If you google the term ‘EMF shielding’, you’ll see thousands of results with products claiming to provide protection from EMF radiation"Radiation" in the context of Electromagnetic Fields (EMF) refers to the process by which energy is emitted and transmitted through space or a material medium in the form of electromagnetic... More. And with that many genuine-looking choices, it’s hard to know how to pick the right one.
So how can you navigate these complex EMF product claims and know which ones are legitimate? The first thing you’ll have to do is spend a little time educating yourself on the subject.
Even though EMF comes under a complicated branch of physics, I have tried to explain it in simple and easy-to-understand language on this blog. You’ll find hundreds of posts here talking about EMF, its health effects, and EMF protection.
If you’re new to this topic, my post “What Is EMF In Simple Words?” is a great place to start.
It’s essential that you find a product that is both effective and relevant to your situation. If not, it will either be a waste of money or, worse, it will amplify your EMF exposure.
So, let’s jump in to understanding how you can decipher the different EMF product claims and find the right EMF protection for your needs.
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What is EMF Protection?
Before answering this, here’s some context about what EMF is and why rapid progress in the tech industry is worrisome for our health.
EMF is an energy"Energy" is a fundamental concept in physics, often described as the ability to do work or cause change. In everyday terms, it's what is needed to move things, heat them... More that comes from a combination of electricity and magnetism. It doesn’t need any cables to travel. It can simply go from point A to B via air. We use EMF for things such as data transfer, heating, and signaling.
Your devices like laptops, cell phones, microwaves, WiFi routers, and smart meters use EMF to operate. Recently the medical industry has also started using controlled EMF therapy to treat a number of diseases.
It has been widely established that non-ionizing EMF radiation, like the one your devices emit, has a thermal effect that causes tissue heating and potential tissue damage. But it doesn’t stop there. Years of research on the biological effects of EMF on humans have shown that EMF also creates a range of other health issues from sleep disorders to chronic diseases like cancer.
This is why protecting yourself from EMF is so important.
‘EMF protection’ is an umbrella term for anything you do to reduce your EMF exposure. You can limit your tech use, distance yourself from EMF sources (which I will talk about later in this post), and use EMF shieldingEMF shielding refers to the practice of reducing the electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure in a particular area by blocking or altering the electromagnetic waves with barriers made of conductive or... More products.
With a growing number of research studies on EMF’s health effects, many companies have emerged in the market selling EMF shielding products. This market has grown significantly in the last ten years, and now you can find a range of products that you can use to shield yourself from EMF.
Here are some examples:
- Electronics accessories like phone cases
- Apparel (e.g. underwear or headwear)
- Pendants and stickers
- Neutralizers and harmonizers
- Supplements that claim to reduce or reverse the damage from EMF exposure
- Devices and gadgets that claim to protect your entire home
The list goes on.
And all of these products ‘claim’ to protect you from EMF. But do they really work as they claim?
EMF is Unregulated
It’s hard to believe that something like EMF, which is proven to cause major health issues, is completely unregulated. But sadly, this is true. And because of this, the industry is left in a vulnerable state where misleading claims and false advertising thrive.
Even among the companies that sell legitimate solutions, many lie and decieve about how well their products work or intentionally mislead with their testing data.
How to Find Legitimate EMF Shielding Products?
This is fairly simple. When you see a new EMF shielding product, you must ask yourself, what does it do? I know it sounds pretty obvious — it protects you from EMF. And many companies sell products on a huge scale just by making this broad claim.
But what you need to understand is that the way EMF shielding products work varies from one product to another. So, asking questions like these are super important:
- Does it block EMF?
- Does it neutralize the EMF and make it less harmful for you?
- Or does it claim to repair damage to your body from EMF?
When you ask these questions, it opens up the product to further questioning, and from there you can identify if the seller can verify their claims.
Is This Backed by Science?
EMF comes under the electromagnetism and photonics branch of physics, and EMF shielding is a concept created by scientist Michael FaradayMichael Faraday: Pioneer of Electromagnetism and the Faraday Cage Michael Faraday, born on September 22, 1791, in Newington Butts, Surrey, England, was a brilliant scientist and experimentalist who made groundbreaking... More almost 200 years ago. So, it is only fair to ask if the product being sold is backed by science.
Before buying a product, you can ask the following questions to the seller:
- Is there any science that can explain how the product works?
- Is there any science that can be used to test the product’s claims?
- Are there ways for you to test how the product works?
Now before I go further, I want to make it perfectly clear that lack of science doesn’t always mean that the product is ineffective.
I have lots of customers – thousands of them – who, in addition to using my products, use other products without any basis in science. Products like pendants and crystals, which they say work for them.
This is why I always say that if a product does not have supporting science, it doesn’t mean that the product doesn’t work. It just means that you can’t prove the claims with science.
I, for one, only recommend products that are based on verifiable science and have testable claims. It is also the type of product that my company, SYB, specializes in.
So, when there is no way to test a certain product scientifically, it is very hard for someone like me to support or endorse them.
But if a product works for you, then please keep on using it. If a trusted friend tells you a certain product works for them, even though there’s no science, then, by all means, give it a shot. Especially if you are not finding relief with other means.
Testing EMF Shielding
As I mentioned above, EMF shielding is based on fundamental, universally accepted scientific principles almost 200 years old.
Electromagnetic shielding works by creating a mesh of conductive or magnetic material to form a barrier that obstructs EM fields. Think of an EMF shielding product as a window shade — except instead of blocking sunlight, these products block and deflect EMF radiation.
You may be familiar with the term SAR, and even if you’re not, I’ve written a detailed post about it which you can read before going further.
In brief, SAR is a measurement of emissions – how much EMF something emits into the environment that is then absorbed by your body. It’s basically a test of how much EMF a device emits.
In contrast to that, an EMF shielding product is tested with attenuation tests. Attenuation tests tell us how much EMF radiation something like our SYB Phone Pouch will ‘attenuate’, or block.
There are four critical elements to an attenuation test.
- A controlled environment, so you don’t have EMF pollution tainting the results
- An EMF signal emitter that can emit very specific doses of precise EMF frequencies
- A shielding product or material
- A frequency"Frequency" in the context of electricity, Electromagnetic Fields (EMF), and wireless communication, can be thought of as the number of times something happens in a second. Specifically, it refers to... More analyzer to see how much of the emitted EMF makes it through the shielding material or product
When you get a result of an attenuation test, it produces data in decibels and percentages. They’re actually similar, but scientists often use decibels because of their accuracy, and percentage conversion is for the general audience.
I publish my products’ attenuation test results to show that my products actually work. Companies similar to mine do the same.
Performing these tests and publishing results are important for consumers. This is because EMF is a complex subject, and a lot of people don’t know how to test EMF shielding for themselves. Due to this, consumers heavily rely on tests like this for confirmation.
But, what an ‘EMF test’ means might be different than what you think it means.
EMF Product Claims Vs. Reality
Attenuation tests do, in fact, tell us how much EMF was blocked, but under very specific circumstances. That’s a really important clarification because the amount of EMF a certain product block is in no way proof that you’ll be able to replicate the results at your home. This is why more often than not, EMF shielding users report underwhelming results from their home-test — not because the product doesn’t work as the manufacturer claim, but because the claim was made after testing the product in a controlled laboratory setting, which doesn’t replicate the real-life environment.
As I said in my earlier post:
“Lab testing almost never tells you how EMF shielding will work, for you, in your real life. The testing environment is too artificial, too unrelated to how you’ll actually use the product.”
For instance, let’s say that the description of an EMF shielding product claims the following: “Tests show product A blocks 99% of EMF radiation.”
When we see that, our minds interpret that to mean “blocks 99% of all EMF radiation;” and then our minds add “in all circumstances” to the end of the phrase, without even realizing it – completely subconsciously.
So even though the original claim was:
“tests show it blocks 99% of EMF radiation”
we read it as:
“tests show it blocks 99% of all EMF radiation, in all circumstances.”
When in fact, the original claim would be more properly stated as:
“tests show it can block up to 99% of EMF radiation, in a very specific set of circumstances.”
With “specific circumstances” referring to the exact conditions under which the test was performed. Conditions like:
- What was the EMF source?
- Where was the EMF protection product placed in relation to the source?
- What tool was used to measure the EMF levels?
- Where was that EMF measurement tool placed?
- What frequencies were measured?
- What product was tested?
All of these factors are important in an attenuation test, and if we change any one of those factors, the results can change dramatically.
The way a product is tested in a lab could have little or no relationship at all to how you’d use the product in real life.
Does It Mean That the Lab Tests Are Useless?
Absolutely not. Even if the product may perform differently in two different conditions, the lab test shows you that the product can actually shield EMF.
If the testing data says that it can shield 99% of EMF, it is possible that, in other conditions, it will block 60%, or 75%, or even maybe 90% of the EMF coming towards your body. But the unchangeable fact is that it works.
If a company can’t show that their products shield in a lab, then that almost certainly means their products won’t shield in real life, either. So, you need to avoid shielding companies without testing data for their products as much as you can.
How Do You Ensure Complete EMF Protection?
You can’t. EMF is everywhere, and unless you’re sitting inside a Faraday CageA Faraday cage, named after the English scientist Michael Faraday who invented them in 1836, is a structure used to shield its contents from external electric fields, including electromagnetic fields... More all day, you can’t be wholly protected from EMF. But that doesn’t mean you can’t reduce your EMF exposure to a level where it is safer for your health.
So, how do you reduce your exposure?
This brings me to my key message, the one that I even have on my email signature. The message is that “the best EMF protection is always free.”
EMF protection products are the second line of defense. Good EMF protection products, like the ones I make and sell, help you reduce your EMF exposure, but they don’t completely solve the EMF problem.
To reduce your EMF exposure, you have to change your tech use habits first.
You have to minimize the time you spend on your gadgets and maximize your distance from EMF sources. The more you refrain from using tech gadgets, the less you’ll be exposed to EMF. And on top of that, if you create a distance between EMF sources and your body, you’ll face much weaker EMF energy. This is because the power"Power" in a scientific context refers to the rate at which work is done or energy is transferred. In simpler terms, it's how fast something is using energy. For example,... More of EMF weakens with distance, as explained in the inverse-square law of physics.
Why EMF Protection Products?
Minimizing use and maximizing distance is a great way of mitigating EMF exposure, but it’s rare that someone is able to escape tech completely. We use EMF-emitting gadgets for work, entertainment, communication, and many other things. Unarguably, EMF-emitting tech plays a more important role in our lives than we think.
And when you are using your devices, you are exposing yourself to EMF emissions. This is where EMF protection products come into action.
To summarize, these products make it safer for you to use your tech. And by using these products, combined with minimizing tech use and maximizing distance, you can live a safer and healthier life without giving up the convenience that tech brings.
Using EMF Protection Products Correctly
This leads to my final point and an absolutely critical one. You need to make sure to use the product the way it’s designed to be used. This is important because if you don’t use the product the correct way, it may do absolutely nothing — or in a worst-case scenario, it may actually increase your exposure.
Let’s take the SYB Phone Pouch as an example. The rear of the pouch is lined with EMF shielding fabric, and the front is just regular neoprene. This product is designed to make it safer for you to carry your phone.
When you carry your phone in the SYB Phone Pouch with the neoprene side facing to the front, it will deflect the EMF coming from your phone away from your body. And it does it without interfering with your phone’s reception or battery life.
And what I can confirm is that it works for that specific purpose. But it does not, for example, make it safer to sleep with your phone.
Even though there are clear instructions about using this phone pouch, I’ve had customers who bought it to sleep with their phones. And frankly, it doesn’t help in that situation at all. Instead, we have other products designed for that purpose.
So, pick the EMF protection product that best fits your requirements and use it correctly.
Final Thoughts
Whenever you’re browsing an EMF protection product, think about these things.
- The claims the company is making.
- The data they’ve presented supporting their claims.
- What does the data actually say?
- What was actually tested?
And if you decide to buy it, use the product as intended.
Besides that, you can learn how to test EMF levels by yourself. Since EMF is tasteless, odorless, and you can’t touch or feel it, knowing how to test EMF levels will help you a lot.
This way, you can not only test the effectiveness of a product, but you can also identify your exposure level and find products that suit you best.
I have a free guide to EMF testing that I’ve written and updated over the past few years. You can download it on my website.
This guide has explanations, comparisons, and recommendations of different EMF meters. And it also tells you the dos and don’ts of testing EMF at home. It is completely free, so do check it out.
