7 Ways to Live a Cleaner Life in 2025

It’s a bit of cliche: New Year, New You! But the new year does give you an annual benchmark to review what you like about your life and what you want to change. In 2025, we have a lot more knowledge and transparency about what is in our food, and how our food systems are managed.

After learning a little bit more (maybe too much!) about our American food systems, I am making some subtle changes that I hope will keep my family healthier and happier this year, and in the long run. Check out the list below to see how you can live cleaner and greener in 2025.

1. Ditch the Teflon and Opt for Healthier Cookware

We all kind-of know that Teflon isn’t great for you, and it comes with health risks. Teflon can release toxic gasses when it’s heated too much. If you take the plunge and ditch your teflon cookware, you have a few options:

• Cast Iron Cookware: This is the most straight-forward option, and least likely to leech anythign weird into your food. One advantage is that cast iron cookware can increase bioavailable iron in food, (after all, the pan is only made of iron!) which is a plus. For this reason I use Cast iron whenever I can (and when I have time to clean it afterwards). This usually includes pizza on a Cast Iron Pizza stone, breads and stews in a cast iron dutch oven. However, Cast iron can be high maintenance in that it needs to be kept properly seasoned in order to be non-stick. Cleaning it can also be quite the task, which sometimes takes longer than the cooking itself! As a busy mom, I do not have time to do this after every thing I cook, so I opted for the next option.

• Ceramic Coated Cookware: I splurged and bought myself a beautiful Caraway cooking pan. It came in just the right size – the black 4.5 Quart Caraway Skillet comes with a lid is just the right size pan for 90% of my cooking. It’s also gorgeous and matches my kitchen perfectly! After the first time I used it, I was HOOKED. This pan browned meats better than any other pan I’ve ever owned, and it cleaned up in less than one minute (I am NOT exaggerating). I have tried other brands of Ceramic cookware with mixed results… and none as amazingly delicious as the Caraway. All of my cookware will be Caraway moving forward. I’ve already purchased the 10.5″ frying pan for myself. The Multi Pan set makes a perfect gift for parents, in-laws or siblings when you need something extra special for Christmas, an anniversary of wedding gift (especially when you snag a deal during Amazon Prime day!).

• Seasoned Carbon Steel Frying Pans: I also bought a seasoned Carbon Steel pan for frying eggs. It was just so cute with the wood handle, i love the look and feel of this pan. Carbon steele is an exceptionally clean and green option for cooking, but like cast iron it needs to be kept seasoned. It is easier to store as it’s less bulky, and usually fairly easy to clean and keep non-stick when seasoned regularly. It cooks beautifully but is less versatile than the Caraway pans. This is the material that traditional Woks are made of for cooking asian dishes — or any dish you want to thoroughly pan-toss.

2. Milling my own Flours and Grains

There are many reasons why milling your own flour is a great idea. It not only tastes better and is WAY more nutritious, but store-bought flours and grains are stripped nutrients, and they contains the highest levels of Glyphosate (AKA: RoundUp) than any other food on the shelves. Glyphosate is a common pesticide used by farmers on GMO Crops. It is commonly sprayed on harvested grains to dry them out so they can be processed faster. GMO crops are engineered to resist glyphosate’s toxic properties. But Humans are not resistant to this toxicity: Glyphosate increases the risk of cancer by 41%.

I don’t know about you, but that is not a bet I would take, especially if the only change I need to make is to source and mill my own Glyphosate-free grains. Thankfully, the internet makes this ridiculously easy. Organic designation in the US means that the food was grown and processed without Glyphosate/Round Up.

You can buy organic flour and oats off the shelf, but you are still buying a processed food (yes, even whole wheat flour). During production, the parts of the wheat are separated, which removes much of the nutrition and vitamins from the wheat. Then they are reassembled and packaged as whole wheat flour. I picked up a bag of Organic Hard Wheat Berries on Amazon (wheat berries last indefinitely and wont spoil like flour can) and will use an electric mill to make flour as I need it.

I am using these healthy non-toxic grains to make healthy snacks and baked goods for my kids, which leads me to number three….

3. Making Snacks from Whole Ingredients

Do any other moms out there spend hundreds of dollars a month of pre-packaged processed snacks?!? I know I do, and I told myself I would never be that mom. However, I have always read ingredient labels and opted for low-sugar, dye-free snacks for my kids. Nevertheless, these snacks are still processed! And many use glyphosate-soaked grains (of course, that is not what the ingredient labels say).

I have been dabbling with homemade granola bars, healthy cookie dough balls, and home made crackers for my uber-picky 3 and 5 year old boys. Instead of spending money of frozen waffles and boxes of granola bars, I am spending money on high quality ingredients, and taking 1-2 hours per week and stocking the pantry and freezer myself. Waffles are their favorite breakfast food, so I just ordered this mini waffle maker so I can make waffles and freeze them, so my kids can have nutritious waffles with freshly milled flour for breakfast every morning.

4. Making My Own Lunch Meats

I’m not a big sandwich person, but the rest of my family had sandwiches daily. So I was sort of horrified to learn that Deli Meats – especially my son’s favorite: ham – is full of carcinogens. Even “nitrate free” meats contain harmful ingredients. Instead of buying packaged slides turkey and ham, or meats from the deli counter, I’m making my own egg salad, salmon salad, and chicken salad as sandwich meat options for my family. Luckily my picky eater boys – who turn up their nose at Tuna fish sandwiches – absolutely love all of these options. I think I also get bonus mom-points for avoiding the murcury in tuna and adding extra omega-3s to my family’s diet with the salmon salad.

Hot Tip: I attempted to make salmon salad with canned salmon, which includes bones and skin. My family was NOT a fan of the awkward crunchiness of the bones and the black flecks of the skin. I bought low-cost salmon filets from Aldi’s for $7 each. One of those is enough Salmon salad for about 6 sandwiches! Plus it’s got maximum freshness.

I mix up my meat salads with Avocado Oil Mayo, which leads to number five below!

5. Limiting Seed Oils – Switching to Avocado Oil

My family eats a lot of mayonnaise and a lot of sandwiches. There is a lot of skepticism around seed oild recently: claims that seed oils are pro-inflammatory, develop toxic compounds when over-heated, rely on toxic chemical extraction processes, and contain high levels of Glyphosate. Mayonnaise is made of mostly seed oil, like any store bought dressing.

5. Limiting Seed Oils, and using Avocado Oil Instead

My family eats a lot of mayonnaise and a lot of sandwiches. There is a lot of skepticism around seed oild recently: claims that seed oils are pro-inflammatory, develop toxic compounds when over-heated, rely on toxic chemical extraction processes, and contain high levels of Glyphosate. Mayonnaise is made of mostly seed oil, like any store bought dressing. Avocado oil mayonnaise is a slightly better option for daily meal prep needs, which you can buy here on Amazon.

In the future, I’ll try to make my own Olive Oil Mayo for an even healthier option! You may also want to pick up a bottle of Avocado Oil for pan-frying in your new Caraway cook set. 😉

6. Switch to Glass Food Storage

Plastics can leech nasty chemicals into your food, especially if you heat food in the containers, or if they start breaking down after being sent through the hot dishwasher too many times. Skip the plastic food storage and opt for a healthier and more sustainable glass option with wooden or silicone tops, which are inert and do not leech any chemicals into food.

7. No More Food Dye

Since I was little, I have always been sensitive to food dye. The war on food dye is only a recent development, however this movement has had significant traction lately in lawmaking and in the media. Food dyes are problematic for many reasons, and I am making a concerted effort to not just avoid them, but completely eliminate them from everything my family eats or touches.

This includes toothpaste! My kids love a blue colored toothpaste, but I found this dye free toothpaste from Attitude that they also love, and it comes in great kids flavors.

7. No More Synthetic Fragrance

Synthetic fragrances can lead to many different unpleasant health issues, including hormone disruption, depression, and cancer. However, ditching factory-made fragrance doesn’t mean you will be stinky. There are plenty of options for clean and natural fragrances that smell amazing.

Pura is a home and car fragrance brand that sells only all natural fragrances that are paraben and phthalate free. They are baby-friendly and smell incredible (there are hundreds of options, including name-brand fragrances). I use pura in my home, and I love that I can easily control everything with an app on my phone and it has a programmable fragrance schedule so I don’t waste the product when I dont need it.

Skylar clean beauty is an all natural fragrance brand for perfumes and body sprays. I love their travel-sized fragrance rollers (Salt Air is my favorite scent!).

Deodorant is a sneaky source of synthetic fragrances– and you put it on a sensitive part of your body which absorbs a lot of it into your blood stream. Many deodorant companies green-wash, claiming aluminum-free, and hypoallergenic, but the products still contain harmful synthetic fragrances and phthalates. I found Salt & Stone brand deodorant to have the most amazing scents, and also are truly non-toxic.

Eliminating and Simplifying is the Key to a Healthier Life

You can see a theme in the points above: Eliminating Toxins is the key. We live in a society that is focused on more, more, more. More things, more complexity. But this is problematic and leads to more disease, more cancer, more depression. The key to really living healthier is less things, less ingredients, less complexity.