Question from Juliee
Debra, I read some of your articles re: chlorine. I swim 3 X a week. Before going into the outdoor pool, I cover myself w/ Coconut oil. When I get out, I pour a bottle of H2o over me that has 1000 mg of Vit C dissolved in it. I then go into the sauna from 15-30 min. I really am trying to get rid of any chlorine that I have absorbed while swimming. Am I wasting my time doing this routine?
Debra’s Answer
We discussed this in 2007 at Q&A: How to minimize risk from swimming in chlorinated pool.
I just was searching about this and came across a useless article that gave ste-by-step instructions for removing chlorine from your body after swimming with soap and water.
Chlorine is immediately absorbed through your skin on contact, so there is no way to remove it after the fact, you need to apply a barrier, like you are doing with coconut oil. I don’t know how effective that is, but it would be better than nothing.
There is a field called “toxicokinetics” that is the description of what rate a chemical will enter the body and what happens to it once it is in the body. It’s very useful stuff to know. You can seach on “toxicokinetics” and the name of the chemical to get this information online. Unfortunately, it isn’t always available or complete.
I searched on “toxicokinetics chlorine” and found that there wasn’t anything on the effects of chlorine in your body when absorbed through the skin, only when inhaled. So I’ll tell you when it is inhaled, it basically is absorbed into the body through the airways. The distribution, metabolism, and excretion of chlorine is determined by how it reacts in one’s individual body.
The purpose of chlorine is to kill micro-organisms. It doesn’t care if those micro-organisms are in the pool or in your body, and it also doesn’t know which are harmful and which are beneficial. It just kills them all. So it’s best to keep chlorine out of your body as best you can. I imagine it would leave your body fairly quickly as it is a gas. It’s not something your body would store.
