Thursday, September 26, 2013

More Misinformation From the MLM Realm

There is a blog by a rep from one of the Multi-level marketers of essential oils that some of us keep an eye on.  My friend Gretchen from Adirondack Aromatherapy sent me a link to another one of her outrageous posts again and I just have to put some REASON and TRUTH out there.  Really, it IS true that with all the information in the world at our fingertips (literally) there is no excuse for stupidity.  Being stupid for most people in this day and age is a choice.

Here is the blogpost:  http://scentsable-living.com/2012/04/26/essential-oils-not-all-created-equal/

Take a few moments to read it for your self before you continue with my blogpost, or better yet, open it in another window so you can refer back to it.

First of all, I find it interesting that she would choose Clove to do her little comparison.  Clove is one of the strongest skin sensitizers there is in aromatherapy.  So, yes, you want to be extremely careful should you decide to use this oil.  It has a VERY high phenol (eugenol) content and may cause burning on your skin (and certainly your digestive tract) if it isn't HIGHLY diluted!  If you look at the Young Living website they recommend ONE drop in FOUR ounces of vegetable oil for internal use.  This is WAY diluted. 

The problem bottle in the picture she has up is with the Young Living bottle not the Aura Cacia bottle.  Why?  Essential oils are not nutritional supplements, for one thing.  For another thing, it is ILLEGAL to prescribe essential oils for internal use in the United States.  Even in France where you CAN obtain aromatherapy products compounded for internal medicinal use it's illegal to do so unless you have formal medical/pharmaceutical training AND formal aromatherapy training.  I'm talking clinical training and not a weekend seminar over at Young Living.  Aura Cacia is protecting the consumer from misuse and protecting themselves from lawsuits from ill informed consumers.  Essential oils are natural but it's still chemicals.  Essential oils are EXTREMELY concentrated!  In fact, if you look through some of her other posts, she has one where she puts a drop of lemon oil on a Styrofoam cup to show how YL oils destroy petrochemicals in the body.  WHAT?  Little does she realize that she is actually proving what powerful SOLVENTS they are.  Not only will they eat through a Styrofoam cup but also corneas and mucous membranes.

She starts off talking about how they used essential oils in biblical times.  Nope.  No stills.  What they were using were infused herbal oils.  Don't interpret the word "oils" as essential oils. 

She also says that if the plant is edible then the oil should be too.  There are MANY problems with this theory.  If you distill a plant for the essential oil you are not distilling all the components of the plant, just volatile oil.  You may be boiling away another constituent that was there to protect you from the damaging effects of the essential oil.  It takes dozens of roses to make one drop of rose essential oil, so ingesting one drop of rose oil is equivalent to eating three dozen roses.  Now a little rose flavoring is nice but you don't want to eat a pound of them.  And when you start talking about oils with more toxic components,like sage, you are actually concentrating the dangerous parts of the plant.  A little sage in your stuffing is harmless, but ingesting a drop of sage essential oil a day is endangering your life.  I'm allergic to dill.  If I eat food with dill on it I become violently ill, and have even passed out once.  I didn't used to be allergic to dill.  I LOVE dill.  This happened in my 30's out of nowhere after years of ingesting this delicious herb.  Somehow, my body became sensitized to it.  This can happen with ANY substance, natural or not.  If you are ingesting essential oils or applying them undiluted to your skin you may be fast tracking this process and you never know when the reaction will occur.

There is no such thing as Therapeutic grade.  There is no agency that decides if an oil is "therapeutic" grade.  Most reputable suppliers test their oils.  Honestly, they can't test for purity-they can only analyze the chemical constituents to make sure there are no pesticides or to determine if there is a really unusually high level of a certain component.  Let's take Lavender as an example.  One of the relaxing chemicals in Lavender is Linalool.  You can add artificial linalool to an oil and a chemist won't know it's synthetic.  But if they get a Lavender with 80% Linalool content then they will know something's wrong because that's WAY too high.  And yes, Young Living has had oils tested that turned out to have synthetics in it.  The fact is, that unless Gary Young is standing there at every distillation and personally overseeing every single step of every of every single distillation and every single step of bottling and so forth and so on................even he can't be 100% sure that 100% of his oils are 100% pure.  That's a fact.

I have been looking around on the Young Living website and I saw that their Valor blend is presented as a blend of pure essential oils yet if you look at the list of ingredients you'll see that it comes in a base of almond oil.  Well, that doesn't sound pure to me.  Then if you look at the directions for using it it recommends diffusing it for an hour.  So I should put almond oil in my diffuser and light a CANDLE under it?  Really?  Fire under oil...............

I read through some of her blogposts and she has a post up suggesting using very lightly diluted lavender oil in your dogs ears to loosen earwax.  Infused calendula oil would work better and it won't eat your dogs ear drums.

I have left comments on her blog several times.  She moderates them and she won't post any of them that are not in line with her corporate training.  That's convenient.

Don't buy into the hype from Young Living and Do Terra.  There's nothing wrong with their oils and I do believe they have high standards but their business tactics are sleazy at best.  At worst they are robbing people of their hard earned money with outright lies.  And they do harm to the entire aromatherapy community.  Not only do they trash the many MANY reputable producers and suppliers of essential oils, but they also have the nerve to treat people like me like charlatans merely because we want others to share our joy of these oils without doing harm.

9 comments:

Donna said...

I tried to use your link but it has been removed.. I was really hoping to read it and agree with all you've said!

Anonymous said...

same here :/

Jackie said...

That blog has been removed now. Someone had posted a comment that they were turning her into the FDA so maybe they did.

Amy said...

Question, why in the world would you want to use a heated difffuser? When oils are heated you loose the quality and purity of that oil. Cold air diffusers are what she is probably talking about. What a lot of you are not aware of is that companies like mine (Simply Aroma, YL, DT) educate and encourage education on each of their advocates.

Moonbeam said...

Hi, I just found your blog and I am enjoying all the information on it. I signed on a few months ago as a YL distributor in order to get the oils "wholesale". I did it without researching - so shame on me!

I am going to school at the American College for Health Services in the fall with a double major in Aromatherapy and Herbalism. There were some practices my upline and her upline are doing that I was feeling very uncomfortable with - neat oils and ingesting without being monitored by a licensed aromatherapist or ND. Instinctively this feels very dangerous to me, although I HAVE used a few oils neat now and then.

I have heard all the lines "you are paying for quality", no one else has pure, safe oils, etc. The last one just this morning is Young Living has the largest lavender fields in the world and how one of the chemists has tested several oils and they were found to be synthetic, etc. (I will post the quote below this and would love your feedback) but they are only listed as Brand A, Brand B, Brand C, etc. No companies are listed to show which companies are selling those oils. Maybe that is true- the oils and the lavender fields - I don't know. But I have NEVER believed they were the only company that sells quality oils and I just couldn't swallow a lot of what others were saying and doing on the private fb page. One of the comments in response to the post about the oils was "I don't even CARE what brands they are - YL is the best!" I am not a blind follower and reading that just made me feel weird. WHY wouldn't you want to know what brands were being tested - if they were being tested AT ALL?? Just because this person says so? Just because there is a neat little chart created to show the "test"?? It all makes me VERY uncomfortable.

Because I DO want to practice as an Aromatherapist, I am worried about how their dangerous practices will affect in the future those of us who are going to school to become knowledgeable about oils and the science behind it and become licensed. This could eventually prevent those who COULD be helped with oils from seeking that help in the future; it could mean making it hard to get oils in the future for licensed aromatherapists. It could mean impossible regulations for self-employed Holistic Health Practitioners to be able to meet.

I did not sign on to YL to make a business, but I wanted to learn more about how to use essential oils and believed that this was a safe way to do so. I am very, very disturbed by many of the practices - especially for my friend who is doing things that I am afraid are going to hurt her permanently in the future. It is an awkward situation because you can't speak ill of YL or Gary Young without getting your head bit off or being given an icy shoulder. =(

Anyway, I am doing my research now and I'm glad I found your blog. I DO wish you would include links to back up your statements so they are truly, truly taken seriously and average everyday people just looking for help to feel better, or to maintain good health can read the source material for themselves. Thanks again for your research into all of this!

Moonbeam said...

Here is the post from this morning. I can't get the chart to post because it is an image, but would be happy to send it to you via email. Thanks for your feedback!

DID YOU KNOW...Lavender is one of the most commonly-used essential oils around the world. Because the demand for lavender far exceeds the supply, Lavender essential oil is one of the most adulterated. Young Living has 2,300 acres of lavender farmland, where we grow and distill, pure, therapeutic-grade Lavender essential oil. It is the largest lavender farm in the world.
---------------------------
Using GC and GCMS to Investigate the Quality of Different Brands of Lavender by Seed to Seal - Dr. Cole Woolley, PhD

"One technical strength that makes Young Living the “World Leader in Essential Oils” is experienced research scientists who know how to operate analytical instrumentation and interpret the results. We have five research scientists with a combined 180 years of analytical chemistry experience. At Young Living we routinely run GC and GCMS tests on different brands of essential oils (sold by direct sales, retail sales, and internet sales) to examine quality trends. The routine testing of other brands helps demonstrate our Seed to Seal difference.

During routine testing I’ve found several ways that other essential oil brands have manipulated their products. Some brands manipulate “single” essential oils by adding another essential oil to enhance their aroma - I classify these as Manipulated Grade Oils. I’ve uncovered examples of synthetic chemicals added to some brands of essential oils to improve their aroma - I classify these as Perfume Grade Oils. I also discovered some essential oil brands that are totally synthetic (made in a chemical factory) - I classify these as Synthetic Grade Oils.

In this example, seven different brands of essential oil (sourced from internet, direct sales, and retail sales) labeled as “lavender” were tested by GC. I compared the quality of these brands with the ISO 3515 standard for “true French lavender”. For simplicity I’ve included just two biomarker components of lavender: linalyl acetate and linalool. Three of the lavender oil brands did not pass the required percentage range for these two components (marked in RED). Five out of seven brands failed the ISO 3515 standards based on other GC test components.

These GC test results demonstrate that the quality of true lavender essential oil cannot be determined merely by the look and color of the label, or by the marketing story posted on the internet, or even by its “flowery” aroma."


Jackie said...

My biggest fear with the misuse of essential oils, especially with the oily Moms using undiluted oils constantly on their kids, is we are going to have an entire generation of people sensitized to essential oils.

Anonymous said...

Not all people follow the tactics that this person was posting. I am proud to say that I am a doTERRA Wellness Advocate and the first rules of oils are: dilute, less is more, and never put them in orifices. Yes, I do ingest oils. doTERRA follows the French method of Aromatherapy and ingesting a unadulterated oil in moderation is considered safe. I believe choosing to ingest an oil is a personal choice. I would think if you load up a glass with 10 drops of oil, you are asking for something bad to happen. One drop in a bottle does not eat away your stomach lining. There is no scientific proof stating that ingesting is proven to be unsafe.
I see some of the things posted by others in what you refer to as a MLM company. At times I just shake my head. Some people choose to ignore safety and follow "recipes" they find online and I cringe. If something on Pinterest tells you to put 90 drops of oil in a 5ml roller with 10 drops fractionated coconut oil, a warning should be going off in your head. I teach classes every week and I spend the first 15 minutes of each class covering safety with a heavy concentration on proper dilution that is recommended by Tisserand. I pride myself on my knowledge and safety that I have. I have probably spent more hours learning safety, oils, chemistry of oils and distillation processes than many people who went to school for it. I was terrified to hurt others or myself with the oils.
I take a personal responsibility to educate anyone interested in being a wellness advocate to make sure they are not putting outrageous suggestions out there and hurting people. I even have people come to my classes that choose not to use doTERRA. I still welcome them because I want them to walk away educated and understanding dilution.

Jackie said...

About the heated diffusers-that isn't correct because the oils are created using much higher heat. I do find the ultrasonic nebulizers more efficient, however, and I like that there is no fire involved.

You can google "eye drops with essential oils" and more of these type of articles come up.

If YL and DT encourage real education among their reps then they need to crack down. Many threaten their downlines if they join safety groups or seek education outside of the company.