Detox Your Kitchen In 5 Simple Steps

Kristen Boucher has created an awesome post all about how to detox your kitchen and get rid of toxic chemicals one step at a time. I’m so glad she’s decided to share it with all the HRFV readers today! Kristen blogs about real food and healthy living on her blog Mix Wellness. To learn more bout her and her website, see her bio below and enjoy her great article!

From Kristen at Mix Wellness:

Making the change from a highly processed life to that of clean, REAL FOOD takes time, energy, and A LOT of patience. It’s truly a transition, with lots of incremental changes. Why the baby steps?

1. You need to keep your sanity – there’s a LOT of ground to cover and food categories to hit (fruit & veggies, dairy, fats, fish, eggs, meats, grains, etc.) – changing one thing at a time makes it less daunting.
2. You have a budget to maintain – tossing everything and replacing it with its real counterpart all at once is expensive, unless you’re Oprah.
3. You want to stay in good terms with your loves (“Maaaaaa, where’s the Goldfish??”). Am I right?

In my work, the one area that is often overlooked in this massive detox is the mecca of where all of this real food is going down.

The kitchen!

From the cookware we use to the cleaners we spray, and everything in between – the kitchen is quite possibly ground zero for a tsunami of toxins just waiting to leach into our prized fresh, real, organic yummies. So what’s a real foodie to do? Here are five areas in the kitchen were you can take steps to make sure your eats and the air you breathe stays clean and chemical-free.

1. Cookware

Non-stick cookware was the knight in shining armor during the height of the low fat craze, when it was sacrilege to fry your eggies in butter or use any kind of real fat to cook. Thank GOD we’ve come to our senses and have ditched that mentality. Unfortunately, this cookware (like Teflon) is still lingering in many kitchens. Why is this bad? Well for starters, it contains a chemical called PFOA that gets released into the air when the pan reaches high temperatures – which is easily attained when pre- heating. The colorless and odorless gasses that are released are actually fatal to birds, and any bird owner, bird magazine or pet shop will tell you that you absolutely cannot have any non-stick cookware in your home if you have birds. It’s so commonly reported from bird owners that it has a name, “teflon toxicosis”. Talk about a canary in a coal mine!

But wait, there’s more!

When that coating is scratched in any way, you can actually ingest small particles of it in your food. This chemical actually shows up in 98% of the human population, and is persistent in the environment, which means that it never breaks down. Every drop of non-stick coating that has ever been made going back to the 1950’s is still in existence, and will always be. This chemical is linked to low-birth weight, thyroid disorders, immune system toxicity, and testicular and liver cancer, to name a few. Scary, indeed!

In light of all this, it’s best to simply move away from using it altogether. Here are your options:

• Cast iron like this brand
• Enameled cast iron like this brand
• Stoneware like this brand, this brand, or this brand
• All clad stainless steel like this brand

2. Food Storage

I’m a firm believer in cooking once and eating thrice. I mean, who the heck has time to cook every single day? Not this busy mama. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. When subscribing to this mantra, your leftovers will need a home. A non-toxic home, that is. While plastic food storage is cheaper {and let’s face it} unbreakable, the chemicals that make up plastic can easily leach out into the foods we store in them. Chemicals, like Bisphenal-A (BPA), that are linked to everything from weight gain or trouble losing weight to early onset puberty and cancers. Why negate all of the hard work and money spent preparing and eating pesticide-free organic food if the containers you’ll be storing the said food in is a toxic waste dump? Here are your options:

• Glass food storage containers like these
• Glass mason jars like these
• Reused glass jars that cost nada, zip, zilch, zero

3. Kitchen Cleaners

Shocking as it may be {insert sarcasm here}, chemicals in household cleaners are both unregulated and untested. Companies can use whatever chemicals they want, and they don’t have to test them for safety, or list all the ingredients on the label. Kind of like GMOs, but I digress. Naturally, this makes choosing the safest product a bit of a challenge. What’s an eco-concscious person do to? Here are your options:

• Make your own! Save money and your health by making your own cleaning products using ingredients you {most likely} already have. Check out my Pinterest board for some inspiration here. You can learn more about using essential oils for DIY cleaning here.
• If you’re not ready to jump into the D-I-Y household cleaners world, at the very least look for the following words on the packaging of commercial cleaners: CAUTION, WARNING, or DANGER. Those tell you right away they contain harmful ingredients. Put the product down and walk away.
• Choose cleaners that meet the guidelines of the Environmental Working Group’s Guide to Healthy Cleaning. Get that here.

4. Pantry and Food Items

Similar to the plastics debacle discussed above, where we have harmful chemicals leaching into our beloved organic produce, the same can also be said for the packaging that many foods come in, particularly processed food. If you’re reading this, you have most likely ditched processed food for a more whole foods-based diet, but even the cleanest organics can inadvertently contain harmful chemicals, particularly BPA, which is found in the lining of many canned goods and plastic packaging. This is a particular issue for foods that are highly acidic. Read here why you should never consume {even organic} canned tomatoes. Here are your options:

• Choose brands of coconut milk, canned beans, pumpkin, and canned tomatoes and veggies that come in glass or that have made the switch from BPA lining.
• Save money and the belly bloat that the musical fruits are known for by properly preparing dried beans. Not sure how? Read this.

5. Water

Ahhh, water. It’s nature’s most precious resource. It’s the ONE thing that we cannot live without for extended periods of time, yet pure, clean, chemical-free water is becoming increasingly hard to come by. Lead, arsenic, pesticides, fluoride, and chlorine are just a few of the toxins found in tap water – commonly exceeding government-approved “safe” levels. Scary huh?

So what if I only use tap water for cooking? Doesn’t boiling it remove these toxins?

Unfortunately no. Again, you’re going to all of this trouble to eat the best of the best – why sacrifice the fruits of your labor when it comes time to prepare all of that goodness?
That’s why I take matters into my own hands and purify my own water using the best of the best, when it comes to home water filtration systems. This purifying system removes all of the aforementioned toxins, plus viruses and pathogens, and retains the minerals. Not too shabby!

Now what?
Before you go throwing the baby out with the bath water, or stressin’ big time, start small. Make one change at a time, and as your budget allows. Rome was not built in a day. Neither was a completely toxin-free kitchen.

Tell me, have you made any of these switches to detox your kitchen? What else would you add? Please leave a comment! I’d love to hear!

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BIO
Kristen Boucher is a registered nurse, healthy living junkie, health & wellness coach, real foodie, full-time working wife to an amazing husband, cloth-diapering crunchy mama of two beautiful girls, creator of Lose Weight, Feel Great: 8 Weeks To A New You!, and Founder of MIX | Wellness Solutions For A Balanced Life, where she inspires busy women to eliminate the overwhelm to lose weight, kick cravings, stress less, and cook delicious, healthy, and family-friendly meals so they can gain confidence, double their energy, and save money without crazy diets, countless hours at the gym, or quitting their day job. Kristen can be found pushing the envelope at www.mixwellness.com and on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+.