Plants That Filter The Air In Your Home From Toxic Chemicals (PHOTOS)

Cigarette smokers, nail polish buyers, and eager home fixer-uppers; you might want to listen up. The air in you house could be swimming with dangerous chemicals that cause dizziness, headaches, compromise your immune system, and even eventually lead to cancer.

While outdoor air contains low levels of benzene from motor vehicle exhaust and industrial emissions, it can be found in higher levels indoors. It comes from products like glue, paint, furniture wax, detergents and cigarette smoke. Benzene can cause long-term effects on bone marrow, with a decrease in red blood cells leading to anemia, and eventually leukemia. It can also compromise the immune system.

Formaldehyde can make its way into the home by way of pressed wood products like particle board for your floor, or hardwood plywood paneling on the wall or in furniture. It's also used on durable press drapes and other textiles, glues, and in tobacco smoke. Formaldehyde is suspected to cause cancer in humans.

Trichloroethylene, while mostly used in industrial settings, can be found in paint removers and strippers, adhesives, spot removers, and rug-cleaning fluid. It's another proven carcinogen, and has been loosely linked to miscarriages, though not conclusively.

Xylene can be found in cigarette smoke, paint removers, varnish, shellac, and rust preventatives. At low levels xylene can cause dizziness, confusion, lack of muscle coordination, and headaches.

If you do your nails or spray yourself with perfume often, you should be aware of toluene. It's not only found in nail polishes. It's used in the production of plastic soda bottles, pharmaceuticals and dyes, and like all the other chemicals, cigarette smoke. Toluene can cause central nervous system dysfunction and unconsciousness, and cardiac arrhythmia.

To combat these sneaky chemicals in your everyday products, we've plumbed NASA's list of air-filtering plants to bring you the most effective. We wouldn't say this neutralizes the effects of second-hand smoke, but if you're addicted to doing your toes every week in fire engine red, you might want to consider some of these potted plants as a natural antidote to some or all of these five chemicals.

[Note: we've taken out the areca palm. It's a good filterer of xylene and toluene, but unfortunately we couldn't find an accurate picture for you.]