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. 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. 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 horesradish. The tree itself, is used as a living fence.
The Miracle Tree
Moringa is known by many names around the world, 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
The oil, known as ben oil, (due to the high concentration of behenic acid contained in the oil) is extracted from the seeds. Moringa seeds contain 35-40% of oil by weight and can yield more oil per hectare than sunflower or peanuts.
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.
In Conclusion
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.