Oh, Too!

The Angry Toxicologist (an informative new science blog I found) takes on one of the silliest products one could ever market:

The POD, or Personal Oxygen Device, by GO2, is simply that: portable oxygen for you to "energize" and "refresh, restore, renew your mind and body on the cellular level with oxygen". Ooooo...cellular. Sounds scientificy, let's get it!

First I have to note that if your body is short on oxygen, you'll simply breathe harder.

However, as I have probably discussed on this blog before, breathing oxygen in excess of what we normally breathe in the air is really quite harmful. Why? Well, one more time for the world:

Oxygen is reactive, our bodies exploit this aspect by having O2 accept the energy that we use to keep our bodies going (that's a really broad definition of why we need oxygen). However, this reactivity can have unintended consequences; for one, oxidation is the main reason our bodies age (oxidation is also why iron turns to rust). This is the reason that anti-aging creams try to pack in the anti-oxidants.

Too much oxygen in the lungs can really damage the tissue with its reactivity. Researchers started measuring the damage a couple years ago by looking at isofurans, a chemical that signals that the cell walls are being damaged by oxidation.

When this damage occurs, the lungs heal themselves, but that's exactly where the problem occurs, because the lungs are a really flexible and permeable tissue. Scar tissue isn't. So eventually, the scar tissue builds up and it's not only harder to breathe, but less air gets across the lung surface to the blood and vice versa. As you can imagine, asthmatics and smokers will feel this first.

So there! Marketers attempting to sell the health benefits of pure oxygen are just spouting so much hot air.