Toxins Under Your Kitchen Sink
From LOSING IT! With Jillian Michaels Tuesday, August 30, 2011
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you’ve probably been getting the sense that our bodies are under assault in the modern world. We ingest toxins in the form of refined sugars, artificial sweeteners, and other additives in our food. Some toxins are present in our environment, in the form of air and water pollution. And some can be found right in our homes, under our kitchen sinks and in our bathroom cabinets. Conventional cleaning products are full of toxic chemicals — in fact, most incidents of poisoning occur in the home and involve items like cleaning supplies. Chemical cleaners pump harmful volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into the air, which we then breathe in. The worst offenders are drain, oven, and toilet bowl cleaners and products containing chlorine and ammonia. (Get this: Chlorine and ammonia combine to produce chloramine, which was used as a chemical weapon in World War I.) Instead of chemical cleaners, stick with products made from 100 percent natural ingredients to clean your house; they’re just as effective and they’re cheap too! Here are a few useful cleaners you probably already have in your pantry or bathroom cabinet:
Baking soda can be used to deodorize your fridge, freezer, and carpets, to clean cutlery, and to scrub toilets and tubs.
Lemon juice is a great substitute for bleach.
White vinegar mixed with water can be used to clean floors, windows, and mirrors. To clean kitchen surfaces, spray them first with pure white vinegar, then with hydrogen peroxide, and wipe the surfaces clean. Be sure to keep the vinegar and peroxide in two separate spray bottles — mixing them before you spray can create a hazardous concentration of the germ-killing acid formed when the two products are combined.
Joy’s Thoughts:
This is a soap box I have been on for twenty years. One of my volunteer jobs is to teach a workshop called Is Your Home a Healthy Home? and it’s about toxins under the sink.
Julian’s recommendations are on target, but there are a few problems: freshness, performance and convenience of using those products for cleaning. Our busy life styles do not take to freshly mixing up home remedies each time we clean. Fortunately, there are convenient healthier choices all around. Some of the big corporates, who want a piece of the “go-green” pie, have done a good job of providing safer for you cleaning products alongside their traditional toxic ones on the store shelf. The higher price and the poor performance of them is only going to be tolerated by those truly committed to safer choices, however.
But keep looking – the need for those choices is growing. Where I shop, their customer base has grown tremendously in the last few (economically stressful) years. They have figured out how to do better working, safer for you products for less money than what is on the store shelf. With the growing need for healthier choices – other companies are going to be working on doing that – surely.
Choices matter! More at www.joyboudreau.com.
