Personal care products disrupt the human oxidation field

This article has a headline engineered with shock value connotations, but when you read it carefully, it takes pains to rein the suggestions of the title in as much as possible while still stirring the pot. It’s a kind of artistry you need to get papers published these days.

All that aside, it’s an interesting thing to think about but it’s not a basis for any kind of personal health recommendation and the authors state that. I have relevant expertise and this is a very complicated area that people routinely want to be boiled down into black and white simple advice. What this article seems to say is that lotion can affect the oxidation chemistry nearby it, but it’s not yet known if that is an effect with consequences that are on the whole negative or positive.

I would criticize the authors for their use of the word disrupt, because of the negative connotation carried by that word when talking about human biological systems. They use a softer, more neutral word, perturb, to express the same idea later in the article, which I think better expresses the idea without an emotional tinge to it.

"A commercial lotion composed of aqua, glycerin, Brassica campestris seed oil, Butyrospermum parkii butter, ceteareth-12, ceteareth-20, cetearyl alcohol, ethylhexyl stearate, Simmondsia chinensis seed oil, tocopherol, caprylyl glycol, citric acid, sodium hydroxide, acrylates/C10-30 alkyl acrylate crosspolymer, sodium gluconate, and phenoxyethanol was chosen for this experiment."

Personal health recommendation: You'd be better off rubbing down with olive oil or sunflower oil than with that concoction, most likely. The ancient Greeks got some things right.

> Personal health recommendation: You'd be better off rubbing down with olive oil or sunflower oil than with that concoction, most likely

What evidence can you point to that supports this "most likely" assertion that isn't purely naturalistic fallacy?

> The ancient Greeks got some things right.

The pantheon of capricious gods living on mount olympus? Harvesting the sweat of wrestlers to use as treatment for genital warts?

Massage with vegetable oil, usually mixed with some fragrances, had been a widespread practice for many millennia, not only in Ancient Greece, but in most lands around the Mediterranean, which was about as frequent as it would be today to take a shower.

In fact, in the ancient world the main use for vegetable oils was for massage and for perfumes, and not as food.

In the ancient literary sources, there are very few, if any, mentions of vegetable oil used as food, but countless mentions of massage with oil.

Already in the first version of the Gilgamesh Epic, almost 4 millennia ago (the Old Babylonian version), there were 4 pleasures listed as the benefits of being a civilized man as opposed to a savage: making love with a professional woman, eating bread, drinking beer and being massaged with oil (these were used to lure Enkidu into going to a city).

While in later times olive oil was the main oil used for massage, in the Gilgamesh Epic it seems that the oil that was used was sesame oil.

2000 years after Gilgamesh, e.g. in Pliny the Elder, similar accounts were given, i.e. that the main benefit from grapes is drinking wine while the main benefit from olives is being massaged with olive oil, both for pleasure and for a healthy skin.

While massage with olive oil or other vegetable oils was ubiquitous and daily for those who could afford it, for me it is a bit of a mystery how they cleaned themselves after that, in the absence of soap, because I have never seen any mention about this.