If you would have asked me about essential oils a few years ago, I wouldn’t have even known what they were. Today I see them as one of the most effective tools for natural health and alternative medicine that I know. How can that be? Well, maybe we need to sit down for a chat. (You’re welcome to set that up – I offer free essential oil assessments)
Scientifically speaking essential oils are naturally occurring, volatile aromatic compounds found in the seeds, bark, stems, roots, flowers, and other parts of plants. What exactly is a volatile aromatic compound? They are called volatile because they change state quickly. Essential oils aren’t true oils like almond oil, olive oil, or flaxseed oil — those are called fixed oils. Fixed oils don’t vaporize the way essential oils do, and they are much heavier. Over 3,000 varieties of volatile aromatic compounds have been identified to date. Essentially, there is an oil for everything!
Essential oils are super-concentrated. For example, it takes about 16 pounds of fresh peppermint leaves to produce an ounce of essential oil . These oils constitute important active ingredients and flavor additives in many kinds of everyday products — candies, syrups, toothpastes, cleaning products, skin creams, lip balms, shampoos, bath salts, and soaps. Essential oils even give flavor and aroma to the spices that you use to add zest to your cooking such as cinnamon, allspice, and nutmeg used for apple cider and baked goods. Nutmeg, allspice, thyme, oregano, basil, and savory all contain essential oils.
Believe it or not, most forms of modern-day medication started by scientists, researchers, and pharmaceutical companies extracting the beneficial properties of essential oils. In other words, the vast majority of pharmaceutical drugs that we have today actually started as essential oils that were harvested from plants and other sources. Unfortunately, in order to patent their products, pharmaceutical companies create synthetic versions of the beneficial compounds contained within essential oils. This allows them to fund mass production and control distribution, increasing their profits while simultaneously decreasing the benefits to consumers.
Considering the fact that most over-the-counter medication we use today actually started from essential oils, the reality is that essential oils are not only legitimate, but are superior to over-the-counter medication because they are the original source, not the synthetic creation. So why use synthetic methods of medication when you could get access to the original essential oils themselves?