Spring is in the air, and many people use this season to detox and cleanse. This is a great idea, since we have dozens of toxins hanging around in our bodies.

These toxic chemicals most often arrive through food, so it is important to reduce consumption of the toxins in the first place.

Here are five ways to reduce toxins in your diet.

1. Go organic! The most important organically grown foods to consume are meat and dairy. Toxins are stored in fat, and when you drink milk from cows that are doused in chemicals (through food, antibiotics, growth hormone, etc) you are getting a concentrated dose of all of these. When you eat organically grown foods of all types, you dramatically reduce your exposure to cancer causing pesticides. Your health is worth the extra money these items cost.

2. Avoid artificial colors, flavors and sweeteners. Did you know that Red 40, Blue 2 and yellow 5 are all banned in Europe? Why are those colors in so many packaged foods (especially for children!) on American supermarket shelves? Aspartame is another fake ingredient in lots of our food that is banned overseas. It is linked to cancer and diabetes.

3. Use glass. BPA- a hormone disrupting chemical- is found in plastic and lines cans. When you use glass to store your food, you avoid that toxin! Some ways to do this:

• Buy beans and tomato sauce in glass jars
• Use fresh, seasonal fruits and vegetables from a local farmer’s market or join a CSA.
• When buying these items at the grocery store, skip the plastic produce bag! You don’t need it!
• Drink filtered water from your tap. Do not drink water bottled in plastic. You can find it bottled in glass, and use a stainless steel reusable bottle for yourself and kids. If you do use plastic for children, do not microwave food in them, and never run them through the dishwasher. This can increase toxic leakage by 55%.

4. Drink more water! Here’s a fact that should make you reach for a glass: if you are dehydrated, your body pulls water from the large intestine to use, which in turn makes you constipated. Do you really want that toxic water that has been sitting in your bowels to be recirculated into your bloodstream and around your body? I don’t. Drinking more water flushes out toxins, keeps your skin radiant, curbs hunger, combats stress and fatigue, and the list goes on. Our bodies are 65% water. Our brains are 85% water. Drink more water!

What is your favorite way to detox?

My four year old has been asking me questions incessantly since he began stringing words together.

Only now they are usually about much heavier things.

Who is my wife going to be? When am I going to die? Are there playgrounds in heaven? How did I come out of your tummy? Why does Grandaddy know everything? How did the dinosaurs leave? If the earth is spinning, how am I standing still? How do baby giraffes nurse? How when we talk does sound come out? And these are all the questions that I can remember him asking  from today between 2:45pm and about 5:30.

I’ve been trying to keep my answers short and sweet, so as not to overwhelm him with ideas too complex for his 4 year old brain to comprehend. I add thin layers if he keeps pressing.

So this morning when he asked me “why do we take our shoes off when we go inside our house, but other people don’t take theirs off when they go inside their houses?” instead of giving him all of the reasons we do, I responded with, I guess because we’re part-Hawaiian.

To which he quickly replied, “but I’m not part-Hawaiian, I’m part New York!”

Yes, yes you are. Even more reason to leave your shoes at the door.

The truth is, we never wore shoes in our house growing up because my Hawaiian-Chinese mother never wore shoes in her house growing up. So it is simply a habit I’ve done all my life. Now, in retrospect, I am so thankful it is one that has stuck for many reasons.

I didn’t want to go into excruciating detail with my son about everything that he could possibly track inside our home if he wore his shoes inside, but I will do it here.

Reasons We  Don’t Wear Our Shoes In the House (other than being part-Hawaiian, part-new York, part- New Mexican, part-Tennesseean, part-Texan)

• An EPA study showed that people (and  pets) who walk on pesticide-treated lawns can pick up the toxins for  up to a week after application. The amount of pesticides that are tracked in exceed pesticide residue from conventional (non-organic) produce. This is crazy! You could go out of your way to strictly buy organically grown fruits and veggies, then unwittingly traipse through your neighbor’s yard and into your house and your good intentions go out the window.

All this, and I haven’t even gotten into the two things most people would think about- dirt and germs. Walk down the street any day and at any given moment you can play a gross-out game of iSpy on the sidewalk: I spy with my little eye something disgusting that I don’t want inside my home!  Spit, dog poop, old food, gum, cigarette butts, ew.

An added thought- if we haven’t worn our outside shoes inside, and haven’t tracked dangerous pollutants into our home, I am not as likely to want to use a harsh, toxic, chemical product to clean the floors.

Children are more likely to be affected by these hazards because their bodies are still growing and they spend so much time playing and crawling on the floor. Plus they put ALL things in their mouths- many of which they have found on the floor.

Our children depend on us to make their homes safe.