Attention every duster-wielding, vacuum-maneuvering, Spray-N-Wiping woman out there: your commitment to living up to archaic societal ideals of maintaining a clean house could be making you sick.
Dramatic, us? OK, possibly a little – but upon discovering that ~SHOCK HORROR~ women specifically are at risk of lung damage because they’re, ahem, naturally more inclined to clean the house, what’s a Chux-toting gal supposed to do?
^^ This, perhaps?
Alright, before reaching for that goon bag, let’s get down to the science of this claim: research published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine journal has discovered that regularly inhaling chemicals found in most cleaning products can negatively impact a person’s lung health – and by ‘person’, they mean woman.
When testing the respiratory fitness of 6235 study participants (AKA mostly women with 85 per cent of the ladies in the study stating that the clean, while on 47 per cent of men do) as part of a two decades-long European Community Respiratory Health Survey, each person was categorised into three groups: those who cleaned professionally, those who cleaned domestically and those who did not clean at all.
According to IFLScience, the study highlighted that the amount of air someone exhaled decreased by 3.9 millilitres a year more in women (AHA! but not men) who cleaned for a living and then 3.6 millilitres a year in women who cleaned the home.
Hilariously, what IFLScience so dutifully point out is that this study failed to strike a correlation between a man’s respiratory function and his cleaning habits – something that the authors of the research suggest could be down to a biological reason.
Moral of the story? Ingesting cleaning products over a long period of time can cause a substantial to your lungs – whether you’re a woman or a man…
^^We’re with Betty White on this one…
