Let's talk about a superfood that you may not know about, but you absolutely should, and it's moringa, which is probably the best anti-inflammatory plant you can consume. But it's not just inflammation with autoimmune conditions that it helps with. The anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects of moringa can also help you with your blood sugar control and insulin resistance, and it may also help you with your cholesterol levels.
For women, there's evidence moringa can help with menopausal symptoms, and for men, there's emerging data that shows that moringa can help with your prostate health, it can help with erectile dysfunction, and it may help with fertility by improving sperm health.
So, in this post, I'll tell you about which of these benefits have the most evidence behind them and I'll also talk about the best ways you can take moringa to utilize its full potential. At the end of the post, I'll go over important safety considerations you need to know before you add moringa to your health regimen.
Nutritional Benefits of Moringa
Moringa, or its scientific name Moringa oleifera, it's a plant that is a nutritional powerhouse. It's native to parts of South Asia and Africa, and moringa has been used in Ayurvedic medicine for thousands of years. And almost all parts of moringa tree have been used as food or medicine, but it's the leaves that are the most nutritious part of the plant.
It's the leaves that are full of bioactive compounds that we need. In fact, moringa has been dubbed as the tree of life because of its incredible range of health benefits. So first, moringa provides 46 antioxidants, which is actually more antioxidants than what we find in matcha or acai plants.
On top of that, moringa has all nine essential amino acids that can help with protein synthesis. It's full of vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, and iron. But it's the antioxidant properties is what makes this plant so unique.
Antioxidant Benefits of Moringa
These antioxidants are molecules that help your body fight off harmful free radicals, which are unstable elements that are linked to many chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, dementia, and cancer. On a biochemical level, moringa helps prevent oxidative stress, and it protects against damage on a cellular level.
The antioxidant moringa I especially want to highlight is quercetin. Quercetin is a flavonoid antioxidant that has pretty far-ranging benefits.
First, quercetin can help lower your blood pressure. There is a small, but a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover trial that showed that 28 days of quercetin reduced both systolic and diastolic pressures in people with stage 1 hypertension, which is a mild form of high blood pressure.
In addition to that, moringa is also an excellent source of chlorogenic acid, which is a powerful polyphenol that helps with inflammation. And where you see the most benefit is in its regulation of blood sugar control and in the reduction of glucose spikes after a meal.
We do have a pretty small, but a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of 30 people with impaired glucose tolerance and what they saw was the group that was assigned to taking chlorogenic acid had a significant decrease in fasting plasma glucose, as well as an improvement in insulin sensitivity. And the treatment group also had a decrease in body weight and body mass index, as well as a decrease in waist circumference and triglycerides.
When it comes to inflammation, most of the research has been limited to animal studies. But we do have this human trial that was a small, but it was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial that included 50 women with rheumatoid arthritis. In this trial, the group that took quercetin for 8 weeks, which is one of the main bioactive compounds in moringa had a huge improvement in their symptoms. So, what they noted was a significant reduction in early morning stiffness, reduced morning pain, and reduced after activity pain.
The treatment group also showed a significant reduction in inflammatory markers, like TNF-alpha, when you compare that to the placebo group. So, unfortunately, there are no many human trials that study moringa when it comes to inflammatory conditions. But there are animal studies that show that moringa can be helpful when it comes to common conditions like asthma, and ulcerative colitis, and even advanced forms of fatty liver disease, like non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH. But, once again, these are not human studies, so the evidence is pretty limited in that sense.
Health Benefits of Moringa for Women
Another area where moringa could be helpful is in the regulation of perimenopausal symptoms, like hot flashes or night sweats. There's evidence showing that perimenopausal symptoms are associated with increased inflammation and increased oxidative stress.
So, moringa's anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties can help with that. And there was a small study that showed that supplementation with moringa in post-menopausal women resulted in a significant increase in many antioxidants, including retinol, ascorbic acid, glutathione, and it showed a significant decrease in markers of oxidative stress.
Health Benefits of Moringa for Men
Now, when it comes to men's health, we don't have any human clinical trials, but we do have some animal data that we can rely on.
First, we have this study that showed that moringa leaf extract can help with enlarged prostate through the enhancement of antioxidant defense mechanisms. Moringa may even help in the treatment of prostate cancer, with some studies showing that moringa extract can inhibit the proliferation of prostate cancer cells.
Another benefit, moringa may also help in the treatment of erectile dysfunction, with this study showing that the phenolic compounds in the moringa extract can help relax the penile smooth muscle and it can improve the blood flow.
And finally, there's animal data to suggest that moringa can also help men with fertility, and it does so by improving sperm health, and it can improve motility, and it can increase semen volume.
How to Use Moringa to Get its Health Benefits
Now, let me tell you the best way to consume moringa to get the most benefits. So, most people in the U.S. do not have moringa trees growing nearby, unless you live maybe in Florida or Arizona, I believe.
So, the easiest way to take it is as a supplement, either in a pill form or a powder form. And I recommend using the powder form, and you can use the powder to make teas or smoothies, or you can even stir it into soups or stews. And when you're looking for the best moringa supplement brand, make sure you pick the one that uses high quality moringa leaves, not its stems and roots, because it's the leaves that are the most nutritious part of the tree.
As with any other supplement, you want to make sure that the powder is third-party tested for purity and bioactive diversity. And you also want to pick the one with the least amounts of pesticides used. So, the brand that I personally take and I recommend to others that actually does meet all those criteria is called Kuli Kuli. But I'm sure there's other good brands out there, that's just the one that I found and I trust.
For my African brothers where we can get Moringa trees in abundance, we should try and include its leave in all our daily food. We can as we cook the leaves alone and eat with groundnut cake. The water we use to cook the leaves are equally beneficial, so we shouldn't discard.
Safety of Moringa as Food
Last, but very important, let's discuss safety considerations to moringa. Eating moringa leaves or taking the powder supplement is generally considered safe. But I would be cautious if you consume moringa root or bark, as those contain a lot of alkaloids that can cause toxicity.
But all in all, none of the human studies that we have talked about have shown any adverse effects, with some studies using up to 50 grams of moringa as a single dose, and some studies using up to 8 grams per day for up to 40 days.
Now, where I would recommend extra caution is if you have thyroid issues or if you're on a thyroid medication like Synthroid, as moringa has been shown to affect thyroid conversion levels in rats.
I would also use extra caution if you're taking any diabetes medications, including insulin, as moringa may improve your insulin sensitivity and you may need to adjust your diabetes medication to avoid low blood sugars. So, moringa is amazing nutritional powerhouse. It's probably one of the best antioxidant supplements or foods you can take.
The overall strength of the data is not as strong as I'd like to see, as it's mostly centered around small human trials and animal studies. But out of the data that we do have, it does seem to be very promising.
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