Today’s post is really interesting about Moringa oleifera it's a plant and I'm wondering should I be talking about this what are the health benefits is their any research behind it. I got a good opportunity to really dive into some of this research and prep for this post so moringa is an interesting plant it's called the Tree of Life and it's been used for thousands of years in a lot of eastern countries as a kind of cure-all herb because it has a lot of general health properties that we're gonna get into in this post and Moringa is also great outside of its health benefits.
Behind my house, there are some moringa plants we take the leaves and flower to prepare moringa curry which has many health benefits.Moringa also called queen of spinach leaves.
Today while capturing moringa plan am shocked to see snake spotted in the tree.
Moringa really has two different properties it has an antioxidant property and an anti-inflammatory property which make it a beneficial health supplement but as you're gonna see in the punchline here is it's not a better antioxidant or anti-inflammatory than other things we already have in your diet so kind of that's the punchline here but let's look at what antioxidant anti-inflammatory.
Actually means antioxidant means that it helps prevent free radicals and you may have heard the term free radical before these are essentially these compounds that are in our bodies that damage our DNA and we produce free radicals naturally and what they do is they kind of cruise around they have one unpaired electron so they're very reactive and they bump into things and they create more free radicals so it's this cascade of damage that happens in our bodies so when we hear the term antioxidant which is something that most good fruits and vegetables are they are antioxidants what antioxidants do is they squash free radicals they get rid of them so they don't damage our bodies.
So that's good we want antioxidants in our diets and not surprisingly the best superfoods on the planets like you know you got your broccoli your blueberries your cacao powder your turmeric you know fish oil a lot of these things are antioxidants and they're also anti-inflammatories which is very related anti-inflammatories basically are things that squash inflammation in our bodies and inflammation is this response where our immune system reacts to stuff drives a lot of blood flow and can really create some damage if left unchecked so we want acute short-term inflammation like when you twist your ankle we want inflammation to happen to start the healing process but what happens to a lot of people who are living bad diets eating lots of sugar not sleeping being stressed is they have chronic inflammation throughout the entire body.
When we take things that are anti-inflammatories they help reduce this chronic total body inflammation and we want to keep that low we want free radicals low we want inflammation low so Maringa seems good on paper right it's getting the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory but how does it stack up to other things in the diets as I said there are other great anti-inflammatories two of the best anti-inflammatories on the I'm sorry antioxidants on the planet our blueberries and cacao powder and that's one of the reasons why we recommend you include the cacao in your morning shakes on the fit father program because it's one of the most powerful antioxidants on the entire planet it whoops Maringa spud so is there a benefit of taking Moringa for antioxidant properties.
The anti-inflammatory properties yes Moringa is an anti-inflammatory but it's not better than things like fish oil and the turmeric curcumin that we recommend on the program so yes it has these properties but it's not best-in-class it's a sure it's an all general supplement it's very good but the only thing that we know from Moringa that it really is best-in-class at and this is kind of funny is it actually produces increases milk production in pregnant women it's really good at that doesn't have that effect in men obviously but that's something that Moringa has a very potent effect so overall Moringa is a good supplement you know in the sense that it has provides general health benefits will it actually enhance your health on top of all the other things.
Moringa it really doesn't stand up to best-in-class in that sense but it's certainly something you could take in my opinion you would never make our staple supplement list so I hope that helps you and actually one more thing I want to say about Moringa that makes it actually very interesting I mean is it as a pretty narrow therapeutic range meaning I think when people take when they take Moringa is and take around 500 milligrams of the extract of the leaf two to three times per day but if we even triple that dose you know three to four times that dose it becomes toxic so it's an interesting compound and it has a very narrow therapeutic range mean if we step outside the range just a little bit three to four times which is really not that much it can create toxic damage to our DNA so that's not good right and there are some so many compounds like vitamin C is a really potent antioxidant you could take a ton of vitamin C like ten thousand percent more than a normal recommended dose.
In animal studies Moringa does lead to abortions and it's not safe in pregnancy and some of that data has not been fully fleshed out for ethical reasons in humans but there's a lot of speculation that you should not take Moringa if you're pregnant so I don't think anyone here at the fit father project has too much of that concern but if you have someone in your family that's considering taking this and maybe taking too much could cause problems especially if you have someone your family's pregnant so something to definitely think of and consider overall Moringa.