Five Ways to Keep Your Home Healthy
Sometimes we get so caught up in thinking about how to keep our bodies healthy through nutrition and fitness that we forget about the effects that the environment we live in can have on us! Here, five ways that you can keep the environment in your house and your entire home healthy for the whole family:
1) Clean with baking soda and white vinegar. These two ingredients can do wonders for deep cleaning and basic cleaning in the kitchen and bathroom especially. Mix baking soda and vinegar together and apply to surfaces with a damp cloth – you’ll be amazed at how easily dirt will scrub off! Baking soda and white vinegar are also considerably healthier for you than using toxic chemicals in your home.
2) Change your towels regularly. This includes dish cloths, tea towels, hand towels, and body towels. Germs love to live on these materials! Change them daily if possible, or use the same one for no more than a couple of days. It will reduce the amount of germs in your home and it will also make you feel better to always have fresh towels at your disposal.
3) Use standing fans in the summer and thick blankets in the winter. Reduce your exposure to air conditioning and heating systems, which can dry out your skin, and instead use more natural ways to cool down and warm up. Eliminate dry skin completely in the winter by moisturizing like crazy – your body will love it.
4) Get reusable dryer sheets instead of conventional dryer sheets. As nice as the smell of Bounce sheets is for adding to your laundry in the dryer, that stuff is packed full of chemicals that you really don’t need to be breathing in on a regular basis. Instead, get reusable dryer sheets to decrease static in the dryer without releasing chemicals into the clothes you wear every day.
5) Let the fresh air in. This is tougher in the middle of winter, but leaving a window partially open (with a screen in place!) during the spring, summer, and autumn is just the thing for constant air flow in your home and to keep the air you breathe all day long fresh and clean.
What do you do to keep your home environment a healthy one? Share in the comments section below!
clean clean clean but as YOU SAY—NONTOXIC NONCHEMICAL ways.
Well, of course, the primary thing I do is avoid allergens, which means:
1) No vinegar. Breathing even white vinegar can give me a headache in seconds flat. (As can the store-bought cleaners you’re replacing, of course.) A simple damp cloth can do a lot. After that, there’s baking soda, or dish-washing liquid (UNscented, thank you), depending on what I want to clean.
2) Changing towels at least every other day is what my dermatologist told me to do back in high school when I was fighting bad skin (which completely disappeared within a month of getting my allergies retested and changing to my new allergy diet, after seven years of useless treatment). My allergist endorsed this, since I’m allergic to some bacteria, as well as mold of course.
3) Yep.
4) I’ve never used dryer sheets, of course, because I see no need to wax my clothes, even when I was wearing more synthetics back in the seventies. Now, the vast majority of my wardrobe is all cotton, so I don’t have a static problem. When I was wearing nylon and rayon (didn’t phase those out for years after I got allergic to polyester), I just shook things. If you really need to cut down static in the wash, look at percentage of synthetic fibers in your laundry and think about it.
5)Except for keeping the pollen and leaf-mold out in the spring and fall.
/end allergy rant!
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