Essential Oils: A Big Risk

Within the world of “essential oils” you take a lot of risks. People extract the oils from trees, flowers, roots all basically non-edible. The “essence” of these plants comprise “essential oils”. Many extract these with methanol, ethanol, chloroform, and even benzene: all known toxins.

Many essential fragrance oils come from Steam distillation. Again we never know how much pressure or what temperature or whether oxygen was involved. These make enormous differences in what alkaloids you get consistently. And you never can fully remove the solvent.

The best example of an “Essential” extract might be caffeine free coffee. You can read about the problems caused by extraction processes.

My approach consists of relying of super-critical-carbon dioxide for my decaffeinated coffee. This uses carbon dioxe at high pressures can dissolve away the caffeine. And carbon dioxide is the important to our bodies, we cannot live without its balance.

So every essential oil you find in small bottles with wonderful aromas has a mixture of solvents that are known carcinogens, unknown substances, and therefore risk. The essential fats in your diet comes from fish, algae, safflower, chia, kiwi, flax, canola. None of these oils use chemical solvent extractions. And remember your favorite Lavender and Tea Tree have loads of estrogens that doctors avoid like any other hormonally active carcinogen.

Very little of the information about Essential Oils as any hard science behind it. And if ever there were a place that word “organic’ does not apply it would be in Essential Oils.

Essential oils come from mainly non edible plants. They come from eucalyptus, tee tree, lavender and thousands if not more. And each has a health risk. I use the Essential Oil Safety by Robert Tisserand And Rodney Young for my information.

The decision to use an essential oil like eucalyptus or even lavender requires thoughtful guidance. Just intuitively, it makes no sense to me to use an extract based upon hearsay evidence.