Why Your Skincare Products Should Be Low-PUFA.

 

When was the last time you rubbed soy oil on your face? Probably never, right? Unlike olive oil or beef tallow, which have been eaten and used on the skin since antiquity, industrial seed oils like soy and cottonseed only have a history of being used for roughly 100 years. If people didn't historically consume something or use it on their skin, it should give us pause for thought.

Yet we are constantly exposed to seed oils – they are in fast food, restaurant food, supermarket ready meals, etc., and the majority of most ‘natural’, ‘organic’, ‘plant-based’, and ‘vegan’ skin care products. The problem is that these seed oils are polyunsaturated fatty acids (or PUFA for short), and they are far from healthy. Cosmetic oils like almond, argan, rosehip, and grapeseed may be organic and/or cold-pressed but are still high in PUFA and therefore unstable and prone to oxidation, which causes sagging, wrinkling, and ageing of the skin. Let's take a look at the types of oils used in modern skincare products and why some types of fats are healthier and more nourishing than others.

Understanding the Types of Fats

There are essentially two types of fats: saturated and unsaturated.

Saturated vs. Unsaturated Fats

Saturated fats, like butter, lard, tallow, and coconut oil, are solid at low temperatures. Unsaturated fats come in two sub-types: monounsaturated fats (olive, macadamia) and polyunsaturated fats like hemp, rapeseed, sunflower, flax, etc. These unsaturated fats are liquid at cool temperatures which means they are chemically very unstable. Unlike more stable saturated fats, PUFAs have an incomplete hydrogen bond, which means they oxidise - become damaged and rancid when exposed to heat and light - just sitting in the bottle. Our bodies are warm - and the perfect environment for oxidation to occur and create havoc in our cells.

This very short video shows how quickly linseed (also known as flaxseed) oxidises and how dangerous that can be.

 

The Rise of PUFAs in Modern Products

So how did PUFAs come into such widespread modern use? It's a whole system of promotion, advertising, and profitability. According to endocrine physiologist Dr. Ray Peat:

In the 1940s paints and varnishes were made of soy oil, safflower oil, and linseed oil. Then chemists learned how to make paint from petroleum, which was much cheaper. As a result, the huge seed oil industry found its crop increasingly hard to sell. Around the same time, farmers were experimenting with poisons to make their pigs get fatter with less food, and they discovered that corn and soy beans served the purpose, in a legal way. The crops that had been grown for the paint industry came to be used for animal food. Then these foods that made animals get fat cheaply came to be promoted as foods for humans, but they had to direct attention away from the fact that they are very fattening. The "cholesterol" focus was just one of the marketing tools used by the oil industry. Unfortunately, it is the one that has lasted the longest, even after the unsaturated oils were proven to cause heart disease as well as cancer.

Cotton seeds, soy, grape seed, canola (rape seed), safflower, sunflower, and other modern industrial seed oils were long considered waste products. The invention of the hydraulic press and new solvent techniques changed all that, and what was once considered waste could now be sold off to the public as food and became immensely profitable for big-ag. These PUFA oils have now made their way into our cosmetics as well as our diet.

Industrial seed oils are rendered using a complex process of high heat and extreme pressure. Unlike an olive, for example, which is easy to extract oil from when cold-pressed, it's not so easy to extract oil from a grape seed. All oxidation produces free radicals, which are the cause of cellular ageing in the body, and note that the fresh oils, whether cold pressed or consumed as plant, seed or nut, are intrinsically unhealthy, and it is not any special industrial treatment that makes them so.

Dr. Peat goes on to say:

The food-derived polyunsaturated fatty acids play important roles in the development of all of the problems associated with ageing - reduced immunity, insomnia, decreased learning ability, substitution of fat for muscle, susceptibility to tissue peroxidation and inflammation, growth of tumours, etc. They are probably involved in most other health problems, even in children. If research hadn't been guided by the economic interests of the seed oil industry, many of those problems would have been solved by now.

Sugar, by reducing the level of free fatty acids in the body, actually tends to protect against the toxic effects of the PUFA. Diabetes, like cancer, has been known for a long time to be promoted by unsaturated oils in the diet, rather than by sugar. The seed oil industry has been more effective than the sugar industry in lobbying and advertising, and the effects can be seen in the assumptions that shape medical and biological research.

 PUFAs and Skin Damage

 

The higher an oil's PUFA content, the more prone it is to oxidation. Coconut oil, for example, is over 90 per cent chemically stable saturated fat with only a small percentage of PUFA. The chemical composition makes it far less prone to oxidation than something like safflower oil, which is almost 80 per cent PUFA, or grape seed oil, which is over 70 per cent PUFA. The higher the percentage of unsaturated fat in a cosmetic oil, the more likely it is to cause free radical damage to your skin, and so cosmetic companies aren't doing us any favours by putting PUFA - especially highly processed seed oils - into skin care products. PUFAs are just as prone to oxidation (and the resulting free-radical damage to our cells) when they are used in cosmetics as when they are used in the frying pan.

Learning to be savvy about reading food and cosmetic labels will help you avoid PUFA. Ingredients are usually listed in descending order - the closer to the top of the list the PUFA oils are, the higher the PUFA content of the product. Good oils to look for (ideally at the top of an ingredients list) include: coconut, cocoa, capuacu, shea, babassu, and mango - all solid at low temperatures and therefore stable.

It's especially important to avoid putting PUFA oils on your face because this is the part of the body that gets the most sun exposure, which means more damage: PUFA + iron + estrogen + sun = lipofuscin (age or liver spots). Using sunscreen doesn't help because - guess what? That's usually high in PUFA too!

Given what I have learned about the skin-damaging effects of PUFAs, I use grass-fed beef tallow in Absolutely Pure Skin Food. Tallow is a supremely stable fat, consisting primarily of saturated and monounsaturated fatty acids, and naturally has a very low PUFA content (typically 5% or less). Chemically similar to sebum, the natural oil that our skin produces, tallow moisturises skin more effectively than high-PUFA plant-based ingredients like seed and nut oils.