It’s crazy when you think about all of the different kinds of food we eat.
We just swallow and hope it all works out for the best.
Well, it turns out there are better ways
to think about keeping our bodies humming healthfully along.
Welcome to Nutrition Facts.
I’m your host Dr. Michael Greger.
Today we explore the true health benefits of Moringa.
And no, it’s not an exotic dance.
In the west, it's mainly available as a powder from the Moringa plant.
Here’s our first story.
Moringa (Moringa oleifera) is a plant commonly known
as the “miracle tree” due to its purported healing powers
across a spectrum of diseases.
If “miracle” isn’t hyperbolic enough for you, on the internet
it’s also known as “God’s Gift to Man”.
Is moringa a miracle or just a mirage?
“The enthusiasm for the health beneﬁts of [moringa] is
in dire contrast with the scarcity of strong experimental
and clinical evidence supporting [the claims].
Fortunately, the chasm is slowly being ﬁlled.”
There has been a surge in scientiﬁc publications on moringa,
and in the last ten years the number
of articles is closer to a thousand.
What got my attention was the presence of glucosinolates,
compounds that boost our liver’s detoxifying enzymes.
I thought they were only found in cruciferous vegetables
like cabbage, broccoli, kale, collards, and cauliﬂower.
But no, it turns out they’re also found in the moringa family,
with potency comparable to broccoli.
That’s exciting, but why not just eat broccoli,
rather than mail-ordering some exotic moringa powder?
Is there anything special about moringa?
It’s “been described as the most nutritious tree yet discovered”.
How much is that saying, though? Who eats trees?
Supposedly moringa “contains higher amounts of …
nutrients than most conventional … sources”:
10 times the vitamin A of carrots,
12 times the vitamin C of oranges,
17 times more calcium than milk,
15 times more potassium than bananas,
25 times more iron than spinach,
and 9 times more protein than yogurt.
First of all, even if all this were true,
this is for 100 grams of dry moringa leaf.
That’s like 14 tablespoons— almost a whole cup of leaf powder.
Researchers have had trouble getting people to even eat 20 grams,
and so anything more would likely “result in excessively
unpleasant taste, due to the bitterness of the leaves.”
And secondly, the nutritional claims in these papers are
"adapted from Fuglie," which evidently is just some lay publication.
If you go to the USDA nutrient database, and enter a more
doable dose like the amount you might get in a smoothie
(about one tablespoon for instance), a serving of moringa powder
has as much vitamin A as a quarter of one baby carrot,
and as much vitamin C as one one-hundredth of an orange.
So, an orange has as much vitamin C
as a hundred tablespoons of moringa.
A serving of moringa powder only has the calcium of
half a cup of milk, the potassium of not fifteen bananas,
but a quarter of one banana, the iron of a quarter cup of spinach,
and the protein of a third of a container of yogurt.
So yeah, maybe nutritious, but not off the charts
and certainly not what’s commonly touted.
So again, why not eat broccoli?
It’s got the A-C-Calcium-potassium- iron-and-protein of broccoli!
Moringa does seem to have anticancer activity—in a petri dish—
against cell lines of breast cancer, lung cancer, skin cancer,
and fibrosarcoma, while tending to leave normal cells
relatively alone, but there haven’t been any clinical studies.
What’s the point in finding out that “[Moringa] … enhances
[the] sexual performance [of] stressed rats.”
What are you supposed to do with that?
Studies like this one, though, started to make things
a little interesting. Researchers were testing the effects
of a tablespoon of moringa leaf powder once a day for three months
on antioxidant status and saw a drop in oxidative stress,
as one might expect from eating any healthy plant food.
But they also saw a drop in fasting blood sugars from
prediabetic levels over 100 to more normal levels.
Now, that’s interesting. Should we start recommending
a daily tablespoon of moringa powder to diabetics?
Was it just a fluke? Moringa and blood sugar control:
A review of the current evidence... next.
“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,
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].”
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.
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.
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