Post by Gautam MajumdarPost by CuriousIs sandalwood poisonous if eaten?
Can't say about sandalwood as a whole but sandalwood oil is not poisonous
to humans. It is used in various medicinal preparations of the Ayurvedic
(ancient Indian) system.
As with almost anything, the dose makes the poison.
A few minutes with google reveals that for the oil of Santalum album
the oral LD50 in rats is 5580 mg/kg and the skin LD50 is 5.00 g/kg. I
don't know why they don't standardize the units, but as far as acute
toxicity you'd have to drink a cup or two to poison yourself to death
with it, and you'd probably die of intestinal impaction before you
could eat enough sandalwood sawdust to kill you.
That said, unsurprisingly the oil is an irritant to
skin, eyes and mucous membranes, and people can develop an allergic
reaction to it. More interesting is that it's believed to have some
kidney toxicity, and has been established to induce cytochrome P-450 in
the liver and also act as a cyclooxygenase inhibitor. This means that
it can potentiate, antagonize or interfere with a lot of different
prescription drugs and as a diuretic may cause hypokalemia especially
in conjunction with other drugs.
The US FDA rates it as GRAS (generally recognized as safe) as a food,
drug or cosmetic additive. GRAS mainly means that it's been in use for
a long time as such without any evident harm caused by it, although it
hasn't been formally tested for safety. It appears that no research
has been done on long-term issues like mutagenicity, carcinogenicity or
teratogenicity, or effects of prolonged high dosages on any organs or
systems. There is some research indicating anti-fungal and
anti-bacterial action, unsurprising since that's probably its function
in the plant.
What little science I can find was mostly done with S.album, but there
are a lot of other species used. It's been overharvested in India, so
a lot of sandalwood and sandalwood oil now comes from S.spicatum in
Australia, and from other species elsewhere. Essential oils (mainly
terpenes) have a wide range of medicinal and toxic effects, and may
vary quite a lot between species.
Since there's no authority to guarantee purity, sandalwood oil is often
adulterated with other materials, notably castor oil, and other woods
treated with sandalwood oil are sold as sandalwood.
At any rate, used sensibly neither the wood nor the oil are likely to
harm you, but don't get carried away. Even the innumerable web sites
that sell the stuff for its vaguely medical and magical properties have
enough sense to recommend caution, even if they can't agree whether its
"ruling planet" is the moon or Uranus.
While sorting through the swamp of entrepreneurial new age sites google
turned up, I ran into a paper describing some research testing 53
different essential oils for their insecticidal effect on a
particularly troublesome species of white fly in greenhouses in Korea.
About half the oils tested had an 80% or better kill rate on eggs, and
some had good effect against adults. One of the best was peppermint
oil. This is encouraging since some of these greenhouse species have
developed resistance against most chemical insecticides, and white fly
is a big problem on edible crops like greenhouse tomatoes where
limiting pesticide residues is very important.
Of course, any discussion of herbal remedies these days has to have
personal anecdotes to prove a point. I've been using a rather nice
sandalwood scented soap from China for many years and I'm not dead
yet. It's denser than the North American soaps because it doesn't have
air whipped into it to make it float, so it doesn't dissolve away as
fast in the shower. It's cheap, too. I like the scent a lot. But my
husband finds that it aggravates a chronic skin condition he has, so he
uses Ivory now. There's no telling if it's the sandalwood or another
ingredient at fault, however. Or maybe there's an astrological
incompatibility, right?