E45. Your Home as a Pillar of Health with Domonique Silva

How much can the environments we live in influence the way we feel?

In this episode of Practical Nontoxic Living™, I speak with Domonique Silva, an Environmental Health & Safety Specialist whose career has included work at NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center and more than a decade in environmental and occupational health.

For Domonique, the connection between environment and health became personal as well as professional.

She shares the changes she made to her diet, products, and home while navigating allergies, eczema, psoriasis, bloating, fatigue, and depression—and the improvements she experienced along the way.

Her experience cannot tell us that any one environmental change caused those improvements. But it helped deepen her interest in a question that also sits at the heart of my work:

What role does our everyday environment play in the larger picture of health?

In this episode:

• How Domonique’s work in environmental and occupational health shaped the way she sees the home

• What she learned from working in environmental health and safety

• The personal health challenges that made environmental exposures feel much more relevant to her own life

• Changes she experimented with in food, household products, and her home environment

• Why environmental health extends beyond obvious pollution or industrial exposures

• How the products, materials, air, water, and habits inside our homes can become part of the health conversation

• Why the home should be considered alongside diet, movement, sleep, stress, and other familiar pillars of well-being

• How to begin making changes without assuming that your environment explains every symptom

I like the idea of thinking about home as a pillar of health because it gives our surroundings the attention they deserve without turning the home into either the cause—or the cure—for everything.

We are shaped by many things.

Our biology. Our relationships. Our habits. Our food. Our stress. Our communities.

And also the spaces where we spend so much of our lives.

The opportunity is to notice what we can shape in return.

Go deeper:

• Listen to Domonique’s Healthy Home Habits podcast

• Learn more from Domonique at EOH Explorations

• Explore the Practical Nontoxic Living™ framework

• Learn the foundations of Practical Nontoxic Living™ with the free Ultimate Home Detox Kickstart email series

• Explore the D-Tox Academy, Phase Two of the Ultimate Home Detox™, for ongoing guidance applying Practical Nontoxic Living™ across your home and everyday life

Podcast music by Chris Robertson.