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ASCP Esty Talk
Ep 335 – The Rogue Pharmacist: Seed Oils
00:17:34
Seed oils like sunflower and grapeseed are very common in cosmetics but they can go rancid easily and might not be so great for the skin. In this episode of The Rogue Pharmacist, we sit down with Ben to discuss the nature of seed oils and whether they...
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- [00:00]
Benjamin Knight Fuchs
Calling all forward thinking estheticians, it's time to redefine the art of skincare and embrace a revolutionary approach that begins with your clients. Skin Cell Health. I'm pharmacist Benjamin Knife Fuchs WELcoming you to Truth Treatment Systems where beauty begins. At the cell, we believe you're not just a beauty professional, you are a healthcare professional. You want to make a positive difference and you want to make a good living and we will help you do both. We're here to support your out of the box thinking and empower you to question traditional products, outdated formulations and old school ingredients. Imagine a world where solutions to the skin's enigmatic conditions lie just beyond the horizon. At Truth, we're not just a skincare brand. We're a movement that encourages you to explore better solutions and find that aha moment that changes the game. You are an artist and a healer of the skin and we're here to provide the canvas and the tools for you to create tailored protocols leaving generic ones in the past. Sign up now at truthtreatmentspro.com and receive two complimentary mineral rich electrolyte sheet masks. That's truthtreatmentspro.com where healthy skin is beautiful skin.
- [01:12]
Maggie Stasik
Hello and welcome to ASCP and the Rogue Pharmacist with Benjamin Knight Fuchs. In each episode we'll explore how internal and external factors can impact the skin. I'm Maggie Stasik, ASP's program director. And joining me is Ben Fuchs, skincare formulator and pharmacist. Hi, Ben.
- [01:28]
Benjamin Knight Fuchs
Hello, Maggie. Good to see you again.
- [01:29]
Maggie Stasik
Good to see you, Ben. We've heard seed oils like sunflower and grapeseed can go rancid easily and might not be so great for the skin, but they are everywhere. What's the deal? Are these oils helping or hurting?
- [01:41]
Benjamin Knight Fuchs
Well, here's the deal.
- [01:43]
If you know anything about biochemistry or chemistry, organic chemistry, you know there's a problem with seed oils and I've been talking about them for decades and I've never formulated with seed oils. I never, back then I didn't call them seed oils. I call them vegetable oils. Now they're called seed oils. And as a formulator, I can always tell by looking at an ingredient deck or ingredients or packaging if the company who's doing the products knows what they're doing. And one of the red flags for a, let's say a company that's not hip to how skin and products interact is a vegetable oils or what are called seed oils. I'll tell you what that is here In a second in a formulation B, if the packaging is clear, is in a clear bottle. Those are two red flags for me when I'm looking at a product to see how valuable the product is or if the company really understands skin and the interaction between skin and products. So first of all, what are seed oils?
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A seed is one of the most.
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Powerful things in nature. We take it for granted. But think about the planet. It all comes from seeds. An oak tree, right. Or a redwood tree in California. You see those redwood trees?
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Maggie Stasik
Yeah.
- [02:46]
Benjamin Knight Fuchs
That are like hundreds of hundreds of feet high. They all come from a seed. So a seed represents some serious, serious power on planet Earth. And one of the ways a seed gets its power is from oils. Oils are trapped sunlight. And what ends up happening is the sun interacts with plants, is where photosynthesis comes from. And then the end result of photosynthesis is sugars. And those sugars get converted into fats, what we call oils. The oil is going to be the energy for that seed as it, as it germinates. So seed is almost like a condensed form of energy that's asleep. And then you put water and you put sunlight and you put nutrients and then that sleeping substance, blossoms, blooms, germinates, they say. Have you ever seen that? What happens, how a flower plant comes out of a seed is pretty darn miraculous.
- [03:34]
Maggie Stasik
Yeah, yeah. Back in elementary school.
- [03:35]
Benjamin Knight Fuchs
Exactly. It's an amazing phenomena really when you think about it. The power that runs all that, the energy that runs the a machinery of growth is in the oils. So oils are super, super high energy. Now, seed is tiny, so you're not going to get a lot of oil from that seed. But gram for gram, compared to the size of the seed, that oil is like a, is like a nuclear explosion. It's like a powerful, powerful source of energy. And seed, it's, it's, you know, tiny, so you can't really see it. But if you were to conglomerate all that energy into a big bucket, you would have a lot of energy. And fat, as it turns out, has the most calories compared to carbohydrates and protein, gram for gram of any macronutrient. So oils are very powerful in nature, in nutrition, I should say in the world of nutrition, when something's very powerful, it's a double edged sword, you need the power. But when something's powerful, it's also unstable. And so instability is something you have to deal with in the world of nutrition, in the world of energy. And nothing exemplifies instability more than oils because there's Such dense sources of power and dense sources of energy. So the instability of an oil is what renders it problematic. When something's unstable, it has to be controlled. So in nature, in seed, you got a problem, you got this powerful source of energy, but it's unstable. And if it breaks down, you could have, I'll tell you what that means here in a second, you could have some issues. So nature has protected that oil one with a covering on the seed. And that's one way that nature protects the oil. But then there's also molecules within that oil that act to stabilize the oil. Vitamin E, for example. Wherever you find oil in nature, you'll find vitamin E, flavonoids and phytonutrients we call them. Those also have stabilizing effects. Antioxidants in general, like there's certain minerals like selenium and zinc that have protective properties for the oil. When you make an oil for a skincare product, you can't get any oil from a seed. There's not, you know, not even a drop. There's, you know, a fraction of a drop in a seed. So you've got to get a bunch of seeds together in order to get enough oil. And in order for that to occur, in order to extract that oil, you've got to use some pretty hardcore technology. Most of the time they're using solvents, they're using chemical solvents. So in order to extract the oil from a seed, you've got to use chemical solvents. That's problematic right there because some of these chemical solvents remain in the oil. It's hard to get all the, they try to get some of the solvent out of the oil or a lot of the solvent out of the oil, but some of it remains in the oil and solvents are very toxic. So right from the get go, even before you get into the oil, the problems with the oil, you've got chemical solvents.
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Now, it's true that there are other.
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Ways to extract oil. The safest way or the gentlest way is with cold pressing. But cold pressing is not really efficient. And so oils that are cold pressed tend to be very expensive. Skincare companies don't really use cold pressed oils. Most oils that are used in skincare products are extracted via solvent extraction. So right away you've got solvent. And when I say solvent, I'm talking things like benzene and hexane and these basically dry cleaning fluids. The way dry cleaning works is basically the same way solvency works. And when you dry clean your clothes, they're actually dissolving the dirt they're pulling. And dirt tends to partition into the oil phase of your clothes or of your face or anywhere else. So you have to use these kind of solvents to get rid of the dirt on your clothes. Dry cleaning fluid has a reputation for dry cleaning solutions have a reputation for being extremely toxic. Same with these solvents. So even before you get to the oils, you've got the problem, the solvents. And you're never going to know in your skincare product whether these oils have solvents that are residually remaining in the oil. So right away, even before you even talk about the oil, you've got the problem of the solvents. But then you got the oil itself. And as I said, oils are high energy. And what we call oil is really a blend of fatty acids. An oil, vegetable oil is kind of a, a catch all phrase or an umbrella term for a blend of fatty acids. Fatty acids come in a, in a spectrum of, we'll say sizes. You got short fatty acids, you got medium fatty acids, and you got long fatty acids. The long fatty acids can be especially problematic. And those are the ones that people consider to be good. And the oils that contain the long fatty acids are the ones that everybody's crazy about. And the oils that contain the long fatty acids are the ones that are used mostly in food. And cosmetic oils are degraded food oils. They're oils that can no longer be sold as food grade. Cosmetic grade is a less purified, a less pure grade of oil than a food grade, than a food grade oil. So by the time a cosmetic company buys their oils, they're already buying a degraded oil, and especially an oil that's, especially if it's an oil that's rich in long chain, they call them long chain fatty acids. You're going to run the risk of oils that are broken down. Use the term rancidity, which is another term for oxidation. So right from the get go, when a cosmetic company buys the oil, that oil is, tends to be too rancid to be used as food. So it's already broken down, it's already oxidized. So number one, you got the solvent problem, number two, you got the oxidation problem. That's even before the oil was processed. The great enemy of oils is heat. Heat really accelerates the breakdown of oils. And when the cosmetic company buys the oil which is already broken down, it's already rancid, it's already oxidized, then they heat it. That further breaks down the oil, further oxidizes the oil. And remember, the Worst offenders are the long chain fatty acid rich oils, which are the ones that everybody's using. Like you said, sunflower, safflower, corn, almond, and even the super fancy ones like grapeseed. And I heard some gal on a YouTube video, a naturopath, talking about how she loves raspberry seed oil. And these are these oils that sound exotic and sound really cool. And they are theoretically, when they're fresh, when they're unprocessed. But by the time raspberry seed or hazelnut oil or peanut oil or almond oil or safflower oil get to the factory, they're already broken down. Then they're heated, they're broken down even further. And remember the ones that are rich in the long chain fatty acids, and by the way, Omega 6 and Omega 3 are classic unstable long chain fatty acids. Those are the worst offenders. So then the oil's put in the skincare product, so it's broken down by the time the factory gets it. Then it's further broken down when it's heated. Then you put on your skin, it's already broken down, it's already oxidized. And I'll tell you why that's a problem here in a minute. Then it gets interacts with the sun, then it interacts with oxygen from the air. And of course the combination of sun is heat and oxygen from the air further oxidizes the oil. So by the time you put that oil on your skin, you are putting an oxidized, rancid, broken down oil on the skin. And on top of everything else, I'll tell you what the problem is. There's no skin benefit. You're not getting any health benefits from that. You're getting a softening of the stratum corneum. And because as we've talked about before, people have this, consumers tend to have this idea that if they can feel softness on the skin, something's happening. That's not true. When you feel that softness on the skin, all you're feeling is a soft, dead stratum, corneum and product. So nothing's happening. You're not getting any benefit from these oils. But here's what really becomes a problem. Oxidation is contagious. So when you put an oxidized product on your skin, you oxidize, Your skin oxidizes, it accelerates the aging process. And because oxidized fats, oxidized oils, are pro inflammatory, it increases the likelihood of inflammation. So you're not getting any benefit from the oil and rather you're having to deal with instead of Benefit, you're having to deal with toxic solvents. And on top of that, you're accelerating the aging in the skin and you're inducing inflammation because of the contagious nature of oxidation. So if you want to have that kind of soft feel on the skin, use a stable lipid fat. Ironically, even though in our culture we tend to think of vegetable oils as being all soft and gentle and healthy, for us that's not the case. Vegetable oils, when they're not fresh, when they're oxidized, when they're heated, when they're extracted via solvency, are problematic ingredients, pro aging ingredients and anti health ingredients. And by the way, while this is a problem for the skin, it's especially a problem internally. And this is one of the major reasons for our chronic degenerative disease health crisis is the ingestion of not only oils that are oxidized in a factory, but heated in the kitchen or in the restaurant. And one of the worst things you could ever do for health, longevity for, for the induction of chronic diseases like cancer and leaky gut, which leads to all kinds of other health challenges, is ingesting fried fats, which we all love, and french fries and pizza and cheeses and cooked any fat that's heated. I don't even know. They have these weird deep fried Snickers bars now and deep fried butter. Have you heard of deep fried butter? That's another one. So if you're going to use oils, make sure they're the stable oils. And ironically, the most stable oils are coconut oil, butter, and, believe it or not, lard. And that's one of the reasons why you're hearing now about beef tallow. Beef tallow, while it's not great for your skin, it's not really going to do much for your skin, as I think we've talked about beef tallow before, how poisons tend to partition in the fats and the hormones, the antibiotics and the toxins in the animal are going to be in the tallow. It's at least stable. It's not going to break down. The best kind of, if you want a lipid on the skin, a fat on the skin, the best is going to be coconut oil. Coconut oil is very stable. Coconut oil has a source, is a source of vitamin E, which is good for the skin, but it's not going to do much for your skin. And that's really the bottom line here. Yeah, you're going to have to deal with oxidation, which is contagious. Yeah, you're going to have to deal with solvents, toxic solvents. But the real issue is there's no benefit, there's no upside. So why does the skincare company do this? Any chemist knows that there's a problem with oils. And any a biochemist knows there's no benefit, no long term benefit to using oils. In fact, in the long run, if the oil is occlusive, it's going to suppress chemistry, it's going to suppress moisturization, it's going to be an anti moisturizer. So why do skincare companies do it? Because these oils are cheap. And the combination of inexpensiveness, cheapness and the perception that the consumer has with the idea that, oh, it feels like something's feels soft, so that means something's happening, makes oils ideal for skincare companies to use. And unfortunately, and this is a terrible thing to say because I'm in the skincare business, most of your companies don't care. And you can tell they don't care by looking at the ingredient deck. And if you see almond oil or safflower oil or corn oil or raspberry seed oil or hazelnut oil or peanut oil, that's a sign that a company just doesn't care. And it's really unfortunate. And as somebody in the business, it hurts my feelings. And I've never used oils and vegetable oils and I've been talking about them for years now. It's interesting to hear how everybody's finally understanding the problem. If you have to use an oil and I don't recommend them, use jojoba oil. Why? Because jojoba oil is not an oil. It's technically a wax. The profile, the fat profile of jojoba oil is very similar to normal sebum. And jojoba oil does not oxidize. It's extremely stable. It will give you that oil feel. It's still not going to give you a lot of nutritional or health benefits. But if you like that feel of oil, stick with a jojoba oil. Jojoba oil is expensive, so you're not going to see it in a lot of products. And if you do see it in a product, it'll be called out, it'll be highlighted, so the company gets a marketing mileage out of it, but it's not going to give you a lot of benefits. If you find yourself in a position where you have to use an oil use, make sure you're using vitamin E with that oil. Vitamin E is nature's most protective substance for oils. And that's why I said earlier, wherever there's Oil in the sea, nature will always provide vitamin E. So vitamin E is protective against rancidity of oils. Once an oil, you're putting a rancid oil on your skin though, because of this contagious nature or ox, there's a oxidation chain reaction in essence that occurs. You're really not going to, you're not going to mitigate the damage a little bit, but it's not going to mitigate it a lot. What I suggest is we ingest lots of these lipid protecting antioxidants. Vitamin E is one, but there's a lot of selenium is very important for protecting fats. Zinc, as I said earlier, is important for protecting fats. Vitamin A can have some fat protecting properties. The what we call phytonutrients in general, many of them have flavonoids in particular have fat protecting properties and those are incredibly valuable to take internally. Some of them you'll get some protective benefits topically, but really the oils are best avoided is the bottom line. And be an ingredient deck reader. That's the most important thing I could tell consumers as well as estheticians and professionals. Read your ingredient decks. Your ingredient decks will tell you everything you need to know. Look for nutrients, look for ingredients that have a certain amount of activity and stay away from certain ingredients like processed vegetable oils. And if you find yourself using a working with a company who uses vegetable oils, find out how they're extracting the vegetable oil. Find out how stable the vegetable oil is before they buy it. Find out how much heat they're subjecting that vegetable oil in the factory too. But really, in my opinion, they're best avoided.
- [17:16]
Maggie Stasik
That concludes our show for today and we thank you for listening. But if you just can't get enough of Ben Fuchs, the ASCP rogue pharmacist, you can find him@truthtreatments.com for more information on this episode or for ways to connect with Ben Fuchs or to learn more about ascp, check out the show notes.