[Tanada]

I stumbled across a European report from last year about the quantities of machine oil contamination of the western style food supply.
http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/2704.htm
In the past I had always read that mineral oil used for machinery in processing plants was inert when you eat it, the stuff is supposed to pass right through your digestive system without being absorbed and might have a laxative effect if you consume too much of it. Digging further you will discover that acute levels of ingestion actually cause an effect, your organs can develop granulomas, tiny bubbles of oil suspended in your tissues, especially in your fat cells. It turns out that like all complex issues there was a lot more to know here than what first met the eye. Granuloma's are not dangerous per se, they are just there like grains of sand in your tissue that do not do anything. Well that isn't quite true, they do not cause cancer but because they are inert and long lasting they do cause bulking up of those effected. Rats with machine oil granuloma's induced through feeding are heavier and plumper looking than rats fed a standard diet.

As an added level of complexity two things need to be added. Machine oil or mineral oil is too broadly defined to be meaningful for discussion of biological effect without adding a lot more information. Some sources call anything from Pentane (C5) up through Tetracontane (C40) light machine oil, but animal bodies especially humans do not treat them all the same way. Because Pentane (C5) through Docosane (C22) are nearly identical to fatty acids that make up the fats in plants and animals in the human diet the receptors in your intestines do absorb them, on the order of 90%. The straight chain versions of these hydrocarbons are frequently converted by your liver cells and other body cells into carbohydrate fatty acids if they are absorbed in low quantities. It turns out one of the things that can happen to fatty acids during digestion is to be converted into hydrocarbons by the digestion process, but it is a small effect and your body has the ability to process small quantities of hydrocarbons as a result. So for straight chain hydrocarbons in small quantities your body converts them into fatty acids and then they act just like any other fat in your diet, your body burns them for fuel. You really are eating hydrocarbons if you live in Europe or North America and eat any food processed in a factory.

Problems arise because Hydrocarbon or Fatty Acid chains longer than C-22 are increasingly difficult for your cells to metabolize, that is the longer they get the harder it is for your body to burn them for energy. Fatty acids much longer than that are rare in food sources in the natural environment so our body never developed an efficient way to metabolism them. As a result of this fact lower and lower percentages of hydrocarbon or artificial fatty acids between C-23 and C-35 are absorbed until almost none of the C-35 molecules are passed by the intestine into the blood stream. That is what causes the laxative effects of machine oil, the long chain hydrocarbons are passed through just like fiber, undigested. Some artificial fats like Olestra have been created as diet cooking oils specifically because they can not be digested. Straight chain hydrocarbons in this range, absorbed but not easily metabolized, are suspected of being the cause of those granuloma's I mentioned earlier.

More problems arise because not all, or even most, mineral oils are straight chain hydrocarbons that your body recognizes as damaged fatty acids and converts into fatty acids. Many of them are either branching chained or aromatic hydrocarbons like Benzene that are carcinogenic. Because they are in the right size range (C5-C-35) your digestive system will grab them and put them in your blood stream in decreasing quantities as their size increases. This is why Gasoline, Kerosene and Diesel Fuel all have the warning label Harmful or Fatal if swallowed on them. They contain lots of branch chain and aromatic hydrocarbons in the easily absorbed range for your digestive system. Some good grade mineral oils have very little of these harmful kinds in them, others contain a lot. It depends mostly on two factors, the chemistry of the crude oil used to make the oil and the specific design of the process to refine the light machine oil.

Now for the really bad news. I found a report yesterday specifically about the contamination of edible oils, that is lard, tallow, vegetable oil, butter, margarine, olive oil and so on.
http://www.iffo.net/downloads/Research% ... 1997-1.pdf
The first 68 document pages explain exactly how they tested the different edible oils, machine oils and diesel fuel. After that you get into the tables of data showing what they learned, what types of contamination is in each of the oils we eat.
It turns out the less processed the edible oil is often means the more mixed up the hydrocarbon contamination is. The converse is also true, the more processed it is the more likely the contamination is to reflect certain properties. This means your extra virgin olive oil is contaminated with a wider spectrum of petroleum derived hydrocarbon's and many of them fall into the C5-C22 range of human digestion and conversion to fat, while the super processed corn, soybean, rape and cotton seed oils tend to have more in the C27-C33 range oils that are absorbed and then stored as granuloma's. It is important to note that this report was kept secret for many years and they focused much more on diesel and less refined machine oils, so today might give very different values for each kind of carbon size than they did when these tests were run. Not only are different refineries making the machine oils now than were back then, the petroleum going into those refineries is almost completely different because most of the fields used back then are not producing significant oil now.

All that being said, I would love to know if they have done biopsy studies at autopsy of modern Americans to see what percentage of us are carrying around granuloma's of inert hydrocarbons without even knowing it? I spent decades eating "healthy" vegetable oils, does that mean every fat cell in my body now has a tiny bubble of C27-C35 machine oil suspended in it? If so how do I get rid of it?

Oh and one last thing, the researchers discovered that one of the companies that they bought fish oil from actually added almost 40% vegetable oil to the fish oil to bulk it up and let them sell more 'fish' oil.

[longpig]

Better than the drain oil they use for cooking in china.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-n ... 31712.html

A recent study estimates that one out of every 10 meals Chinese people eat in restaurants is cooked in recycled waste oil—that is, oil that has been dumped in the sewer, scooped out, processed, and resold at low prices. The recycled waste oil contains toxic chemicals that could cause adverse reactions or even cancer.
He Dongping, a professor at the Wuhan Polytechnic University, has been studying the problem for seven years. According to China Youth Daily, he found that China recycles an estimated two million to three million tons of waste oil per year. Combining that figure with the estimated 22.5 million tons of total vegetable oil and animal fat consumed by the Chinese per year, it is estimated that 10 percent is returning to people’s dining tables.
Medical research shows that a regular diet which includes recycled oil could cause developmental retardation, enteritis, swelling of the liver, heart, and kidneys. One of the major chemicals in the oil is aflatoxin, a powerful carcinogen which is 100 times more toxic than arsenic.

[Keith_McClary]

What about baby oil and Vaseline - is it absorbed?

[Tanada]

What about baby oil and Vaseline - is it absorbed?

Mineral oil is absorbed on a descending scale as the size of the molecules increase, Vaseline is almost all long to very long chain hydrocarbons and is very poorly absorbed. Baby oil on the other hand is a mixture and varies from petroleum input source components differing over time. The lightest molecules in baby oil can be absorbed but are mostly absorbed if they enter the digestive tract, not through the skin. Baby oil is eventually purified light machine oil, the same stuff used as food grade mineral oil to lubricate food manipulating machinery like the device that folds your hot pockets before they get flash backed and then flash frozen by other machines. People have been swabbing babies and adult skins with the stuff for 50 years or so and we have not had a mass outbreak of shocking problems linked too it so I reckon it is relatively safe on your skin. If you are eating a teaspoon a day for some reason you might want to get yourself checked for granuloma's, otherwise the effect on a person with a normal intake level is easily dealt with by your digestive enzymes that convert them into free fatty acids and burn them for energy.

[Keith_McClary]

the same stuff used as food grade mineral oil to lubricate food manipulating machinery like the device that folds your hot pockets before they get flash backed and then flash frozen by other machines.

Thanks.
Well, I'm sure my hot patties must be hand made in Jamaica.
I wont ask you what the bottles of mineral oil in the pharmacy are used for.

[Subjectivist]

the same stuff used as food grade mineral oil to lubricate food manipulating machinery like the device that folds your hot pockets before they get flash backed and then flash frozen by other machines.

Thanks.
Well, I'm sure my hot patties must be hand made in Jamaica.
I wont ask you what the bottles of mineral oil in the pharmacy are used for.

I have seen diet studies where they substitute natural fat with mineral oil, I wonder how much this new information invalidates them?