My former roommate was an early adopter of essential oils. Using a diffuser (ultrasonic humidifier) to spread fragrances house-wide, I would come home to aromas of peppermint, orange, and lavender instead of the familiar musty scent baked into our basement apartment. Sold on the efficacy of essential oils in reinvigorating stagnant air, I too became a user. In a rational world, this is where the story would end. Unfortunately, we do not live in a rational world.

Essential oils have taken upper middle class suburbia (and by extension Instagram) by storm. Social media platforms – once the refuge of dank memes and animal pictures – are now home to the blurred line between people’s personal lives and their multi-level marketing schemes. What’s particularly frightening, however, is how quickly each exciting new business opportunity has become the path to true health and wellness.

If you believe everything you read, you might think that essential oils are here to cure cancer, solve world hunger, reverse climate change, and ultimately prevent the impending heat death of the universe. You might think that essential oils have been divinely bestowed on us to empower stay-at-home parents to become entrepreneurs and health gurus while simultaneously enriching themselves, their communities, and the world around them. You would be wrong, but I can’t blame you.

Essential oils have been marketed relentlessly and deceptively by multi-level marketing organizations that profit from our modern addiction to wellness. Although Young Living pioneered the business of deceptive essential oil marketing, doTERRA made it a household affliction through their consultants’ insistence that oils could treat anything from asthma to Ebola.

In reality, essential oils have not been demonstrated to be particularly effective at preventing or treating any disease or condition. It wasn’t long before both the EPA and the FDA took action against this blatant pseudoscience, prompting doTERRA to go on the defensive. Now, rather than instructing their consultants to make unsubstantiated health claims that are illegal, doTERRA provides guidelines for consultants that employ semantics to avoid those pesky science-based regulators:

Of course, there isn’t even good evidence that essential oils satisfy any of the “Structure-Function Claims,” but the mildness of the claims are enough to appease the FDA. As unfortunate as it is for public health, however, doTERRA advocates are not mild people.

In London, we are home to Canada’s first Presidential Diamond doTERRA representative: Ange Peters. In their not-at-all-a-pyramid-scheme compensation plan, the honor of Presidential Diamond is bestowed only on those who have climbed to the top and profited from those below.

Of course, it is unlikely that anyone gets to the top of the doTERRA food chain without being a prolific purveyor of pseudoscience.

Although Peters claims to guide women to true HEALTH, her social media is not filled with responsible health advice. Instead, her media is a window into a world where self-promotion, product marketing, unsubstantiated health claims, and even her personal life have become intertwined into a caricature of the social media takeover by advertisers.

But I digress; what troubles me more than the content of my social media feed is the content of Peters’ advertising. The sheer magnitude of misleading medical claims that appear on Peters’ various platforms is staggering. Her own “Getting Started with Oils” guide provides a compendium of medical recommendations for essential oil, which can be accessed by clicking the prominently displayed “Health Concerns” graphic:

In this encyclopedia of serious medical conditions, various criticisms are levied against effective medical treatments. Instead, specific essential oil “Protocols” are offered for every affliction you can think of. Of course, none of them are proven to work in any capacity, hence the inclusion of the Quack Miranda Warning. In many cases, these “treatments” likely do more harm than good.

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Although the domain of this site is registered to doTERRA, the content was taken offline some time ago, presumably in response to the crackdown by the FDA. I find it troubling that Peters went to the trouble to link to an archive of the site. I’m further troubled by the vast assortment of dubious health advice Peters offers when promoting her products and services.

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The vitamin and mineral comment likely stems from a landmark 2004 study (and similar studies) that saw a small reduction in some nutrients among cultivated crops, likely attributable to changes in soil composition and changes in cultivated varieties. It’s a worrying trend and certainly something to keep an eye on, but to say we need to eat five times the food today for the same vitamin and mineral intake is nothing short of ignorant. The claim grossly overstates the reduction and doesn’t identify which foods or even which nutrients in those foods are impacted. Further, do these changes even impact our health in any capacity? I get the impression that Peters hasn’t read the primary scientific literature.

Peters often claims to be “passionate about educating and empowering women to live their best life through natural solutions”. In reality, Peters is empowering her audience to take big risks with their health and their finances. Unfortunately, doTERRA has laid the foundation for Peters and other like-minded practitioners to prosper unabated while organizations like Health Canada have been complicit and ineffective in preventing false health claims. Whether a result of incompetence or ignorance, Health Canada – the organization mandated to protect the public from dangerous and ineffective health products – has failed.

In what is certainly an effort to find a balance between consumer demand and public health, Health Canada allows for the registration of Natural Health Products – products which are supposed to be screened to ensure they are “safe, effective and of high quality.” The problem, however, is that a vast number of registered products have literally no scientific evidence supporting the claims they are permitted to make. So how did they come to be registered?

In place of scientific evidence, Health Canada will accept “Tradition Use Claims“. So if someone once used an ingredient, made up a claim about it, and then wrote it in a pharmacopoeia, products using this ingredient can register as natural health products and make the same claims – true or not. This is an ongoing failure of Health Canada that the CBC frequently illuminates. It’s the same flaw doTERRA has exploited.

Let’s look at a specific example: doTERRA’s Juniper Berry Essential Oil. On their Approved Claims List, doTERRA permits Canadian representatives to make a number of aromatherapeutic claims:

Here’s the problem: Health Canada’s monograph for juniper essential oil doesn’t contain a single scientific or clinical study supporting its use for anything. Nonetheless, the oil is a registered natural health product, citing juniperus communis as a medicinal ingredient – a compound that also lacks scientific evidence from Health Canada for oral use.

A lack of regulatory controls on health products can have serious consequences. Not everyone is privileged enough with time and resources to conduct a thorough review of health claims. When essential oil companies boast that their products are registered natural health products, it lends legitimacy to the outlandish claims, emboldening proponents to believe that they were right all along about every mystical claim attributed to what is simply an aroma. As a result, listening to doTERRA advocates is like listening to a child talking about all the things Santa’s elves can do. Health Canada needs to be the one to tell her that Santa isn’t real.

I should be clear that I don’t believe Ange Peters acts maliciously. Although I wouldn’t say her business is innocent of profiteering, I get the sense that she feels her beliefs are vindicated. After all, she has amassed an audience of happy and healthy followers. Every successful customer is not just a business win, but a philosophical win. These are the people who I worry about the most.

When one of her clients asks “Does terrazyme help fight against disease?” and Peters answers “Yes,” it condemns her audience to spend time and money chasing supplements that have no clinical evidence for preventing disease. Some may seek these products in place of legitimate medical care, but as it stands, doTERRA is not a medical company and essential oils are not medicine.

Despite not living up to their hype, I don’t hold anything against essential oils. In fact, I still use them nightly in my diffuser. Why? They smell nice and I enjoy it. What I won’t do is purchase from unethical companies like Young Living and doTERRA that have profited from misleading health claims and a predatory business model.