Could EMFs Be A Cause of Symptoms?
Interestingly, The Institute for Function Medicine® considers EMFs an environmental toxin and lists it under the header Toxins & Detoxification. In the article EMFs: Health Impacts and Reducing Exposures, they start off saying "Electromagnetic fields (EMFs) are invisible areas of radiation that are created both naturally (e.g., earth’s magnetic field and sunlight) and by human invention (e.g., cell phones and power lines)." So, some of these are natural and some are not.
In my Functional Diagnostic Nutrition® Practitioner training program, the advice to avoid EMFs (or, more specifically the radiation from electromagnetic fields) was a given. For example, the advice is to not sleep with your phone in your room, and especially not by your head. Turn your phone on airplane mode, and even better, turn off your wireless router at night. Use corded earphones to keep your phone and wireless earbuds away from your head. Wow! Seems kind of extreme and "out there."
What has this on my mind now? Recently, YouTube served up an ad to me about a chip that you could stick onto personal electronic devices to block EMFs.
Why? It turns out there are a lot of reasons.
Some of the most alarming reasons include the 2011 World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer's classification of certain non-ionizing EMFs as possibly carcinogenic to humans. These fields are produced by electronic products like cellphones, smart devices, and tablets. Other research links mobile phones to tumors in the salivary glands and specifically points to holding your cell phone near your head as a potential contributor. From the National Cancer Institute Cell Phones and Cancer Risk Fact Sheet, "energy from ionizing radiation can damage DNA. DNA damage can cause changes to genes that may increase the risk of cancer." These things sound really bad - like worse case scenarios.
But, what about us regular people just going about our daily lives? How could EMFs be affecting us? In my brief research, I found references to studies that suggest a correlation between EMF exposure and health issues like:
Sleep disturbances
Memory issues, Loss of Concentration, Decreased Learning Ability
Irritability
Headaches, Migraines
Fatigue, Tiredness
Anxiety, Mental Health Disturbances
Skin & Tissue Damage
Nausea
Fertility Issues
Oxidative Stress
Endocrine Disruptions
From the National Institutes of Health, a 2022 study from the journal, Nutrients, entitled Mobile Phone Radiation Deflects Brain Energy Homeostasis and Prompts Human Food Ingestion, says that their "results identify RF-EMFs as a potential contributing factor to overeating, which underlies the obesity epidemic.
For a deeper dive, I recommend the healthline.com article entitled Should You Be Worried About EMF Exposure.
Finally, in addition to the advice to limit exposure to EMFs, The Institute for Functional Medicine® states, "while the research continues to develop, preliminary results from animal models and human-based research suggest that nutrients such as vitamin C, vitamin E, omega-3 fatty acids, and various plants and herbs may mitigate some of the negative health impacts that have been suggested for chronic EMF exposure…"
I've put together supplement ideas to Support Immune Function and Decrease Inflammation on my Fullscript website. Once you've created an account you will have lifetime access the the catalog. Plus, there is a 15% discount.
