How Essential Oils Work: Molecular Weight
- Bethany Brown
- Oct 29, 2018
- 2 min read
Updated: Sep 7, 2021
What is the blood brain barrier? The blood brain barrier is a literal barrier of blood between the body and the brain meant to keep the environment in the brain as stable as possible. It's a coating around the nervous system and around the brain to keep toxins and junk out and to keep them from affecting the brain. While it is designed to keep harmful substances out, it is still semi-permeable. Some dangerous substances, ones we come in contact with every day – gasoline, cleaning solutions, pesticides, herbicides, and pollutants in the air, among others, can still enter into the fragile environment.
This permeability can be especially dangerous, but it is a wonderful thing when it comes to essential oils. Essential oils can cross the blood brain barrier also! The cell particles in essential oils are so tiny and they're so potent that they can cross the lining of the blood vessels, cross in the capillaries, and they can get through the blood brain barrier. This allows the effects to get neurologically deep in your system and they affect every system and cell in the body quickly.
Why can they get in? Here are just a few examples!
Being aromatic, essential oils can easily circulate in the air so that they can enter our noses and be detected as a smell.
Essential oils are all less than 500 amu (most are under 300 amu).
Essential oils are compact in shape – almost always containing ring structures. Other fatty molecules, even though they weigh less than 500 amu, consist of long chains rather than rings and thus their shape prohibits them from going through the “filter”.
Essential oils are also fat soluble. This makes them easy to enter into the blood tissue of the brain, thus affecting brain function and delivering its therapeutic benefits.
While there are plenty of other molecules with some of these characteristics, they do not have all of them. Take water, for example. Although its atomic mass unit (weight) is only 18, it is not fat soluble – which is a good thing as too many water molecules in the brain can be dangerous.
Pretty cool, huh?! Stay tuned for more on our "How Essential Oils Work" series!
Reference source: The Chemistry of Essential Oils Made Simple by Dr David Stewart.
Now go break those bonds and live unbound!
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