10 Simple Ways to Detox Your Home (and Reduce Toxins)

The average home contains 500-1000 chemicals and toxins, most of which you are unable to see, taste, or smell.

Any kind of body detox method is worthless if you don’t detox your home as well. It’s just an endless cycle of removing toxins while welcoming them right back into your body.

I found these two facts to be enough to decide to detox my home, especially since I have a child who suffers from the occasional asthma attack.

Why I Decided to Detox My Home

Common household and body care products have been found to have devastating health effects on the nervous and immune systems, our reproductive systems, and on our endocrine, cardiovascular and respiratory systems.

Many of them have been proven to cause cancer.

While these toxins can be tolerated by us in small doses, all kinds of health problems emerge when we are exposed to them in combination or large doses.

Our tolerance depends on many things like genetics, nutrition, alcohol and medication use, and overall health.

But:

There’s a fix. It may not be easy, and it may take some time, but it’s worth it.

10 Ways to Reduce Common Household Toxins

Some of these ways are easy. Just take your shoes off when you walk into your house. Others are more complicated and may need reaching out to your wallet.

1. Take Your Shoes Off

Did you know that you can reduce 60% of #toxins in your home just by leaving your shoes outside?

Most household dirt, pesticides, and lead (!) come into your home through your shoes. All you have to do is declare your home shoes-free to eliminate more than half of your in-home toxins.

Isn’t that easy?

2. Keep the Air Clean

When it comes to indoor air quality, the chances are you’re better off wandering the fume-filled streets of Hong Kong than sitting at home in front of the TV.

For example, home insulation doesn’t allow fresh air in, so you’re constantly breathing the same stale air. Carpeting is a huge source of dust and traps dirt, fleas, dust mites, and lead.

Try to keep your windows open as much as you can. Remove odors with baking soda, not with nasty chemical sprays. Clean your air ducts and vents with non-toxic cleaners.

Vacuum your carpets often, preferably with a HEPA filter Vacuum.

(HEPA filter vacuums capture the widest range of particles and get rid of allergens).

Air-purifying Plants

Living plants bring a healing nature into your home. All plants improve the air quality in your home, but certain plants are extra-purifying.

For example, the Peace Lilly, “mops up” ammonia, acetone, ethyl acetate, benzene, and formaldehyde from the atmosphere.

Here are the most purifying indoor plants:

 

Portable Air Purifier

A portable air purifier is especially important for those of us with seasonal allergies, asthma, and general respiratory problems.

The best place to put a HEPA air filter is in your bedroom since that’s the room you use most (at least 7 hours of healthy sleeping, I hope). However, its portability allows you to drag it around with you to any room in the house.

A HEPA air purifier can reduce dust mites, mold spores, tobacco smoke, pollen, animal hair and dander, bacteria and viruses and more.

It hardly makes any noise, it actually a relaxing white noise that helps me fall asleep at night. The Honeywell HEPA filter which I have covers rooms up to 390 square feet in size.

Eliminate Mold

Check areas for moisture or leaks (especially basements). Regularly clean surfaces where mold grows. Use a homemade spray of Tea Tree Oil (about 8 drops) and water to kill mold without chemicals and to prevent reoccurrence.

See more remarkable uses for the amazing Tea Tree Oil!

3. Use Natural Cleaners

The common industrial cleaning products we use to clean our bathroom, kitchen, furniture, and windows are loaded with toxic chemicals, and some of them do not even appear on the label.

You breathe these toxins in when you use them, and they pollute the air in your home for days.

Replace generic air fresheners, furniture polishes, laundry products, and household cleaners with non-toxic products. 

You can also easily use basic ingredients you have in your home, such as white vinegar, baking soda, and hydrogen peroxide.

You can clean just about everything with this stuff just as effectively as with the industrial stuff.

 

4. Switch to Natural Skin Care

Just like cleaning products, common beauty and body care products are filled with toxins and chemicals. These penetrate your bloodstream easily through your skin and burden your immune system with more work.

It’s highly important to avoid shampoos, soaps, and lotions containing Parabens, synthetic fragrances, carcinogens (like the infamous SLS), and petrochemicals.

Replace your beauty products with organic all-natural ones, such as the Dr. Hauschka body & face skincare products (and makeup!)

Use pure essential oils instead of perfume. Essential oils do not only smell great but offer many therapeutic benefits. For example, see the 3 best essential oils for anxiety & stress.

 5. Switch to Toxin-Free Cookware

First, the plastic. Bisphenol A, found in plastic items such as drinking bottles, causes reproductive-system defects in animals. And I can assume in us too.

Try to minimize the use of plastic in your home. Do not store food in plastic, do not heat food in plastic ever and plastic toys are not great either. At least stay away from children’s toys marked with a “3” or “PVC.

Freezing stuff in plastic is just as bad.

Replace plastic storage containers with glass vessels and plastic drinking bottles with lightweight metal bottles.

Since I don’t want my kids to drink BPA, I got them these stainless steel water bottles. I even freeze my homemade popsicles in stainless steel popsicle molds.

Replace non-stick pans with ceramic or cast iron (Teflon contains perfluorinated chemicals (PFC’s) which have been linked to cancer and developmental problems).

After long research, I’ve found these to be the safest and most convenient cookware options:

Ceramic Cook & Bakeware

I am a great fan of X-trema cookware. They are easiest to clean, heat evenly, hold flavors in food, and most importantly – do not leach anything into the food.

My favorites are the Extrema 11-inch skillet (which I use multiple times a day), and the 3.5 Quart Saucepan, which I use to cook soups, heat foods, and even bake in.

Cast Iron Cookware

As long as you don’t scrub it with soap and a Brillo pad, a high-quality cast iron skillet can be a great non-stick surface. It cooks evenly and with good flavor.

It can be used in the oven or on the stovetop and we can all use the added benefits of extra iron provided by cat iron cookware.

My favorite brand is the USA-made Lodge cast iron, especially my large skillet.

6. Detox Your Shower & Laundry Room

We’ve already covered body-cleaning and beauty products, so all you’ve got left is laundry and your shower curtain.

First, replace your plastic (with PVC) curtain with a cloth curtain. When it gets dirty, just throw it in the laundry along with a few drops of Tea Tree Oil to disinfect it.

Replace all your toxin-full laundry products with natural/homemade laundry products.

Making your own laundry detergent at home is one of the best decisions you’ll ever make. It’s so much cheaper, it’s chemical-free, the clothes will still smell great, and they will last longer.

 

7. Purify Your Water

This is a very important step in your home detox plan. Why? Because our body is 70% water. The water you put into it.

What’s in Your Water?

Tap water contains more than 300 chemicals and pollutants, according to the Environmental Working Group.

Some of them are chlorine, pesticides, herbicides, lead, mercury, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and the infamous Fluoride and you don’t want to know the rest.

Bottled water is saturated with nasty stuff leaking from bottles (yes, BPA again, among other things). Drinking filtered water is a better option than bottled water.

The 2 Best Water Filtering Options

After trying every water filter system on earth, here are my conclusions:

The 2-best water filtering options are Reverse Osmosis and Solid Block Carbon Filters. Here’s why:

Reverse Osmosis – The Reverse Osmosis filter uses a membrane that removes many contaminants, along with Granulated Activated Charcoal to remove chlorine.

This system is placed under the sink and has a holding tank.

The disadvantages of Reverse Osmosis are waste of water (“rejected” by the filtering system) and the removal of some of the minerals from the water (but the system adds the missing minerals back into the water).

Though it removes fluoride and many contaminants, Reverse Osmosis does not filter pesticides and herbicides.

Solid Block Carbon Filters – quality carbon block filters will remove bacteria, chemicals, pesticides, heavy metals, nitrate, fluoride, and parasites.

They can even safely transform rainwater and seawater (!) into drinking water.

They do take up counter space but on the bright side, they are the least expensive in the long run and require the least filter changes.

Also, they do not remove minerals from the water, which is a huge plus.

We have the most common type of these systems – the Berkey. It comes in many sizes (for different uses – home/office/travel) and in my opinion the best water filtering system today.

We have this size for our home and this size for travel. We have a lot of fun filtering rainwater with it!

8. Clean Your Bed

Wrinkle-free and permanent press fabrics used for clothing and bedding commonly contain formaldehyde – use untreated fabrics where possible.

Try to avoid clothes with flame-retardants (children’s pajamas!!) due to the presence of PFC’s.

I’ve just finished replacing all the bedding in my house with organic bedding, for 2 reasons:

1. My 4-year-old son developed a rash from his new Spiderman Set. The rash was gone when I changed it to a white organic set.

2. I realized that my dear family and I spend at least 7 hours every day lying on chemicals, Formaldehyde being one of them.

Conventional bedding supports chemical-heavy synthetic fabric production and pesticide-laden cotton farming.

If possible, replace your bedding with Organic Cotton Sheets, organic cotton mattresses, and organic cotton pillows, like this one.

Also, if possible, encase mattresses, box springs, and pillows in dust mite barriers.

9. Avoid Industrial Pesticides 

Of the 30 most commonly used lawn chemicals, 19 have studies pointing toward cancer, and 15 are known to cause nervous system poisoning.

Also, the pesticides we use in our gardens eliminate not only plant pests but also most of the insects that are beneficial to help control these pests.

So, what’s a devoted gardener to do?

 

Avoid toxic pesticides and replace them with non-toxic ones. Avoid common termite terminators and conventional bug sprays and make your own pesticides.

10. Detoxify Your Pets

If you have pets at home, you can’t control the dirt they bring in from splashing around outside all day (and we love them so much that it’s worth it).

But, you can definitely avoid the industrial chemical stuff you use to fight fleas, ticks, and other tiny things that bite.

As fleas become increasingly resistant to synthetic chemicals, pesticide manufacturers are making their products increasingly stronger – and more dangerous – in an attempt to keep pace with the parasites.

Yuck.

Instead, add some vinegar to your pet’s drinking water and make a vinegar spray as a natural solution for fleas that works amazingly well.

Finally, let’s not forget about emotional toxicity. If your home is filled with anger, jealousy, unhappiness, and stress – it will remain toxic even if you do all of the above.

What have you done so far to detox your home?

To your health and happiness,

Meital