In case you haven't noticed, we're on a "back-to-nature" kick right now.  Grass-fed beef, organic produce, recyclable this, renewable that.  Back in the '60's, anyone of a certain generation will tell you that the pendulum had swung the other way:  chemical this, factory-made that, baby formula, and, as Walter Brooke told Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate," plastics.  We could conquer the world, essentially, by creating our own cheaper, faster, more hassle-free version.  

Seems like every day we're hearing more and more about the dangers of all things man-made, man-touched, or man-influenced-in-any-way.  I get it, and for the most part I agree with it.  Still, it's easy to see how and why it fits into our current state of national malaise and the questioning of the American Way of Life (are you feeling it, too?).  After the '90's, a.k.a. All-The-Cake-You-Can-Have,-Eat,-and-Take-Home-With-You-and-Never-Have-To-Pay-For-It decade, we're undergoing something of a national hangover that's fraught with one dominant emotion:  guilt.  

As a result, we've decided rather rashly that all things man-made are BAD and all things that grow out of the ground or eat stuff that grows out of the ground are GOOD.  Again--there's a lot of wisdom in this, but still--beware the overreaction.  Beware extremism.  

HOWEVER--this article--which shows a connection between swimming in chlorinated swimming pools and asthma--strikes me as the real deal.  When I started training for triathlons in 2005, I started noticing that I pretty much had a hacking, lung-busting cough that lasted, oh, six months.  I attributed it to a number of things:  bad LA air, asthma (which I've had since I was a kid), even (shudder) a feeling that  all the cardio work was giving me a kind of pulmonary enema:  "I must be clearing out bad gunk from my lungs that's been there for decades," I figured, "I'm sure it's a positive development."  

Just goes to show that even fitness pros aren't above totally ignoring clear signs from the body that they're doing something woefully WRONG to their bodies.  

According to the piece,

"These new data clearly show that by irritating the airways of swimmers chlorination products in water and air of swimming pools exert a strong additive effect on the development of asthma and respiratory allergies such as hay fever and allergic rhinitis," Dr. Alfred Bernard, a toxicologist at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, Belgium, noted...

"The impact of these chemicals on the respiratory health of children and adolescents appears to be much more important -- at least by a factor of five -- than that associated with secondhand smoke," Bernard noted.

Now--there's nothing in the study about the effect of chlorinated-pool-swimming on adults with allergies, but I don't think it's too much of a leap to suspect that it can't be all that good.  

Can't say yet what this means for my pool training.  But I can imagine what it's going to mean for your local pool.  Look for an outcry to have public pools switched to alternative, more bio-friendly systems, coming soon to an editorial column near you.