is pulling on sunflower/vegtable oil really supposed to remove toxins?

Question

Does pulling (hold in a liquid in you mouth and rinsing it around) on sunflower oil really do you any good? Just because it changes color does it mean that this has taken away toxic substances?

Answer 1

I have had personal success with oil pulling AND think the usual explications that I read are garbage.

But, I have an alternative explanation.

I have worked as a compounding pharmacy technician and one of the great ways to boost the buccal absorption of drugs is to arrange to have them be suspended in an oil or an alcohol.

http://www.ualberta.ca/~csps/JPPS1%281%29/A.Shojaei/buccalreview.htm includes:

Furthermore, oral transmucosal drug delivery bypasses first pass effect and avoids pre-systemic elimination in the GI tract. These factors make the oral mucosal cavity a very attractive and feasible site for systemic drug delivery.

Now, where they are talking about drugs, we might want to consider the uptake oil of fat nutrients that may help with conditions like sinus difficulties.

My theory is that the buccal swishing of oils (for the 10-20 minutes usually advocated) allows us to absorb some factors from the oil that would be lessened or destroyed by the digestive tracts processing.

If it was purely a mechanical action, then doing this with water should have the same effect.

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from http://www.do-dietary-supplements-work.com/spray-vitamins.html

Factors impacting sublingual absorption

The physical and chemical characteristics of a drug will determine how well it can be absorbed.

There are several factors which determine how substances (drug, vitamins or minerals) are absorbed inside the mouth:

Fat-soluble drugs are absorbed better when taken sublingually than are water-soluble ones.

Tissues inside the mouth, as any body tissue, consist of cells, and the cell membrane is lipoidal (fat-like). Because of this molecules of materials which are better soluble in fat can penetrate cell membranes more easily.

Small molecules penetrate through oral tissue better than larger molecules.

Molecules penetrate better than ions. (An ion is a charged molecule, or atom.)