Nine Things to Throw Out Now
- 22 hours ago
- 3 min read
Your home, particularly your kitchen, likely contains some hazards your employees may be unaware of. If you’re a guy, you should read all the way through to the last, which is the one most likely to cause, uh, shrinkage.
Now that we have the attention of at least half of you, let’s get started on the listicle.
Sponges
Even with inflation, sponges are one of the world’s great bargains. You couldn’t design better incubators of bacteria (“holding more germs than a toilet seat”). Moistness, food particles, nooks and crannies. Microwaving them kills 99% of bacteria but starting out with a gazillion germs means you’ll still have 1% of a gazillion when you’re done. And don’t even think about a dishwasher.
Honestly, most of us who are not immunocompromised would be fine with these bacteria, but nonetheless just buy some new ones.
Splenda
Artificial sweeteners are all a little sketchy. Quizzify recommends mixing them up because most if not all of the hazards are fairly trivial in moderate use but can spike dramatically if you use your favorite all the time. Having said that, Splenda, in our opinion, never should have been approved. It can cause leaky gut syndrome (SPOILER ALERT: Link contains grossness) and even possibly alter your DNA.
Visine
Like many OTC remedies, this one is fine for occasional use, but like many OTC remedies, people mistakenly assume it is harmless and use it regularly. In regular use, it does the opposite of what it claims to do, and actually dries out your eyes.
While some bottled eye-moistening drops claim to be preservative-free, we would throw out most of them and switch to the single-use preservative-free vials. They end up costing only about a quarter apiece and can be used all day, though not longer than that.
Ducolax
There are a zillion laxatives to choose from. Many are safe even for regular use. Not this one or other “stimulants,” like Ex-Lax or Correctol. As with Visine, they do the opposite when used for more than a handful of days.
Artificially colored candies and foods
The FDA is moving to eliminate these mostly petroleum-based dyes, whose possible hazards include cancer and hyperactivity in children. Anything that is brightly colored should not be eaten. And you’d be amazed at how many non-brightly colored foods have artificial food dyes.
Sure, no one would expect Jolly Ranchers, Skittles, Starburst, Twizzlers, Kool-Aid, or Fruit Loops to be colored naturally (the last of which isn’t even spelled naturally), but Birdseye, Slim Jim, Betty Crocker and...Gerber? My balloon is officially burst.
Plastic Cutting Boards
These would be perfectly fine if you carefully cut only 99% of the way through rather than actually scraping the knife on the surface. But seriously, who does that? A single knife stroke on a plastic cutting board can release 100-300 microplastic particles.
Plastic Spatulas
The biggest enemy of plastic is heat. And why else would you use a plastic spatula, other than on a hot pan? In 2025, there was a particular vendetta against the black ones. And while we are not fans of black plastic spatulas, it turns out they got the math wrong, and the “good” news is they are no worse than any other color spatula.
Single-use plastic containers
These containers are designed for, shockingly, a single use. It seems convenient and economical to reuse those containers. But that plastic is not designed to be reused. Store your leftovers in glass containers, even those (like most) with plastic lids. A lifetime of plastic lids on glass containers wouldn’t leach remotely as much microplastic as one small cup of...
...Tea (in bags)
OK, wasn’t it worth the wait to get to this last one? It’s harder to think of anything more conducive to microplastic leaching than a combination of very hot water, extremely high plastic surface area-to-volume ratio, and being shaken around. A cup of tea could contain 14 billion particles, which, AI tells us is “thousands of times higher than plastic in other food.” And microplastics may indeed shrink your testicles.
However, not all tea bags are plastic vectors. Here are some that aren’t. Or, you could make your tea the way our forebears used to do before Thomas Sullivan invented the tea bad in 1908. His were made of silk, as Mr. Sullivan presciently recognized that plastic tea bags would create hazards, once they were invented.
No, you aren't going to save money by letting us teach your employees about everyday hazards. But you will have some very grateful ones. And we have plenty of questions and quizzes that do save money pretty much right away. Americans are he world's most prodigious consumers of healthcare, but through Quizzify employees come to realize that "Just because it's healthcare doesn't mean it's good for you."
