Juice vs. Oil

As I’ve worked to learn more about essentials, primarily dōTERRA essential oils I’ve started to wonder what the oil is and where do they get it. One of my favorites to use is Vetiver, which comes from a grass in Haiti. The roots of a grass especially. I’ve play in grass and pulled up plants. I can’t comprehend where the oil is in the plants. And I definitely don’t see much oil in the dirt and roots of a plant. Always feels dry to me.

So I keep asking, where on earth does the oil come from. It comes from distillation of the plants to extract the natural oils. I can’t quite wrap my brain around what the process of distillation does or how it works. I do know it helps pull the oils out of whatever plant the oil is being extracted from. Then the essential oil will float to the top of the distillates so that it can be collected for human use. Don’t quote me on this, but this is my very minimal understanding of how this works and we get our precious essential oils.

Okay, I guess that’s oil process, but in things like Wild Orange that smell like an orange how is that not juice? The juice from fruits and vegetables is created by squeezing the liquid and watery contents from a plant. When you squeeze an orange and the liquid pours out into a beautiful aromatic glass of orange liquid that is the flavorful water content of the fruit.

I guess still there is another thing we drink and use as a liquid. That would be tea. Sometimes pulling a juice isn’t very practical so we make a tea. dōTERRA offers Lavender and Peppermint oils, but I’ve also seen these in flavors of a tea before. Teas, even herbal, are often made be steeping leaves or flowers from the plants in hot water to bring out the flavors for drinking. Tea is not as potent as oil or juice, but it is still a very popular drink around the world.

Now I feel confident that I know the difference between the various types of liquids that we can extract from plants. Potency definitely matters depending on  the purpose for which you need it. Also it’s good to know where things come from, especially if we’re putting them into our body. It’s one of the reasons I’m so glad that dōTERRA is known for being (CPTG) Certified Pure Therapeutic Grade^®. I’m confident when I use their oils that I am using the best of what nature has to offer me.