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It's free. On this episode of The Daily Doll, we're chatting about cast oil. Should you put it in your belly button? It doesn't really reduce inflammation and bloating.
We'll unpack this new wellness trends and get to the bottom of what the science really says. It's a dollar time. Hey, hey, my name is Kate. I'm a registered nutritionist and after 20 years in the field of nutrition, I'm tired of seeing people stressed about eating and confused about where to start.
And so, I'm changing the conversation. You deserve to feel confident in your food choices and empower to maximize your health every weekday will dull an episode into your feed covering everything from busting nutritionists, practical food ideas, my thoughts on trending topics and habits for a healthy life. My promise to you, it will always be sustainable, realistic, restriction-free and strictly no-woo. Only good science translated into easy everyday advice.
Let's do this. Welcome back to The Daily Doll. Pock us everyone. Happy Monday.
I've got an epic lineup of episodes for you this week. We're going to look at the science for a new wellness trend on social media. And speaking of social media, my LinkedIn feed has a lot of talk about the AI space. How to use AI in your work, how to build an AI business, AI training courses, how AI shares information, how AI mimic humans, all sorts of things.
And there was a lot of concern about AI spreading misinformation. And that's true. It doesn't always share good information. It lacks nuance and the ability to reason like a human can.
But honestly, I'm more worried about humans spreading misinformation. AI is really only sharing information that it's found online that was created by humans. It's not just making up random things. So misinformation in my opinion is the human thought.
When 90% of the nutrition information shared online is incorrect. You need a trusted source to wait through the roof. Hey, dream and reporting. Welcome to the windows.
And influencers share the apparent benefits of putting cast oil in your belly button. She claims that when cast oil is placed in your belly button, it penetrates your skin, detoxifies your liver, improves your gut health, and reduces inflammation. She also cites a well-known but discredited individual barber own meal, who says it can help a peacock by breaking up a variant cysts. Ironically, she starts a video by debunking the fact that cast oil is a magical weight loss hack.
However, apparently it can do a range of things from improved digestion and detoxing your liver and improve hair growth. Let's take a listen. So I saw this girl in TikTok saying that cast oil is the newest envy because she puts it in her belly button and eye and weight loss skin. I've seen other people claiming that's talking to lose weight literally without doing anything else.
And five into it the years. It's not a magical weight loss hack. What happens when you put cast oil on your belly is it penetrates your skin, it supports your liver, detox, improves inflammation, it can get things moving into your gut. That's why you can wake up feeling vitally now that's bloated.
And barber own oil also talks about helping women with PCOS by breaking up a variant cysts. That's like I noticed the biggest improvement with digestion. It's also got a lot of little scars that have my belly. And I also know other women that swear by it for hair growth and getting it in so much.
Oh, man. Have I seen some dodgy things on Instagram lately? Seriously, so many. But this is my favorite one so far.
So let's unpack what the science really says can cast oil in your belly button do all of those amazing things detoxify your liver, reduce inflammation, improve digestion, break up a variant cysts. Some solid claims there. What we need to do when we research topic is definitely not Google it because what you'll do is Google search for keywords on the internet, it's actually not looking for reputable sources. A lot of this information on the internet is just regurgitated because when I Google cast oil in your belly button, all I found were blog articles on magazine articles or online shops, or alternative medicine sharing, all the benefits and I couldn't find any actual research.
So that is not true research, just Googling something. Now, I'm actually not professionally a researcher. I am nutrition practitioner which means I use nutrition in practice. But I've done research throughout my university degrees.
And so what I'm going to do is take you through a process of research which is actually really important. And so what we need to do is we need to understand our problem and then break it down into smaller chunks and understand each of those chunks and find designs behind each of those elements that really understand and receive the claims that are being made are actually true. So I'm going to take you through me doing this process with you. And so this first episode starts with what is cast oil.
And that way we're going to have the foundations and the fundamentals. We can truly understand that as a beginning and baseline and then we'll start getting into the more complex stuff on whether this amazing thing currently cast oil can do all of these amazing things for your health. So cast oil is extracted from the cast seed which comes off the cast of the plant. And the type of seed oil.
Now, so I know this surprised me greatly as generally the online wellness community are very anti seed oils. And they make a lot of claims that seed oils are very bad for you which is not evidence based on all because there's plenty of good randomized control trials, systematic reviews and meta analysis showing the very opposite of the seed oils are not only safe to consume, but they also benefit human health. But you know what I guess that's the benefit of being an influencer and not a qualified nutrition professional is that they don't have to share evidence based info. They can just pick and choose what they share and as long as it aligns with their narrative and potentially the narrative of the current wellness community that's okay.
Sometimes the cast seed is referred to as a barista bean which I guess makes it sound a little bit better that's not a seed but technically it's a seed. So cast oil is obviously extracted from the seed and it can be extracted by two different methods cold pressing or using a chemical solvent. So the solvent method is actually the most effective extraction method and it's the most common and there's also a few different chemicals used for the various solvent methods. But I'm not going to go into detail on this podcast just know that it's very common for some kind of chemical to be used to help extract the oils from the seed and separate it out from the matter part of the seed.
So obviously it's an oil so it's primarily made of fatty acids and triglycerides and the fatty acids is primarily mono unsaturated fat and all the unsaturated fat statement means is referring to its chemical structure. So fatty acids are long chains of carbon that are then surrounded by hydrogen molecules and then they have other different hydroxy groups and things around it and that's a quite complex. But basically what an unsaturated fat means is that there is a double bond between some of the carbons and in a mono unsaturated fat there's one double bond in the whole fatty acid and in a poly unsaturated fat there's just more double bonds. So in past oil the fat make up is that it's primarily a mono unsaturated fat and so it is actually very similar chemically to other vegetable oils and the main fatty acid about 75 to 90% of cast oil is what is a single acid and I go to the pronunciation of this and I got so many different things on YouTube and maybe lots of it.
All right see I'm a see I see acid so we're seeing a lot of that is how I want to say it but we'd like to be corrected by any organic canvas out there. So that is the predominant fatty acid band in cast oil and it is a mono unsaturated fat. So as such because it is a mono unsaturated fat it is a very stable oil. So means it can handle high temperatures and it doesn't oxidize easily and this makes it very versatile for industrial users.
types of cars are all include ointments and moisturizers, nylon, varnishes, airplane engine lubricates, hydraulic fluids, dyes of detergents, plastics, synthetic leather, cosmetics, and perfumes. So a pretty broad range of industrial uses for cars are all, and a lot of those that I had no idea about. So that was really interesting. Cars are all has also been used to induce and accelerate childbirth since ancient Egypt.
Now the precise mechanism of its action on the onset of childbirth is not known. A potential theory for this is due to its causing an increased production in what's known as prostate gland and which can help with the ripening of the cervix, which is part of the induction of labor. Now, as I'm not studying this in particular, I didn't go into the research, but I did come across a few systematic reviews on recent reviews in the last couple years on the user car store oil in labor and its safety and efficacy in inducing labor. I didn't read those things.
I can't tell you what the answer is about those things do exist. So that's pretty cool. The other thing is that car store oil has a laxative effect on the bowel. So when you do consume it orally, it generally leads to the loosening of the bowel and it just stimulates things to move on through really quickly through the bowel, which just means that there is little time to absorb the water.
So it just means the bowel empties out and is not a dry, like harder stool. It is loose, my friends, very loose. So this is car store oil. Let's look at car store oil from a health-based perspective.
So obviously we found that car store oil is used quite a lot in other industries like airplane engine lubricants. That's a pretty specific usage. Hydraulic loads detergent, lots of other uses. From a health perspective, in Australia, we have the therapeutic loads of administration, which regulates our medicines and supplements and things like that.
So car store oil is permitted for use by the therapeutic goods administration in Australia, and it is permitted for use as a laxative to relieve constipation and as an argument to provide skin. And if you'd like to read more about the information on the TGA website, I've popped the link to car store oil in the show notes. Also found some brief information that the US Food and Drug Administration and the FDA has classified the use of car store oil as safe as a laxative. So it's used in those areas that is some evidence-based that it can be used in that way.
So that's it for today's episode. Hopefully you now have a pretty good understanding of basic understanding of what car store oil is, how it's made, where it comes from, and what its current sort of evidence-based uses are from a health-based perspective. On tomorrow's episode, we're going to chat through what the evidence is about putting it in a bell gun. Stay tuned.
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