4 ms·
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 a
by antasvara 6y ago
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.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoI 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.