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Are they really that bad, for being soaked in chlorine?

I havent noticed anything bad from eating them, but should I just get regular carrots instead?

That's the first I've heard of that one - I don't think there's really any concern there though http://www.snopes.com/food/tainted/carrots.asp

If anything you should be worried about all the chlorine in tap water.

Exactly. Although I work at a hotel and one time one of my guests was telling me that he had his own bottling water company and to comply with some regulation was required to put a certain amount of bleach into the water...

What are the worries regarding chlorine?

Well, drinking a lot of it makes you sick, and since it's anti-microbial it follows that it could be a long term immune suppressant.

The amount of chlorine you would get from your carrots would be small compared to that which you get from drinking water and other sources. Apparently showers are the significant way of absorbing chlorine.

Damn, I love showers, does all tap water have chlorine in it?

Mine doesn't, I'm on a well. If you are on municipal water, it's probably chlorinated.

I don't follow. How does this work?

The following is what I've come up with.

Most of the negative stuff I've seen on the internet is on sites selling purifiers, etc.

Chlorine is deadly poisonous in high concentrations. Low doses (swimming pools, drinking water, etc) are not harmful. Some people put too much in their pool and it's irritating after an hour or so.

People who work in a chlorine environment do not get any more sick that the general population except for industrial accidents. This suggests that Chlorine itself in low doses is not harmful.

There may be impurities in the water that react with the low levels of chlorine that produce harmful reactants.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mrrev.2007.09.001

It seems prudent to me to limit your exposure but where chlorine has a valid public safety role, it's unlikely to go away. Just make sure you use care with your swimming pool chemicals and hope that your municipality and chemical plants in your area do the same.

I'd be more concerned about flouride in the water than low levels ofchlorine as well as MSG and other additives in food.

Well the chlorine is there in the water to kill mold/bacteria - it follows that it would kills some percentage of mold/bacteria in you when you drink it.

Our bodies, are they not able to recognize that, chlorine is not needed and so the body excretes it?

Well it's removed from the body somehow - I can't find the exact metabolic process though. Even if it's removed very quickly, it's still bleaching out some amount of microbes - it's inconceivable the body metabolism could remove it so fast as to have no effect.