Stuff You Should Know - Essential Oils: Nature's Cure?

Episode Date: July 9, 2020

Essential oils are from plants and they can help the human body in a lot of ways. There are also many false medical claims. Learn all the ins and outs today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello friends, we have a book coming out finally, and it is awesome. You're gonna make me say the title again? Yeah. Fine.

It's Stuff You Should Know, Colin, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. And get this Chuck, you don't have to wait to order until the book comes out. You can do what we in the book biz call pre-ordering it. And then when it does come out, you'll be the first to get it, or among the first. Well, and not only that, you get a pre-order gift.

You get this cool custom poster from the illustrator of the book, Carly Monardo, 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, Colin, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. And then after you do, you can go on over to StuffYouShouldReadBooks.com and upload your receipt and get that pre-order poster.

So thank you in advance for everybody who is pre-ordering. That means quite a bit to us, and we appreciate you. StuffYouShouldReadBooks.com, pre-order now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Joshua Joshy Clark, and there's Charles W.

Charles Chuck Wayne, Chuck Wayne, Chwayne Bryant, and Jerry the J-Dog Rowland is floating around somewhere in the ether. So this is Stuff You Should Know, everybody. Hi. Hi. This is the episode I'm nervous about. Why?

Because of Emily. Oh, well, what's, I mean, why? Oh, because she knows so much about it, she's gonna be like, you got this wrong, that wrong. Not so much getting it wrong, just, you know, it's one of these, it's close to her heart, so I feel like I gotta do right by it. Oh, I'm sure you will.

Like I usually don't care at all about anything we ever talk about. Geez. But this one I care about. You're like a nihilist like Flea. Hey, by the way, we should mention, we got a book coming out. Yeah, we do, which not only do we have a book coming out,

we have a pre-order gift that's ready to go now too, I think. We have a pre-order gift, which is a custom poster written by us and designed by Carly, our amazing illustrator for the book. Yeah, that's right. 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 stuffyoushouldreadbooks.com. So great. And then it looks great, the webpage 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 you should know site, it's great. We're working on that too, though. We are, we are. But so here's the deal, you can go anywhere and pre-order the book now and then come, I think sometime in, is it October, November, Chuck? When the pre-order gifts are coming?

No, 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, stuffyoushouldreadbooks.com, you can upload an image of your receipt and they'll say, oh, thank you for pre-ordering the book.

Here is your pre-order gift and you can hang it in your room next to the torn out posters from Tiger Beat Magazine. Wouldn't it, Teen Beat? I don't think so, smart, smarty pants. Yeah, so we're gonna be mentioning this a lot because as John Hodgman told us, the secret is to A-B-C, A-B-P, always be plug-in.

That's what I know. Man, that is, it's gonna be on his headstone and there'll probably be a QR code on his headstone so he can buy his books. Oh man, that's a great idea. 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 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 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 100% sure exactly what the functions are of essential oils but they know that it's some form of communication. I mean, like scent is a form of communication in the plant world and the animal world and these communicate different things,

likely things like getaway cow, I don't want you near me and eating me. Instead, bring on the honeybee to help pollinate me. That's right and we'll get into what they have been used for and are used for but 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. Right, so we'll talk about all this. Let's get into also a big shout out to Julia Layton for helping us out with this one. Yeah, Julia's back in the rotation, very happy about that. Yep, for sure. So essential oils, you know what an essential oil is,

most people do 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, aldehydes and then on the hydrocarbon side,

they fall under one category called terpenes. If you have ever been in a drug education class and 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 list of emails some point. Someone said that we should not use the term marijuana anymore. Oh my gosh, why? And use the term cannabis because apparently the term marijuana was created as sort of a racist term to make it sound Oh wow.

Foreign south of the border. Wow. And evil, yeah. Wow. News to me, so we'll. It makes sense. Yeah, sure. Wow.

Okay, well we'll start calling it X Factor. Sweet or Urban. 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, isn't it? No, that was Fear Factor. I bet you anything that was an X Factor and I bet Joe Rogan had something to do with it.

He's like, we gotta come up with a good name for the spin off. So you were talking about, 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 great scent that you get from peppermint oil is the alcohol, menthol.

Right, and all of these different things, they're different kinds of compounds, 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 to 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 VOCs, volatile organic compounds, which are just a type of compound, usually, I guess carbon-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 evaporate. They have, 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, alcohols 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 petals, whatever, and hit our olfactory senses through our nose, and we smell, but that's all it is. It's a compound that vaporizes very easily at low temperatures and spreads through the air. Yeah, and those little tiny droplets, they diffuse 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 old question, like if a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound? Like 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 will get it going. 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 Emily and I both and my daughter to just run our hands up one of those stalks.

Sure. And just rub our hands together and you 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 sidewalk. Because who knows who is walking by with what on their hands rubbing your food, basically.

Hey man, if you've got edibles in your front yard, then that's your fault. No, I'm saying, yeah, totally. They're up for grabs. But so you need like the public rosemary bush for people to walk by and smell, then you need like your headstache 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, okay, so volatile organic compounds, we've kind of gotten that across I think. And with essential oils, this is,

I think pretty essential to know. 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 3,000 different species of plants so far.

It's amazing. 300 of which, and we'll talk about this more later, but 300 of which have been shown to have some sort of biomedical properties, which is pretty important. But from all of these, they've realized there is a central player, right? Like what was the one that you called out?

Peppermint oils, menthol? Uh-huh. It's a type of alcohol. But if you just smell menthol, you're not like, 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. And that is what an essential oil 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 gonna talk about them in a minute, but there is a Swiss chemist Chuck 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 believed in five elements. The four elements were earth, wind, water, and fire. And then there was a fifth element that was elusive. It was the one that bound all the other elements together and just, it was the glue that bound reality and existence and the universe together. And so quintessential comes from quintessence,

meaning the fifth essence or the fifth element. And so quintessential was shortened eventually into essential oil, which was thought to be the purest, most 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. Williams.

They could open for earth, wind, and fire and water. For sure, yep. And they would have done the soundtrack to the fifth element, whatever. So if we go back in time, if we hop in the old way back machine, boy, we haven't been in this thing for a while. No, let's hear it.

Kick it, Jerry. It's fired up. It smells a little musty. I don't think we've been in this thing since in 2020, Abby. Well, 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 moldy. That was true.

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. The trades between, 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 trade to these sort of magical oils

as far as they were concerned. We know it's not magic now. But back then, this was early medicine, you know? For sure, yeah. And I mean, it was used in traditional Chinese medicine, still is. It spread from Egypt to the Mediterranean, to the Greeks to the Romans, over to the Persians

who figured out how to distill ethyl alcohol from sugar, which would become a really big component in extracting essential oils from plants. It was a huge innovation. And then that trickled over to Europe in the Middle Ages and that is where we join up with our friend Paracelsus, that Swiss chemist whose birth name was Philippus Theophrastus ariolis bombastus von Hohenheim.

Oh man, that's amazing. Isn't that amazing? Just von Hohenheim gets him a statue in my mind, you know? Yeah, 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 tumors 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 the compositions were revealed in the 19th century. And then of course, you know, the 20th 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, 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. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen

so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So, I want to say something, Chuck, with extraction. One of the reasons why essential oils are so expensive, and if you get really good essential oil, you're going to pay a lot for it.

I saw, if you bought a liter, it seems like a lot of rose oil, but if you're going to turn around and sell it in smaller amounts to other people, you'd probably buy a liter. And I'm not sure if you're going to buy a liter because you're going to have to pay a lot for it. But if you're going to buy a liter,

to people, you'd probably buy a liter. If you have $21,000 to cough up for a single liter of rose oil. And the reason why essential oils are so expensive is because it takes so much plant material to get that essence from it, right? So with roses in particular, you can expect to need about five metric tons

of rose petals, just to get a kilogram of rose oil, 3,000 lemons to get a kilogram of lemon oil, and something like 440 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? 600 pounds of rose petals for one ounce of essential oil, or 40 to 60 rose buds for a single drop

of rose auto essential oil, isn't that amazing? That's amazing, I love stuff like that. Essential oils are my favorite new thing. No, it's cool, but it's also, sustainability is an issue because of that. Oh yeah. They use the most plant material to 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 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 Emily's all about essential oils for sure, but she's also gotten much more into using the whole herb and the whole plant, and trying to use 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 pretty impressive to see, and inspiring to see someone learning so much, midlife, something brand new, like going back to school, basically. Yeah, I can actually attest this is not a paid plug,

everybody chucked, does not give me money for these. We got some soaps and some room sprays, I think I told you, from Emily, from her company, and we actually sent some to some friends, and within a couple of weeks, they were asking- They were dead. 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 sent them. Not even like we're out, where'd you guys get this? It was, we're halfway through, we wanna make sure we can get some more. So Emily's making the good stuff for sure.

That's right, and go to loveyourmama.com and check it out. She's a small business, and they're all hurting right now, so we always appreciate the business. Yup. So extraction, there have been a lot of different methods over the years, as Emily told me, she's like, 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. Because that would be wonderful. She does say enflourage, Okay, that's good. 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, and you can probably go like pay $5 to watch them dress up in old-timey clothes and stuff, and do this, but you would get a tallow and lard mixture

and spread it out on a flat surface, and then the first thing you have to do with any of these is you gotta crush up the plants really well, and you coat it with these crushed up plants, and the fat absorbs these VOCs, takes a few days, then you filter out those plant parts, 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, 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. Oh yeah. That's pretty cool. And that, I mean, that's great. That seems very ancient indeed.

And there's another variation of it called maceration, hot fat, which is 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 because like a macerated oil is basically an infused oil. So you use a carrier oil now. Yeah, my understanding or my familiarity with maceration is when you make a shrub, a vinegar shrub to put in cocktails or whatever, the 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 mechanical expression, another good band name. And this is like citrus rinds.

Like all those great essential oils that you get from an orange peel or a lemon peel. And you cold press this stuff and just extract those oils with good old fashioned elbow grease. This is what Lucille Ball was doing to those grapes in 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 the, it kind of floats like oil on top of the drink. When you get it just right, it is very satisfying agreed. Or to, 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 sprayed 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 garbage disposal and you 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 cheesecloth 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 skewer, 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. Oh, wow. And the only thing that's coming out is 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 lemon's moose knuckle. What do you think about that? That or the nip, make your choice. Oh, what else do we have? Well, Emily is a steam distiller, you know, she's got a still and she uses a steam distillation process,

which is very cool to see. So with steam distillation, it's basically the same thing that you would use to make 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 grate

or a grid or something. 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 a spigot 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 to pre-mash the, or I guess pre-extract the essential oils. So you'll take say, I saw a demonstration using this ultrasound wand basically,

and they just had a cup of water and like hops that they'd mashed up some hops. And they just stuck the ultrasound wand in the water and it 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 one more essential oil comes out. So you can actually get more essential oil out of the plant and it takes lower temperature steam to lift that essential oil out. So there's no thermal degradation

or 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 butt? Of course. Okay.

That's how they start every single video in Germany. Oh boy. What is a 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 to punch about. Yeah, Guten Tag, everyone.

Yeah. Do you know what that means? It means this wand has not been up anybody's butt. That's right, Guten Tag. So the uses of essential oils, depending on who you ask, and we'll get into the controversies of how they're marketed because there are some for sure. Yeah, a couple.

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. No, they still say that. Do they? Yeah, it's bad. But some of the legit uses of essential oils,

they can be preservative, they can be a flavoring agent. They are certainly used as scent agents and all kinds of things. Emily makes her own insect repellent, mosquito repellent. What does she use, like citronella? Geez, I should know this because I spray it all over my body like every night. Yeah, you should.

I don't know, I just trust her that she's doing it right. It can be a fungocidal, herbicidal, and pesticidal agent for crops. And then there's aromatherapy, which we'll get into in a few minutes as well. Yeah, and all of those will make a lot more sense in a second once we talk about the actual evidence-based research into what kind of biomedical properties

essential oils have. One of the things that we found like pretty early on, and we should say there's hundreds of essential oils that are used for aromatherapy or for industrial purposes, and we really have studied just a handful of them. But the ones that we have studied have turned up some pretty interesting results. Like we 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 Rocky on Draco eventually. Yeah, tea tree oil is something we use a lot in our house as well to like dry out a pimple, let's say,

or to heal something, you know, something like on your skin. It's very good for skin treatments. What else here? I mean, and we should mention too, the reason people are turning to these is because there's a big movement, and there always has been, but it seems like it's really gained steam

in the last decade of people trying to find all natural alternatives to synthetic treatments. Sure, which is laudable and commendable. 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 too. But one of the things that they're figuring out

about essential oil, and they, or scientists I should say, is that because they have antifungal properties and antimicrobial properties, 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 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, Emily makes room sprays, and those I don't think are so much for the disinfectant as just a good 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? After you poop. Oh, I gotcha. Another cool thing is, is increasingly there is drug resistance among infectious microorganisms.

And so that has 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 talking about MRSA here, right? So one of the problems with MRSA is that it's resistant to the drugs we have.

So 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 MRSA because it can kill us and we can't treat it. They're finding that the essential oil has properties that MRSA can't develop a resistance to. So not only can it kill MRSA,

we would expect that MRSA's not eventually going to evolve to be resistant to these essential oils as well. Yeah, and I mean, maybe now would be a good time to take that next break because we're gonna dive into aromatherapy and that's the one area. Like you said, they've done, I wouldn't say a lot, but they're doing more and more studies

on a handful of essential oils in their uses, but aromatherapy 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 wanna say we're talking about individual studies

that are basically the first steps in a scientific understanding of the properties, the biomedical properties of essential oils. So it's all like G-Wiz and everything, but it's not settled by any stretch of the imagination. We're still just beginning to investigate this stuff. So bear that in mind as well. We're gonna dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Oh, stuff you should know. All right, Chuck, we're back. That's right, to talk about aromatherapy.

And this is when you get into the different applications for essential oils. There in Emily told me to make sure I mentioned that there is, 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 cleaner to combat viruses. 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, just don't do that. It's a good PSA. Yeah, it's much better in a tincture maybe or a topical thing or in this case,

we're talking about aromatherapy, which is breathing stuff in either through your skin or into your mouth and lungs. Yeah, but either way, apparently, however you ingest it like that through your lungs or your nose or mouth, your olfactory center is initiated and it starts doing all sorts of different things

depending on what volatile organic compounds are hitting it, right? And one I found that was a really good example of my favorite smell of all time, lavender. And lavender through some studies, isn't it great? Through some studies, lavender has been shown to prevent serotonin reuptake. They've shown what kind of neurochemical mechanisms

lavender affects our brains through. And one of them is it prevents serotonin transporters from doing their job. Once a serotonin transporter gets a hold 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 of serotonin.

Well, lavender, or specifically I think lavenderal, which is a terpene from lavender, prevents the serotonin from taking up, or the serotonin transporter from taking up that serotonin. That's step one. And then another one is that it's an NDMA receptor antagonist which puts it in the same class of chemicals,

dissociative chemicals as ketamine. So 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 aromatherapy does have therapeutic effects. And lavender in particular now we understand how. Now, do you mean SSRI, potential like a natural SSRI?

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 gonna be able to just take lavender pills

as like a mood enhancer or to combat depression. It's just not pronounced enough for that. It could conceivably open a door to some inquiry or some investigation that could lead to new synthetic compounds based on what we find. But just taking like lavender is not going to cure your depression from anything I've seen.

Yeah, and I think, I mean, it depends on who you're talking to, some people might advocate for a complete replacement of a practitioner of TCM, let's say, might be like, no man, don't take any of these 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 with things like lavender or eucalyptus

or cedarwood 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 caveats are checked or else it's harmful. Yeah, well, let's talk about some of these 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 spraying it on your pillow. Eucalyptus is a big one for congestion,

for burns, for cold sores, arthritis even. Rose is a big one for anxiety. And a lot of these too have to do with skin things like eczema or dandruff. Dandruff or rosacea and stuff like that. And all of these you should say, these are all ones that the essential oil industry says that not that science necessarily backs up, right?

Well, that's what I meant by purported health benefits. Okay, gotcha, I gotcha. Yeah. I didn't pick up on that. Or if you play 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 and craft different things with them to help yourself. Oh, that's neat. Do they have X factor in it in the game? No. I got bit by a rattlesnake the other day in the game and I said, you've been poisoned. You might wanna go find some medicinal herbs

and 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. 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. Well, it's different. I don't think it counts. Right.

It's not real. As far as we know, it's not real. So some of these oils have been studied to a certain degree and I like the way that Julia puts this, studied enough to confirm or strongly suggest a positive association between oil and a health outcome. But it's tough because the, and we'll get to the FDA part,

but all these plants are different and when you're talking about these scientific studies, that's all built on consistency of the product that you're testing. Yeah, replication. Yeah, and because these are plants, it's tough, but where depends on where the plant grows and what month you pick it

and how it was distilled. There's so many X factors. Nice one. Yeah, that kind of confounds things, right? It does. And I mean, apparently depending on the time of day, the plant might be producing different levels or types of essential oil.

And because no one has said, this is the chemical compound of, or the chemical recipe of 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 very, it's definitely like the Wild West right now. Like people are getting bit by rattlesnakes level Wild West. Yeah, and it's important because it's not regulated by the FDA right now. 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 that may not have been peer reviewed, that may have had a very small sample size,

that may have been virtually made up, but that support your claim, that say things like, you know, Roman chamomile is good for heart health or something like that. You could put that on the label. But if you say something like, Roman chamomile helps stave off heart disease,

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 all over the place. And a lot of them come in the form of multi-level marketing or pyramid schemes.

Like I think young living is a really good example of that where you can find young living products in your neighbor's garage or on Twitter or Instagram and not necessarily in a store. And so it makes it very difficult because it's decentralized. 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 recourse 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, that was one of them. Yeah, and this is where we get to like, this is why it's actually problematic.

Yeah, I mean, you know, anytime that you're, 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 a couple of companies. Let's see, Young Living has like a series of essential oils that they recommend for different stages of pregnancy. Hopewell has a whole baby chart for your child to use for things like teething or ear infections, that kind of stuff.

These are all essential oils. And the problem is is some essential oils have been shown to actually potentially be harmful for women, for pregnant women. Like there's a whole class of essential oils that are, that can produce sudden and heavy menstruation, which is not what you wanna do when you're pregnant. So those oils should not be marketed

toward pregnant women who should not be using them. Like rosemary is a really good example of that. It's actually used as an aborto fashion in Brazil, in traditional medicine in Brazil, because it can bring on heavy sudden menstruation. So there's a lot of reasons not to use these things depending on your situation, who you are. And the problem is not only that kind of marketing

is being avoided, they're actually being aggressively marketed toward women without proven results, but also without being proven as safe because they skate the edges around FDA regulation. Yeah, or that there may be like one study that is sort of cherry picked and overstated. I know that in this article, it's mentioned a 2008 study about lemon oil

and the effects on mood. And in that study, the subjects did say that their mood improved, but then the scientists were like, well, your actual biological markers on stress and mood isn't really changing. So is it the placebo effect that's going on here? Which I mean, that's fine. They said they felt better.

Yeah, and that's fine. The placebo effect is fine, Chuck. It's just that if you're not treating something else, or you're not using something else to actually treat a problem, like lemon oil improving your mood, who cares? But if you're using something that's actually harmful, then that is problematic.

And what you were just talking about also about how you could just cherry pick a study, that's essentially what we were doing toward the beginning of this podcast. When we were saying there are some studies that have shown that these definitely do have antimicrobial and antifungal properties. So maybe we'll end up seeing them

as like aerosolized disinfectant 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 based on these cherry pick studies. Yeah, and I know the company Terra, T-E-R-R-A, they've come under fire. They're one of the giants of the industry.

In 2014, they got a big warning from the FDA about crossing that line into making medical claims. And they're like, you're basically touting yourself as a pharmaceutical and you're not, basically. Yeah, so a really good example of this is some essential oils, there are studies out there that have shown that they may have antiviral properties. Like how clove oil has antibacterial

and antifungal properties. Some essential oils are showing the possibility of being antiviral as well. So then those essential oils will be taken by a company like Young Living or doTERRA 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 assume that somebody who is turning to essential oils to cure their Ebola is probably doing so because they don't want to use Western medicine. 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 Ebola. 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 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, 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, but that's not to say that you can't use certain essential oils to help with nausea because of your cancer treatments or something like that.

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

and put a drop of clove oil on it, then yes, I would not bet you a single scent that clove oil wouldn't kill the Ebola virus. 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 Ebola, stop for a second and just do me that favor.

Just stop, is that what you're saying? Just stop and think. Don't forget the second part, it's very important. Oh, see, I usually just stop, that's not good. Thank you for letting me go off there, Chuck. Regardless, this is a big industry and the market is booming and growing. It's expected to reach 7.3 billion

in just the next three or four years and that's up from about four and a half billion just last year in 2019. And they're looking by 2026, $14 billion industry. Yeah. Big money. It is big money. So you got anything else?

I got nothing else. Well, 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 Bruxist. Hey guys, just listening to your episode about Bruxism, I myself grind teeth like a champ

but I got really excited when I heard that Chuck and I have the same mouth. Just went to the orthodontist and the list of atrocities inside my mouth could take up a short stuff episode. So Chuck, I feel your pain. I have a cross bite, a weird underbite. I feel like my lower jaw belongs in a different mouth

just like you. I left the orthodontist feeling like a freak of nature 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 McCarrens from Memphis, Tennessee and Erica, my family is from Memphis. So you might be my sister from another mother. That's right. That's great. That was a good one. Thanks a lot, Erica. I'm glad Chuck can make you feel a little better about things

because that's what Chuck does best, huh? Who's gonna make me feel better? Me. Yeah, okay. Or one of Emily's room sprays will help too. You need to get those things out of the bathroom and get them more involved into your life, Chuck. They're, oh dude, I'm constantly being slathered

and tinctured and poulticed and I'm a guinea pig. Nice. That's a pretty pleasant thing to be a guinea pig for, I have to say. I agree. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like, did? Erica. That's right, Erica.

I just want to make sure you knew still too. Thanks again, Erica. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen

to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say.

Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.