Soy and Peanut Allergy: Oils May Affect Skin
Soy and Peanut Allergies may be important to skin care. Today most manufacturers use soy and/or peanut oils without warning people because the FDA does not require such labeling. Both Cir-Safety.org (the US Cosmetic Ingredient Review supported by FDA and Cosmetic Companies) and the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) have raised questions about soy and peanut oils and by inference wheat oils as to labelling. Both suggest that we should label cosmetics containing soy and peanut oils with allergen warnings Until we can have definitive work that skin products need to be labeled as containing allergens even with highly refined soy and peanut oil.
In the Final Report Plant-Derived Fatty Acid Oils as Used in Cosmetics March 4, 2011 Cir-Safety wrote on page 5,
The European Medicines Agency (EMEA) Working Party
on Herbal Medicinal Products concluded that soy and peanut products
“should be treated as allergenic unless they have an analytically-
monitored non-allergenic specification and a safe maximum daily dose.”34
The EMEA found that threshold concentrations for induction of a protein
contact dermatitis were not available and recommended, “all medications
for topical use containing soya or peanut products should be treated
as allergenic.”
This brings up some serious concerns because almost all Vitamin E tocopherol comes from soy or is suspended in soy oil. Soy and peanut allergy may take a while to develop makes it hard to see because most studies for allergies study only short periods of observation. Few if any observers move beyond rashes, severe illness, anaphylaxis. Focus remains on the highly visable acute allergic responses. Several allergic symptoms rarely get identified such as just feeling poorly or malaise. Allergies may cause systemic symptoms that seem unrelated to skin. And gut issues remain simply invisible to these difficult to correlate rarefied allergens. If you wanted to eliminate soy based tocopherol you would have to eat only fresh foods and eliminate most cosmetics and shampoos.
David Changaris, MD
Dr David Changaris is an award winning Neurosurgeon who has dedicated study toward lipid chemistry and skin. He is the founder of Skin By Ceela and is a contributor at HealthyOilNews.com.