An Engineers View on Essential Oils
Hello everyone. This is Ryan, Jada’s husband. Jada asked me to be a guest on here for one reason (It certainly wasn’t for my writing skills), I was a big-time skeptic of essential oils for a long time. I was that guy that referred to it as “witch doctor meds” and believed it was all placebo results. However, when my wife first started getting into them I had to give them a chance. What can I say, love makes you do some crazy things. Being an engineer, this meant that I buckled down and really started diving into the research on this stuff. I wanted to share with y’all some of my findings and why I am now a believer in the oily life.
Starting off I kept reading articles saying that Essential oils may very well work, however the research just wasn’t there yet. These articles stated that Essential oils were so new that the research just hadn’t caught up to prove anything on them, yet. Even as a skeptic this seemed ridiculous to me. Indigenous people from every continent had been utilizing the properties of plants around them as medicine for as long as there have been people. This has to be the longest and most wide-spread research study to date. I do realize that distillation did not exist for the entirety of this time, so it was not always what we consider essential oils today that were being used but the chemical compounds are there. Even in modern-day conventional medicine, natural compounds are constantly being studied for their healing properties. Many products that you use on a regular basis are compounds that come from nature. The only difference between essential oils and most of those compounds is that most name brand items you are using study the natural compound, discover its healing benefits, and then derive a way to synthetically replicate the compound. Mostly because of cheaper costs.
Hold on tight because it may get a little “engi-NERDY” up in here. Let’s take wintergreen as an example. Wintergreen oil is 98% Methyl Salicylate. This compound can be utilized in two different ways, it is a topical analgesic and it also activates transient receptor potential ion channels that trigger a feeling of cold, and heat within our deep tissue. All this fancy lingo basically means that it triggers little local thermometers in your body giving you the sensation of heat or cold while also dulling pain. If this sounds familiar to you it’s because it is being used in several products around the world such as “Icy-Hot” or “Bengay”. The only difference is that these products utilize a much cheaper synthetically produced Methyl Salicylate.
Synthetic Methyl Salicylate starts off as Phenol, also called Carbonic Acid. Phenol is a very common starting point for many synthetically made compounds that pharmaceutical companies use. It is a very volatile compound and requires careful handling as it will produce chemical burns when it comes in contact with living tissue. Phenol is the active ingredient in Chloraseptic spray which treats sore throats by utilizing small amounts of Phenol, ~0.5%, to actually burn a portion of the nerve in the throat to relieve the pain.
When you add carbon dioxide and sodium hydroxide you get one step closer to the synthetic Methyl Salicylate. Carbon dioxide we all know is the substance we exhale out of our lungs. Sodium hydroxide is a very strong base. Many of us may know it as “Lye”. If you have seen the movie “Fight Club” you know that Lye is incredible caustic. From this point we add sulfuric acid. This is one of strongest acids and is also incredibly caustic and needs to be handled with care as it is very dangerous if it comes in contact with skin. This creates a substance called salicylic acid. This compound is combined with methanol in a process called methylation to create Methyl Salicylate. Methanol, much like ethanol can be used as a fuel source for combustion engines. Ingesting Methanol even in very small volumes produces permanent blindness.
There you go! You have Methyl Salicylate. Despite what you may hear this is the same Methyl Salicylate that wintergreen has as well. A molecule is a molecule. It doesn’t care how it got there. Now this is not meant to be a chemistry lesson on how to make this compound it is just meant to show what all goes into making the synthetic form of it. You are probably asking, “If a molecule is a molecule and it doesn’t care how it got there why does this matter?” This is important because although you do end up with the same compound, the purification process to yield this can never be absolute. What this means is that there will always be trace amounts of all the ingredients that were used to create the compound. This is true in all cases. Even with natural wintergreen oil, the difference is the other constituents that tag along with wintergreen in the distillation process are not a bunch of toxic chemicals, but they are also good for you. Alpha-pinene, beta-pinene, 1.8 cineole, and linalool are the other 4 compounds you will find in pure wintergreen oil. All of these constituents are known to have anti-inflammatory and antibiotic properties. Linalool is mainly used as a natural scent and can also be used as a safe insecticide, if it is not oxidized, which it is not within an essential oil.
The complexity in which plants construct their molecular blueprint is nothing short of a miracle and it would be impossible for humans to exactly replicate this in the lab. These constituents combined the way they are naturally in the wintergreen plant is something companies have been trying to replicate for years. It just can’t be done, and this is just one example. There are many others, for instance Menthol in peppermint is synthesized and used to relieve pain, nausea, headaches, congestion, and many other things. The method to synthesis Menthol is way too long to go in-depth on here but has the same message as wintergreens synthetic counterpart.
I really want to stress that Jada and I are both believers that God has blessed us with the medical knowledge that we have amassed through the years. This includes pharmaceutical medications as well as more natural medications. We believe each have their place and choose to utilize safer alternatives with fewer side effects anywhere we can. The idea of this post is not to “poo poo” all over modern medicine but to share the idea that maybe taking a pill for everything isn’t the answer. There are much healthier alternatives to many ailments that don’t carry the baggage of side effects that are often worse than the ailment itself. There are definitely people out there that have serious health problems that do require pharmaceutical medications. I want that person to know that there is nothing wrong with that, I do not judge you. I just want to encourage everyone to cut out as many toxins as they can, wherever they can so you can live a healthy, fulfilling, “more refined” life.
https://www.chemistryworld.com/podcasts/methyl-salicylate/8947.article
http://www.phytochemia.com/en/2017/06/12/synthetic-methyl-salicylate-and-you/
The Refined Family 