Air your Dirty Laundry! Toxin avoidance opportunities
In my pursuit of including as many Don Henley lyrics as possible in the Blog (*note this is the first one*) I wanted to discuss more toxin avoidance opportunities to include in your daily life. Detox with Doug is coming in October, and one of the tenets of this program is minimizing the toxins coming into our body, while maximizing our ability to metabolize and get rid of them. I like to envision detoxification and our ability to detoxify as a constantly flowing toxic soup ‘bucket’.
The toxins from our environment (food additives, cosmetics, baking ingredients, perfumes, etc) are constantly filling up our bucket, while our body works hard at turning them into a product that can easily be excreted when we sweat, pee or poop. We’ve discussed some of this in prior letters which you can find here and here.
The opportunities today I wanted to discuss are in regards to your laundry.
#1 Dryer Sheets and fabric softener: Why go to the trouble of washing and cleaning your clothes, then coating them with chemicals that you’re going to put back on your skin?! I know they can make them smell like a spring rain, but there are better options out there. If you don’t have them, I highly recommend purchasing some dryer balls to your shopping list. One purchase, then you can just add a few drops of essential oil (I like lavendar) to help your clothes smell good. As an alternative to chemical fabric softener, I recommend using household vinegar in the fabric softener dispenser of your washer. This will do the same trick as the downy, but is also less expensive and can help keep the washer smelling good! You can find household vinegar at most retailers in a gallon jug for this purpose!
#2: What about Dry Cleaning?
Most dry cleaners use a chemical solvent to clean the clothes called perchloroethylene or PERC. PERC is great at cleaning but at a large cost to both your health and the environments. In fact, dry cleaners have to dispose of PERC as a hazardous substance! You can imagine that the chemical dry cleaning stays on your clothes and emits the chemical into the air while your wearing and breathing it! If you can, find a PERC-free dry cleaner near you (hint, google is a search engine I’ve found that does a nice job with this 🙂 ). If there are no environmentally friendly dry cleaners in your area, ensure that you air out the dry cleaned clothes outside for at least 6-8 hours after you pick them up!
I hope you found these toxin avoidance opportunities useful and easy to implement!
