Are terpenes safe to eat? Simple answer? No. Not the answer you thought, right? Find out the truth about eating terpenes in this week’s breakdown of “Are Terpenes Safe To Eat?” from The Terpene Institute.

So how can we possibly say that terpenes are not safe to eat when you go on the internet and see people eating terpenes all over? There are companies putting terpenes in food, and drinks, and wine. How could they possibly not be safe to eat? Well, there are some facts that you’ve got to look into, and the answer is they’re kind of not safe to eat. So here’s how it works.

Now, there are two different types of terpenes when we’re talking about terpenes in general. We’re talking about cannabis-extracted terpenes over here, and plant-extracted terpenes, non-cannabis-extracted terpenes, over here. Now, individual terpenes, every individual terpene has an MSDS sheet attached to it. In industry, that is a material safety data sheet. The material safety data sheet, or MSDS, explains to you the toxicity level of a given substance, and we’re going to use alpha-Pinene, for example, in this video.

Now if you look up the MSDS on, say, alpha-Pinene, it will tell you if you can eat it or not. A lot of terpenes are toxic in small amounts, relatively small amounts, and there are different ways that terpenes can be toxic. One of the main ways that terpenes can be toxic is when you eat it. And what they say is that, first thing, it’ll make you sick, but second thing is if it gets into your airway, it’ll close up your airway, you’ll choke, and you’re gonna die.

Now, I know how this sounds terrible, but I need you to understand why I say that terpenes are not safe to eat. Now, safety in eating something, like you’ve heard the term before, “the devil is in the dosage.” So really, it’s about how much of something can I eat safely? Now if we were talking about one simple terpene, like alpha-Pinene, we could just look up the terpene and say, “Hey, you know what? I can eat one gram per gallon of water, and I can drink one cup of that, and I’ll be safe.” You know, maybe you can figure out that ratio.

When you’re talking about terpene profiles, like I create, I create terpene profiles by hand. I will take a cannabis strain, I’ll mix a bunch of organic terpenes together, and I will recreate the terpene profile of the cannabis strain. The difference with that is that I know every terpene that’s going into that. I can look up the MSDS for every single terpene that I’ve put into that mixture, understand the amount of terpenes that a person can ingest, and then recommend how much a person should ingest. That’s different from cannabis terpenes.

Now, there’s a lot of material to cover on why terpenes are not safe, but let’s look at this this way. Cannabis terpenes, as you know, a lot of people go out there and they say, “Oh, cannabis terpenes are better and cannabis has these mysterious secret terpenes that are only available in cannabis.” If you’re gonna recommend, as a company or as an individual, that a person can eat terpenes, let’s take cannabis terpenes, for example, cannabis-extracted terpenes.

Now, if you’re saying that there are a hundred different terpenes that are naturally occurring in cannabis, and usually there are about 25 per strain, and some of them are unknown to science and we haven’t identified them yet, if you know that terpenes can be toxic and you know that terpenes can be poisonous, how can you take a substance like a cannabis-extracted terpene profile and recommend it to somebody when you know there are things in there that you don’t know what they are, you don’t have an MSDS for them, and you don’t know how toxic they are?

There are a lot of terms that are being thrown out in the industry, such as “food-grade terpenes,” which are really misleading. Now, go watch our video on food-grade terpenes to understand what a food-grade terpene is. It’s the wrong terminology completely. But when you use terms like “food-grade terpenes,” you’re implying that something can be eaten, or should be eaten. You should not eat terpenes, because it’s about how much of it you eat.

Now, as a company, you would need to break down the terpene profile and recommend that a very specific amount be eaten. But that’s not what’s going on. Terpene companies are selling bottles of pure terpenes and then telling people they can eat them. Now, I guarantee, if you just started drinking bottles of terpenes, you’re gonna get very sick and possibly die. But these aren’t coming with instructions. And the instructions they’re coming with are negligible on whether or not they’re actually offering you true safety requirements.

Now let’s go a little bit farther. Are cannabis terpenes safer to eat than organic plant-extracted terpenes that we’ve recreated in profiles? I’m gonna tell you right now that cannabis terpenes are not safer to eat than something that is constructed by hand, for the same reason I told you before. When I construct them by hand, I know exactly what terpenes I’m using, and I can tell you how much you can and cannot eat. When you take a cannabis-extracted profile, we don’t know exactly how many terpenes are in there, or we don’t even know all of the terpenes that are in there.

When you tell somebody they can eat that, you’re not telling them how much of that they can eat. Honestly, they’re really just guessing. They say put a quarter gram per gallon, or whatever random-ass fact they’ve got. But we know scientifically that if you do not know all of the terpenes that are in cannabis, you can’t know the toxicity level of every single one, and you cannot tell people to eat them.

You have a lot of people that are sick, a lot of people that are medical patients. The majority of this country is medical patients. As a company, as an individual, you should never tell people that you know, or are statistically probably sick, that they can eat something that is superior. You know that it’s toxic. You know that it’s toxic. You just don’t know how much of it is toxic, okay?

That whole thing should be left to the FDA and the professionals. That is not something that you, or your company, should be engaging in, period, hands down. Unless you know every single terpene in there, every single MSDS sheet, how much of each one you can give to a person, and then create something specific that the customer cannot mess up. Does that make sense?

Because you can tell these people these are food-grade terpenes, and cannabis is magical, and we’ve been smoking weed forever. But I guarantee, people have not been extracting terpenes and drinking them by the jug for a thousand years. That’s the truth, okay?

So, when you’re talking about eating terpenes, look at it like this: can you eat mushrooms? Some. Some are deadly, some are toxic, some get you high, some are great on pizza. Terpenes are the same way. Some of them are okay to drink, some of them are not, some of them will kill you in an instant. The problem is, we have a lot of amateurs out there that are just telling people to go ahead and eat things.

So the question is: “Can I eat terpenes?” The answer is no. Don’t eat terpenes. Wait until you look farther out in the future, when they’re accurately describing every single terpene, giving you the exact amount that a person can ingest, and putting some guidelines on it. That is the exact reason the FDA was established, to stop things like this from occurring, okay?

So, I hope you understand it. I know it’s not the information or the answer that you were looking for. Use some common sense. The Terpene Institute is a foundation based off of simple common sense that we should all be operating under. You do not need a scientific degree in order to understand that if something’s toxic, don’t give it to a medical patient unless you are a scientist and you’ve done some testing, okay?

So, watch some of our other videos. Learn enough, make some money. This is all about you helping people and making money, and that’s what I’m here to teach you, alright? Enjoy the show. Go check out another video.