Flavoring with essential oils

**jigtg** · 08-15-2008, 05:33 PM

aromamedical.com/articles/internal.html
kobashi.co.uk
"All of our 100% Pure Essential Oils are FCC or food grade ..." nowfoods.com/?cat_id=3514 .

Found some aromatherapy shop is selling 60 1/2ml EOs for 20 pounds. Not food grade unfortunatelly.

According to wiki: "LD50 for most essential oils or their main components are 0.5-10 g/kg (orally or skin test)". No sign of where this information came to wikipedia. What I don't know is why aromatherapists are so alarmed about taking EO internally. Who in their right mind would think zipping, say 10 grams of EO(that smells like hell) is safe? Watch out for allergies though. Also, I read somewhere that mixing certain oils can create some hefty toxins.

Some magic words for finding quality EOs:
- ISO (International Standards Organisation)
- AFNOR (French ISO member)
- FCC
- Supplement Facts (aromatherapy4u.wordpress.com/using-essential-oils/)

**Nazareth** · 08-15-2008, 05:48 PM

I'd steet clear of inhaling essential oils after they are atomized- epsecially in the amounts we would be doing by esmoking constantly. I know you can inhale some essentials, but generally this is done in very small quantities- not in constant vaping sessions liek we would be doing with esmoking. Don't forget, atomizing and hten vaporizing changes the chemical structures of the elements being vaporized, so it might be possible that doign so negates the health benifits of hte essentials

**jigtg** · 08-15-2008, 06:25 PM

Yes, I'm aware that chemical structure might easily change when atomized. Nearly all EOs are steam distilled which pretty much proves how delicate these aromas are. Unfortunatelly, I have not found much info on what those resulting compounds might be.

However, I was under the impression that some of the "bakery flavors" are made of essential oils. So why would they be any safer?

**jigtg** · 08-17-2008, 03:35 PM

**TropicalBob** · 08-17-2008, 04:00 PM

That's a pretty good list of all the extracts we avoid.

Beyond your atomizer, consider how your lungs might like a regular coating of oil. Not worth the payoff to even try oils. Extracts that are considered safe have PG, alcohol, water and/or flavoring not from oils.

There are many, many flavors available without oil as an ingredient. McCormick's is a brand most e-smokers avoid like the plague. Go Bickford or Cook's.

**jigtg** · 08-26-2008, 10:08 AM

"DIY tobacco& nicotine flavor... without tobacco" thread paper
talks about < 0.1ul(0.001ml) of oil per cigarette in some tests they did. Now I don't know how long it would take lungs to absord that much but I'm having hard time imagining considering how much tar is in one cig.
It seems typical to EOs that they are not very solulable to water, which gives reason to suspect lungs do not absord them very fast. Some(all?) are solulable to alcohol or PG which I think is the main reason why these are found in extracts.

Bickford and Cook's say their extracts are "Natural flavors" and, as I understand, if you overrule EO and artificial flavors, you would have no way of making those flavors. I understand "natural flavors" in ingredients list to mean chemicals extracted from EOs or otherwise identical.

mccormick extracts destroying atomizers is a bit hard to explain. Either mccormick products are just crap or some EOs just have enough chemicals that can't take the heat.

cooksvanilla.com mentions quite a few flavors with "oil of x" as ingredient. Which ones have you tried?

Shipping to EU costs too much.

**Kate** · 08-26-2008, 03:33 PM

Jigtg, is it the case that food flavours and extracts are made from concentrated essential oils? Does the extraction method determine whether the extract is an oil or not?

I noticed that rose otto and other oils are used in ecig.com liquid. This is something I am personally concerned about, I would rather choose my own flavourings. I would not choose to inhale oil if I could avoid it so I try to find flavourings that don't list oil as an ingredient. I understand that there is no guarantee that the extraction process for the flavour does not involve oil.

Essential oils are very concentrated, when used in food flavourings they are usually diluted for us already. I would be concerned about how to judge a safe dose for flavouring eliquid ... if there even is a safe dose. To me oil is high risk and it's something I try to avoid.

I appreciate your trying to inform us about this, it may be, as you seem to be saying that using oil in some form or another for flavouring is unavoidable. In which case we should try to do this in the safest way possible given the lack of testing in relation to inhaling these substances.

**jigtg** · 08-27-2008, 10:42 AM

By definition, essential oil contains all chemicals that have flavor or aroma. My belief is that EO becomes extract when you start dropping chemicals from it. So if you have "flavor extract" of some plant etc., it shouldn't really make any
difference if it was isolated directly from plant etc. or from essential oil.

Should you take eg. CAS 000127-91-3, 000138-86-3 and 000099-85-4 of Lemon Oil Analysis Batch kb01028 , you'd call this "natural flavor extract".
The term "oil" in essential oil is a bit misleading. I mean, if you take only CAS 000138-86-3 of lemon oil and call it "flavor extract", it would still have nearly identical chemical properties because it is 72.01% CAS 000138-86-3. There should be no reason to use oil to extract EO. You can find pure oil in extracts because some EOs are solulable to oil, so it just makes a good carrier for the flavor.

Ok, found plenty of useful information today:
http://members.ift.org/NR/rdonlyres/...2_complete.pdf
Safety Summary of Citronella Oil as a Flavouring Agent (Safety Evaluation of Citronella Oil for Food Uses)
Summary of Evaluations Performed by the JECFA - Table of Contents
Summary of Evaluations Performed by JECFA
Acceptable daily intake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Good EO database like ESO 2000 - The Complete Database of Essential Oils would be almost necessary to pull of these calculations. Less concentrated chemicals can assumed to be toxic to ease calculations without having to go through the hole list.
Also LDO doesn't take account the fact that chemicals build up in body so it is best to use ADI instead.

Anyway, I'll start harassing kobashi now. Perhaps they can suggest some EOs to investigate and/or can provide more info.

**Kate** · 08-27-2008, 09:40 PM

Sorry to ask silly questions but I'm a bit confused by the flavourings and oils issue. To get flavour in our eliquid we are already using a certain amount of oil which probably comes from essential oil - is that correct?

Do you use essential oils for flavouring your own liquid Jigtg? Do you have to measure it in tiny doses?

**TropicalBob** · 08-27-2008, 10:23 PM

Add me to the confused list. I have no idea what his bottom line is .. and that's all I really care about, not some chemistry lecture with EO and CAS and ESO and LDO and NAACP and FBI and CIA.

Bottom line summary needed without jargon discourse.

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