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.
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
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.
I don't know why people become allergic to them, but there must be something in some peanuts which sets off their immune system.
https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2017/01/10/peanut-allergy-earl...
Similar to germ theory, some exposure is actually good.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
(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).
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.
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.
Would you say VOCs are harmless to people who are not sensitive to them?
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.
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.
If I could live infinitely long but never experience anything, what's the point? Safety is the largest danger.
Certainly riding in a new car is not worth it, is it? Or having a "fresh-smelling" house with nice-looking furniture?
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
The nice smell after a rain storm? VOC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volatile_organic_compound#Biol...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is it less hard to take seriously when the proper term is utilized?
Volatile Organic Compounds (a.k.a. VOCs)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.