"The Efficacy and Side Effects of Moringa Leaf Powder"
“Clearly, in spite of the widely held “belief”
in the health beneﬁts of [moringa], the interest of
the international biomedical community in the medicinal potential
of this plant has been rather tepid”—“spectacularly hesitant
[in fact,] in exploring its nutritional and medicinal potential…
other “superfoods” such as garlic and green tea have enjoyed
better reception,” but they also have more scientific support.
There are thousands of human studies on garlic and more than
ten thousand on green tea, but only a few hundred on moringa.
The most promising appears to be on the effects
of moringa on blood sugar control.
If you have people eat about five cookies,
this is the kind of blood sugar spike you get.
Add about two teaspoons of moringa leaf powder
into the cookie batter, and even with the same amount of sugar
and carbs, the blood sugar surge is dampened.
Just having people drink one or two cups
of moringa leaf tea before a sugar challenge
“suppressed the elevation in blood [sugar] in all cases
compared to [those who drank plain water instead].”
Here’s the spike after sugar with no moringa,
and here’s the reaction to the same amount of sugar
30 minutes after drinking moringa tea.
No wonder moringa is used in traditional
medicine practice for diabetes. But you don’t really know
if it can help until you put it to the test.
Diabetics were given about three-quarters of a teaspoon
of moringa leaf powder every day for 12 weeks and got
significant improvements in measures of inflammation
as well as long-term blood sugar control.
But the reason they call it a quasi-experimental study
is because there was no control group.
The researchers just took measurements before and after,
and we know that just being in a dietary study can lead
some people to consciously or unconsciously eat more healthfully,
so we don’t know what effect the moringa itself had.
Even in moringa studies with a control group,
it’s not clear if the subjects were randomly allocated.
And in this study, the researchers didn’t specify
how much moringa people were even given.
What does one tablet’s worth mean?
No significant improvement in this study;
maybe they didn’t give enough?
This study used a tablespoon a day and not only saw
a significant drop in fasting blood sugars,
but a significant drop in LDL cholesterol as well.
Two teaspoons a day didn’t seem to help, so was it just
that a whole tablespoon is needed?
Apparently not, since finally, a randomized placebo-controlled
study using a tablespoon of moringa a day failed to show
any benefit on blood sugar control in type 2 diabetics.
So, we’re left with a few studies showing potential
but most failing to show benefit.
Why not just give moringa a try to see for yourself?
That’s a legitimate course of action in the face of
conflicting data when we’re talking about safe, simple,
side effect free solutions.
But is moringa safe?
Probably not during pregnancy, as about 80 percent
of “women folk” in some areas of the world use it
to abort pregnancies, and its effectiveness for that purpose
has been confirmed, at least in rats;
though breastfeeding women may get about a half cup
boost in milk production based on “six randomized,
placebo-controlled, blinded, clinical trials”.
Just because moringa has “long been used
in [folk medicine traditions]” in no way proves
that the plant is safe to consume.
Lots of horribly toxic stuff, like mercury and lead
for instance, have been used in traditional
medical systems the world over.
But hey, at least “no major harmful effects of [moringa] …
have been reported by the scientiﬁc community”,
or more accurately, “no adverse effects were reported
in any of the human studies that [had] been conducted to date.”
In other words, no harmful effects had been reported... until now.
“Stevens-Johnson syndrome … following [moringa leaf] consumption”:
Stevens-Johnson syndrome is probably the most dreaded drug
side effect, a rare but potentially fatal condition
characterized by “epidermal detachment.”
In other words, it can make your skin fall off.
Fourteen hours after consuming moringa, a guy broke out.
The same thing had happened three months earlier,
the last time he had eaten moringa, causing him to suffer
“extensive lesions with blister formation
over [his] face, mouth, chest, abdomen, and genitalia.”
“This case report suggests that consumption
of Moringa leaf is better avoided by individuals
who are at risk of developing [Stevens-Johnson].”
Although it can happen to anyone, HIV is a risk factor.
My take on moringa is that the evidence of benefit
wasn’t compelling enough to justify shopping online
for something special when you can get healthy vegetables
in your local market like broccoli which has yet
to be implicated in any genital blistering.