About Lime Essential Oil Benefits

From squeezing some fresh lime juice on your tacos or even putting a small wedge into your nice cold beer, you often find lime used simply for its juice. While lime does have many nice culinary applications, it can do much more than just add a little something extra to your food or beverage of choice. Lime essential oil has many health benefits.

Chemical Constituents

Aromatherapy with essential oils such as lime is a medicinal and not a magical process. Just as with any over the counter medicine, lime essential oil's benefits come from the chemical compounds that it contains. In her book, "The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Essential Oils," aromatherapist and author Julia Lawless lists the primary constituents in lime essential oil as limone, pinenes, camphene and citral. These compounds give lime oil its health benefits.

Properties

Lime essential oil possesses a number of beneficial properties. Lawless writes that lime oil works as an antiseptic, antiviral and antibacterial agent. Other research supports essential lime oil's antibacterial actions. A 2006 study published in "BioMed Central Complementary and Alternative Medicine" found lime oil killed bacteria, while another 2006 study in the "African Journal of Traditional, Complementary, and Alternative Medicines" also found lime oil worked as an antibacterial.

Uses

Based on essential lime oil's medicinal properties, it has a number of potential health benefits. Its ability to help fight bacterial and viral infections makes it a good choice for many respiratory ailments. Lawless suggests lime essential oil for helping to treat bronchitis, throat infections and general nasal congestion. You also can put lime essential oil to use to help fight off the flu or a cold.

Methods

To get the most benefit possible from lime essential oil, you need to consider how to best use it. To treat throat or respiratory conditions, Lawless recommends using steam inhalations. Add a few drops of the oil to steaming water and inhale the vapor. You also can spread the oil throughout the air and breathe it in through the use of a diffuser or burner.

Cautions

Lime essential oil comes in not one but two types---oil from cold expression of the peel and oil distilled from the whole fruit. You need to make sure you know which one you are using. While both oils have the same benefits, the peel oil has on additional property. The peel oil is photo toxic---it makes your skin more susceptible to getting burned by the sun and should not come in contact with your skin when you will be outdoors.