Healthy Lifestyles

Non-Toxic Home

The world is full of toxic products. . .your home shouldn’t be.

In one five year study, the EPA reported that a number of homes had chemical levels that were 70 times higher inside the home than outside. In her booklet "Why are you poisoning your family?", Kare Possick writes: "Seventy thousand new chemicals that have been introduced since World War II were developed out of the extensive research in chemical warfare! That’s 250 billion pounds of synthetic chemicals produced each year in the US (according to the California Public Interest Research Group)! Now, thousands of these chemicals are appearing innocuously on the shelves of your grocery store—to clean your clothes, your floor, your hair, your teeth and your oven. By just being for sale on the grocery store shelves—you would think these products for your floors and your delicates—are safe for you and your family. We are the first generation to grow up with such extremely high levels of chemicals in our homes. And what do we do with them? We see them. We use them. We disinfect our baby’s room with them, we clean with them, we smear them on our skin, we wash our clothes in them and wear them all day and sleep on them all night, we wash our dishes in them, we brush our teeth with them. They are a part of our lives. We don’t question whether they are safe. We grew up buying them from our grocery store. We trust that if the grocery store sells the product—it is safe. According to the U.S. National Research Council, no information on toxic effects is available for 79% of the more than 48,500 synthetic chemicals listed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Fewer than one-fifth have been tested for acute effects, and fewer than one-tenth for chronic, reproductive or mutagenic effects."
The health in our nation is not looking good. We are seeing allergies, birth defects, ADD, migraines, asthma, Alzheimer’s, cancers of every kind and the list goes on. According to the Toxic Substances Strategy Committee, 80-90% of cancers are triggered by exposure to hazardous substances in the environment. This was reported in 1980. So why are se still using all of these toxic products? We as consumers need to look for products that don’t use toxic chemicals as ingredients. Many people don’t realize that the fumes from most of these cleaner don’t disappear when you are done cleaning, they linger in your home for your whole family to breathe over and over again. Not only should we consider how these chemicals affect us as we breath them and as they get on our skin, but also if there are children in our lives, there is always the possibility of poisoning. What a scary experience it is to have a child swallow a substances such as a cleaner. Many children have been badly hurt, or have even died because of such a toxic chemical. Even more sad is realizing how easy it would have been to prevent it. I heard of two little girls, that decided to have a tea party with a multi-purpose cleaner. How thankful that parent must have been, that they had cared enough to make sure it was a non-toxic multi-purpose cleaner. According to the U.S Consumer Product Safety Commission, in 1988 hospitals emergency rooms treated more than 9,000 patients for injuries related to household bleaches (more than 60% of these were children under five).

"I had a friend say to me once that they have never had any problems with their cleaners and personal care products before. And besides, as he told me, our bodies are designed to filter out and get rid of such toxic things. My answer then, as it is now, is that the more garbage we expect our bodies to handle, the less efficiently they will be able handle the garbage there is no way to avoid. And as those unnecessary things are allowed to pollute our bodies a little at a time, it will most certainly build over the course of our life into a problem that will suddenly manifest itself in an undesired ailment such as cancer, as it did in my life."

There are safer products on the market, you just have to be willing to do the homework to find them.