Marinko (Indiana) on 07/03/2020

Replied By John (USA) on 10/24/2022

No it is not a detergent and clearly you do not understand the chemistry of detergents and soaps which are totally different but accomplish similar goals under differing conditions.

Borax is a salt that contains the mineral boron. Before we had water softener's and treated public water works if you had hard water it would not clean very well. So you had to add something to it like Borax or Washing Soda. This was because we used Laundry "Soap" later on things like water softeners for people on wells and the development of Laundry "Detergent" changed all of that.

The addition of Borax to the washer made the soap work better by softening the water. Just like old laundry soaps needed hot water to clean well but the development of laundry detergent changed that and allowed for the use of cold water in most cases.

Sadly not only do most people not understand any of this marketing plays fast and lose with the terms soap and detergent they are chemically completely different things but both can be used for cleaning! Just like enzymes can be used for cleaning but they are neither a soap or a detergent! Words matter and science matters!

Borax is a mineral just like iron, aluminium, calcium, magnesium. We use mineral for all kinds of things my favorite automotive grease is calcium sulfonate based. We use calcium and magnesium in antacids for an upset stomach. Lithium is used to treat bipolar disorder but also to make car batteries, phone batteries and most popular general purpose grease.

Depending on how you treat an element and what else to mix in with you you can make all kinds of things both things good for our bodies and things that are bad for us. The form matters and the science matters!

For the record, Washing Soda is not Baking Soda. Never confuse the two. You will often use Washing Soda to make bath bombs and Baking Soda as an antacid or a number of other things. They are not the same thing and Washing Soda should be treated with the same care and caution as you would treat Lye. All of the above are common in a house especially 10-20 years ago for sure.

We put a lot of minerals into the form of a salt. We must have sodium to survive you die without it. If you tried to eat pure sodium, it would blow your jaw off of your face and probably kill you. Instead we eat "Sodium Chloride" sodium chloride does not spontaneously explode in the presence of water. Likewise we do not eat elemental calcium we eat calcium that is bound to something like calcium carbonate or calcium citrate etc....

You could even use google "Is Borax a detergent" and you could see it is not a detergent but is a detergent booster and that it is Sodium Borate and its other forms!

Lastly, if you just add Borax to your washer, you will not get very clean clothes outside of what the water and agitation alone can do. By itself Borax does almost nothing to clean clothes.

I have been using Borax for about more than 8 years now. While it does not do much for me besides correct my poor absorption of Vitamin D it has been almost a miracle for my Dad and my wife. Well I should say it has not worked to reduce my painful joints, arthritis or calcium deposits. It did all of those things though for my Dad and for my wife. Hard to say what it is or is not doing inside your body but I keep using it because it can not hurt!

Replied By Nigel (Canada) on 11/21/2022

Do you really understand the process of chelation? Every heavy metal has a unique chelation process that's accelerated or inhibited by entirely different compounds. There's no such thing as a wonder-chelation compound that simply rolls into the body and chelates heavy metals non-specifically. And if there WAS, it would probably kill you because the process of chelation involves the UNbinding of heavy metals from wherever they've wound up, which temporarily turns them into free agents and liable to end up deposited elsewhere in the body. To properly complete the chelation process for A SPECIFIC heavy metal you need to open up the channels that first release the metal and then facilitate its proper excretion so it doesn't just end up moving from a muscle tissue into your brain or heart.

So on that note, do you have any evidence for borax/boron being a chelation agent? Because if so I would strongly recommend AGAINST taking it, unless you fully understand chelation and are aware of all the other potential chelation agents that you might already be taking and how they might interact with this particular mechanism.

Replied By Gene B. (Ontario CANADA) on 11/20/2023

A ChatGPT search says that boron is NOT a chelating agent to remove heavy metals from the human body. FYI

Replied By Greg (Australia) on 05/09/2024

I'm pleased to say that ChatGPT isn't as clever as humans....yet.

I have toxic metals, and I observed numerous foods and supplements would aggravate symptoms; I tried sharing this information with many doctors, including functional medicine doctors, to no avail. They didn't have the aptitude to understand or join the dots. So I did further research since the medical profession demonstrated that this was my fight alone. I found many sources stating the same foods and supplements that I observed do actually have the effect on toxic metals I had concluded. And yes boron, and borax was one of the supplements.

Research paper title: The effects of some boron compounds against heavy metal toxicity in human blood

Link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/45388619_The_effects_of_some_boron_compounds_against_heavy_metal_toxicity_in_human_blood

The abstract from the above research paper:

Heavy metals can accumulate in the environment and cause serious damages to ecosystems and human health. Boron is considered to be essential micronutrient with its well established biological functions and the antioxidant effects of boric acid (BA) are controversial. However, the potential of important boron compounds in cellular activities remains unexplored. Therefore, we aimed to assess the efficacies of some boron compounds (BA, borax, colemanite and ulexite) on the genotoxicity induced by heavy metals (arsenic trioxide, colloidal bismuth subcitrate, cadmium chloride, mercury chloride and lead chloride) in human blood cultures. For this aim, sister chromatid exchange (SCE) and micronuclei (MN) assays were performed to establish DNA damages in lymphocytes. Besides, oxidative stress was monitored by estimating the changes of main antioxidant enzyme activities and the levels of total glutathione (TGSH) in erythrocytes. The present study showed that heavy metal treatments increased the frequencies of SCE and MN and the plasma malondialdehyde (MDA) level; decreased the antioxidant enzyme activities and the level of TGSH compared to controls. Whereas, the tested boron compounds (5-20 ppm) significantly reduced the genotoxic effects induced by low doses of heavy metals. Our results revealed that the protective roles of boron compounds occurred with the effectiveness on their anti-oxidant capacity. In conclusion, these compounds could be useful in the development of functional food and raw materials of medicine.

Replied By WealthofHealth (Wyoming) on 06/23/2024

Please translate the following in layman terms. Thank you!