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Saturday, 8 August 2015

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Why chemophobia is actually damaging your mind than real chemicals.

Dihydrogen Monoxide is a dangerous chemical and is found in excised tumors of cancer patients, in by-products of hydrocarbon combustion, as solvent in pesticides, and gaseous DHMO even causes serious burns and visual problems, and its liquid form is even the prime cause of drowning!
Welcome to the world of chemophobia, which is the irrational fear of “anything chemical” or chemical names. The chemical compound that I mentioned in the beginning is nothing but water! There is even a whole website that is devoted to DHMO hoax!
It cannot be known for sure when a person develops chemophobia. I think it all starts when they are introduced to “toxic chemicals” in the school laboratory right from childhood or, is it from the constant fear of failing in chemistry subject for not remembering chemical names? In chemophobia the person develops this illogical fear whenever they see something written in chemical names.
Take the case of this director of Waterfront Park in Louisville who placed signs around fountains warning them about the high amount of hydrogen it contained (it’s H2O) as he was sick of telling people all the time not use it for washing their face or something. The prank worked. Many of us have seen those dumb Facebook shared posts that say something like, “coca cola melts your stomach because it contains acid!!!” Yes it is acidic but the dumbo didn’t seem to know that our stomach also handles a much stronger one called hydrochloric acid. Hell, some Internet literati may start feeling sympathy for that guy who posted and the people who actively shared that. Or maybe, it was fronted by Pepsi who wanted to devalue Coke while they already knew how gullible their consumers were. Fruit juice companies are made to use corrosive acid warnings in their tanker trucks carrying fruit juices because they do contain naturally dilute acids (like citric acid, malic acid etc) which damage metals with corrosion, but our stomachs handle them differently.
I know a friend of mom who stopped using talcum powder because she found it contained zinc oxide. This is another kind of chemophobia where the person finds out that such a substance have not been used traditionally. Yes, but we know that consumer goods regulatory authorities are not fools to let these “chemicals” run loose into daily products and there are safe limits applied to them. I think she may not touch any food here after if she is taught all foods contain dihydrogen monoxide and sodium chloride in them!
We all are familiar with the hullabaloo that was set loose when India banned Maggi noodles as some lab found excessive amounts of lead and MSG in them somewhere. Meanwhile it is also surprising that Chinese and the southwest people didn’t go extinct despite centuries of MSG consumption in their foods on a daily basis. Maybe the lab staffs just got scared when they figured out MSG, nastily, reads Monosodium glutamate or something. Plus, there was a time when Canada banned 14 ayurvedic drugs from India since it contained detectable levels of heavy metals and India government didn’t raise an eyebrow on it.
 Now, coming out of examples, another stuff, which I can think of, that is related to chemophobia is the buzz word “Radiation”. The whole “radiation is bad for you” mantra evolved among common people sometime during the cold war era when the threat of a random nuclear bomb randomly falling out of a random aircraft in the sky, at some random point in US or USSR, was imminent. In the meantime, some unwise guy found the same word being used in radio communication and, bingo, history was born!
Let me try to explain you why it is a misconception. Radiation from a radioactive substance (like you get in a nuclear explosion) is chiefly gamma radiation. They are free flying photons with such a tiny a wavelength and high energy that it can penetrate nucleus of atoms and de-stabilize them. The wavelength of UV-A radiation is slightly larger and able to penetrate DNA and corrupt it.
Hence, a cell containing such a compromised DNA looses valuable data regarding the former’s function and starts to go crazy. If it is the cell division data that has been corrupted, then the cell multiplies wildly, copying the wrong data in newly formed DNA’s along with it. They continue with this process and a cancerous tumor is, sadly, formed.
Do you know that we are not essentially free from nuclear radiation anywhere in the world? In reality it is something known as background radiation. This is because radiation producing isotopes are present fundamentally everywhere in the world, including bananas! Yet they are so weak that our bodies can easily block them.
Visible light, infra reds, microwaves, radio waves and so on are the magic we witness when the photonic wavelengths goes on increasing, at the same time losing its energy. Yes, you are currently being bombarded with radiation from your PC monitor and room lighting, but the wavelengths are so large when compared to gamma and UV-A that they have essentially lost its penetration power to cause any damage. Infra reds just heats things up and so are microwaves. Wait a minute, isn’t it true that leaked microwaves from a microwave oven causes cancers? Absolutely not!!! It just heats up your body surface where it is incident and you would instantly avoid it as an instinct. There is a reason why a metallic mesh is placed inside your microwave oven door. The wavelength of the microwave is so large that (under a centimetre) the poor thing cannot even escape through it, let alone penetrating your DNA! Visible light spectrum can easily pass through it hence you see the food cooking (burning?) inside.
Coming back to my cola paragraph, I would still recommend avoiding them. It is not due to the acid content but its sugar! At 11g/100g, and in large amounts of consumption, it is enough to cause type-2 diabetes, obesity, tooth decay and, not surprisingly, dim wittedness!
Sugar, chiefly sucrose, has this magical IUPAC name:
(2R,3R,4S,5S,6R)-2-[(2S,3S,4S,5R)-3,4-dihydroxy-2,5-bis(hydroxymethyl)oxolan-2-yl]oxy-6-(hydroxymethyl)oxane-3,4,5-triol
Yet we see an anti-chemophobia trend there!
Consequently, if abiogenesis of life (life originated through complex chemical reactions) is true, then we all are, like, self sustaining, super large, super complex chemical molecules!
I consumed exactly 524g of dihydrogen monoxide while writing this article!




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