Essential Oils: Nature's Cure?

You get this cool custom poster from the illustrator of the book, Carli Manardo, who is awesome. We worked with another great writer who helped us out with this thing a great deal. His name is Nils Parker, and it was just a big team effort and it's really really cool.

We love how it's turning out. Yeah, we do. So anywhere you can buy books, you can go pre order the Stuff you Should Know Colon An Incomplete Compendium of mostly Interesting Things, and then after you do you can go on over to stuff you Should read books dot com and upload your receipt and get that order poster. So thank you in advance for everybody who is pre ordering. That means quite a bit to us, and we appreciate you.

Stuff you should read books dot Com pre order now, Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Joshua Josh e um Clark h And there's Charles W. Charles Chuck, Wayne Chuck, Wayne Twayne Bryant, and Jerry. The Jade Dog Roland is floating around somewhere in the ether. So this is stuff you should know, everybody. Hi, Hi, this is uh the episode. I'm nervous about why because oh, well,

what's I mean? Why? Because she knows so much about it, She's going to be like, you got this wrong. That wrong, not so much getting it wrong us. You know, it's one of these it's close to our hearts. So I feel like I got to do right by it. Oh, I'm sure you will. Like I usually don't care at all about anything we ever talked about, jeez, but this one I care about. You're like a nihilist like flee. Hey. By the way, we should mention, uh, we got a

book coming out? Yeah, we do. Um, which not only do we have a book coming out, we have a preorder gift that's ready to go now too. I think we have a pre order gift which is a custom poster. It's written, written by us and designed by h Carly are amazing illustrator for the book. And we even have a book website. Now. Oh, is it up already? Yeah? Have you seen this thing? Yeah? I saw the drafts of it. I didn't see that it was up. I'm so glad you're handling things. So thank you for doing that. Yes,

and that is stuff you should read. Books dot com so great and it's it looks great. The web page looks awesome, and it gives you a little excerpts and you get a little peek inside. It looks way better than our actual site, like our regular stuff. We are we are. But so here's the deal. You can go anywhere and preorder the book now, uh, and then come I think sometime in is it October? November? Chuck the when the pre order gifts, When when the actual book

arrives when it comes out. I think we pushed it back a little bit into November, right, Okay, so you will eventually get the book, but in the meantime, if you go on to the website, uh, stuff you should read books dot com. Um, you can upload an image of your receipt and they'll say, oh, thank you for pre ordering the book. Here's your preorder gift, and you can hang it in your room next to the torn out posters from Tiger Beat magazine, wouldn't it Team Beat?

I don't think so. Smart smart plants. Uh yeah, So we're we're gonna be mentioning this a lot because, as John Hodgman told us, the secret so A B, C, A BP always be plugging. That's why I know, man, that is it's gonna be on his headstone and they'll probably be a QR code on his headstones. He can buy his books. Oh man, that's a great idea. Um.

So we're talking today not about books necessarily. We're talking more about essential oils than books, although there's plenty of books on essential oils, but that has nothing to do with our book. Instead, essential oils has to do with our podcast, in particular this episode of our podcast, which

is on essential oils. That's right, And these are the oils, these little chemicals that are stored in plants, in the glands of all different kinds of plants and all over the plants from pedals to stems to roots, and depending on where you are in the plant, you might be getting a different kind of oil from that particular spot. Yeah, there there might be a certain type of essential oil found in the seeds and a totally different one found in the leaves or the roots, or the bark or um,

the stems, the twigs, the hair, the teeth. Basically every part of the plant can hold some sort of essential oil. And one of the things that I love about this, chuck is that science isn't sure exactly what the functions are of essential oils, but they know that it's some

form of communication. I mean, like scent as a form of communication in the plant world in the animal world, um, and these communicate different things, likely things like getaway, cow, I don't want you near me and eating me instead, bring on the honey bee to help pollinate me. That's right. And we'll get into, um what they have been used

for and are used for. But uh, it's safe to say that since the times of ancient Egypt, people have been using essential oils, certainly back then before there was modern medicine as medicine, so so we'll talk about all this. Let's let's get into also a big shout out to Julia Layton for helping us out with this one. Yeah, Julia is back in the rotation, very happy about that. So um essential oils duce. You know what in essential

oil is? Most people do um. But as far as like plants go, as far as chemistry goes, they're really just a certain kind of compound. You can divide them into two different categories. One is oxidated compounds and the other is hydrocarbons. And oxidated compounds come in all different forms and shapes, things like alcohols, phenols, oxides, esters, alde hydes um, and then on the hydrocarbon side there's a

there they follow under worn category called terpenes. If you have ever been in a drug education class and the the educator brought out that briefcase full of different drugs, you may have gotten a whiff of the marijuana. That is, the terpenes in the marijuana that give it that distinctive smell. That's right. And by the way, I'm gonna read it

on a listener mail. At some point, uh, someone said that we should not use the term marijuana anymore, Oh my gosh, why, and and use the term cannabis because apparently the term marijuana was created as sort of a racist term, uh, to make it sound wow, foreign, south of the border and evil. Yeah news to me, so well it makes sense. Yeah sure, wow, Okay, well we'll start calling it um. Okay, that's the new name for pot. Everybody, X Factor. I think that's a TV show. We might

get sued. That's a Joe Rogan TV show, wasn't it. No, that was fear Factor. I bet you anything that was an X Factor, and a bet Joe Rogan had something to do with it. But he's like, we've got to come up with a good name for the spinoff. So you were talking about um, Like you mentioned one thing, you said something about an alcohol. People are like, what

in a plant? But that's true. Like if you look at peppermint oil, that that great scent that you get from peppermint oil is the alcohol menthol right, And all of these, all these different things, they're different kinds of compounds there. Um, they have different kinds of atoms put together, they do different things, They provide different functions. Again, they probably all largely have to do with plant communication to other plants or two animals, but they smell different. They

combine to make different smells. The thing that they all have in common is that essential oils are all v o c's volatile organic compounds, which are just a type of compound. Usually I guess car been based. They might have to be, yeah, because it's organic. So they're all carbon based compounds that have in common the fact that at room temperature or at low temperatures, they um evaporate.

They have their their boiling point is so low that it happens at room temperature, and it can happen at such a low point that it doesn't actually even go from solid you know, alcohols too, to liquid into gas. It can sublimate sometimes just from solid into gas. And it's that gas that spreads out off of the plants stems or leaves or roads or petals, whatever, and and hit our olfactory senses through our nose and we smell. But that's all it is. It's a compound that that

vaporizes very easily at low temperatures and spreads through the air. Yeah, and you know those little tiny droplets they diffused through the cell membrane and then all of a sudden they're on the surface of the plant, just waiting for somebody's nostrils to come by. But it's kind of like that that old question like if a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound? Like if if there's nobody there to smell a volatile organic compound, does it actually smell?

And the answer is clearly yes, yeah, and just the tiniest I mean, sometimes you can just smell with your nose and it smells great. But sometimes the tiniest bit of activation, we'll get it going. Um. One of my favorite things to do is on a walk when someone's got one of those big, beautiful rosemary bushes out in there by the sidewalk, it's just, you know, Emily and I both and my daughter to just run our hands up one of those stalks and just rub our hands together,

and you've got delicious steak hands. Which is why I mean, that's also a good example why if you grow rosemary that you use in your food, you want to grow it away from the side because who knows people are touching who was walking by with what on their hands rubbing your food. Basically, hey, man, if you if you've got edibles in your front yard, then that's your fault. I know I'm saying, yeah, but you so you you need like the public rosemary bush for people to walk

by and smell. Then you need like your head stashed rosemary bush up by your house, you know, right, And if you go up to the house, you can lean out the window and say, hey, sir, that's my private bush. Stay away, Steer clear, steer clear. So um okay, So volt organic compounds, we've kind of gotten that across I think, um, and with essential oils, this is I think pretty essential to know m hm, that when you smell something like lavender or rose or juniper or something like that, like

you know what that smell smells like. And from researching this stuff, I think scientists have managed to isolate the essential oils found in like three thousand different species of plants so far, um, three hundreds of of which and we'll talk about this more later, but three hundred of which have been shown to have some sort of biomedical properties, which is pretty important. Um. But from all of these they've realized there is a central player, right, Like, um,

what was the one that you called out? Peppermint oils? Menthol It's a type of alcohol. But if you just smell menthol, you're you're not like that that smells like peppermint instead. The essential oil is that main component, that main volatile organic compound with dozens or hundreds of others in varying quantities and amounts, all mixed together just perfectly so that you have not menthol, but peppermint, the essential oil of peppermint um. And that is what in essential

oils is. It's a really intricate, complex combination of volatile organic compounds. That is the essence of that plant. That's right, the essence of the plant. That's exactly perfectly said. And I'll just say this now. We're going to talk about them in a minute. But there is a Swiss chemist chuck Um named Paracelsus, and he was an alchemist, and it turns out the alchemists are the ones who coined the term essential oil because the alchemists believe believed in

five elements. The four elements were earth, wind, water, and fire, and then there was a fifth element that was like elusive. It was the one that bound all the other elements together and just it was the glue that bound reality and existence in the universe together. And so quintessential comes from quinta essence, meaning the fifth essence or the fifth element, and so quintessential is was shortened eventually into essential oil, which was the thought to be the purest, most um,

basic fundamental essence of a plant. So that's where we get essential oil is from alchemists. Boy, why wasn't there a soul band in the seventies named the Fifth Essence featuring Billy d Volumes they could open for earth, wind, and fire and water and they would have done the soundtrack to the Fifth Element. Yeah. Whatever, So if we go back in time, if we hopp in the old way back machine, Boy, we haven't been in this thing for a while. Think about it. Kick it, Jerry, it's

fired up. It smells a little musty. I don't think we've been in this thing since. You didn't dry out the life preservers from last time. You just threw them in there in a pile, and now they're all well. Luckily we have some essential oils on hand, because we're going back to ancient Egypt and this is when they

started using essential oils, integrating them into medicine. Um, the trades between you know, of course in China they were doing stuff like this and the Orient and trade routes between the Orient and the Mediterranean really opened up this up, opened up this trade to these sort of magical oils as far as they were concerned. We know it's not magic. Now, back back then, this was this was early medicine, you know for sure. Yeah, and I mean it was. It

was used in traditional Chinese medicine still is. UM. It's spread from Egypt to the Mediterranean, to the Greeks, to the Romans, um over to the Persians who figured out how to distill ethyl alcohol from sugar, which was become a really big component in UM. Extracting essential oils from plants.

It was a huge innovation. UM. And then that trickled over to Europe in the Middle Ages, and um, that is where we join up with our friend Paracelsus, that Swiss chemist who's birth name was Philippus theo ast Us Aerolis Bombastus von Hohenheim. Oh man, it's amazing, and't an amazing just von Hohenheim gets some statue in my mind. Yeah, yeah, that's that's pretty amazing. But he was known as the Luther of medicine because at the time people were like, oh,

this Galen guy had it all figured out. There's four humors and that explains everything. He's like, no, no, let's use like evidence based science. Let's use things like chemistry. And this guy was an alchemist even and he died bitter and angry because no one would listen to him. But he really helped kind of push things forward as

far as reforming science into thinking scientifically is concerned. Yeah, and he was a big proponent of these plant oils that he was extracting, and uh, the compositions were revealed in the nineteenth century, and then of course, you know, the twentieth century comes along and we get much more efficient with our extraction and that just means more essential oils, which means more experimentation basically, Yeah, you know, and good smoking,

a little X factor and a little fooling around. Who knows. Should we take a break? Definitely? Now, all right, let's take a break, and we'll talk about this extraction process. Something that I see under my deck a lot these days. Right after this, so I want to say something chuck with extraction um one of the reasons why essential oils are so expensive, and if you get really good at essential oil, you're gonna pay a lot for it. I saw if you bought a leader, which seems like a

lot of rose oil. But if you're going to turn around and sell in smaller amounts of other people, you probably buy a leader if you have twenty one thousand dollars to cough up for a single leader of rose oil. And the reason why essential oils are so expensive is because it takes so much plant material to to get

that essence from it. Right, So with with roses in particular, you can expect to need about five metric tons of rose petals just to get a kilogram of rose oil, three thousand lemons to get a kilogram of lemon oil, and something like four hundred and forty pounds of fresh lavender flowers to get a kilogram of lavender essential oil. Yeah, for our American friends who are like, dude, what are

you even talking about? Um, six hundred pounds of rose petals for one ounce of essential oil or forty to sixty rosebuds for a single goal drop of rose otto essential oil. I love stuff like that. Well, essential oils, they're my favorite new thing. No, it's cool, but it's also you know, sustainability is an issue because of that, um, they use the most plant material to produce produce that very small amount of oil. So you're throwing away the rest of the plant. Well, yeah, I mean that is true.

But here's another way to look at it, Chuck. If if the purpose of life, genetically speaking, is to multiply as much as possible, we are helping plants by propagating them, and we're doing it because those plants are producing a smell that we like. So in this sense, we are the slaves of plants who were propagating as much as

we possibly can to produce that smell. More. Yeah, and you know, Emily is all about essential oils for sure, but she's also gotten much more into using the whole herb and the whole plant, um and trying to use like as much as the plant as possible, which is pretty cool. She's like, here, just stick this whole twig of rosemary up your nose and you'll be fine. She's

really learned a lot. Man. It's it's pretty impressive to cease, you know, and inspiring to see someone learning so much, you know, midlife, uh something brand new, like going back to school. Basically, yeah, I can actually attest. This is not a paid plug, everybody, Chuck, does not give me money for these. Um. We got some soaps and some room sprays. I think I told you from from Emily from her company, and we actually sent some to some friends and within like a couple of weeks, they were asking,

they were dead. Where can we they said, where can we get some more of this? Because we're spraying this lavender spray on our pillows every night to go to sleep. And they wanted to make sure that they could secure more because they were halfway through the bottle. That we said them, not even like we're out where you know, where'd you guys get this? It was we're halfway through. We want to make sure we can get some more.

So Emily making the good stuff for sure, that's right, and go to love your Mama dot com and and check it out. She's a small business and they're all hurting right now. So we always appreciate the business so extraction. There are have been a lot of different methods over the years. As Emily told me, she's like that, you know these are all ancient methods, or not all ancient methods,

but many of these are ancient methods. Does she say things like low first, low, these be ancient methods, wonderful? She does say all flourage, which is a very interesting older technique where you isolate these essential oils by using purified fats. And this all sounds gross, but what you would do back in the day, and I'm sure there are probably still some people doing it this way, um, and you can probably go, like pay five dollars to watch them dress up an al temy clothes and stuff

and do this. But you would get a tallow and large mixture and spread it out on a flat surface and then, uh, the first thing you have to do with any of these is you got to crush up the plants really well, and you you coat it with these crushed up plants, and the fat absorbs these v o C s. It takes a few days. Then you filter out those plant parts, you know, because you don't want those around anymore. You've gotten what you needed from them.

You're done with them, get out of my sight. And then the fat will eventually become saturated with this essential oil. And then you extract that oil with a solvent basically like alcohol. Yeah, from what I saw though, it is this is a multi step process where once you extract or once you get rid of like the plant material, once you've gotten the essential oil out of it, you repeat the process again and again and again until like the fat is saturated with essential oil. Yeah, that's pretty

cool and that I mean, that's great. That seems very ancient. Indeed. Um, And there's another variation of it called maceration hot at, which is um where you do the same thing, but you warm the fat to kind of speed up the absorption process. So I guess that means that essential oils, or at least certain kinds of them, are fat soluble, is what I'm taking from this. Yeah, I couldn't really

figure out this maceration. That may be an old term um, because like a macerated oil is basically an infused oil for use a carrier oil. Now. Yeah, my understanding or my familiarity with masceration is um. When you make a shrub, a vinegar shrub to put in cocktails or whatever. Macerating is where you basically chemically mash the fruit by putting so much sugar on it that it just breaks it down. And then you take that and add vinegar to it and shake it up and let it sit for a

few weeks and thank me later. One of my favorite ways of extraction is good old fashioned mechanic cold expression another good band name. And this is like uh citrus rhyns, like all those great essential oils that you get from an orange peel or or lemon peel, and you cold press this stuff and just extract those oils with good

old fashioned elbow grease. This is what Lucile Ball was doing to those grapes and that classic episode where she's mashing grapes by jumping around a tub with another lady. I mean, is there anything better than taking a lemon twist and squeezing that thing into a drink and seeing those little that citrus sneeze come out of it. Yeah, and then like that it kind of floats like oil on top of the drink. It's when you get it

just right, it is very satisfying. Agreed or two. You know, if you ever just like use some lemon juice and then throw away that lemon without using the peel for something, then you're doing it wrong, like just rayed in the air, sprayed on your counter, sprayed on your hands. Do whatever, Oh friend, this is what you do with a lemon peel.

You never throw it away. You throw it into your um garbage disposal and eventually run your garbage disposal, and not only does it make your garbage disposal smell really good, it actually disinfects the garbage disposal so that it doesn't smell funky nice. Yeah, do that, Like if you drink a lot of lemon water, your garbage disposal is going to thank you for it. I saw one of those, and I hate calling them hacks, but one of those food hacks lists the other day, and this was pretty good.

You take, instead of cutting the lemon and then getting like a cheese cloth or something to keep those seeds and things in there, you just roll it on the

you know, before you do anything. You roll it on the counter like a rolling pin with your hand and just get it all soft and squishy, and then you just stick like a like a skewer or like a kebab skewer through the little what is it called the nipple, Sure, the nip, the nip of the lemon all the way through, and then that's just a little spout and you can just squeeze the heck out of that thing. The only thing that's coming out as the juice. I've never heard

of that food hack. That was a good one. You know what else we could call that part of the lemon is the lemons moose knuckle? What do you think about that? That or the nip? Make your choice? What else do we have? Well, Emily is a steam distiller. You know, she's got a still and she uses uh steam distillation process, which is very cool to see. So with steam distillation is basically the same thing that you

would use to make um like gin. The still that we talked about in Gin is basically the same thing where you've got some hot water that's producing steam. The steam rises up through like a great or a grid or something. Um, it passes through that and then up past these mashed up bits of whatever plant you're extracting

the essence from. And then that water vapor carries those essential oils from the mashed up plant up, up, up, and then down down, down again to another part of the still where it's cooled and turns into a combination of oil and water. And correct me if I'm getting any of this wrong, because I've never actually seen this firsthand. And then the oil and water goes into the final little area with a spigot at the bottom for the water and speak it at the top for the oil,

which will eventually start to float. It sounds about right, Okay, great, And then I saw something else chuck that ties into another episode of ours that I found very satisfying. Ultrasound is used sometimes two premash the um or I guess

pre extract the essential oils. So you'll take say I saw a demonstration using this ultrasound wand basically, and they've had a cup of water and um like hops that they mashed up some hops and they just stuck the ultrasound wand in the water and made the water go crazy.

And what they found is that using a lot less energy and even less plant material, you can extract more essential oil because the cavitation that's produced by those sound waves in the walls of the cells that hold the essential oil in the plant, those cell walls get busted open and so when more essential oil comes out, so you can actually get more essential oil out of the plant. And it takes lower temperature steam to look that essential

oil out, so there's no thermal degradation. There's a lot less thermal degradation, so you use less plant material, less energy to get more essential oil out thanks to the beauty of ultrasound. Now, before they did that demonstration, did they say this wand has not been up anyone's but of course that's how they start every single video in Germany. Oh boy, that was the German company. Sure, and they're

into that kind of thing. Yeah, and Germans listen to this, hey Germany, because we have a specifically tailored ad for Germany, which I'm proud of punch about. Yeah, guten talk everyone. Uh do you know what that means? Uh? It means this wand has not been up anybody's But that's right, guten talk. So the uses of essential oils um depending on who you ask, and we'll get into the controversies

of how they're marketed, because there are some for sure. Um, you know, if you read some sites, they'll say basically they'll cure anything, or maybe not cure anything, because you have to be careful of how you say things. But they still say that. Yeah, it's bad. But some of the legit uses of essential oils um. They can be a preservative, they can be a flavoring agent. They are certainly used as scent agents and all all kinds of things.

Um Emily makes her own insect repellent, mosquito repellent. Was she used like citronella um jeez, I should know this because I sprayed all over my body like every night. I don't know. I just strussed her that she's doing it right. Uh, it can be a fungicidal, herbicidal, and pesticidal agent for crops. And then there's a Roman therapy which we'll get into in a few minutes as well. Yeah, and all those will make a lot more sense than a second once we talked about the actual evidence based

research into what um kind of biomedical properties essential oils have. Uh. One of the things that we found like pretty early on, and we should say, there's you know, hundreds of essential oils that are used um for a Roman therapy or for industrial purposes, and we really have studied just a handful of them. The ones that we have studied have turned up some pretty interesting results. Like we've found that very clearly some essential oils are antimicrobial and antifungal as well.

Some essential oils are both at the same time, Like clove oil. If you're a bacteria or a fungus, you do not want to be around clove oil because it is going to mess you up pretty bad, worse than than Rocky on Draco. Eventually. Yeah, Tea tree oil is something we use a lot in our house as well, UM to like dry out pimple, let's say, or to heal something, uh you know, uh, something like on your skin. It's very good for skin treatments. Uh what else here? UM?

I mean? And we should mention to the reason people are turning to these is because there's a big movement UM and there always has been, but there's seems like it's really gained steam in the last decade of people trying to find uh natural alternatives to UM synthetic treatments. Sure, which is laudable and commendable UM as long as the science backs it up. And part of the science also too is showing that it's not actually harmful, which we'll

talk about two. But one of the things that they're figuring out about essential oil, and they are scientists, I should say, is that because they have antifungal properties and anti microbial properties, UM, and because those properties survive being vaporized, that you could use this stuff as a spray for a cleaner conceivably. And that's not to say like just stop using any other cleaner and just use clove oil, although we use clove oil a lot to disinfect things.

We use lavender oil to disinfect things. So I don't know, maybe do what you want. But um, we're probably going to start seeing more essential oils in cleaning products than we do even now, and they're starting to be all over the place. Yeah, I mean, the air based disinfectant is pretty interesting. We use um, you know, Emily makes room sprays, and those I don't think are so much for the disinfectant as just a good, you know, scent based poop cover up. Yeah. Oh, I hadn't thought about that.

I was just using it to make the room exponentially more pleasant. Yeah, but they're good to have in the bathroom, you know what I mean, what do you mean empty poop? I got you. Another cool thing is is there is, uh, increasingly there is drug resistance among infectious microorganisms, and so that is opened up the doors for more research into the anti pathogenic properties of essential oils because they're saying, like, hey, maybe some of this stuff can be replaced these synthetic

compounds with these natural compounds. So they're so they're talking about MERSA here, right. So, like one of the problems with Mercy's that it's resistant to the drugs. We have so even if you even if even if you're like I don't care if it's all natural or the most horrid industrial compound we've ever come up with, kill the mersa because it can kill us and we can't treat it. Um. They're finding that the essential oil has properties that mersa

can't UM develop our resistance too. So not only can I kill mersa, we would expect that Mercy is not eventually going to evolve to be resistant to these essential oils as well. Yeah, and um, I mean maybe now would be a good time to take that next break because we were going to dive into a roman therapy and that's the one area, like you said, they've done uh, I wouldn't say a lot, but they're doing more and more studies on a handful of essential oils in their

and their uses. But aroma therapy is the one area where they still have not done a ton of studies. And that's probably the most controversial area of essential oils, wouldn't you say it is for sure? And before we take a break, I do want to say we're talking about individual studies that are basically the first apps in a scientific understanding of the properties the biomedical properties of essential oils. So it's all like g whiz and everything. But it's not. It's not, it's not it's not settled

by any any stretch of the imagination. We're still just beginning to investigate this stuff, so bear that in mind as well. Alright, Chuck, we're back. It's right to talk about aroma therapy and um, this is when you get into how the different applications for essential oils. Um there and Emily told me to make sure I mentioned that there is, uh, there are people out there that are recommending people actually ingest essential oils more and more, and

she's saying, don't do that. That sounds a lot like injecting bleach or um cleaner to combat viruses. That's not that's not how these work. Yeah, she's saying that there are people out there recommending that you literally ingest this stuff. And she's saying, don't just don't do that. M much. Yeah, it's much much better in a tincture maybe, or a topical thing, or in this case, we're talking about a Roman therapy, which is breathing stuff in either through your

skin or into your mouth and the lungs. Yeah, but either way, apparently, however, you ingest it like that through your lungs or your nose or mouth, um, your your old factory center is initiated and it starts doing all sorts of different things depending on what the what volatile organic compounds are hitting it right. And when I found that was really good. Example my favorite smell of all time lavender and lavender through some studies, isn't it great?

Through some studies, lavender has been shown to um prevents serotonin reuptake. They they've shown what kind of neuro neurochemical mechanisms lavender affects our brains through, and one of them is it prevents serotonin transporters from doing their job. Once the serotonin transporter gets ahold of like a serotonin molecule, that thing gets taken out of your brain and you're

no longer feeling your mood from that particular molecule serotonin. Well, lavender or specifically I think laven dual, which is a turpin from lavender, prevents the serotonin from taking up or the serotonin transporter from taking up that serotonin. This step one, and then another one is that it's an n d M, a receptor antagonist, which puts it in the same class of chemicals, uh that dissociative chemicals as ketamine. So it does.

They they've actually studied lavender now closely enough to say this is how it affects your brain, and it definitely does affect your brain. So there is something to the idea that aroma therapy does have therapeutic effects, and lavender

in particular. Now we understand how now do you mean, uh, S s R I potential like a natural S s R I. I don't know, because I think part of the other thing about essential oils too, is like the impact and the effects that they have on us are pronounced enough that we could study them and see them. But it doesn't necessarily mean we're going to be able to just take lavender pills as like a mood enhancer or to combat depression. There it's just not pronounced enough

for that. It could conceivably open a door to some some inquiry or some investigation that could lead to new synthetic compounds based on what we find it. Just taking like lavender is not going to cure your depression from from anything I've seen, Yeah, And I think I mean it depends on who you're talking to. Some people might advocate for complete replacement of you know, a practice or

of TCM. Let's say, might be like, no, man, not don't take any any of these uh um quote unquote Western medicines, Like this is the only stuff that you need to be taking. But other people will say, hey, you can augment uh with things like lavender or eucalyptus or cedar wood and stuff like that. I have no problem with augmenting. I have no problem with traditional medicine of any culture. As long as it works, it's not harmful to the user, and it's not harmful to other

sentient beings or the planet. Those are really my only qualifications. As long as it works, just go for it. But just make sure that those those caveats are are checked or else it's harmful. Yeah. Well, let's let's talk about some of these uh purported benefits of these various oils. We talked about lavender. Of course, relaxation. Sleep is where you're gonna see a lot of it, like springing on your pillow. Um. Eucalyptus is a big one for congestion,

for burns, for cold sores, arthritis. Even rose is a big one for anxiety. UH and a lot of these two have to do with skin things like eczema or dan druff or rosatia and stuff like that, and all of these you should say, these are all ones that like the essential oil industry says that not not that science necessarily backs up right. Well, that's what I meant by purported health benefits. Okay, gotcha, I got you. Yeah,

I didn't pick up on that. Uh. Or if you play, uh the video game dead Red Redemption, you can spend a lot of your time gathering herbs because it's the Old West. What do you do with those herbs? You use them in craft to print things with them to help yourself. Oh that's do they have X factor in it? And I got a bit by a rattlesnake the other day in the game, and I said, you've you've been poisoned. You might want to go find some medicinal herbs and can eat them. Did you survive? I survived And I

shot that snake too. You shot the snake. That's gotta be tough to shoot a snake. Yeah, Uh, they are tough to hit, yes, unless you pull out the old shotgun. Oh, well there you go. Yeah, it's funny. Someone who loves animals and hates hunting as much as I do. Really gets a kick out of hunting in this game. Oh, it's different. I don't think it counts. It's not real as far as we know, it's not real. UM. So you know, some of these oils have been studied to

a certain degree. UM. And I like the way that Julia puts this studied enough to confirm or strongly suggests a positive association between oil and a health outcome. But it's tough because the and we'll get to the f D A part. But all these plants are different. And and it's when you're talking about these scientific studies, it's that's all built on consistency of the product that you're testing. Yeah,

and because these are plants, it's it's tough. But where it depends on where the plant grows and what month you pick it, and how it was distilled. You know, there's so many X factors. Yeah, that that kind of confounds things, right, it does. And I mean apparently, depending on the time of day, UM, the plant might be producing different levels or types of of essential oil. And because no one has said this is the chemical compound of or the chemical recipe of UM, lavender essential oil,

because there's nothing like that. Then, even if you are trying to apply science to studying essential oils, you don't know if you're studying the exact same thing that somebody else is studying, who's getting results that you're having trouble replicating. It's it's very um. It's definitely like the wild West right now, like people are getting bit by rattlesnake's level wild West. Yeah, and it's you know, it's important because it's not regulated by the FDA right now. Uh, it is.

It falls in that weird gray area between being a pharmaceutical medicine and being a cosmetic and so they aren't FDA regulated, so they don't have to go through that testing and approval process that medicines do, right, So technically they can make vague claims like if you are an essential oil producer, you could take some of these studies that you found um that may not have been peer reviewed, that may have had a very small sample size, UM, that may have been virtually made up, UM, but that

support your your claim. Let's say things like, um, you know roman came meal is good for heart health or something like that. You can put that on the label. But if you say something like Roman came meal, UM helps stave off heart disease, you'll you'll then you'll get a letter from the FDA saying like, hey, you're making health claims that you can't back up, that science certainly

doesn't back up, and you need to stop. The problem is there's a lot of companies out there making these claims right now, UM all over the place, and a lot of them come in the form of UM multi level marketing or pyramid schemes like I think Young Living is a really good example of that, where you can find UM Young Living products in your neighbor's garage or on Twitter or Instagram, and uh, not necessarily in a store.

And so it makes it very difficult because it's the centralis it makes it difficult for the FDA to find out about this stuff, and then even when they do, they don't have a lot of record worse to UM to stopping it, aside from sending threatening letters threatening you know, legal action. Yeah. And I think they were one of the ones that markets to pregnant women specifically. Yeah. Yeah, And this is where we get to like, this is why it's actually problematic. Yeah, I mean, you know, any

time that you're UM. Anytime it's an unregulated substance, and they're saying, hey, use this on your baby, or use this if you're pregnant, and there's been so little peer reviewed research, then that's when it can get a little bit dodgy, because there is very little research on how these oils should be used at all on kids and babies. Right. As a matter of fact, I mean there's UM a couple of of companies UM. Let's see Young Living. UM has a like a series of essential oils that they

recommend for different stages of pregnancy. Hopewell has a whole baby art for UM for your child to use for things like teething or um ear infections, that kind of stuff. These are all the such A oils and the problem is some essential oils have been shown to actually potentially be harmful UM for women, for pregnant women, Like there's a whole class of essential oils that are UM that can produce sudden and heavy menstruation, which is not what

you want to do when you're pregnant. So those oils should not be marketed towards pregnant women who should not be using them, Like Rosemary is a really good example of that. It's actually used as an aborta fashion in Brazil and traditional medicine in Brazil because it can bring on heavy sudden menstruation. UM So there's there's a lot of reasons not to use these things, depending on your situation,

who you are. And the problem is is not not only that kind of marketing is being avoided, they're actually being aggressively mark getting toward women without proven results, but also without being proven as safe because they skate, you know, the the edges around f DA regulation. Yeah, or that. You know, there may be like one study that is sort of cherry picked and overstated. Um, I know that in this article, it's mentioned a two thousand eight study

about lemon oil, uh and the effects on mood. And in that study, they you know, the subjects did say that their mood improved. But then the scientists were like, well, your actual biological markers UM on stress and mood isn't really changing. So is it the placebo effect that's going on here? Which I mean the yeah, and that's that's fine.

The placebo effect is fine, Chuck. It's just that, um, if you're not treating something else, or you're not you're not using something else to actually treat a problem, like lemon oil improving your mood, that's who cares. But if you're if you're using something that's actually harmful, then that that is problematic. And and what you were just talking about also about how you could just cherry pick a study.

That's essentially what we were doing towards the beginning of this podcast when we were saying, there are some studies that have shown that it's you know, these definitely do have anti microbial and anti fungal properties, so maybe we'll end up seeing them as like you know, aerosolized disinfectants spray in the future. That's really close to what some

of these companies are doing. But instead these companies are actually selling these things and saying here, drink this or take this or use this um based on these cherry pick studies. Yeah, and I know the company Tera T E A T E r R A UM. They've come under fire. They're one of the giants of the industry. In two thousand fourteen, they got a big warning from the f d A about crossing that line into making

medical claims. And they're like, you know, you're you're basically touting yourself as a as a pharmaceutical um and you you're not bal Yeah. So so a really good example of this is UM some some essential oils. There are studies out there that have shown that they may have anti viral properties, right like how clove oil has anti bacterial and antifungal properties. Some some essential oils are showing

the possibility of being anti viral as well. So then those essential oils will be taken by a company like Young Living or um Doughtera and marketed as a cure for ebola or coronavirus. That's a big problem. That's a huge leap that's totally unfounded, and that people really should not be using rather than say seeking medical attention, because you have to. You have to assume that somebody who is turning to essential oils to cure their ebola is probably doing so because they don't want to to use

Western medicine. In the problem is is western medicine is one of the few, if only courses of treatment that has been shown to be able to take on a botla um and certainly not something like clove oil. So that's really again, I don't know if I'm getting this across or not. That's problematic. Same with UM using marketing essential oils to cure things like and again we're using the word cure here, Parkinson's disease, autism, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, insomnia,

maybe insomnia, heart disease, PTSD, dementia, MS, UH, tetanus. All these things have been marketed to be curable by certain kinds or combinations of essential oil, and there's just not science to fully back that up or even come close to backing that up right now, right, And but that's not to say that you can't use certain essential oils to help with UH nausea because of your cancer treatments

or something like that. Yeah, Or apparently lavender also is good with UM helping curtail UM agitation and aggression in dementia patients, which is great because those are really tough to treat UM pharmaceutically. So there is stuff that it can do. It's just it can't cure a bowla like, stop and think for a second. It can't clove oil can't cure a bowl. I'm sorry. Maybe if you take a bowl of virus and put in a peatree dish

and put a drop of clove oil on it. Then, yes, I would not bet you a single scent that that that clove oil wouldn't kill the bowl of IRUs. I'm sure, but that's not how our bodies work inside. So stop and think for a second. If you actually are walking around believing that clove oil cures a bowla stop for a second and just do me that favor. Just stop, that's what you're saying. Just stop and think. Don't forget. The second part is very important. Oh see, I usually

just stop. That's not good. Thank you for letting me go off there, chump. Regardless, this is a big industry and the market is is booming and growing. It's expected to reach seven point three billion uh in just the next three or four years. And that's up from about four and a half billion just last year in two thousand nineteen. And they're looking by uh fourteen billion dollar industry. Yeah, big money. It is big money. So you got anything else?

I got nothing else. I've said my piece too. So since we don't have anything else about essential oils, everybody, it's time, of course for listener mail. I'm gonna call this fellow bruck sist. Hey, guys, just listen to your episode about brucks is. Um, I'm myself grind teeth like a champ. But I got really excited when I heard that Chuck and I have the same mouth. I just went to the Orthodon us in the list of atrocities inside my mouth could take up a stuff episode. So, Chuck,

I feel your pain. I have a cross by a weird underbite. I feel like my lower job belongs in a different mouth, just like you. I left the orthod honest feeling like a freak of nature. Uh, And hearing that one of my all time favorite personalities has the exact same diagnosis made me feel less pitiful. Eventually, I'll have that horrible jaw breaking surgery and the plan was to recover with cheeseburger smoothies and stuff. You should know, Marathon. Now it'll mean a whole lot more. And that is

from Erica. Mccaren's from Memphis, Tennessee. And Erica with my family is from Memphis, so you might be my sister from another mother. That's right, that's great, that's a good one. Thanks a lot, Erica. I'm glad Chuck could make you feel a little better about things, because that's what Chuck does best. Huh. Who's gonna make me feel better me okay? Or one of Emily's rooms. Phrase will help too. You need to get those things out of the bathroom and

get them more involved into your life, Chuck. They're dude, I'm constantly being slathered in tinctured and poulticed and dipity. Dude, I'm a guinea pig. Nice. That's a pretty pleasant thing to be a guinea pig for. I have to say I agreed. Well, if you want to get in touch with this like did Eric, that's right, Erica. I just want to make sure you knew you still too. Thanks again, Erica. You can send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a

production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.