6 Tips to Spring Clean Your Pantry
(Health Secrets) Most cleaning products are chemical cocktails,poisoning families and environments. They are a lot more harmful than a little dust and dirt. Many cleaning products can irritate lungs and eyes, and are implicated in cancer. They leave behind toxic residues, and pollute the water supply when rinsed down the drain.
Anyone wanting to use cleaning products should learn to read labels, even those of the so-called ‘Green’ products. If an ingredient can’t be pronounced or it has more than 3 or 4 syllables, it’s a good bet this product should be avoided.
Baking soda, vinegar, lemon juice, borax, and a good scrubbing sponge can take care of virtually every household cleaning task and will save a great deal of money while keeping you and your family safe.
Children are at greatest risk of harm from the chemicals in cleaning products because their organs, especially their brains, are still growing. For them, even a tiny dose is toxic.
Children put anything in their mouths and often end up in the Emergency Room from ingesting a common household cleaner. Babies whose mothers have been exposed to some of these chemicals have vision problems from birth.
Respiratory distress sends many children to the hospital and has actually become the number one admission diagnosis for children in Canada. Childhood asthma has jumped nearly 400% in the last 15 years as the use of these products has grown.
Even healthy adults are not immune. Multi-chemical sensitivity is finally being recognized as a real syndrome. It leads to asthma, hospitalization for respiratory problems, absence from work, disability and death.
Air fresheners, plug-ins and sprays with artificial scents are huge contributors to increased asthma. Try replacing these with a few drops of essential oil on cotton balls.
Here are just two examples of alarming ingredients in a common antibacterial air spray, found in many, if not most homes.
1: Denatured alcohol: Denatured alcohol causes irritation of the eyes and mucous membranes. It causes central nervous system depression if inhaled or ingested.
2: Alkyl dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride: This product is used in pesticides. It is suspected to be toxic to the brain, the immune system, the lungs, the gastrointestinal system, the liver and the skin.
Think about this the next time you go to ‘freshen’ the air in your home
To maintain optimal health, commit to cleansing your body of harmful chemicals and toxins twice a year using one of the several detoxification protocols that can be found on this site.
Photo by Ryan Harvey 
