"Cleanliness is next to godliness."
Are you slow to get to cleaning your dishes? You might be causing your own poor health.
Clean, fresh air is the most vital ingredient in maintaining good health. Increasing
the amount you breathe of it each day and the quality of what you breathe can improve
your health, insists past authors like Dr. Philip Welsh,
health educator Ellen G. White, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg.
And cleaning your dishes and kitchen, as well as keeping the trash emptied frequently, can go
long way to improving the quality of air in your home.
"Wherever decay of either animal or vegetable matter is taking place, germs are developed and given off in great numbers,"
wrote Kellogg. Mold spores from old bread, composts too close to the house, garbage in the
trash can can be seen under the microscope to actually throw into the air spores that are
thought to be active in producing disease. You can imagine what rotting food on old dinner
plates can do.
It makes sense, then, that it would
give your immune system a lot to fight off. If you're sick, that could mean your illness
could win the battle!
Washing one's hands a good 5 times a day - especially under the fingernails - has been proven for some time to
lighten the load on one's immune system, so that it is free to work on the bigger illnesses.
Lessening the strain on our immune systems, in general, is one of the easiest things we can do for our health -
and it's free!
Keeping a clean home - especially kitchens and bathrooms - can improve the
quality of the air that feeds our cells. Keeping windows open whenever possible, it would seem,
would help to keep clean fresh air circulating.
Your skin breathes, too, through its pores. It eliminates poisons through the pores (breathing out)
through sweat, and it also is very efficient as soaking them up from the air, too (breathing in).
Recently the manager of a health food store informed me of the importance of
taking epsom salt baths.
The chemicals dumped into the air by airplanes actually fall on our skin, just for starters! She
said that epsom salt baths help to draw out the poisons we have
"breathed in" through our skin.
Keeping our bodies clean helps to prevent the absorption - or RE-absorbption! - of germs and chemicals. It washes off
what the body is trying to eliminate through sweating and "breathing" through the pores.
Listerine baths?
We thought my great-aunt was nuts when she took these.
But it might have
been better than using the new anti-bacterial soaps too regularly. Apparently, bacteria and
germs can mutate to become resistant to their enemies. Stuart Levy, medical researcher at
Tufts University, advises that anti-bacterial soaps for the skin and the home only be used
occasionally, so that germs don't develop their own immunities the way they have to certain
overused antibiotics.
The trick is to rotate your soaps.
Interestingly, the active ingredient in Listerine is eucalyptus
which is antiseptic and anti-viral, can be used on
the skin or in the home. I'm not suggesting you wash with Listerine - there is a lot of alcohol in
it which is very hard on the skin, but.... maybe my great-aunt knew what she was talking about?? :-))
(Read more about Eucalyptus here.)
