You’ve probably heard of food intolerances to gluten, dairy, eggs, or other foods. But chemical intolerances, or sensitivities, have become increasingly common, as well. A person with a chemical sensitivity has an immune reaction to chemicals and heavy metals in air pollution, pesticides, plastics, adhesives, household cleaners, cosmetics, perfumes, and more.
When exposed to these chemicals, the sensitive person may react with a variety of different symptoms, including migraines, fatigue, inflammation, brain fog, memory loss, vertigo, sore throat, respiratory or sinus problems, or a skin rash.
A chemical sensitivity can also trigger or exacerbate an autoimmune disease.
Why doesn’t everyone have a chemical sensitivity?
Although we now live in a world of thousands of toxic chemicals, some people react to chemicals and some don’t. In fact, lab testing may reveal the person who doesn’t react actually carries a heavier toxic burden than the person who reacts very easily. Why?
The answer lies in how well the person’s immune system handles exposures to chemicals and pollutants in our environment. Several factors can cause a chemical sensitivity:
- The immune system reacts to certain chemicals or heavy metals as allergens due to an immune imbalance.
- An individual has lost the ability to detoxify chemicals from everyday exposure.
- An individual’s natural antioxidant status is deficient, increasingly one’s vulnerability to toxicity from chemicals.
- A breakdown of immune barriers—gut, lungs, skin, and blood-brain barrier—increases the body’s vulnerability to toxins.
In other words, it’s not necessarily small exposures to toxic chemicals or heavy metals that make one sick (even though they are not good for us), but instead the body’s inability to handle environmental toxins.
How chelation can worsen a chemical sensitivity
A common method of treating a chemical sensitivity or other chronic condition is chelation. Chelation is a detoxification therapy that removes heavy metals from the body.
However, for the person whose immune system is reacting to chemicals and heavy metals, chelation can actually make things worse. By using chelation to liberate chemicals and heavy metals from tissue and into the bloodstream, the chemically sensitive person may react with even more symptoms and more tissue damage.
Chelation should only be considered if the immune barriers are in tact (i.e., no leaky gut, or leaky blood-brain barrier, which would allow chelated toxins into the brain), the immune system is balanced, and detoxification functions are working normally.
How to prevent or alleviate a chemical sensitivity
These days, it is difficult to isolate ourselves from pollutants, chemicals, and heavy metals. There is very little testing of new chemicals that enter our environment, and it is extremely difficult to require manufacturers to ban chemicals. Instead, you can focus on using toxin- and scent-free cleaners and personal care products, eating organic, whole foods, and consuming plenty of fibrous, antioxidant-rich vegetables and filtered water to help cleanse your system.
Beyond that, we have more advanced clinical strategies to help alleviate a chemical sensitivity. These include supporting the activity of glutathione, the body’s most powerful antioxidant, repairing the immune barriers—gut, lung, and blood-brain—with nutritional support, balancing the immune system, and restoring the body’s natural ability to detoxify.
Thank you for the informative article. I have mild sensitivity to a few different chemicals. I appreciate the information!
Hi Tina, thank you for visiting my site, I hope you found the information useful.
I wanted to mention a website that you should visit, www.http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/. This is a great site that allows you to search almost all of your household cleaning products, your personal hygiene products including makeup, for toxins. It’s a great site and I hope it helps you remove these toxins from your environment.
My relatives all the time say that I am killing my time here at net,
however I know I am getting know-how everyday by reading such good content.
Hi Janie,
Thank you for visiting my site. I am trying to put together a great resource for people searching for answers. My goal is to provide information to everyone that visits the site from a functional medicine perspective, which is identifying the drivers of disease processes and working from a preventative perspective to unwind damage to the body, so that it has the best chance of healing naturally, from the inside out. The functional medicine perspective is one that is in opposition to the traditional medical perspective of diagnosing a disease and then treating a symptom with medications which are synthetic. Traditional medicine fails to address the drivers of the disease process and only look at diagnosis and symptom management in most cases. There is much more to health, and it is my goal and passion to share that truth with the world.
Love your blog! This article especially hit home with me because I always had an upset stomach growing up and it wasn’t until I was getting my Masters in Nursing Education that I was diagnosed with a gluten intolerance. I also went to a dermatologist because my skin was breaking out so much and it turns out I had an intolerance to one of the (animal) by-products that were used in my makeup. It’s something that many people may not think about or realize but it happens and when it does, it can be scary! Thanks for your article and insight into this!
Hi Kris, glad you found the article informative. Not enough people know about these hidden drivers of disease processes and end up going through a lot of unnecessary mental and physical pain. The goal here is to share the latest in functional medicine and teach people how to look at their diagnosis or problem through a different lens. We all have the capacity to heal, just remove the bad, supplement what’s missing and watch your body do the rest. Thank you for your comment and interest.