Your second sentence made me think of this.

Parts of my thesis were definitely written with “Goodbye Horses” on loop (you know from that one scene in Silence of the Lambs). Not sure what that says about my vibes in grad school.

It’s $3 per month for 200GB for me currently in the US.

A pound of peanut butter is around 2600 calories. A pound of Nutella is about 2400 calories. Honestly not as bad as I thought initially.

1 to 2 pounds a week is 370 to 740 calories per day. Eating that much peanut butter for a week or so wouldn’t be too hard, but keeping that rate up consistently would be tough.

This article is talking about benzene, not benzine FYI.

The allowable limit in drinking water by the EPA is 5 ppb. Inhalation exposure limit by OSHA is 1 a 5 ppm per day (inhalation is not an apples to apples comparison to consumption though). I’m not a toxicologist so I don’t know what exposure amount is “safe”, but dosage does matter.

This article mentions benzene coming from the carbomer in these formulas. The benzene is a residual impurity in the carbomer making process, and there are carbomer on the marketplace that don’t use benzene in their manufacturing process, but they are more expensive. I’m not sure the source of carbomer for these products, but I’ve seen reported on carbomer I’ve looked at to have up to 1 ppm of benzene impurity. Products like this might use carbomer up to 0.5 to 1%. So you’d expect maximum levels of benzene to be in the product (at the aforementioned levels) to be 10 ppb. So possibly at double the amount allowable in drinking water by EPA. People drink a lot more water than cough syrup (I hope) so it might not be that concerning.

The article frustratingly does not give amounts of benzene found in these products so it could be sensationalist—I just don’t know. So is benzene bad—yes. Does the cough syrup have concerning levels of benzene? Maybe, but just saying benzene might be present isn’t enough information in my opinion.

Can’t rule out that the furnace is dying—might be carbon monoxide poison you are experiencing.

Can see the before and after images in this article