Andrus - Natural Cleaning Recipes: Essential Oils Recipes to Safely Clean Your Home, Save Money, and Protect Your Family

As consumers, our purchasing decisions are often driven by marketing and product labeling. We go to the store, and find shelves lined with products claiming to be the biggest and the best. We want things done faster and easier, which means that we spend our money on the products that claim to help us achieve those results.

The household cleaning industry is a great example of effective marketing. The products claim to make your house cleaner than the competitors, and you can get the chores done faster.

The problem with these marketing claims is that the products often contain harmful chemicals that are toxic for humans. These chemicals may be able to remove the grime, but they contaminate the air with toxicity and leave behind a chemical residue. Do you really want these harmful products in your home? What's the point in cleaning if you are adding a toxic substance in place of the dirt?

Studies have linked some of these chemicals to health problems such as cancer, birth defects, allergies, and degenerative diseases.

Each year, over a million people in the United States are poisoned by household products, and over half of them are children under the age of 5. Often, they get into the cleaning closet and play with the cleaning products, not realizing how dangerous those chemicals can be. Sometimes those children drink them or spray the bottles into their face or mouth, other times their skin comes in contact with the chemicals in other ways.

Many people think that the solution is to store the cleaners in a high cupboard, or to put a child lock on the cupboard so that it's hard to open. But, the children are still exposed to the toxicity from those products when the products are used to clean the home!

In fact, the most common exposures to these toxic chemicals are through the respiratory tract and the skin. Children are especially sensitive to this exposure because they are so little... they are getting the same amount of exposure as the adults, but because they are smaller it is essential a stronger concentration.

This exposure can occur in many ways around the home. After the floors are cleaned with toxic chemicals, kids are crawling and playing on the floor. Smaller children often touch the floor while they are playing and then put their fingers in their mouths, ingesting any residue that may be there. High chair trays are cleaned with household cleaner, and then the children eat their food directly from the tray.

These are just a few examples, you can see that the exposure can happen in many different ways.

Often, the toxins from these chemical cleaning products are "bioaccumulative," which means that the body can't easily get rid of them through proper waste channels. A lifetime of exposure to toxic substances can result in a build-up of those toxins within the body, which could potentially lead to health problems.

It would be impossible to list all of the toxic chemicals to avoid, so rather than listing everything that you should be avoiding we are going to focus on the less-harmful alternatives that you can use in your home. It is safer to use homemade cleaning solutions that use non-toxic ingredients such as baking soda, vinegar, essential oils, etc.

These ingredients are cheap and safe to use, and they are effective cleaning solutions to keep your house looking great!

Using natural cleaning solutions prevents the long-term, bioaccumulative exposure from toxic ingredients. There is also less of a risk of serious accidents. If a small child were to drink from a bottle of standard household cleaner, it may result in severe health problems. But, if a child were to drink from a bottle of vinegar and essential oil based cleaner, it wouldn't cause as much harm.

Natural cleaning solutions should still be properly stored and kept out of the reach of children and pets, because too much of anything isn't good for health... and in large quantities these natural ingredients can still be potentially harmful. But, the risk of toxicity is much, much less, and you don't need to worry about bioaccumulative exposure over time.

I could continue on the topic of how dangerous chemical cleaners can be, if you want more information on this topic a simple internet search will show you many eye-opening statistics about the harmful nature of chemical cleaners.