Moringa

Moringa oleifera Lam, is one of the world’s most useful plants cultivated in tropical countries. It is easy to plant, and is available throughout the year. It has many uses: food, antibiotics, source of oil, and coagulants for turbid waters. No wonder it is called “mother’s best friend” and “miracle vegetable” by many who know of its beneficial effects. As a tribute to its usefulness and practical benefits, its image was used as the official logo of the Food and Nutrition Research Institute of the Department of Science and Technology.

Looking for a complete vitamin source? No tablet or capsule can compare with it.

Protein source

The leaves are an excellent source of Vitamins A and B, and minerals such as calcium and iron. It is even an excellent source of protein, and contains very low fat and carbohydrates. This is good news for overweight individuals and vegetarians who need a good protein source. The leaves are an excellent source of the sulfur-containing amino acids methionine and cystine, which are often the natural minerals humans are lacking of.

Due to its high content of Vitamins A, C and E, which are very potent antioxidants, malunggay can effectively neutralize unstable free radicals that can react with and damage other molecules that cause aging. Antioxidants reduce the appearance of wrinkles and fine lines. They also prevent the onset of various chronic diseases like arthritis, cancer and heart and kidney diseases.

For those with cancers or strong family histories of cancers, the lowly moringa can be heaven-sent. It contains the phytochemical niaziminin, which is found to have molecular components that can prevent the development of cancer cells. The first naturally occurring thiocarbamates, novel hypotensive agents niazinin A, niazinin B, niazimicin and niaziminin A and B were also isolated from moringa.

Moringa is a “miracle vegetable” with its medicinal and nutritional values. It helps promote good eyesight and digestion, facilitates bowel movement, and may help relieve stomach aches. Due to its high calcium content, lactating mothers are often advised to consume moringa leaves to produce more milk for their babies

“I have been heavy my entire life. I have a very supportive family and friendly coworkers, but when you don’t like the way you look, nothing anyone says or does to make you feel better works. I was negative about myself and everyone around me.

Here’s where you come in. Driving home from work I passed Moringa ysp tea’s daily and always wondered what it was like. I stopped my car a couple of times, but the patio was full of “beautiful people” and I felt terribly inadequate, so I would slink away. One day on the drive home I was listening to a call-in show on the radio, and found myself listening to a woman with the same complaints and woes as I had—and she sounded truly pathetic.

I pulled over and cried for half an hour. Then I turned my car around and headed straight back to a store, walked past the people on the patio and found an empty seat at a tea bar. I started to ask you questions about the health benefits of moringa tea. You stopped me dead in my tracks when you started to talk about the amazing weight loss benefits associated with moringa tea. Then you began to tell me about your Moringa Tea Diet, and I started to take notes.

I did just what you said. I drank my moringa tea all day, ate what I knew was right for me to eat, meditated at least one minute a day, and started to do something in the form of exercise. I had not moved around much for years. I began by walking around the house and, I have now made it around the block.

I am happy to tell you, I have lost 17 pounds in the last month. I feel healthier and happier than I have ever before. Thinking positively has changed everything about me. I owe you so much on Moringa Tea. You treated me like I was somebody and now I am. May all of life’s blessings visit you often.

Edith P., Los Angeles, C

Edith P. is, like millions of people, concerned about her health, unhappy with her appearance, and insecure about her ability to change her life. When she came to me for advice, I told her to do the very thing that had worked for me: start slowly, stop the insanity of endless diet plans that do not work, and start your journey towards good health, one cup of tea at a time.

My research about moringa olifiera has shown me that it is being used already  for over 3000 years.

It’s tea’s time! According to the Tea Association of America, the tea industry topped $6.2 billion in 2005 (and is expected to exceed $10 billion by 2010) with Americans drinking 2.2 billion gallons of tea each year. Americans are wising up to the fact that they don’t need a “grande” beverage from the local coffee establishment to get the extra boost they need to make it through their day. The health benefits of moringa tea can provide the stimulation and kick without all the side effects of a highly caffeinated beverage. It’s simply a cup of good health a day.

Do you know which beverage is the most consumed in the world? No, it’s not coffee, or beer, or wine. It’s water. And what comes next on the list? Still not coffee. Nor wine nor beer. It’s tea. In the most populated countries in the world, the drink they consume most often after water is tea. It’s time for tea to be recognized in this country, not only for the health benefits most of the world have known about for centuries, but for its incredible ability to help stop one of the world’s biggest health crises to date: obesity.

Americans, and American children and teenagers, are getting larger and larger every year and are paying the consequences in diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. Millions of Americans go on and off diets every day.

If you’re reading this article, you are probably one of those millions, and you are probably tired of your own yo-yo dieting experiences. We try to eat right, to make healthy choices, and to get off our addictions to sugar and caffeine, but it’s just too hard.  So we turn to drugs; we buy supplements made from obscure plants found only in African deserts; we cut out entire food groups; and we get totally confused by what the latest diet guru is telling us to eat (which is just the opposite of what the previous guru espoused). What we don’t know is that we don’t need drugs, supplements, or slide rules to help us figure out how to shed the pounds.

What we do need to know is very simple: Drinking Moringa ysp tea will help us lose weight. Yes, Moringa tea. Inexpensive. Good tasting. And available to everyone everywhere. Moringa ysp Tea, with natural ingredients that will not only help us lose weight, but will reduce our cravings for sweets, suppress our appetite, increase our insulin’s effectiveness, lower our cholesterol, and stimulate thermogenesis, which helps the body burn fat for energy. All this from a cup of moringa ysp tea!

This is not theory, guessing, or wishful thinking. This is hard science proven in study after study conducted over the past ten years by some of the most respected scientists around the world who have all come to the same conclusion: tea helps you lose weight.

Simple, and true.

A Common Tree With Rare Power

“Moringa’s potential as diet aid, water purifier is seen as boon to hunger fight. It’s cheap, full of nutrients and a known quantity in much of the developing world.

Scientifically speaking, Moringa sounds like magic. It can rebuild weak bones, enrich anemic blood and enable a malnourished mother to nurse her starving baby.  Ounce for ounce, it has the calcium of four glasses of milk, the Vitamin C of seven oranges and the potassium of three bananas.

Sounds like your Power Bar, you say? Well, consider this: A dash of Moringa can make dirty water drinkable. Doctors use it to treat diabetes in West Africa and high blood pressure in India. Not only can it staunch a skin infection, Moringa makes an efficient fuel, fertilizer and livestock feed.

Memo to Popeye: Moringa has triple the iron of spinach and more impressive attributes than olive oil. And it’s not only good for you, it’s delicious. You can cook Moringa in Moringa oil and top it with Moringa sauce and still taste a spectrum of flavors.

And it’s cheap enough to grow on trees. Which is what Moringa Oleifera is: A tree, with a gnarly trunk and tousled head of foliage that make it look like a cypress that just rolled out of bed. It is a common tree that thrives in both the desert and the living room and produces leaves, pods, seeds and flowers that each do uncommon things” ………
Mark Fritz, LA Times, Staff Writer

Moringa Oleifera

Moringa Oleifera is the most well known of the 13 varities of Moringa.  It is progated from either stem cuttings or seed.  It is an exceptionally nutritious vegetable tree. Except for the bark, which can be toxic, every part of the tree is edible. The young, tender, mustard-favored leaves are eaten raw in salads and cooked as a tasty potherb. The cooked leaves are also placed in soups and curries. The leaves can also be powdered and used as a spice.  The edible flowers taste similar to radish.  Either the flowers, fresh or dried, or young leaves can be used for tea.  The immature pods are cooked whole or the seeds removed and cooked as peas.  Mature  seeds are roasted and eaten as nuts.  Mature seeds are also pressed for their oil.  The roots can be ground and used as horseradish.  The tree itself, is used as a living fence.

The Miracle Tree

Moringa is known in 82 countries by 210 different names, but the one name that fully encompasses all its attributes is “the Miracle Tree”. The indigenous knowledge and use of Moringa is referenced in more than 80 countries and known in over 200 local languages.  Moringa has been used by various societies (Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and Indian to mention a few) for thousands of years with writings dating as far back as 150 AD.

While the continued use of Moringa for food and medicinal purposes by cultures in separate and distant parts of the world attest to its beneficial effects, Moringa is a recent “discovery” of modern science.  The leaves of Moringa Oleifera are nature’s multi-vitamin providing 7x the vitamin C of oranges, 4x the calcium of milk, 4x the vitamin A of carrots, 3x the potassium of bananas, and 2x the protein of yogurt.  On top of that, science is proving Moringa to be a power house of nutrients; 90 are known to date, with the possibility of more yet to be identified.  If that were not enough, Moringa has no known impurities, with no adverse reactions ever recorded.

Combats Malnutrition Worldwide

Moringa can be found in the tropics, world wide.  It also thrives in the arid parts of the world where bad water, poor diet, and the diseases they promote are leading killers.  The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that nearly 80% of the world’s population relies on traditional medicine (the use of plants) for their primary healthcare.  With Moringa being a known quantity in much of the developing world, Moringa can meet the needs of local populations in terms of availability, accessibility, and utilization.  Available in that it is already growing in areas of need, with spontaneous growth in many regions, and is a hearty and drought tolerant plant.  Accessible in that unlike imported medicine, foods, or other supplements, the cost per quantity is very inexpensive making Moringa affordable to poor populations.  Its potential as a cheap local supplement in the fight against malnutrition is promising.  So promising that dozens of humanitarian organizations including the Church World Service, the Educational Concerns for Hunger Organizations, Trees for Life, and the National Science Foundation now promote the use of Moringa in poverty-stricken areas to combat malnutrition.

Lowell Fuglie, director for Church World Service, West Africa, found that powdered Moringa leaves were more readily embraced by rural villagers than other dietary aids and decided to put it to the test.  After a two year pilot project in the southwest villages of Senegal, the organization recently convinced the Senegalese government to promote Moringa as part of the national diet.  In a 65 page book on the project, Fuglie described the willingness of a hospital administrator to substitute Moringa for the classical and costly methods of using whole milk powder, vegetable oil and sugar to treat malnutrition.  The administrator, a diabetic who had been drinking Moringa tea for years to control his diabetes, had been unaware of its nutritional properties.  One star of the project was a premature baby weighing only 3lbs. 5 oz at birth.  Due to her birth weight along with her mother not producing enough milk, baby Awa was not expected to live.  According to Fuglie, when mom and baby were both placed on a Moringa diet, mom started producing enough milk and baby quickly grew quite fat.

Amadou Ba, director of a Senegalese village health post concurs, “We were all trained in the classic solutions for treating malnutrition– whole milk powder, sugar, vegetable oil, sometimes peanut butter. But these ingredients are expensive and the recovery of malnourished infants can take months. Now we have replaced this with Moringa. We start seeing improvements within 10 days.”

Combats Childhood Blindness

Lack of vitamin A (due to malnutrition) causes 70% of childhood blindness around the world.  That translates into 500,000 children going blind every year due to lack of vitamin A.  The Bethesda, Maryland based International Eye Foundation, is using Moringa with its high content of beta carotene, which is converted to vitamin A by the body, to combat childhood blindness around the world.

Better Protein than Soy

Moringa is considered to have the highest protein ratio of any plant so far identified, with the protein in Moringa being comparable in quality to that of soy.  Food scientists once believed that only soy had protein comparable to meat, dairy, and eggs.  Now they have added Moringa to that very short list.  Some even consider Moringa protein better than soy protein as it is non-allergic.  Proteins are digested into smaller units known as amino acids.  Moringa contains 18 of the 20 amino acids required by the human body including all eight of the essential amino acids found in meat products.  (Meat is a luxury most people around the world cannot afford).  The body cannot manufacture those eight essential amino acids and must get them through the food we eat.  Moringa is one of very few plants that contain all eight.

More impressive than Olive Oil
Oleifera, Latin term meaning oil containing
The oil, known as ben oil, (due to the high concentration of behenic acid contained in the oil) is extracted from the seeds.  Moringa Oleifera seeds contain 35-40% of oil by weight and can yield more oil per hectare than sunflower or peanuts. The oil has more impressive attributes than olive oil.  It is used in cooking and cosmetics; and because it won’t spoil and turn rancid, it is also used as a preservative and machinery lubricant, even being used as a lubricant in fine watches.  What’s left after the oil has been extracted from the seeds is called seed cake, which is used as feed to increase milk production in cows.

Purifies Water
Lack of drinkable water is one of the world’s most serious threats.  Water related diseases account for more than 80% of the world’s sickness.   People in many developing nations simply do not have acess to clean safe water, leaving them with little choice but to drink and wash with water so contaminated that we wouldn’t even dare to walk in it.

Professor Suleyman Aremu Muyibi, of the International Islamic University of Malaysia, believes Moringa seeds could potentially provide a renewable, sustainable and biodegradable material for treating global water supplies.  When Moringa seeds are crushed and added to dirty, bacteria laden water, they purify the water.   As part of a Nigeria-based study, Muyibi feels that such an opportunity could be especially attractive in developing countries, where roughly 1.2 billion people still lack safe drinking water, with an estimated 25,000 people dying from water-borne diseases every day.

Britain’s University of Leicester is also studying the coagulating properties of Moringa seeds for its water purifying abilities.  Researchers at the school believed the Moringa seeds would work better than the common water purifier, aluminum sulfate, which can be toxic, and have successfully replaced the imported alum system of a Malawi village with a simpler full scale system using Moringa seeds.

Moringa may be the new kid on the block, where modern science is concerned, but with all its attributes Moringa will not only continue to help people who live a world away from us not only in location but also in need; it will also be integrated into many industries of the western world including food, pharmaceutical, and cosmetics.

Moringa’s Nutritional Compounds

Moringa Oleifera contains over 90 nutritional compounds.  Proper nutrients are required to maintain one’s health and lower the risk of degenerative diseases.

“There are over 500,000 known species of plants on the planet and, to date, only 1% have been studied for medicinal and nutritional purposes”.
Monica Marcu, Pharm. D., Ph.D

Biochemists constantly look to the plant world to discover new ways to benefit the human body.  Now that they have found Moringa, they are calling it the most nutrient-rich plant on the planet.

With its complex range of naturally occurring vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and other important phytonutrients (plant nutrients), Moringa is a rare powerhouse of nutrition.  It has massive amounts of chlorophyll, more protein than soy, a healthy quantity of omega-3 oils, anti-inflammatories, and an extensive range of antioxidants (nutrients that attract and neutralize highly reactive molecules called free radicals that could otherwise damage body cells in ways that initiate cancer development, heart disease and age-related eye damage).


Moringa in Medicine to Treat Diabetes

Moringa ysp Tea contains compounds (such as beta-sitosterol) that show potential blood-pressure-lowering benefits.  In fact, it is often in India for hypertension. Other uses include treating ulcers and anxiety”.
Karta Purkh Singh Khalsa, C.N.

*Ayurveda is an alternative medical system that has been practiced for 2,000 years primarily on the Indian subcontinent where it is used by 80% of the population.  Ayurveda includes diet and herbal remedies and emphasizes the use of body, mind, and spirit in disease prevention and treatment.  The word Ayurveda is derived from two Sankrit words “ayus” and “veda” meaning life and knowledge, respectively; so Ayurveda literally means science of life.

“The Moringa tree is truly remarkable.  Yet it is virtually unknown, except to botanists and ayurvedic herbalists.
Doctors in West Africa use Moringa to treat diabetes. Moringa has a long history in medicine.  Ayurveda*, in particular, has used Moringa as a source of vitamin C, and to treat colds, boils, fever,  joint pain and even gout. Ayurvedic medicine uses Moringa leaves to prevent 300 diseases.

Benefits of Moringa

1. Contains over 90 nutrients to support body health
2. Contains 46 anti-oxidants
3. Contains 36 anti-inflammatories
4. Promotes healthy circulatory system
5. Promotes healthy digestion
6. Promotes healthy cellular structure
7. Enhances skin health
8. Reduces the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles
9. Provides a sense of well being
10. Triggers the metabolism
11. Increases energy
12. Supports the immune system
13. Nourishes the eyes and brain
14. Supports normal blood glucose
15. Promotes natural serum cholesterol
16. Promotes normal functioning of the liver and the kidney

People tend to think that solutions to their problems are expensive and hard to find.  But more often than not, real solutions to basic problems can be found the way nature intended, in nature, herself.  Moringa ysp , won’t necessarily do the same thing for everyone or in the same amount or in the same time frame, but with regular daily use Moringa ysp Tea will do something for everyone.