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Using products with nontoxic ingredients is one of the most important choices you can make to safeguard your family’s health, especially when it comes to household cleaners and personal care. Just about every conventional product you use now can be replaced with a natural, environmentally sound alternative that’s readily available in any supermarket or home improvement store.
- Use the amazing “Nontoxic Trio” — baking soda, soap, and vinegar — throughout your home for a safe kind of clean. Making your own formulas may seem complicated, but it’s actually simple and inexpensive, too. Get started with some easy cleaner recipes on Healthy Child’s website.
- Conventional carpet cleaners, especially the aerosol kind, bring too many chemicals into your indoor environment. Instead, blot stains quickly before they set, vacuum regularly, and steam clean occasionally with natural cleaners.
- Our mothers were right: good old soap and water keep surfaces just as clean and bacteria-free as specialized “antibacterial” products. Not only have antibacterial soaps and disposable wipes proven no more effective than regular soap, the most common ingredient — triclosan — is related to dioxin and raises significant concerns about development of resistant bacteria.
 Human skin absorbs just about everything we put on it. Avoid synthetic preservatives and petroleum-based ingredients in the personal care products you use on your child’s body — and your own.
- Look for label information that backs up unregulated terms like “natural,” “nontoxic,” and “eco-friendly” with specifics like “no solvents,” “no phosphates,” “no petroleum-based ingredients,” “no parabens,” and “biodegradable in 7 days.”
- Lose the scent. Most conventional perfumes, hair gels, shampoos, and other scented products contain the family of fragrance-carrying chemicals called pthalates. Not enough is known about those chemicals for us to be sure that they’re safe. Animal studies indicate that they interfere with hormonal and reproductive function.
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