complimentary, but you must register here.