I know that the news today can be overwhelming, even just mentioning the word facts can trigger all sorts of reactions.

I'm Dr. Michael Greggren. I happen to really like facts, so I devoted my life to learning all there is to know about the latest nutrition research so that you and your family can lead healthier or productive lives.

Today we discover the benefits of an oil that comes from the leaves of the mal-lucal turnipolia tree or tea tree for short.

Now you can't make tea from the tea tree oils, actually, poisonous to drink, but you can't put it to work on your skin and in your house.

Household cleaning products can be hazardous, landing hundreds of thousands of children in U.S. emergency rooms, and the product most commonly associated with injury was bleach, which can be toxic even if used as directed.

We've known that those with asthma who work with cleaning products day in and day out can suffer adverse respiratory effects, obwarsening of symptoms, declining lung function inflamed airways, but even cleaning workers without asthma can be effective.

Even below, so-called acceptable exposure levels, cleaners with or without reactive airways can suffer a substantial decrease in lung function.

Okay, but that's people who clean for a living. Although we've known that occupational use of bleach may have adverse respiratory health effects, but it was unknown whether just common domestic use of bleach in the household may put lungs at risk until now.

Bleach use was significantly associated with nearly five times the odds of non-allergic adult onset asthma, as well as ongoing lower respiratory symptoms such as chronic cough.

The way bleach works is as such a strong pro-oxidant that the thought is that it can lead to like leaky lungs and allow allergens to penetrate.

This phenomenon of cleaning product induced asthma has been known for decades, more than three quarters of the dozens of populations that are looking into it have found increased risk of asthma or nasal inflammation, ideally safer cleaning products should be available.

Unfortunately, this body of evidence has been largely ignored by the manufacturers and commercial cleaning companies, and most of workers put at risk are women.

In fact, that may help explain some of the gender differences in asthma, the relatively high frequency of bleach use for home cleaning by women around the world together with a strong association between bleach use and non-allergic asthma emphasizes the need for reconsidering the use of bleach for cleaning.

There are natural, environmentally friendly cleaning products that may offer a safer alternative, safer perhaps, but are they as effective? We didn't know until now.

The effectiveness of three home products in cleaning and disinfection of staphlococcus orias, the bacteria that causes staph infections, and ecoli on home environmental surfaces.

The first report ever of the performance of purportly safer alternative.

In the home setting, some individuals will select conventional products such as bleach due to familiarity, smell some associate with cleanliness, other seeking less hazardous and environmentally preferable green organic natural disinfectants which you can buy or make yourself so-called DIY, do it yourself recipes that typically involve ingredients like vinegar, clapsoda, and plant essential oils such as tea trees,

or oil such as tea tree oil, prized for its antimicrobial qualities.

So, researchers pitted head-to-head chlorox bleach versus a natural disinfectant based on thymol, which is from time essential oil, versus a DIY recipe half-clubs, a half-white vinegar with a few drops of tea tree oil.

You could probably buy the bleach for around three bucks, the natural stuff from like $7, but the DIY mix for less than a dollar.

Yeah, but does it work? On the bottle, it says bleach can kill 99.9% of germs, which is the EPA standard for the disinfection of surfaces that don't come into contact with food like the bathroom sink or something.

They claim 99% of germs, but when put to the test, the bleach actually killed 99.9999% of germs, completely wiping out the ecoli and staph germs, which even exceeds the EPA standard for food contact surfaces,

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