How often do you hear comments like this? Whether or not they are true, scientists will often hear these types of statements and laugh. That’s because to a scientist everything can be considered a chemical.
When you plant a pepper, grow it, and pick it, it is still full of chemicals such as capsaicin and piperine. In fact, even you and I are made up of chemicals. It may not be the sort of chemicals that we typically think about when we hear ‘chemicals’, but in science these are all chemicals.
Defining Chemicals
Everything in this world is made up of elements such as oxygen, iron, gold, and every other element you can find in the periodic table. A chemical is an element or any combination of these elements. For example, oxygen in the air is a chemical, and is always a combination of two oxygen elements. Elements are the building blocks of other chemicals, making a single element the simplest form of of a chemical.
Water, a combination of two hydrogen atoms bonded to an oxygen atom, is a chemical. The chemical name for water is dihydrogen monoxide. The chemical capsaicin in the peppers is what makes the pepper spicy.
Source: study.com