Marinko (Indiana) on 07/03/2020
Replied By Eardrum Manna (Cleveland) on 07/08/2020
Replied By Cal (Philippines) on 01/25/2021
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 Preston (MA) on 02/16/2021
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