Hacker News Reader

Comment by forgotmypw17 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it is horrifying to think about how much air pollution we inflict upon ourselves. It's very hard to stop even in a two-person household, because so many of the "products" most people in the Western world are used to buying and using since an early age are violators. I am blessed with being quite sensitive to most of them, so it's an endless struggle with partners and cohabitants.

Basically anything bought new has it: furniture, clothes, cars, anything plastic, dyed, glued, particleboard.

"Cleaning" products: sprays, detergents, most "soaps", shampoos, creams, conditioners, have this type of crap in them.

Even most stuff which claims to be "eco-friendly" is bullshit, and has all the same crap in it if you look at the ingredients.

And it feels like online there is a whole army of "rational scientific defenders" ready to jump into action anytime I mention it. It feels like there is a whole playbook for discrediting this type of comment, and calling into question how "scientific" it is, etc.

View on HN

The scary part is that you become desensitized to VOCs the more you're exposed and people willingly increase their exposure by using air fresheners, scented candles, fabric softeners, and incense burners. It gets to the point where they can't even smell moderate amounts.

My partner has severe allergies and will break out in hives when exposed to many fragrances so we've cut them out of everything. We avoid most cleaning products and stick to water, salt, baking soda, vinegar, and peroxide for most household cleaning.

My MIL is very desensitized to fragrances and my partner has asked her on multiple occasions not to "freshen up" the house before we visit. My MIL swears up and down that she doesn't but the moment you walk in the door it's like a punch in the face. My partner unfortunately will break out in hives and immediately becomes congested.

> My partner unfortunately will break out in hives and immediately becomes congested.

normalize_relation(OP.MIL, OP.partner) == partner.mother

Right?

So, your partner's mom uses products that she knows will cause an allergic reaction to her kid.

Kid asks not to use said products for fear of allergic reaction.

Kid enters mom's abode.

Kid has immediate allergic reaction.

So I have to ask-- what is your MIL's reaction to clearly causing her kid to predictably suffer every time you visit?

I also have to ask-- why do you two keep visiting?

In her defense, she has toned it down considerably. She thinks however that the amount she still uses is so trace that it's undetectable, possibly because she's fried her sense of smell. She also has anxiety issues about not adhering to social expectations, like she can't arrive empty handed or will spend all day cleaning and then apologize for a "filthy" home that's cleaner than a laboratory clean room. So it's a struggle for her to hold back.

My partner is quite literally allergic to everything so it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation a lot of times.

> home that's cleaner than a laboratory clean room

> My partner is quite literally allergic to everything

... and now research is showing those two statements may be cause and effect to some degree, ironically.

I asked my mom to switch to unscented fabric softener and it took MONTHS for her clothes to stop smelling like being punched in the face with a bouquet. It's amazing how desensitized people are, and how long it takes those fragrances to dissipate.

> I asked my mom to switch to unscented fabric softener and it took MONTHS for her clothes to stop smelling like being punched in the face with a bouquet.

Yes! It's amazing how the smell persists subsequent washes.

The molecules are quite resilient compared to anything we consider "biodegradeable", which means they also persist when in our bodies.

Eh, old people can be weird and stubborn. (Or people in general.) Some don't really believe in something and might even be having early stage dementia (i.e. memory loss).

My own mother had a dismissive attitude towards dietary intolerances and even basic hygiene sometimes.

In my experience with working with many elderly patients, a lot of them are self-conscious of having "old person smell" so attempt to mask that with perfume/cologne. It's also harder for them to bathe and reach all the nooks and crannies so sometimes hygiene deteriorates.

One of the strongest smells in a nursing home isn't unchanged diapers it is that staph infection festering under a neglected old lady's underbreast area. Very infrequently checked due to modesty issues and caregivers trying not to offend and respect her decency but it does have to be monitored and checked routinely because that skin area stays moist and chafes against the folds and I've seen too many elderly women in severe pain from their bra straps chaffing the skin off here and getting infected.

Men of hackernews, check your elderly mothers underbreast area and make sure her caregivers are routinely keeping it clean and dry!!

This comment brought to you by a very sweet, very neglected old lady who we took out of a pretty bad situation in a care home and I will never forget that smell and the shame and plea for help in her eyes as I assessed what exactly was the source of her various ailments. And she was nonverbal so couldn't complain nobody was doing their damn jobs.

Some are just assholes. My aunt told a vegetarian once that she'd get some color back once she started eating meat again.

I'm keeping the closest watch that I can on this age and being a default assehole gig that I have heard all my life and am guilty of using myself to blank out some of my parents behaviour that was beyond salvation. I'm 50 now and looking for the SMaaS app I need the Shoot Me aaS when I default to asshole cos of age app is desperately needed in society.

That reminds me, a friend and I made a pact when we were teens. Hopefully he doesn't remember.

This is me basically, minus MIL with crazy fragrances. Every time I walk past a fragrance shop,I wonder how people survive in there...

Bicarbonate soda is an amazing product: we've been using it instead of washing-up liquid for our daughter's cutlery and crockery. Also to clean the bath before she goes in.

5 years ago,we bought a sofa, which came with a massive stench because of VOCs and fire retardants it gets soaked into.. After we complained, they sent in a guy,who pretended he can't smell shit and suggested going to the doctor for allergies.. to my knowledge, California is one of very few places, where furniture foam doesn't need to be soaked in harmful chemicals.

I pour a baking soda slurry on my hair in showers instead of shampoo, sometimes exfoliate my face a bit right after. Rinse it out with some diluted white or apple cider vinegar. Most shampoos had me developing horrible neck and scalp pimples and gave me dry skin.

Now if you want to really kick up the cleaning potential you put on gloves and bake the baking soda turning it into Sodium Carbonate which is an adequate replacement for lye in many household uses from cleaning to making pretzels.

There are many kinds of VOCs, some harmful and others benign. The human nose is sensitive to certain substances and insensitive to others. For example, the human nose can barely smell 1ppm of formaldehyde [1] or 0.000002ppm of damascenone (the fragrance made by roses and added to many products) [2]. That's a difference in concentration of 500,000. Put another way, an overpowering rose smell shows a tiny and harmless concentration. While a light formaldehyde smell indicates a harmful concentration. So you cannot trust your nose to tell you if VOC levels are harmful or not.

I used to be like your partner. A whiff of perfume would trigger nasal congestion, itchy eyes, and irritable mood. It got worse over 5 years. It became unbearable, interfering with my work and personal life. I consulted with an allergy doctor. They told me it was incurable and probably won't get better, just avoid perfume.

I started doing my own research. I found a study result [0] showing that perfume sensitivity is psycho-somatic. Then I learned stress-reduction techniques and used them to cure myself. Specifically, whenever I smelled perfume, I would practice slow breathing, go for a short walk, or get a drink of water. Gradually, I stopped feeling stress after smelling perfume. After about one month, I used lightly-perfumed (normal) hand soap at my friend's home and felt no discomfort afterward. My life improved a lot.

Allergy is a very specific physical process involving the immune system. Doctors have reliable methods to measure this process. Perfume sensitivity is something different. People develop emotional habits of reacting with fear when smelling perfume. When the body enters that triggered emotional state, it releases stress hormones. The stress hormones cause the symptoms of perfume sensitivity.

Your partner can cure their-self, as I cured myself four years ago. After they do it, please reply here so I can point others to this thread.

[0] http://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(06)01696-4/abst...

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00022470.1969.10...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242146083_GRAS_Flav...

This is something my mother does on a grand scale, and we all probably do on smaller scales. (Obviously plenty of allergies are real, I'm not claiming it's all made up.) For 20 years she's attributed various health problems to allergies. There tend to be 2-3 allergies that she believes she has at any one time, each one lasting for about 5 years. Last I checked, she was "gluten sensitive", that was the main one. Another person I know claims to be allergic to "about 20 to 30 things, but all on a very mild level that combines and accumulates over time". Just the sort of thing that you couldn't, you know, test for. A more determined person would probably hit on one thing and stick with it for a long time.

I think "rationality" is not any kind of preventative against getting caught up in this. It's a matter of being in a community, and everyone in the community saying "yeah I discovered I had this problem, it's actually way more common than doctors realize and it had these symptoms, and fixing it improved my life so much." So then you start to think about whether you have had anything that resembles those symptoms, and your brain wheels start to go on the possibility that all your life issues could be solved if you just eliminated whatever it is. Pretty soon you do have the symptoms, you see them every time you encounter this thing. Why didn't you notice it before? You must have been desensitized... and so on.

To be clear, I'm not making light of the issue, and I'm definitely not willing to say that this is what is happening to anyone in this thread in particular, but by my observation it's an extremely common problem, one I've fallen into myself before. I literally do not let myself listen to anecdata about allergies, because I know I'll fall for it again. This is all sort of reminiscent of England's famous "catching" psychological issues, or the betwitched children of Salem.

> Pretty soon you do have the symptoms, you see them every time you encounter this thing.

Your comment seems to imply that psycho-somatic symptoms are not real symptoms and people who suffer from them are behaving irrationally. If so, you are incorrect.

Psycho-somatic symptoms are real measurable physical problems in the body that are triggered by the brain. They are not imagined problems. For example, my perfume sensitivity triggered real nasal congestion. You could hook up a nasal flow meter and record data showing that my nostrils were blocked. For people with chronic lower back pain, you could connect a sensor to the pain nerves and measure the pain signals going from the lower back muscles into the spinal column.

Suffering from a psycho-somatic disorder does not imply that the person is rational or irrational. Psycho-somatic problems arise from everyday life situations. For example, my own perfume sensitivity developed over a year of high pressure at the office. My desk was near the women's restroom. Several times an hour, people wearing perfume would walk by my desk to use the restroom, and then walk by again a few minutes later. I became distracted when I smelled their perfume. I would respond to the distraction by desperately forcing myself to concentrate. When concentrating was difficult, I felt more stress. Gradually, my brain developed an automatic response: smell perfume -> feel anxiety and stress. Unfortunately, this was a self-reinforcing habit. After I recognized the root cause, I was able to un-learn the emotional habit and cure the psycho-somatic disorder.

Your tone implies that people develop psycho-somatic disorders after "falling for" some false idea. That is incorrect. Some would consider it extremely condescending and would take offense. When a person suffers from excruciating lower back pain, they are not "falling for" the idea that they have a back injury. They are just suffering. They try to understand why they are suffering. "I have a bad back" is a reasonable explanation. The knowledge of the most common cause of lower back pain is not yet widespread: that lower back pain is usually caused by subconscious tensing of muscles. Please re-examine your bias about psycho-somatic disorders. They are real symptoms suffered by rational people.

I assure you that your mother is suffering real symptoms. They are very likely not psycho-somatic. I commend her relentless search for root cause and cure. You could help her: Take her to consult with experts, help her objectively record her symptoms, help her systematically test different hypotheses and interventions, find a fun fitness class and attend it with her, research healthy recipes and cook them together, and make sure she takes enough vitamin D3. My own mother developed cancer and there was little I could do to help her.

> Your comment seems to imply that psycho-somatic symptoms are not real symptoms and people who suffer from them are behaving irrationally.

No, I was intending to do exactly the opposite. Sorry that that was unclear. My only point was that the cure is entirely a mental one, not that the suffering is fake. I suspect that you can develop symptoms by being around other people who have the symptoms. That doesn't mean your experiences aren't legitimate. As I said in the comment, I myself have had this experience. In my case it started with imagining things about my past experiences, but quickly turned into a real ordeal for me.

> I assure you that your mother is suffering real symptoms. They are very likely not psycho-somatic.

I agree, and we've tried to help her. She unfortunately has a pretty strong skepticism of traditional medicine and has an extremely unhealthy lifestyle that could more than explain most of her symptoms, but has chosen to micro-focus on the things people on her Facebook feed tell her are her problems. So she says, for example, that she has pain in her gut and gets headaches whenever she eats gluten. This is something she'd never complained of before, and a test for celiac disease turned up nothing. But still she insists. My only explanation is not that she's pretending to suffer, but rather that she's created the gluten intolerance herself. That it's a mental problem. Next time I visit, she'll probably be back to eating bread again, this time totally convinced something else is going on.

I'll just leave this here for anyone who wants to consider the idea that reactions to perfume may not always be psycho-somatic:

https://davidsuzuki.org/queen-of-green/dirty-dozen-parfum-fr...

https://www.ewg.org/research/not-so-sexy

https://www.mamavation.com/featured/toxic-perfume-chemicals....

https://alituranaturals.com/the-top-10-toxic-chemicals-in-pe...

https://www.forceofnatureclean.com/truth-about-toxic-fragran...

Just upthread you complained about someone's links to journal papers because

> The studies you cite do not list who funded them, but one of the links is ... a website which sells sneakers! One of the worst VOC offenders!

I'd ask you to consider that perhaps your sources of information, all apparently non-scientific (and many also having financial interests in "all natural" products) may not be the best counter-point to mainstream scientific research.

To be fair, I think the David Suzuki foundation is pretty well respected.

Here are some quotes:

Synthetic musks used in fragrances are of particular concern from an ecological perspective. Several of musk compounds are persistent in the environment and build up (bioaccumulate) in the fatty tissue of aquatic organisms.

diethyl phthalate, or DEP, is widely used in cosmetic fragrances to make the scent linger. Phthalates are choice ingredients in cosmetics because they are cheap and versatile. However, the European Commission on Endocrine Disruption has listed DEP as a Category 1 priority substance, based on evidence that it interferes with hormone function. Phthalates have been linked to early puberty in girls, reduced sperm count in men, and reproductive defects in the developing male fetus (when the mother is exposed during pregnancy).

That sounds pretty science-y to me, admittedly a layperson.

The studies you cite do not list who funded them, but one of the links is ... a website which sells sneakers! One of the worst VOC offenders!

Also, that's a nice story, but I already practice stress reduction techniques on a daily basis for other stressors. I also regularly assess myself for stress level so that I know to apply them.

When my partner bought a couch that off-gassed from the particleboard for months, I was not stressed by it. I did, however, develop a severe headache, disorientation, and migraine-like symptoms.

There's also the correlation of various VOCs with long-term health risks. Do you think that is just stress as well?

Stress is probably higher risk. Notice your triggers and integrate stress reduction at that present time. It's sort of reprogramming your self. Not into NLP though.

Well, having a gruesome headache and unable to think straight or function is certainly a stressor.

As I mentioned, I practice stress reduction techniques on a daily basis. I have studied and practiced them for years, from older traditions and today's teachers. I even teach them to others. People often comment on my calm and peaceful state and demeanor.

Stress is not the culprit here. The culprit is chemical poisoning.

Many sofas produce toxic formaldehyde.

> There's also the correlation of various VOCs with long-term health risks. Do you think that is just stress as well?

Some VOCs are toxic. Perfumes are not. You can look up their safety data sheets.

Are you familiar with skin prick tests? A grid of half inch squares are drawn over the test area, usually your arm. Each square receives a different allergen via pin prick. After a few minutes or sometimes days, the allergist accesses the degree to which you had a reaction in each square. The reactions vary from nothing to blistering. The reactions are isolated to the site of the pin prick. You do not know what allergen was applied to each grid square. It's only after the fact that you learn what you've reacted to.

The skin prick test done over my partner's entire back using dozens of allergens to form a comprehensive list of allergies. There was not a 100% reaction to all allergens and there was no way for my partner to know which allergen was applied in each grid.

You're going to tell me that my partner's selective reactions to over 100 different skin pricks were all psycho-somatic? I actually find your remarks dismissive and rather offensive.

Did the allergy doctor do a skin prick test with perfumes?

Did I write anything that downplays your partner's problems? Perhaps you think that psycho-somatic problems aren't common, or are somehow the fault of the people suffering from them? Psycho-somatic symptoms are real. I experienced them myself for many years. I do not dismiss your partner's symptoms.

Human bodies are complicated and diverse. Finding solutions to health problems requires an open mind and effort to learn and try various potential solutions. Please try not to react defensively to this stranger's words. My intention is to help you and your partner.

I am quite certain that your partner's perfume sensitivity and skin allergies are different biological processes. Allergies are a very specific process involving histamines and leading to inflammation. Nobody has demonstrated that process happening because of perfume in the air.

It's possible that your partner's skin allergies flare up when the brain releases stress hormones. Stress affects the immune system in complicated ways. Stress can trigger hives [0]. That doesn't make them perfume allergies.

Consider this process:

Smells perfume -> brain enters fear emotion -> brain releases stress hormones -> immune system increases sensitivity -> infection alert goes off in areas of skin (hives)

If this is the case, then you can prevent the hives by preventing the brain from entering the fear emotion state.

[0] https://medlineplus.gov/hives.html

> Did I write anything that downplays your partner's problems?

Yes, here are some examples:

> Perfume sensitivity is something different. People develop emotional habits of reacting with fear when smelling perfume.

> I am quite certain that your partner's perfume sensitivity and skin allergies are different biological processes. Allergies are a very specific process involving histamines and leading to inflammation. Nobody has demonstrated that process happening because of perfume in the air.

You don't know anything about my partner's allergies and yet you're certain in your diagnosis.

Here are some facts:

* Contact dermatitis is the second most common allergic reaction.

* Fragrance chemicals are the leading cause for contact allergies.

* Airborne accute contact dermatitis has been studied extensively.

I'm not sure how you've come to the conclusions you have but you're outright dismissing decades of scientific research and concluding that my partner's allergies are psycho-somatic.

You're in league with new age medicine like healing crystals and tinctures.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/cf8f/f7d8b5cb3f8c279b2d877a...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/00128071-200304110...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1600-0536....

1. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/cf8f/f7d8b5cb3f8c279b2d877a...

The first article you link is a review of Allergic Contact Dermatitis (ACD). This is for substances that stick to skin cells and then trigger an allergic reaction. I searched through that article for reports of allergy to airborne fragrance and found only one:

> In 1 driver and 4 passengers, airborne ACD to such scents was diagnosed in Miami, FL [72].

It's from a short report from a hospital [0]. Five separate patients reported ACD related to driving or riding in separate Uber cars. The patients had positive patch tests for a fragrance (balsam of Peru). They did not analyze the substances in the driver's fragrance diffuser or the fragrances of the other cars. There are many possible explanations for the symptoms. Driving for Uber is a stressful job. And riding in Uber can be stressful, too, especially when the car has a bad smell that requires a powerful fragrance to cover up. So an equally plausible explanation of the five peoples' dermatitis is stress-induced dermatitis.

All other reports in that article of airborne ACD are for industrial substances affecting people working in factories and labs which use the substances. A worker in an addiction treatment facility became allergic to airborne heroin and morphine. Somebody became allergic to airborne sawdust.

2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/00128071-200304110...

The second article is titled "Fragrance Contact Allergy". You can read it at [1]. It studies fragrance substances that people apply to their skin. It contains this statement, with no references or further information:

> Air-borne exposure to perfumes may elicit an allergic reaction in very sensitive individuals, but this is an extremely rare phenomenon.

3. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1600-0536....

The third article you listed is titled "Fragrance contact allergy: a 4‐year retrospective study". You can read it at [2]. The article does not contain the word 'air' or 'airborne'. It studies fragrance substances that are applied to the skin. It does not talk about allergic reaction to airborne fragrances.

I may be wrong. It's certainly possible that somebody somewhere has been allergic to airborne fragrances. But I found no credible evidence of that when I reviewed the scientific literature 4 years ago. And these three articles you linked also do not provide any evidence of it. If you find something concrete, or I missed something in the articles, please let me know.

[0] https://sci-hub.do/https://doi.org/10.1111/cod.12804

[1] https://sci-hub.do/https://doi.org/10.2165/00128071-20030411...

[2] https://sci-hub.do/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0536.2010....

> Three-quarters of the toxic chemicals detected in a test of 140 products came from fragrance, reported a 2018 BCPP study of personal care and cleaning brands. The chemicals identified were linked to chronic health issues, including cancer.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/23/fragrance-pe...

> According to the Environmental Working Group, the average fragrant contains about 14 secret chemicals that aren’t listed on the label, many of which are linked to hormone disruption and allergic reactions, as well as about 80 percent of them not being tested for human safety in personal care products.

https://www.nontoxicrevolution.org/blog/wtf-fragrance

> Of the thousands of chemicals used in fragrances, most have not been tested for toxicity, alone or in combination. Many of these unlisted ingredients are irritants and can trigger allergies, migraines, and asthma symptoms. iii A survey of asthmatics found that perfume and/or colognes triggered attacks in nearly three out of four individuals. iv There is also evidence suggesting that exposure to perfume can exacerbate asthma, and perhaps even contribute to its development in children.

https://davidsuzuki.org/queen-of-green/dirty-dozen-parfum-fr...

> In 1986, the National Academy of Sciences tested commonly used fragrances for neurotoxicity; however, the results have still yet to be released. The good news is that many other tests have been done. In fact, in 1991 the EPA tested conventional, synthetic perfumes and found a long list of toxic chemical ingredients, including acetone, benzaldehyde, benzyl acetate, benzyl alcohol, camphor, ethanol, ethyl acetate, limonene, linalool, methylene chloride as well as phthalates, stearates, and parabens.

https://alituranaturals.com/the-top-10-toxic-chemicals-in-pe...

> “The average fragrance product tested contained 14 secret chemicals not listed on the label,” reports EWG, which analyzed the Campaign’s data. “Among them are chemicals associated with hormone disruption and allergic reactions, and many substances that have not been assessed for safety in personal care products.” EWG adds that some of the undisclosed ingredients are chemicals “with troubling hazardous properties or with a propensity to accumulate in human tissues.” Examples include diethyl phthalate, a chemical found in 97 percent of Americans and linked to sperm damage in human epidemiological studies, and musk ketone, which concentrates in human fat tissue and breast milk.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/toxic-perfumes-an...

> The good news is that immediate, irreversible damage to your health caused by one-time use of perfume or cologne — so-called “perfume poisoning” — is rare. But exposure to topical fragrances can trigger allergies, skin sensitivities, and cause harm over time.

https://www.healthline.com/health/perfume-poisoning

> BCPP’s report disclosed the results of chemical testing of 140 popular U.S. personal care and cleaning products. The testing revealed hundreds of toxic chemicals in these products, the majority of which were associated with the fragrance in the product.

https://www.womensvoices.org/2018/09/26/new-data-reveals-one...

Which of those articles claim allergic reactions from airborne fragrances?

Surveys are not reliable.

Shout out to vinegar! The huge jugs of "cleaning vinegar" changed my life a couple years ago. I still use diluted bleach for the bathroom every once in a while, but vinegar is sufficient for almost everything day-to-day. And it's so much cheaper than most "cleansers".

Peroxide is a surprisingly good stain and odor remover. I prefer it to vinegar because it doesn't have a pungent odor that masks the odor you're trying to get rid of.

But yes vinegar is awesome. It's fantastic at water stains like nothing else.

Acetic acid also works great as fabric softener, and it works against limescale in the washing machine. Anecdotally it also keeps colors vibrant.

Having your relatives and friends finally take you seriously is such a relief when you're dealing with MCS.

It's crazy how dismissive people are. My partner had a comprehensive allergy test done, the kind where they draw a grid on your back and apply different substances in each square.

You're supposed to leave and come back a few days later but my partner had a reaction in every square before she left the doctor. They asked if the interns could come take a look because they'd never seen such a complete reaction.

Not sure if it's what you meant, but I had a similar story where I reacted to everything, even the control. The allergist took that to mean "you're really allergic to everything," but I went looking for a second opinion who was able to get both the positive and negative controls to work. Turns out I'm not allergic to everything, the first allergist just didn't recognize benign dermatographia and was a bit too quick to ignore my positive reaction to the negative control. In all, it saved me a good chunk of change and sensitization risks that would have come from having unneeded components in my allergy shots.

I don't know the details of your case or if any of this applies, but if by chance you were in the same boat wrt the negative control it might be worth circling back for a confirmation test at some point.

I'm exaggerating a little, my partner has extensive allergies but not absolute. I jokingly say my partner is allergic to life but in reality it's just life on earth.

I had this test done. Your partner needs antigen shots they really help, ask their allergist for this therapy.

I'm not soliciting for advice, my partner has been seeking medical treatment for allergies for at least 30 years.

well you never mentioned antigen shots, so thought I'd share a n=1 therapeutic that worked for me. Allergies suck, hope your partner finds relief.

Fun fact, I'm actually mildly allergic to salt. Docs didn't believe me and just tried to say it was GERD or similar. Finally found one that did some more tests and yep.

I also can't be around any strong perfumes or I'll break out in hives. It sucks when someone on a plane comes on like they just took a shower in the stuff.

Wait, what? I'm pretty sure you can't be allergic to sodium chloride. Salt is literally part of your body. You'd die if you didn't ingest any salt.

Do you mean you're allergic to some common additive in table salt, or specifically to elevated salt concentrations? The former sounds like something you could call an allergy (but not to salt itself); the latter I probably wouldn't call an allergy so much as higher sensitivity to significantly hypotonic food or drinks. An allergy is usually defined as an excessive, damaging immune reaction to a foreign substance that is itself harmless at that concentration. Salt isn't a foreign substance.

I get the feeling a lot of people are lumping tons of things into the category of "allergies" where the underlying biological processes are very different. That doesn't mean the reactions aren't real, but it makes it very difficult to reason to reason about them. When everything's an allergy, the word allergy stops having any useful meaning.

Most "plain old salt" available through commercial sources does contain several synthetic additives as "flow enhancers".

Indeed, but then it wouldn't be a salt allergy so much as an allergy to those additives (and one that you could easily fix by cooking with proper pure NaCl).

Sure, but many don't even know it's usually there, even when the ingredient list just reads "salt".

Easier said than done.

I received similar skepticism from people for coconut but after a few times of my lips turning purple they started to believe me. I seemed to have aged out of it though as more recent accidental exposures haven't resulted in a reaction.

I'm not about to tempt fate and willing subject myself to it.

that's because you call it "this stuff" and bundle everything from new cars to soap into the same category. So you're just sensitive to every industrial material? it's hard to take seriously.

It IS the same category when it makes you suffer. Be it sneezes, running nose, coughing, swelling throat, burning eyes, sometimes itching skin, feeling unwell in general after being in contact with or near that stuff.

Maybe our bodies have different tresholds for exposure to that stuff, and after oversaturating them for some time, there is no buffer available anymore?

Resulting in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_chemical_sensitivity

From that article:

> Blinded clinical trials show that people with MCS react as often and as strongly to placebos as they do to chemical stimuli; the existence and severity of symptoms is seemingly related to perception that a chemical stimulus is present.

This reminds me of the people moving out to the middle of no where because they claim to be sensitive to wifi.

While not a physical thing, it can be ""real"": https://youtu.be/O2hO4_UEe-4

I don't believe this study for a second based on personal experience. It sounds about as trustworthy as tobacco-is-harmless and fat-not-sugar studies of the past.

This is why people don’t take your claims seriously. If you aren’t even willing to consider an opposing viewpoint, why should anyone consider yours? What’s the point in having a discussion?

Clearly you have some kind of hypersensitivity to indoor environments. I’m not convinced it’s VOCs. They’ve been with us for a long time now, spanning a few generations, and life expectancy is only increasing. Maybe I’m wrong; I’m open to that possibility.

On the hand, the only other people I’ve met with issues similar to yours have allergic histamine reactions to particulates that are benign to everyone else. Like dust and grass. I have a friend that gets a shot every few months for it, and doesn’t have a problem when treated. Have you considered speaking with a doctor?

Yep antigen shots worked for my grass pollen allergy

I don't have allergies, and I am not sensitive to indoor envornments by themselves. I just get very tired and a migraine-like reaction when exposed to synthetic cleaning products and new furniture, as far as recently.

I don't need scientific consensus to prove it to me, I live it myself.

People I am close with do take me seriously, and the problem is fixed when the VOCs are taken away.

You aren't receiving pushback from people who are attempting to deny your experience. I don't think anybody here doubts the experiences you have mentioned.

Instead people are questioning your analysis of the root cause. You can be meaningfully and honestly impacted and also be wrong about why you are having trouble. Even in the most extreme case where somebody wants to claim you effectively experiencing the placebo effect, that does not detract from the realness of your issue.

I think many people have trouble really groking this separation. Questioning the root cause can often feel like questioning the problem. Additionally it is easy to become attached to an explanation that may be faulty. Humans are not well-evolved to be perfectly rational and completely detached observers of their own lives. And faulty explanations don't necessarily cause faulty solutions, which can make things even harder to disentangle.

However I think it's important to try to keep in mind that all of these aspects are distinct in important ways despite being related. It is possible to question or even refute these aspects individually without casting aspersions on the other aspects. You can have a real problem, and a working solution, and still be completely wrong about why. That's fine, and actually pretty normal.

VOC's aren't all man-made. You'd need to live in a vacuum to avoid them altogether.

The nice smell after a rain storm? VOC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volatile_organic_compound#Biol...

What are you saying, that because some VOCs are found in nature, any man-made VOC is OK too, just because it is part of the same chemical compound family?

I think the appropriate conclusion would be your sensitive to something more specific than just the very broad class of VOCs in general.

So... the ones I am not sensitive to, are they not harmful?

Just for the record, VOCs are literally "anything organic that boils at less than 250°C" (in the EU).

Farts are full of VOCs. No, seriously, every time I fart the TVOC sensor in my air purifier goes nuts, as does the one in my air quality meter. It's almost like the thing is shaming me for it :)

I would encourage you to learn more about the different types of VOCs, and at which concentrations they are known to be harmful. You might be having true allergic reactions to some harmless VOCs. You might be having psychosomatic reactions to other VOCs. You might not be having reactions to some harmful VOCs at all. Lumping it all together into "VOCs" is not helpful.

Wait a minute, so you're telling me when I was laughing with my husband about how we should fart in front of the new air purifier and see if the sensor went off and he dismissed me, rolled his eyes and called me juvenile THAT I WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG?!?!?

I,m using a more restricted definition of synthetics which we didn,t evolve with.

I don't know that we know enough to know that. It's certainly true that there are "natural" VOC's that can be harmful, and man-made VOC's that are not known to be harmful. I wouldn't necessarily presume that sensitivity is directly correlated to harm.

The study may be true on average but not in every particular case. The way we do most medical studies today, with relatively small samples and coarse aggregate statistics, isn't well-suited to detecting rare but genuine issues with a high false positive rate.

There are also two major issues with science today.

The first is that a lot of studies are simply careless. They use a "placebo" which has a scent to give the indication that there is something there, but then the "placebo" unintentionally contains VOCs. Or the lab's janitor uses them to clean the lab, things like that.

The second is that a lot of studies are funded by people with agendas. It's all too easy to get an invalid result by accident, much less on purpose.

See also replication crisis.

So then you either have to know and trust the authors of the study or spend the time to go through it with a fine toothed comb and find replications from independent scientists before you can trust it. Which nobody really has the time to do, so the default position becomes to dismiss anything the reader disagrees with.

It's a problem.

> I don't believe this study for a second

You don't get to throw away opposing evidence because it does not agree with the point you're attempting to sell. You don't actually want to have a conversation, you just want to push an agenda.

I call it the canary system. Some people are more sensitive than others, but we're all being harmed with it.

For my part, I pay attention to what others are sensitive to and avoid it as well.

If someone else has trouble coping with a substance but I'm "fine", that probably means that underneath my constituents are still struggling to deal with it and just not telling me.

Ssome people are allergic to peanuts, doesn't seem like a well grounded theory.

Peanut, Egg, and Milk protein (CMPA) allergies are common in babies. My understanding is that the digestive system is not mature enough to process them, so it rejects them. Some of these allergies develop even while breast fed (baby colic). I take that some allergies stick once developed. But you should consider that something that creates an allergy response in a baby may be not harmful at all for an adult. And sometimes, once the allergy is triggered it sticks.

I wonder why they weren't common 30 years ago. Not a single person in my entire family from my generation and before has a single allergy, nor was it ever a big thing in school I attended in various US states in the 90s and early 00s.

It's like between the time I went to college and my own kids started school, they exploded and now all of the sudden a PB&J sandwich isn't allowed in school. That would have been unfathomable to me in my youth.

Its untrue, peanuts and milk allergies were very common 30 years ago, probably more than now in percentage. My genetic grandmother can't eat most of processed food without having an allergic reaction. Probably people were a bit ashamed of their non-threatening food allergies (most food allergies just give a lot of gas and small stomachaches).

Also related, Distilbene did not only wreck fecondity, it gave a lot of children food allergies, and i'm pretty sure distilben distribution stopped in the late 70s, so maybe we should just get the numbers and compare, but i'd bet food allergies were more prevalent in the 80s.

Interesting, I might have been in a bubble then. My parents and their generation immigrated to the US from a developing country, much poorer, but in all of our family gatherings, there was never a concern for allergies. And we use basically everything in our cooking.

I specifically remember weddings and whatnot when snacks were given out to everyone that there was no hesitation in offering anyone else's kids food for fear of them having an allergy.

I wonder then what the catalyst was for schools banning nuts and airlines no longer serving peanuts. Assuming people were always allergic in similar or higher proportion with similar severity, was it simply changes in the political winds?

It's because

(1) the internet and social media means you know about far more people with allergies than before,

(2) you are a adult and not a child, so you know more people now

(3) institutions have adopter broad inclusionary policies even if no one with an allergy is present

(4) institutions are being far more careful now (you eating a your granola bar poses no significant risk to someone with a peanut allergy, but it's still banned sitewide).

I asked my parents about this, and they said that peanuts weren't common back then - they were expensive and a luxury so as a result we didn't have such widespread visibility of the problem.

Allergies where common 30 years ago, but you are right about the percentage of people that have allergies is raising and getting more severe. You can even find references to allergy going back to Aristotle's time, so not exactly a new thing. I haven't got a link to it, but did take a webinar on allergy some weeks ago.

None know exactly why where are getting more allergic, but since allergy most often is the immune system attacking harmless things some theories is that we have to clean an environment in our homes.

I think that the immune system "correlates" them with other harmful substances which are sometimes but not always present. The number of possible culprits is long: pesticides, random cleaning products used on the processing equipment, sometimes mold can grow on peanuts if they're stored improperly, the list goes on.

Our immune systems are in many ways similar to police forces, and if they hear "a problem being reported" often enough while peanuts are around, they may just bunch them together with the offender.

The problem is compounded by a dirty baseline environment. In the early stages, the immune system is "primed" with a "baseline" of what should and shouldn't be there, but if the VOCs and such are already there, it just learns that they are OK and doesn't react to them.

I attended school in the late 90s early 2000s (in canada).

It was a big deal then, there were kids i knew who were deathly alergic to peanuts.

Severe allergeries seem to be on the rise but i think your timeframe is wrong.

I went to to 8 different schools between K to 12th grades in 6 different states, and I don't recall meeting anyone who was deadly allergic to anything. I'm pretty sure I didn't even learn about epipens until maybe later in high school or possibly college.

The only ailment in kids that I think I had heard of was asthma, for which people had inhalers.

Of course, my data is weak and anecdotal, but based on the fact that a staple American food isn't allowed in schools anymore, I assume something must have changed.

Attending K-12 in the late 80's/early 90's I didn't know anyone with a serious allergy in school. There was never any concern about peanut butter food/snacks, or anything like that. A few kids with inhalers, that was it.

Allergy != Intolerance. When you have an allergy, you suffocate, when you have intolerance to something, it'll be unpleasant to be around you and you may spend some time on the toilet. This is an oversimplification, but one is an immune reaction and the other isn't. Inability to digest something to me sounds like neither of those cases.

This is an oversimplification. An allergy will not necessarily cause anaphylaxis (suffocating, etc). I'm allergic to a lot of types of pollen/mold/dander (skin prick test) and also two food items, also identified with a skin prick test, and I've never yet had anaphylaxis. When I eat oatmeal/rye (my food allergies) I get a runny nose, fatigue, and mild GI distress.

Forgot to mention, I also have lactose intolerance. I think I have a bit of gluten intolerance too, but that might be psychosomatic and I haven't yet had a family member help with a blind study on myself. Sometime I intend to.

The main point was that failure to digest something doesn't mean that you are allergic or intolerant. My impression was that this was what the example with babies' bodies "rejecting" some foods that they cannot process implied. Humans can eat stuff they cannot digest (fiber, corn kernels without chewing, anyone?) without adverse effects, stuff will just pass through. Unless you're eating nails or glass, but that's a mechanical damage...

Peanuts are a great example. I am not allergic to peanuts myself, but I avoid eating them.

I don't know why people become allergic to them, but there must be something in some peanuts which sets off their immune system.

The true irony of this statement, and I want to emphasize I am not a doctor, is that you are more likely to cause a peanut allergy by avoiding it!

https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2017/01/10/peanut-allergy-earl...

Similar to germ theory, some exposure is actually good.

From my understanding, some types of exposure promote allergy while other types of exposure prevent it.

That's not how allergies work. People with allergies get an immune reaction to a harmless compound.

This assumes that if your immune system reacts negatively to something, it is guaranteed to be actually harmful to the body.

If our immune systems and bodies were all-knowing and perfect, then sure, that would be a valid assumption, but they're far from it.

How far do you take that theory? People have allergies to many (normally) benign substances. Melons, natural latex, ibuprofen, pollen, etc.

Generally speaking, if it wasn't in my ancestors' environment, I avoid it. Otherwise, approach with caution.

Nature can be dangerous, too, but at least it's likely that someone in the past has dealt with it and lived to reproduce.

With new synthetic substances, you're essentially doing alpha-testing with your irreplaceable hardware/software system...

Pollen in particular is weird because simply being outside should expose you to some level of pollen, compared to foods like melons or peanuts that may or may not be part of your diet. I'm mildly allergic to dust mites and they're literally everywhere.

Right. I'm currently undergoing allergy immunotherapy, so back in October I had a battery of allergy tests.

Turns out I'm allergic to some trees, some grasses, pollen, mold, dust mites, and a bunch of other things. And yet my childhood from a very young age was filled with playing outside in the yard and and in the woods.

Also my family had (indoor-only) cats since before I was born. My parents were allergic to them, and my sister and I are also allergic. (Wanting to get a cat is what prompted me to start the allergy shots.) So I've been exposed to cat dander since I was an infant. And yet: allergic. Some things are just hereditary, I guess.

I'm sure there are some cases where not being exposed to something when young can cause you to develop allergies, but that's definitely not the only cause. Seems like there is definitely a genetic component that can moot any amount of childhood exposure.

Yes, peanut proteins.

That's pseudo-science. There are lots of things that can kill some people and are harmless to others.

Better safe than sorry, don't you think?

Would you say VOCs are harmless to people who are not sensitive to them?

I am not commenting on VOCs specifically, just pointing out that the logic is flawed.

We should ban or control the substances for which we have strong suspicion, I think most sane people would agree. But where to put the line is difficult. Some trees have pollen that causes asthma attacks and several deaths every year; should we cut them all?

So we need more nuances than black or white.

Now if you want my opinion, I would agree that reducing volatile substances is good; we still need to be careful about the things we put in their place.

I see your point, but I think that you're most likely being overly careful when regulating your exposure to substances. As the person responding to your point about allergies stated, individual's bodies respond to (or don't respond to) substances in different ways.

Peanut allergies are an example of this: a person with allergies is having an immune response to the substance, while most humans don't experience this immune response. This doesn't necessarily indicate that peanuts are always inducing a low level "bad" reaction in people without allergies, just that those with allergies have an immune system that isn't properly reacting to a non-threat. Do you also not eat eggs, shellfish, every kind of tree nut, strawberries, or red meat? Because these are all possible allergies.

This isn't to say that VOC's aren't harmless, because I believe they are. But your assertion that sensitivities in one person indicate something about the entire human population is scientifically false and is most likely casting too wide of a net. You've essentially defined a process with high sensitivity (which means you catch all of the possible bad chemicals/substances), but very low specificity (you often identify substances as harmful when they are not). This is fine for ensuring safety but is unnecessarily restrictive.

I think that all those things are "approach with caution" territory.

Immune system can become sensitized not just to harmful substances, but also to ones "correlated" with them, meaning it's likely they've been exposed to e.g. peanuts which had something bad in them and associated it with the peanuts themselves.

Of course, there's also the fact that when a child is growing up in this VOC environment, their immune system never gets a chance to establish a good baseline for what should and shouldn't be in the system, and that is another reason allergies develop.

Life as a whole is balancing risk and reward. My desire to experience life outweighs my desire for safety.

If I could live infinitely long but never experience anything, what's the point? Safety is the largest danger.

I've done many dangerous things, but where is the experience reward for breathing VOCs?

Certainly riding in a new car is not worth it, is it? Or having a "fresh-smelling" house with nice-looking furniture?

Everything listed there is very enjoyable. New car smell has a name because people like it so much.

Sure, but I can find other enjoyable things which are not proven harmful.

Not to mention the insane amount of "biocide" which happens in the process of producing a new car.

I consider animals and plants to be my close relatives (and dependencies, meaning I won't live long without them), so if I can avoid money-voting for stuff which harms them, I choose that.

Dumb answer, but it's simpler to not have to worry about this stuff. How you balance that with the risk is subjective, but it's not true that there is no downside to avoiding VOCs.

With the existence of lactose intolerance and gluten intolerance, that seems like a difficult policy to live with.

> "this stuff"

Is it less hard to take seriously when the proper term is utilized?

Volatile Organic Compounds (a.k.a. VOCs)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volatile_organic_compound

> So you're just sensitive to every industrial material? it's hard to take seriously.

Our bodies are essentially "legacy code" that's been evolving not for a decade or two, but for millions of years.

If you've ever maintained an old software system, you know that old-tried-and-true inputs are probably good, but trying anything previously untested may cause unpredictable issues.

I look at any new substance which my ancestors haven't encountered (and been selected for tolerating) as basically alpha testing, which I'd rather avoid with my irreplaceable hardware-software installation.

In this thread, you've managed to derive axiomatically a theory of toxicity in which peanuts are suspicious because they trigger allergies, which implies our immune systems see something wrong with them. I feel like a grain of salt (if our systems can tolerate it) would do us well on this thread.

I have serious problems with many of the same chemicals as GP. Well I understand different ones are harmful or not in theory, I only know what I react to. It's almost uniformly products to which artificial fragrances are added intentionally, or exhaust that's known to be harmful such as diesel and gasoline. I only have issues with certain natural fragrances (essential oils) with extended exposure or large amounts. Most likely it's members of several large categories that I react to. Could be VOCs, phthalates, teflon relatives, and synthetic fragrance compounds.

Like gluten intolerance, one of the difficult things about reacting negatively to common consumer products is the number of people who refuse to believe it's a real problem.

So I have an allergy to Aloe. And it got blind tested one night when I slept on a friend's floor and woke up with a rash 100% unaware he used his Aloe plant right where I slept.

I also have whatever the hell the MSG allergy is, though obviously it isn't to pure MSG because they can't reproduce it with pure MSG (from which they conclude it doesn't exist), but if someone wants to throw money at figuring out its root cause from some sort of breakdown product or adulterant that travels with commercially produced MSG, I'm happy to be the guinea pig. The last time it hit, at a Chinese restaurant in SF, the left side of my body was nearly paralyzed. It is bizarre whatever it actually is. And the number of you-know-whats I give about randos taking it seriously or not is precisely zero.

A former co-worker would projectile vomit if exposed to avocado. I saw that get evaluated blind as well.

> The last time it hit, at a Chinese restaurant in SF,

Not to not take it seriously, but isn’t there a lot more stuff in American Chinese food other than MSG? Like of the 1000s of chemical substances that would be in a plate of Chinese food, why of all places would that be where you would isolate an MSG allergy?

> or adulterant that travels with commercially produced MSG

Then that wouldn’t be an MSG allergy. Oats are gluten free but celiacs have difficulty with them, not because of the oats but because of contamination.. we wouldn’t say they have an oat allergy though.

If you’re curious about the MSG sensitivity I recommend trying other foods that are high in MSG and looking for similar sensitivities to foods like tomatoes, snack foods, and meat seasoning mixes, and condiments. If you don’t have sensitivities to those, it may be something else that’s causing the issue, like ginger, soy sauce, oyster sauce, etc.

Actually, in case of MSG, it's easier to try it directly, in chemically pure form.

I'm pretty sure it's not reactant grade MSG. But I wonder about breakdown products and adulterants that travel with kitchen-grade MSG.

From personal experience, once you become sensitized, you become sensitive to literally anything synthetic.

Well, VOCs are in almost all new products on the market...

Is it hard to take pollen allergies from dozens of different plants seriously?

How about dust and smoke? How can someone be allergic to both! The temerity.

It’s less about chemistry of the materials, more about the sensitivity of the squishy, arbitrary human body.

Pollen I don't avoid, because it's not a new substance.

"Dust" allergies often have to do with the substances which are on the dust, which is covered above.

Smoke is certainly not good for you.

This squishy arbitrary human body is the only one I've got for today, so I avoid whatever I think may harm it, even if there is no dots on the i's and crosses on the t's with regards to scientific proof.

If you look at the history of teflon, plastics, cigarettes, VOCs, synthetic food ingredients, you'll see that this strategy would have served a human well in the past, and it's the best one I can think of to follow for the foreseeable future.

One problem with this kind of reasoning is that it's the same thing that the people with the 5G allergies say. It's tricky because VOCs probably are very bad for us, so there's a kernel of truth in it, but you don't want to balance your entire house on a single kernel, if that makes sense.

How about judging each case on its merits rather than shoving them all in the conspiracy box to feel better?

I agree that's how we should do it, and think we are both making the same critique.

I have very serious problems with fragrance chemicals and some VOCs also. It slowly emerged over time in my twenties, well at the same time I was also experiencing what I now know is undiagnosed celiac disease.

I've gone through times where almost anything made out of plastic and most indoor furniture made me feel sick, but these days it's mainly just artificial fragrances. Shampoo, conditioner, air freshener, carpet cleaners, garbage bags, dish soap, incense, laundry soap, pesticides, dryer sheets, and so on. I have to use all of these in special unscented versions and try to get any roommates to do so as well. Some are difficult to avoid in public, other people's clothes and hair, fumes coming from laundry vents outdoors, or areas where large amounts of these products are stored such as groceries and hardware stores. The distancing and masks from covid have helped a bit, plus I'm staying home more which is a safe place.

This is a problem that's been somewhat peripheral to my other health problems, but has been very disruptive for me. in terms of interpersonal relationships, maybe even worse than type 1 diabetes or celiac because it can make it uncomfortable to get near other people physically, either for a hug or to be in their house or car. Having to convince girlfriends to change hair products has been a major source of stress, too. There are times when I've been forced to be around people who use typical fragrances products on a visit, or at a hotel, and that's difficult.

I've tried to look into what health problems could be related to this. There is a syndrome that used to be called MCS (Multiple Chemical Sensitivity) and is now called TILT (Toxicant Induced Loss of Tolerance). Mainly I have found people with Multiple Sclerosis and an immune disorder called MAST cell activation. I have celiac and type 1 diabetes, which are very closely related to MS, so it makes sense. This is the sort of thing that's very difficult to work on with doctors, and it seems likely the best treatment currently available is like an allergy - avoid the triggers.

> "Cleaning" products: sprays, detergents, most "soaps", shampoos, creams, conditioners, have this type of crap in them.

Yeah, that's awful stuff. Your partners and cohabitants should be grateful that you're somewhat of a canary in a coalmine for them:

> Regular use of cleaning sprays has an impact on lung health comparable with smoking a pack of cigarettes every day, according to a new study.

https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1164/rccm.201706-131...

It's like my brother says when there's a food or candy that doesn't taste the same as when we were kids: "they took the cancer out of it." Items that are no longer on the market had to remove so much cancer from their ingredients that it wasn't the same anymore, so they take it off the market.

They say "regulations are written in blood," which makes you wonder what "new car smell" was composed of 50 years ago.

I think it's actually the opposite. They put the cancer in it by swapping out expensive ingredients like sugar and fat for high fructose corn syrup and palm kernel oil. Evey time you see the "same great taste" or "new formula" on a box it means they've re-engineered it to cut costs by substituting ingredients, usually for some engineered compound that's cheaper or more shelf stable.

Hershey's chocolate is now just rancid swill that just tastes of sugar with a hint of vomit.

Hershey's chocolate was like that on day 1, about 120 years ago, because they wanted to use milk without having to keep the supply refrigerated. Lipolysis of the milk fat produces butyric acid, which does taste a bit like vomit or parmesan cheese. People got addicted to the taste, so today the flavor is intentional. Some companies, targeting the American market, even add butyric acid to mimic the Hershey's taste.

That's interesting. I don't recall it being quite so bad 30 years ago.

Of all the things to point out in commercial food production you chose basically the two most benign things.

Swapping refined sugar for HFCS 55 (the most common type) is basically an even trade sans some extra water content in the syrup and palm kernel oil is just saturated fat but sourced from a plant instead of animals.

I don’t think anyone is gonna argue that a high sugar and saturated fat diet is healthy but no worse than the same things sourced from other places. In an alternative universe palm oil and corn syrup would have been the standard and people would complain about the switch to lard and white sugar.

a) Refined sugar and HFCS both cause fatty liver about equally.

b) HFCS is sourced from corn, which means pesticide residue.

c) Palm oil also leads to fatty liver.

They may be an "even trade", but certainly harmful to one's health.

b) White sugar is sourced from sugar cane which is also grown with pesticides. In both cases you have to trust the respective refining processes to clean your food.

I absolutely agree with you that sugar and saturated fat in anything other than moderation is harmful to your health but that, in this case, the source of those things doesn't really matter.

In terms of vegetables, much of the difference is selective breeding for varieties that look pretty in the store and can survive transport easily instead of for taste. No cancer involved.

The cancer is in the pesticide residue.

The pesticide residue wasn't what made it taste good, which was the context of the parents comment

Thanks

Glad to see another I can relate to.

I don't shop (in person) often but when I do visit the Walmart, next town over, the chemicals of all the new products literally bring tears to and irritate my eyes. I have to stop and rest and try to find places to breathe that don't feel toxic. No one else could ever related.

Sometimes walking down the cleaning products aisle in some stores feels like running the gauntlet. (is it now the cancer gauntlet?)

Do you know www.ewg.org/skin deep Do they do a good job? How do you take care of this for yourself?

I don't use anything besides Bronner's, and I use that sparingly. I haven't applied soap to any parts of myself except my hands for several years. My skin is in better shape than it ever has been, and I hear similar results from others who follow this path. I didn't come up with it myself, someone else shared their experience with me. It takes a week or two for the oil production to balance out. Our skin oils serve as protective layer, and also as the perfect "soap" for washing with water. When you remove them with soap, the skin freaks out and starts compensating.

Ok thanks! I've seen that product and was just wondering what it was.

I know, I don't get it. People's laundry steam is pumped out of their basements and when I walk around the city in the wintertime you get an overwhelming scent of unpleasant laundry fragrance every now and then. Some friends of mine had their carpet replaced a month or two ago and there was incredible offgassing. I got an absolutely terrible headache accompanied with nausea after 2 hours but they all seemed to be sitting there inhaling it just fine. I couldn't believe it. I'm just saying "how can you guys handle this?"

Dishsoaps too, I find the Dawn dish soap scent absolutely repulsing, mostly because of poor associations with 3 month old sponges, freezing cold houses, and mildewy sinks from college. I don't know how anyone stomachs the stuff. The smells are so "artificial" in the sense that they are one note, they don't feel organic. They lack the nuance of something that contains 50 terpenes might have.

You are right. However, imagine a world in which you sleep with a log-fire burning...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com