More Healthy Actions

This week we’ll finish up our list of Healthy Actions – simple things you and your family can do to reduce contact with arsenic and lead – and other chemicals – in dirt. We’ve already talked about taking off shoes in the house, washing hands with plenty of soap and water, eating a healthy diet, cleaning house, and keeping pets clean. This week we move outside the house.

* Maintain Your Home and Yard Cover bare patches of dirt in your yard with a ground cover like grass, gravel, or wood/mulch product. Even better, choose native plants – they require less watering and maintenance. By covering bare patches that might otherwise be ideal spots for kiddos and pets to dig and play in, you’ll help protect your family from arsenic and lead in two ways – breathing it in while playing in it, and tracking it into the house. A safer choice is to fill a covered sand box with clean play sand.

It’s also important to maintain the painted surfaces of your home. Homes built before 1978 were likely painted with paint containing lead. When lead paint chips or wears away, it becomes a major source of lead, both inside and outside the home. Even if you maintain the paint now, if you live in an older home, there’s a decent chance that at some point lead paint chipped, peeled, or was pressure washed off your home and landed on the dirt around the foundation of your home, contributing to high lead levels in that dirt today. It’s best to discourage children from playing in this “drip line” near the foundation, or to plant low-maintenance plants surrounded by weed fabric and mulch to block access to the dirt.

* Garden Safely Always wear shoes and gloves when gardening or working in the soil and take them off before coming into your home. You can find child-sized gardening gloves, but they can be hard to keep on – try, and be extra-vigilant about hand washing.

Grow your produce in raised beds built with arsenic-free materials. Treated wood produced before 2004 contained chromated copper arsenate, a chemical preservative containing chromium, copper, and arsenic – not something you want seeping into your vegetables. New treated wood is safer, but untreated wood is the best choice. We’ve been very happy with our now five year old cedar raised beds, and they are showing no signs of deteriorating. When purchasing soil to fill your raised beds, ask where it came from to make sure you’re getting clean dirt that won’t be contaminated with arsenic or lead!

Arsenic and lead may be in dust and dirt found on the surface of fruits and vegetables – more likely if you are not growing in raised beds filled with clean soil, or if you’ve got bare patches nearby that contaminated dust could be blown over from. There is a slight chance that leafy vegetables, like lettuce or kale, grown in contaminated soil may absorb very small amounts of contaminants. Wash all fruits and vegetables to make sure all dirt is removed from the surface. Use a scrub brush on potatoes, carrots, and other sturdy vegetables and fruits. It’s important to remember to wash all fruits and vegetables, whether home-grown or store-bought, organic or conventional, to remove any bacteria.

Are you wondering if I really don’t ever eat a cherry tomato fresh off the vine? I do, and so does my young son, but I wipe them off on my shirt first – and we definitely don’t eat sandwiches or crackers or any other snacks until we’ve taken a break from gardening and gone back inside to wash our hands well. Next week we’ll talk more about how to make decisions about risks from environmental hazards without getting totally paranoid (and never enjoying a sun-warmed tomato again!), taking baby steps (maybe I should be wiping that tomato with a damp rag or rinsing in a container of clean water in the garden), and making healthy choices that work for you and your family.