Choose hard wood blocks and cotton baby dolls over plastic ones. Replace plastic baggies with reusable lunch bags, and plastic cling wrap with beeswax-coated cloth. Swap plastic food storage containers with glass or stainless steel if you do keep plastic ones, don’t use them to store fatty foods, and never microwave them. You can’t eliminate all plastic, but you can take some easy steps to reduce your plastic use. The science varies on how much of a risk these combined exposures pose in everyday life, but recent research shows even very low-dose exposures can be significant. One commonly used shatterproof plastic (PC #7) can contain bisphenol-A, commonly called BPA, and flexible vinyl (PVC #3) contains phthalates. And some plastics contain hormone-disrupting chemicals. It’s wrapping our food, bottling our conditioner, encasing our phone. You can also turn to natural odor-busters like fresh flowers on the kitchen counter, citrus peels in the garbage disposal, or an open box of baking soda in the fridge. And check ingredient labels to find out where else fragrance lurks it can show up in unexpected places, such as diapers or garbage bags.įor safer ways of freshening your indoor air, open windows, use fans, and empty stinky trash cans and litter boxes instead of trying to cover them up. Choose fragrance-free creams, cleaning products, and laundry detergents. Fortunately, fragrance isn’t necessary for a product to function well or be effective.
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But we do know that phthalates, one class of chemicals typically found in fragrance, can disrupt hormones. The word fragrance on a label signifies a mix of potentially hundreds of ingredients, and the exact formulas of most companies claim are trade secrets. You'll also reduce your exposure to other chemicals that can accumulate in your home, like lead (in older buildings), phthalates, and fluorinated chemicals 3. Most families don’t have the budget to replace all these items with flame-retardant-free versions, but we can all afford to keep our house clean by dusting with a damp cloth and using a vacuum with a HEPA filter, which traps small particles of dust instead of blowing them around the house.
Research shows that these chemicals escape from electronics, couches, and baby products and collect in your household dust. Dust and vacuum oftenĮven though they’re linked to hormone disruption (and cancer, too), flame retardant chemicals are used in many common household products. You’ll rinse a substantial amount of chemical residue down the drain. If you follow just one piece of advice from this list, make it this small, easy thing: Wash your hands frequently (avoiding fragranced and antibacterial soaps), and always before eating. JGI/Jamie Grill/Blend Images LLC/Gallery Stock 1. Yes, it sounds scary, but we aren't without recourse: While NRDC works to get better safeguards in place, there are ways you can try to steer clear of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs. “When a hormone-disrupting chemical gets in the way during these windows, it can change the ways these processes happen.
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“We have very tight windows of when, say, our brain and liver are made,” explains Kristi Pullen Fedinick, an NRDC staff scientist. We’re exposed to these chemicals daily, and we’re especially vulnerable to them during phases of accelerated development-in utero and throughout childhood. Here’s the bad news: Synthetic chemicals in products like plastics and fragrances can mimic hormones and interfere with or disrupt the delicate endocrine dance. Most often, we think about this system-the endocrine system-in the context of puberty, but it actually plays a starring role in all phases of development, metabolism, and behavior.
You may remember learning in biology class that our bodies are run by a network of hormones and glands that regulate everything we do.
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