Are you one of those people who pride yourself on how frequently you clean your house?
Well, you might want to rethink that.
As it turns out, cleaning can be bad for your health. Don’t take our word for it, though, just check out the chemicals in the cleaners.
According to researchers at the University of Bergen in Norway, a look into your lungs shows that cleaning your house just once per week wreaks the same havoc on your body as smoking an entire pack of cigarettes per day.
The study was published in American Thoracic Society’s American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, and the findings were frightening.
The experiment monitored the lung capacity of 6,000 women over 20 years time via extensive questionnaires. The study included both professional cleaners and women who only clean their own homes.
According to the research commentary, lead author of the study, Øistein Svanes, claims that the breathing capacity of women involved in the study decreased more rapidly as a result of cleaning.
“We found accelerated lung function decline in women both following occupational cleaning and cleaning at home. The effect size was comparable to the effect size related to 10-20 pack-years of tobacco smoking.”
While, of course, people who clean for a living experienced more extensive damage than their home-based counterparts, even women cleaning one time per week sustained lung damage equivalent to inhaling 20 smokes a day!
How is that possible? Keep reading ↓
At this point, you might be wondering just how unsafe your cleaning products are.
Unfortunately, most commercial cleaning products contain harmful ingredients that can cause serious damage to those lungs of yours.
Feeling sick about all the chores you made the kids do last week? Well before you toss your cookies with ALL your cleaners, you should know that not every product poses a threat to your well-being.
Some chemical cleaning products do more harm than others, and how dangerous a cleaning product is, really comes down to what’s inside that bottle.
To find out if you’ve got a toxic cleaning product on your hands, you can start with your sniffer.
Kelly Vlahakis-Hanks, the CEO of Earth Friendly Products, says that most chemical cleaners are heavily scented with synthetic chemicals that we usually know aren’t good for us. She says,
“We now know that what we are inhaling when we smell strong synthetic fragrance are actually volatile organic compounds. These VOCs are often allergens and can even be neurotoxins or carcinogens.”
Sadly, “fragrances” are in just about every product on the shelf.
Think about it. As health and wellness author Janet Newman points out in Living In The Chemical Age, they are virtually inescapable,
“Fragrances are used to scent a variety of cleaning products, including dish soap, laundry detergent, carpet cleaner, dryer sheets and air fresheners, to name a few. Consumers need to know that the word ‘fragrance’ is a catch-all term.”
This blanket-terminology can cover, quite literally, thousands of chemicals that are extraordinarily harmful to your health.
One glaring example is that of styrene, a petroleum-based product.
Styrene is a common chemical component in fragrances, even though the National Toxicology Program has dubbed the chemical as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen”.
The expert panel of the NTP voted styrene to this status by 8 to 2. If you’re wondering why the other two didn’t vote for this status, according to the report it’s because they wanted to give it this status:
“known to be a human carcinogen”
Other toxic chemicals frequently found in cleaning products are benzophenone, a known endocrine disruptor linked to liver cancer, phthalates, and acetaldehyde.
If you want to know what’s in your cleaner’s, there’s good news.
Please SHARE this with your friends and family.
Are you aware that product manufacturers don’t have to disclose their ingredients on the packaging?
It’s true. According to the EPA, unless you’re eating it, corporations don’t have to tell you a thing.
“Unlike food products, manufacturers of chemical products are not required to list ingredients on their containers or make them public.”
With that in mind, the EPA has a Safer Chemical Ingredients webpage to help you determine the potential dangers of different chemicals, but it only works if you know the product ingredients.
If like many, you don’t quite trust the EPA, the Environmental Working Group has created an awesome search tool on their website.
The EWG is a gargantuan network of independent, non-partisan scientists, lawyers, health practitioners, and policymakers.
They have spent their entire existence compiling chemical, product, and company data on household goods from cosmetics, to tap-water and cleaning supplies.
When a product is searched, it gives it a grade from A-F. You can click on the hyperlink beneath your product to learn more about it, such as chemical ingredients, known toxicology, and comparable earth-friendly alternatives.
Now you don’t have to sacrifice your ability to breathe in order to tackle that mess. Happy cleaning!
