Beyond Castor: Vegetable Oils That Regenerate Your Skin
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Castor oil is very popular on social media, with enthusiastic advice to put it everywhere from your eyes to your vagina.
We did a main feature on it a little while ago, sorting out:
- what things does science actually say it’s good for,
- what things lack evidence, and
- what things go into the category of “wow definitely do not do that”?
Which body parts go into which category (according to the actual science) will probably surprise you: Castor Oil: All-Purpose Life-Changer, Or Snake Oil?
But what about other oils?
Time to get oiled up (but, correctly!)
Dr. Nina Poljšak and her research team were curious (as researchers often are), and investigated very closely (as in: under a microscope, not relying on nebulous before-and-after photos and hoping any difference was because of the oil) the effects of various oils and oil-constituting substances on the skin, specifically in the context of its regenerative ability.
Specifically, they tested the effects of seven vegetable oils (coconut, olive, linden, poppy, pomegranate, marigold, linseed) and their pure fatty acid or unsaponifiable components (unsaponifiable = you can’t make soap out of them; may seem a silly distinction here, but chemically speaking, it’s a useful way of sorting them, since the components that can’t be made into soap share certain properties, which are being looked at here), on skin’s keratinocytes and fibroblasts.
Even more specifically, they measured how each oil affects cell growth (proliferation) and cell movement (migration) in a wound‑healing test. The migration might sound like a strange thing to measure, but this is the means by which new skin cells replace old ones; in the human body, that means going from underneath to outside. They’re not just randomly going on tour or something (if they do, that’s cancer).
Here’s what they found!
The good:
- Poppy seed oil (high in linoleic acid) gave strong boosts to keratinocyte growth, especially at 0.1–0.15% concentration
- Marigold oil (high in calendic and linoleic acids) mildly improved growth of both cell types at similar doses
- Linden oil and linseed oils (especially high in essential fatty acids like linoleic and α‑linolenic acid) also promoted proliferation significantly
The bad:
- Olive oil (mostly oleic acid) slowed migration significantly and changed cell shapes
- Pomegranate seed oil (dominated by punicic acid) strongly inhibited both fibroblast and keratinocyte growth—even at low concentrations (0.01%)
The useless:
- Coconut oil (rich in lauric/myristic acids) showed no significant effect either way
- Unsaponifiable compounds were a mixed bag; some (such as β‑sitosterol or β‑carotene) helped keratinocyte growth; others (like squalene or ferulic acid) hindered fibroblasts; the conclusion the researchers drew here was that they add complexity but aren’t the main drivers of effects.
You can read the paper itself, here: Influence of vegetable oils and their constituents on in vitro human keratinocyte and fibroblast proliferation and migration
In summary…
If you’re looking for natural oils that gently boost skin cell renewal, go for oils high in linoleic acid—like poppy, marigold, linseed, or linden oils.
Skip the pomegranate seed oil (too inhibitory for regeneration in vitro), and be aware that oleic-rich oils like olive oil may cause subtle organizational effects in healing tissues, and slow the replacement of skin cells generally.
Olive oil is wonderful, but best kept to the kitchen: All About Olive Oil ← about its nutritional wonders and why it’s such a healthy oil
Want to learn more?
If you want an even simpler (not to mention: cheaper) approach:
“Slugging” Skin Care Routine (Tips From A Dermatologist)
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Overcome Front-Of-Hip Pain
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Dr. Alyssa Kuhn, physiotherapist, demonstrates how:
One, two, three…
One kind of pain affects a lot of related things: hip pain has an impact on everything that’s connected to the pelvis, which is basically the rest of the body, but especially the spine itself. For this reason, it’s critical to keep it in as good condition as possible.
Two primary causes of hip stiffness and pain:
- Anterior pelvic tilt due to posture, weight distribution, or pain. This tightens the front muscles and weakens the back muscles.
- Prolonged sitting, which tightens the hip muscles due to inactivity.
Three exercises are recommended by Dr. Kuhn to relieve pain and stiffness:
- Bridge exercise:
- Lie on a firm surface with your knees bent.
- Push through your feet, engage your hamstrings, and flatten your lower back.
- Hold for 3–5 seconds, relax, and repeat (10–20 reps).
- Wall exercise with arms:
- Stand with your lower back against the wall, feet a step away.
- Tilt your hips backwards, keeping your lower back in contact with the wall.
- Alternate lifting one arm at a time while maintaining back contact with the wall (10–20 reps).
- Wall exercise with legs:
- Same stance as the previous exercise but wider now.
- Lift one heel at a time while keeping your hips stable and your back against the wall.
- Practice for 30–60 seconds, maintaining good form.
As ever, consistency is key for long-term relief. Dr. Kuhn recommends doing these regularly, especially before any expected periods of prolonged sitting (e.g. at desk, or driving, etc). And of course, do try to reduce, or at least break up, those sitting marathons if you can.
For more on all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
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Build Strong Feet: Exercises To Strengthen Your Foot & Ankle
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A lot depends on the health of our feet, especially when it comes to their strength and stability. But they often get quite neglected, when it comes to maintenance. Here’s how to help your feet keep the rest of your body in good condition:
On a good footing
The foot-specific exercises recommended here include:
- Active toe flexion/extension: curl and extend your toes
- Active toe adduction/abduction: use a towel for feedback this time as you spread your toes
- “Short foot” exercise: create an arch by bringing the base of your big toe towards your heel
- Resisted big toe flexion: use resistance bands; flex your big toe while controlling the others.
- Standing big toe flexion (isometric): press your big toe against an inclined surface as forcefully as you can
- Foot bridge exercise: hold your position with the front part of your feet on an elevated surface, to strengthen the arch.
- Heel raises: which can be progressed from basic to more advanced variations, increasing difficulty
- Ankle movements: dorsiflexion, inversion, etc, to increase mobility
It’s important to also look after your general lower body strength and stability, including (for example) single-leg deadlifts, step-downs, and lunges
Balance and proprioceptive exercises are good too, such as a static or dynamic one-leg balances, progressing to doing them with your eyes closed and/or on unstable surfaces (be careful, of course, and progress to this only when confident).
For more on all of these, an explanation of the anatomy, some other exercises too, and visual demonstrations, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Steps For Keeping Your Feet A Healthy Foundation
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Three Surprising Ways Microplastics Can Enter Your Body
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How many are you and your family subject to?
The wrong plasticity
We’ll not keep the three ways a mystery; they are:
- Inhalation: breathing in airborne microplastics from indoor and urban environments where particles are suspended in the air
- Ingestion: consuming plastics through food and drink, especially from packaging, bottled water, and contaminated seafood especially
- Absorption: absorbing tiny particles and associated chemicals through your skin from cosmetics, personal care products, and more
This is a problem, because nanoplastics are small enough to cross cell membranes and accumulate in tissues like your liver, brain, and lungs, where your immune system triggers inflammation but cannot fully remove them.
The futile immune response then becomes a problem of its own, as repeated immune responses mean chronic inflammation, which is a recipe for disaster in more ways than we have room to list here, but the gist is: your body will get cumulatively rundown over time.
Another way it causes harm is that many such plastics release endocrine-disrupting chemicals like BPA, phthalates, and PFAS, which are well-documented to affect hormones and metabolism in humans (spoiler: the effects are not good effects).
The science of microplastics is (for obvious reasons) young and ongoing, for example, there’s a lot that still unknown about such things as:
- direct disease causation: while it certainly appears that microplastics cause specific diseases like cancer, dementia, and diabetes in humans, the causality has not technically been proven yet.
- dose-response effects: scientists don’t yet know how much exposure (if any) is “safe” over a lifetime in humans
- organ-specific damage: plastics have been found in organs (including the brain), but the the full list exact health consequences of that accumulation are still being investigated. We know it is strongly associated with increased aggregation of tau proteins, amyloid-beta, alpha-synuclein, and so forth, though, amongst other things (see the “learn more” for more on this).
- relative importance of sources: it’s still uncertain which exposure sources (air vs food vs products) contribute most to long-term health risk.
- long-term human outcomes: the strongest current evidence comes from in vitro or non-human animal studies, while long-term human data is still limited and evolving (simply, mouse autopsies stack up more quickly than human ones).
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Microplastics Now, Alzheimer’s/Parkinson’s Later?
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New Year, New Health Habits?
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It’s that time of the year, and many of us hope to make this our healthiest year yet—or at least significantly improve it in some particular area that’s important to us! So, what news from the health world?
The rise of GLP-1 agonists continues
GLP-1 agonists have surged in popularity in the past year, and it looks like that trend is set to continue in the new one. The title of the below-linked pop-science article is slightly misleading, it’s not “almost three quarters of UK women”, but rather, “72% of the women using the digital weight loss platform Juniper”, which means the sample is confined to people interested in weight loss. Still, of those interested in weight loss, 72% is a lot, and the sample size was over 1000:
Read in full: New Year, new approach to weight loss: Almost three quarters of UK women are considering using GLP-1s in 2025
Related: 5 ways to naturally boost the “Ozempic Effect” ← these natural methods “hack” the same metabolic pathways as GLP-1 agonists do (it has to do with incretin levels), causing similar results
The lesser of two evils
Smoking is terrible, for everything. Vaping is… Not great, honestly, but as the below-discussed study shows, at the very least it results in much less severe respiratory symptoms than actual smoking. For many, vaping is a halfway-house to actually quitting; for some, it’s just harm reduction, and that too can be worthwhile.
We imagine that probably very few 10almonds readers smoke cigarettes, but we know quite a few use cannabis, which is discussed also:
Read in full: Switching to e-cigarettes may ease respiratory symptoms, offering hope for smokers
Related: Vaping: A Lot Of Hot Air? ← we look at the pros, cons, and popular beliefs that were true a little while ago but now they’re largely not (because of regulatory changes re what’s allowed in vapes)
Sometimes, more is more
The below-linked pop-science article has a potentially confusingly-worded title that makes it sound like increased exercise duration results in decreasing marginal returns (i.e., after a certain point, you’re getting very limited extra benefits), but in fact the study says the opposite.
Rather, increased moderate exercise (so, walking etc) results in a commensurately decreasing weight and a decreasing waistline.
In short: walk more, lose more (pounds and inches). The study examined those who moved their bodies for 150–300 minutes per week:
Read in full: Increased exercise duration linked to decreasing results in weight and waistline
Related: The Doctor Who Wants Us To Exercise Less, & Move More
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7 Essential Devices For Hand Arthritis: Regain Control of Your Life
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Dr. Diana Girnita is a double board-certified physician in rheumatology and internal medicine. With a PhD in immunology (on top of her MD), and training at Harvard and top universities, she founded Rheumatologist OnCall, offering integrative medicine to broaden rheumatology access. Here’s what she has to say about things that make life easier:
Get your hands on these…
The seven devices that Dr. Girnita recommends are:
- Hand grip strengthener: helps build grip strength with a spring-loaded mechanism. Regular use can improve strength and reduce pain.
- Finger exerciser: different device; similar principle: it strengthens hand and finger muscles using resistance, enhancing hand function.
- Moisturizing paraffin bath: a heated paraffin wax bath that soothes hands, providing heat therapy and moisturizing the skin.
- Weighted silverware: weighted utensils (knives, forks, spoons) make gripping easier and provide stability for eating.
- Foam tubing grips: foam covers to make kitchen tools, toothbrushes, and hairbrushes easier to grip.
- Electric can-opener: reduces strain in opening cans, making meal preparation more accessible.
- Compression gloves: provide gentle compression to reduce swelling and pain, improving hand flexibility and circulation.
- Door knob cover grips: make it easier to turn doorknobs by providing a larger surface to grip.
- Wider-grip pens: ergonomically designed pens with a larger diameter and softer grip reduce hand strain while writing.
This writer, who does not have arthritis but also does not have anything like the grip strength she used to, also recommends a jar opener like this one.
As a bonus, if you spend a lot of time writing at a computer, an ergonomic split keyboard like this one goes a long way to avoiding carpal tunnel syndrome, and logically must be better for arthritis than a regular keyboard; another excellent thing to have (that again this writer uses and swears by) is an ergonomic vertical mouse like this one (aligns the wrist bones correctly; the “normal” horizontal version is woeful for the carpal bones). These things are both also excellent to help avoid worsening peripheral neuropathy (something that troubles this writer’s wrists if she’s not careful, due to old injuries there).
For more on the seven things otherwise listed above, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
- Avoiding/Managing Rheumatoid Arthritis
- Avoiding/Managing Osteoarthritis
- Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
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Blueberries vs Raspberries – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing blueberries to raspberries, we picked the raspberries.
Why?
In terms of macros, blueberries have slightly more carbs, while raspberries have 2.5x the fiber and also slightly more protein, not that the protein figure is why people are eating raspberries, as a general rule of thumb. In any case, we say raspberries win this round based on the higher fiber content and resultantly much lower glycemic index.
In the category of vitamins, blueberries have more of vitamins A and K, while raspberries have more of vitamins B3, B4, B9, C, E, and choline, making for a convincing win for raspberries here.
When it comes to minerals, blueberries are not higher in any mineral, while raspberries are higher in calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc. A very clear win for raspberries in this round.
Looking at polyphenols, both are good but blueberries have more polyphenols in total, so they score a win in this round.
Adding up the sections makes for a compelling overall win for raspberries, but blueberries have their merits too, so by all means enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
21 Most Beneficial Polyphenols & What Foods Have Them
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