Buckwheat Pillows

People are recognizing more and more the dangers of toxic chemicals affecting our health through coming in contact with our skin, being breathed into our lungs, and being ingested through food or beverages. While we certainly wouldn’t be inclined to eat our pillows, if we happen to have small children in our homes, they could chew on a corner of a pillow and thus absorb the toxins.

You may be surprised by my talking about toxins in, of all things, a pillow. However, most pillows use either some form of feathers, or plastic (vinyl) foam, as fillers. They also use a cover made from a natural or synthetic fiber. All of these may be loaded with toxins if they are not both filled and covered with organically grown fabrics and fillings, due to either herbicides or pesticides used in the growing of non-organic natural fibers and fillers, or the chemicals emitted from the natural decomposition of the vinyls.

Consider feather type fillers. Fowl, such as chickens or ducks, are notoriously prone to lice and other parasitic infestations. The growers regularly treat them with toxic pesticides to control those infestations. They also support thriving populations of dust mites (have you ever seen the pictures of them taken through a microscope?). These cause many to suffer from mild to severe allergy attacks.

When you consider that you spend about 1/3 of your life sleeping, do you really want to do that with your face in contact with a non-organic pillow cover, and breathing the air that has passed through a filler of vinyl or pesticide laden feathers?

In contrast, knowing that you are sleeping on an organically grown cover filled with hypo-allergenic, (only a very minute percentage of people are found to be allergic to buckwheat flour, which is triple vacuumed from the hulls in quality buckwheat pillows) organically grown buckwheat hulls which do not support dust mites, should make a person sleep better even without the comfort that comes only with a buckwheat pillow.