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CHEMICAL SENSITIVITY: WHAT ARE ‘CHEMICALS’?
All living things are made up of chemicals – chemicals and water and nothing else. So are rocks and the air and other inanimate objects. But when people use the word ‘chemicals’ that is not what they usually mean. Colloquially, it means man-made chemicals or synthetic chemicals – ones that do not occur in nature, or which only occur naturally in very small quantities, compared to the amounts that we manufacture.
Synthetic chemicals are not intrinsically different from naturally-occurring ones – their basic chemistry is much the same, although there are some novelties (eg chlorinated hydrocarbons – hydrocarbons are fundamental to life, but adding chlorine to them was a human innovation). What is more, many naturally-occurring chemicals are highly toxic: the natural foods we eat are stiff with potentially damaging chemicals – plants, in particular, spike their products with an armoury of defensive substances, fungi on the plants contribute their own toxins, and the bacteria in our gut add to the number we absorb. Human beings are well equipped to detoxify these natural chemicals, with a powerful array of enzymes.
For the most part, the enzymes that our ancestors evolved to tackle natural chemicals work pretty well on synthetic ones – as long as they are not overwhelmed by the amount they have to detoxify. However, the initial products of the enzyme reactions are sometimes more toxic than the original chemical. In other words, the body’s detoxification enzymes have evolved to deal with a certain range of naturally occurring chemicals – they can go to work on synthetic ones, but on the way to breaking them down they may produce intermediates that are harmful. For this reason, such changes are known as biotransformation rather than detoxification.
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