The True Toxicity Of Chlorine

In the ninth grade I broke my knee during tryouts for for the basketball team. Someone was playing dirty and knock me over, and my knee was the first thing to hit the ground. After surgery it took me nearly a year to recover. But even after all that time I still couldn’t run on it, and I wanted to keep playing a sport (especially one I liked). After some searching I finally decided to join the swimming team.

It was simultaneously some of the most fun and most depressing/stressful times of my youth which I detail in my book. But one of the most harmful effects which would set the stage of my later debilitating health challenges was a constant exposure to chlorine.

Chlorine is in all of our drinking water, used in pools to keep them sanitary, and even in foods to bleach and disinfect them. Most recently there was a big brouhaha in the UK when citizens found out that most of their chicken was being dunked in chlorine prior to sale. People are smart enough to realize that this probably isn’t the best practice, and potentially has very negative health consequences.

The amount of chlorine in drinking water is typically dismissed as too low to be harmful to humans, and we passively accept this as truth without any critical thinking or deeper inquiry. Yet we swim in pools which are absolutely dowsed in chlorine at such large amounts that they can actually cause breathing problems in many people, causing skin and eye irritation and more insidiously promote thyroid disease and dysfunction by reacting with vitamin C and iodine in the body—which is why many swimmers later develop metabolic illness and obesity in spite of an ambitiously athletic youth.

The problem with chlorine is that is highly active in our biology. Chlorine plays an intimate role in the chemistry which keeps our cells electrified, pH balanced, and water moving to places it’s supposed to. Normally we get chlorine from sources to which is already reacted, such as normal table salt, which is sodium chloride. There is also magnesium chloride, though that’s less naturally common, and even other chloride salts with potassium, calcium, and others. When chlorine is reacted to other elements the other elements keep it neutralized. When chloride salts dissolve into aqueous solutions such as drinking water or blood plasma they also dissociate, which means the atoms separate and become individual ions (due to the nature of hydrogen in water). But the balance within a solution is still maintained—there are equal parts of each element relative to the ones to which is was bound. If the solution were to dry up the sodium and chloride would recombine back into normal salt. The addition of extra chlorine to an aqueous solution imbalances the concentration of chlorine to other elements, greatly increasing the influence of chlorine over the entirety of the water in which it is dissolved.

All elements influence the nature of water, but chloride and sodium are some of the most important and strongest. Because of this, the body uses chloride and sodium to move water through excretory processes such as maintaining intraluminal hydration (keeping the gut moisturized). It’s also involved in tear production and sweat, which is why both taste salty.

More important than this, however, is chlorine’s role in maintaining the Haldane effect, which is the process by which carbon dioxide and oxygen are transported from the air in your lungs and delivered to tissues to facilitate cellular respiration and thus life. The method by which deadly chlorine gas is said to kill people is by the formation of hydrochloric acid in the lungs which then dissolves lung tissue. But although this acid does dissolve tissue, this is not actually the mechanism of action which kills. Instead, the presence of so much dissolved chlorine in the water of the lungs and then very quickly the entire pulmonary system immediately stops the normal gas exchange of the Haldane effect. (John Haldane was actually also the person who helped develop gas masks to protect soldiers from gas attacks during World War I).

Dismissing chlorine in drinking water as “inert” is straight up fraud, or complete ignorance to the function of chlorine. It is not inert in the least. Its action may be small, because of the relatively small quantity, but chlorine has the same chemical behaviors in a small amount as it does in large ones. it doesn’t change just because it’s a lesser quantity. But the real problem when it comes to this willful ignorance to the effect of chlorine in drinking water is a total lack of understanding about the chemical potential of such substances and the nature of water. This ignorance leads to the consumption of water products like reverse osmosis filters and distilled water, which are actually some of the most toxic things you can take into your body. Water does not just have dissolved minerals in it which are optional. Water also has dissolved gasses in it, the most important of those being CO2 which converts into carbonic acid which then dissociates into hydrogen ions and bicarbonate. The chemical potential of natural water is strongly decreased as it traverses through the environment, taking up gasses and dissolved minerals which serve to fully saturate water and eventually neutralize water’s chemical potential. Removing those elements by filtration resets water’s chemical potential, and raw chemical potential is far more extreme than most people realize. With the right experiments you can actually make water explode. The idea that water is benign is completely ignorant to the forces of physics, chemistry, and nature.

The body operates on exact balances of elements in certain systems. Organs and organelles facilitate excretion, production, growth, and life in general by having greater or lesser affinities for certain elements based in turn on the chemistry of others. When these systems have fluxes in elements this is what drives cellular life and energy. For instance, calcium is largely maintained to the exterior of most soft tissue cells, until the cell uses ATP (which is our energy molecule). ATP use produces a sharp increase in the expression of phosphate which instantly draws in the extracellular calcium which binds to the phosphate which then stops the excessive excitation phosphate would otherwise cause and facilitates its removal from the cell. Excess phosphorus or excess calcium will unbalance that reaction in favor of the one which is greater, which is why many metabolic problems can be caused by an insufficient intake of calcium in ratio to phosphorus.

Chlorine in drinking water is highly reactive. In passing through pipes and infrastructure it can react with elements or organic particles in the water and create potentially toxic compounds. But this is not the primary reason chlorine is harmful—it is the through the disruption of the chemical forces which maintain the Haldane and Bohr effects that surplus chlorine in drinking water can disrupt metabolic pathways and thus contribute to health problems. Again, naysayers regard the amount as trivial, and use the lack of apparent harm to healthy people as evidence. But very few people in developed countries are actually healthy—most are somewhat or very unhealthy. When I was deathly ill with cancer I had a severe, chronic cough that plagued me daily. As I got better this cough started to go away, but every time I took a shower it would start up again and take more than an hour to stop. I finally realized it was the chlorine gas escaping from the hot shower water breathing into my lungs which was causing it. I’m six-foot-seven-inches tall and 250 lbs, and if taking a shower was enough chlorine to cause me a coughing fit when I was sick with cancer it’s enough to disrupt important cellular pathways in the amounts which are in drinking water. I got a vitamin C filter for my shower and the coughing finally went away. But this just goes to show how powerful even a small amount of such elements can be, especially in someone who is not able to resist it. In effect, a small amount of chlorine will in a sick person act like a much larger amount would on a healthy person, because the effect of chlorine is not mitigated by its lack of chemical potential, of which is has much, but by opposing elements, which in a sick person are already deficient.

Chlorine in drinking water does inhibit the distribution of dangerous pathogens, so it does provide us with a valuable service. But if you are at all metabolically ill, especially with symptoms which heavily rely on the balance of dissolved gasses like CO2 and oxygen such as insomnia, weight gain, and depression, it’s a great idea to switch entirely over to bottled spring water for drinking purposes (please buy large gallons or glass bottles to minimize pollution and harmful plastic chemicals). Pools should be switched to saline systems which not only have far less chlorine but also lots of sodium which is good for your skin and metabolic health. You will almost immediately start to feel some benefit from removing chlorine, and in the long run it will assist your body in sustaining the pathways which facilitate healthy cellular respiration and thus the ability to get well.