Animal, vegetable…. mineral oil? October 18, 2011
Posted by cheesefish in : Randomness , trackbackI went looking around Nelson a few weeks ago for a non-toxic, non-petroleum based product with which to treat my wooden fruit bowl. I could only find mineral oil at a few places, which despite its ‘I am from the earth’ nomenclature is a petroleum distillate. When you look up the definition of mineral oil on Wikipedia you learn that mineral oil is “any of various colorless, odourless, light mixtures of alkanes in the C15 to C40 range” and that “it is considered generally safe for human contact and consumption and has been approved by the American FDA in personal care and cosmetic products, as well as for an additive for food to 10 mg/kg of daily consumption” yet at the same time the World Health Organization classifies mineral oils as Group 1 carcinogens to humans”. I found the list of the 25 pages of known Group 1 carcinogens and there on page 3 of 25 sits clear, innocuous seeming mineral oil. Yikes. Okay, maybe you need a lot of oil to spur on the oncogenes, but whether logical or not, I decided it was not something I wanted to rub on the wood that cradles my organic fruit.
The Building Tree provided a product that was food grade hemp oil so in theory I could make salad dressing at the same time as treating the furniture (though I am sure they don’t recommend it) and a beeswax based sealant. I am currently treating the side tables after a successful fruit bowl refurbishing with first the hemp oil and then the beeswax. I like that if my nephews come and take a nibble on the side table, I don’t have to call poison control and hide it from my sister.
I found out after further investigation that the beeswax sealant has some amount of mineral oil in it as well as carnauba wax. Sigh. Carnauba wax is from the wax palm (Copernicia cernifera)
Photo credit: Roberio Dias, Wax Palm
and incidentally is harder than concrete and one of the hardest natural waxes in the world. I didn’t have a problem with its inclusion, but again with the mineral oil. I made inquiries to the manufacturer of the beeswax sealant to find out more about the mineral oil in the sealant. He replied very promptly and cogently, and told me they had considered using jojoba oil, but determined that the price point would be too high and that they use food grade mineral oil and all their research showed this to be a safe and affordable alternative that would not go rancid. After doing a bit of reading in the toxicology literature it seems like the highly refined food grade mineral oil is the safest of the mineral oils out there and is certainly allowed in many foods and drug coatings. I likely eat it or use it in cosmetics or personal health products without knowing. However, there is equivocal evidence that even very refined mineral oil is still linked to some cancers when ingested and strong evidence that food grade mineral oil does not cause skin cancers like the less refined mineral oil may.
“Highly-refined foodgrade mineral oils did not produce skin tumours when applied to the skin of mice, although after intraperitoneal injection they
Knockout Mice by Wellcome Images under Creative Commons
produced plasma-cell neoplasms and reticulum-cell sarcomas in certain strains of mice. It was agreed that, in accordance with the previous evaluation, the significant latter finding is difficult to interpret.”. Source: IARC Monographs on the evaluation of the carcinogenic risk of chemicals to humans Vol:Suppl. 7 (1987) pp 252-4
On the whole food grade is definitely much better than non-food grade mineral oil and I am happy to know that it is the oil in their product. I will be honest. I find it difficult to make this much time to investigate products. I try to be ethical and green, but sometimes, I just get overwhelmed and just want a goddam can of paint to finish a project in the 2.34 hours I have coming up free that evening. But, for some reason this little project got me going. For now, I will use the product with the food grade mineral oil component to it and I have let the producer of the beeswax sealant know that this consumer would pay a couple extra dollars for something I could spread on my furniture and on my toast if I was so inclined.
Comments»
Wow. That’s a lot of investigation. Thanks for looking into this. As I read the start of this post I thought “She needs beeswax.” And then you got to the beeswax.
My only question is if you got something that could go on furniture and toast, which would you pick, if you were down to the dregs of the last bottle of beeswax and had a chair that needed polishing and toast that needed a little something extra?
Mmm. Toast. Definitely Toast.
An update from Clapham’s this morning – they are curious and looking into the viability of hemp oil as an alternative to the food grade mineral oil they currently use.
Hemp oil, eh? I wonder if that can be locally sourced.