Indiana

Yeah, I'm doing good, Andrew.

And I'm also really excited for our topic today.

That is that we're going to be talking about chemicals or harmful substances that we try to avoid in our day-to-day lives, like household cleaners or beauty products or things like that.

This was actually requested by a listener, a member of Q-Lips.

And yeah, I think it'll be a really interesting conversation.

Yeah, and I want to backtrack and start this conversation on this topic with a sort of cautionary note or something that I think can be misleading with this word chemical.

Like chemicals are not inherently bad and everything around us is chemicals.

Like I think chemicals is just any sort of compound that you could talk about in a chemistry class like table salt, right?

Sodium chloride, right?

And that's not poisonous or harmful necessarily.

And I think another thing that I want everybody when they're thinking about this topic to consider is that in large doses, anything could really be fatal or toxic.

If you drink too much water, you could die from that.

I think with that thought, first of all, at the beginning of this conversation, not every chemical is bad and many things are not harmful in small doses, but very harmful in larger doses.

I think that's a good place to start to consider what do I want to have in my home and what do I want to use?

Is it okay if I use this every single day?

I think like what I consider when I'm thinking about my health or, you know, yeah, what could be harming me is volatile compounds, volatile organic compounds, which is a term.

basically for a chemical that gets released into the air and can harm you.

So for example, a really common item that would count as that, a volatile organic compound would be bleach, household bleach, right?

That's a cleaner that is probably in everybody's house.

And like you mentioned, you know, you open up that bottle and you instantly get a headache from smelling it.