How polluted is the air in your home?

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece for the Guardian about the potentially toxic chemicals we almost all breathe in, inside our homes. Two things really struck me about writing it: first - it was all pretty terrifying. We spend a lot of time at home and so do our kids, if we have them. We trust a lot of the cleaning, fragrancing, decorating and personal care products we use and we probably shouldn’t (more on that below, as well as a simple solution). But the second thing was more striking to me, as a writer and journalist, in particular. I spend a lot of time writing and thinking about health misinformation and the ways in which content creators, brands, industries and communicators accidentally or deliberately share health or nutrition information which is incorrect, either in pursuit of profit, or followers, or sometimes both.

What I do less of, these days, is write about health problems which are not yet well known. I tend to think more about how we are exploited by various industries into thinking that something is wrong with us, and that we can be ‘fixed’ by their products. Interviewing scientists who are trying to sound an alarm is less familiar territory for me. And to a certain extent, that freaked me out.