Detoxify your house

[Guest guest]

**Know what freshness smells like. It's not *vanilla passion*, or *new

car*. It should smell like nothing.**

 

Detoxify your house

_http://www.healthzone.ca/health/article/623453_

(http://www.healthzone.ca/health/article/623453)

April 24, 2009

The You Docs (Mike Roizen and Mehmet Oz)

Toronto Star

 

 

Stuff that*s hanging around in your carpet, in your garage and under the

sink can make you older. Clean your house and watch your body's clock turn

back:

 

 

Clean the toxic dump, a.k.a. your garage. Your walls haven't been avocado

for years. So why keep the half-empty paint can? It and other chemicals

lingering on those shelves often contain toluene, a potent reproductive toxin.

Get them out. Today. Just don*t throw them in the trash: Go to Toronto.ca

to find the closest Household Hazardous Waste depot.

 

 

Leave the bleach behind. The chemicals in chlorine bleach evaporates into

the air you breathe and aren*t good for you or the environment. Instead,

use baking soda to clean sinks and tubs; rely on vinegar in a pump spray

bottle for an A-plus job on windows and mirrors.

 

 

Open the windows. The inside of a home generally has three to four times

the dangerous pollutants and small particles that the outside world does.

Open your home to the outside world as frequently as you can during

low-traffic times.

 

 

Leave your shoes at the door. You can track in toxins such as lawn-care

pesticides, which sink into your carpet and can contaminate the kids who

crawl on it.

 

 

Know what freshness smells like. It*s not **vanilla passion**, or **new

car**. It should smell like nothing.

 

 

Waiting to exhale:

Want to make your environment better for you without having to petition to

move the freeway or shut down a coal plant? Use these simple steps to make

a big difference: Enact your own area-wide second-hand smoking ban.

Non-smokers who hang out with smokers effectively become smokers themselves, and

inhale cigarettes' more than 4,000 chemicals. The best way to purify your

environment is to keep smokers 500 feet away from you and from any entrances

you walk through. You*ll have a 25 per cent lower risk of plaque rupture (a

leading cause of heart attacks and strokes) than people who routinely walk

through second-hand smoke on the way in and out of buildings.

 

 

Move away from the printer. In one study, researchers found that a third

of the office printers they tested spewed out high amounts of particles.

Tiny particles not only are a hazard to your lungs, but they may also be

linked to bad artery health.

 

 

If dry-cleaning is optional, hand wash those items. Dry-cleaning chemicals

have been linked to kidney and nervous system damage as well as cancer. If

you must dry-clean, remove your clothes from the plastic wrap and let

outdoor air circulate around them for one hour.

 

 

A fresh approach:

There are two things you probably shouldn't get at your next trip to the

big-box store: green tea and olive oil. Doesn't mean you shouldn*t have

them. But buying them in big quantities means they*ll sit around your kitchen,

and new research suggests that both lose big amounts of their

disease-fighting plant compounds over six months – even when you don*t crack

the seal on

them.

 

 

Green tea loses its catechins-free-radical-fighting compounds. So buy it

in smaller quantities, brew it frequently, and drink it with lemon juice:

This increases your ability to absorb these valuable compounds. Similarly,

hanging around on a shelf for three to six months messes with olive oil*s

ability to fight free radicals, those damaging compounds implicated in heart

disease and some cancers.

 

 

 

The You Docs, Mike Roizen and Mehmet Oz, are authors of the best- selling

YOU: On a Diet.

 

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