You remember the days a decade ago when I celebrated the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ “Discovery of America” and the Native Americans who had colonized it some 25,000 years earlier and been visited by Scandinavians a bit earlier. I believe Leif Ericsson also encountered Native Americans when he landed nearly 500 years earlier, up around Vinland, north of the United States. In reflecting the anniversary of Columbus’ voyage, I often make the comment that Columbus set sail seeking black pepper and black Indians and instead found red Indians and red pepper, changing the cuisine and the medicine of the world and reshaping everyone’s food basket and medicine chest significantly.
The travels of Columbus opened up one of the world’s greatest exchanges of flora and fauna, and yes even germs, including some lethal smallpox germs, as well as higher plants (many never having been seen before outside America) and animals. This has laxly been termed the “Columbian exchange,” the rapid movement, to and fro, of useful plants and animals, some for the first time, from continent to continent.
Frequently, the major producers of spices are not regions to which the species originally belonged, but areas of introduction as a result of the Columbian exchange of plants and animals around the world. I got very excited at what I learned in preparing my talk, Spice rack/medicine chest—Five hundred years after Columbus, presented under the auspices of Old ways in Spain the following year (1991, 1992). Spices are important medicines that have withstood the empirical tests of millennia. New topics come out every year embracing the time proven medicinal efficacy of one spice or another. Chile, garlic, ginger, onion, pepper, and turmeric are almost as popular, and deservedly sso, as medicines as they are as spices.
I’ll freely dispense sage advice:
Sage is an herb, not a spice!
Herbs are tasty temperate shoots!
Spices, barks, buds, seeds, roots, and fruits!
That’s why spices are much higher priced!
I’ll not labor with the technical and varying definitions of spices as opposed to culinary herbs, but I summarized much of it in the verse above. Over generalizing, culinary herbs are temperate leafy shoots used culinarily to flavor other dishes. And I know of no culinary herb that lacks medicinal activities. (Mentha requienii is so small that it seems not to have evolved any serious medicinal folklore; its the only popular herb for which I found no published medicinal folklore.) And over generalizing, spices are more often tropical and involve other plant parts, not just the leaves and shoots. But there is no fine line between spice and herb, and furthermore no fine line between, herb, spice, food, and medicine. Chile, garlic, ginger, onion, pepper, and turmeric are all herbaceous in the botanical sense of the word, i.e., not producing any wood; they are all often included in the spice charts and statistics of the world; they are all foods; they are all medicines.
I have intentionally omitted from this topic many of the better-known temperate culinary herbs. Anethum graveolens (dill), Brassica sp. (mustard), Coriandrum sativum (coriander), Cuminum cyminum (cumin), Foeniculum vulgare (fennel), Mentha spp. (peppermint, spearmint, etc), Origanum vulgare (oregano), Ocimum basilicum (basil), Papaver somniferum (poppy), Petroselinum crispum (parsley), Pimpinella anisum (aniseed), Salvia officinalis (sage), and Thymus vulgaris (thyme). These are clearly culinary and medicinal herbs, and all are carried in the USDA spice statistics. Most are also covered in detail and illustrated in Ed. 2 of our CRC Handtopic of Medicinal
Herbs (et al., 2002). Many of them are also covered in my topics on Medicinal Plants of the Bible (1983, 1999), Culinary Herbs (1985), and Living Liqueurs (1987).
Under indications, I list most published i indications that crossed my desk, alphabetically, with each indication followed by the ‘f’ or numerical score for efficacy, followed by the citation for the source. It was with some trepidation that I converted more specific terms such as arthritis to arthrosis, and bronchitis to bronchosis; but I think that was a more economical (space wise) was of presenting the data. Classically the suffix ‘itis’ means inflammation and ‘osis’ means ailment of. Thus arthritis is inflammation of the joint, and arthrosis is broader, meaning an ailment in the joint. Where some author just said “for joint problems,” that became ‘arthrosis,’ but where they were more specific and said inflammation of the joint it means the more specific ‘arthritis.’ Towards the end I aggregated both under ‘arthrosis.’ Many people will dislike the fact I converted all the more specific -itis etntries to -osis, rather than somewhat redundantly include both.
In the indications paragraph, you see parenthetical numbers followed by three-letter abbreviations (abbreviation of source) or an alphanumeric X-1111111 to identify PubMed citations. A parenthetical efficacy score of (1) under an activity or indication means that a chemical in the plant or an extract of the plant has shown the activity or proven out experimentally (animal, not clinical) for the indication. This could be in vitro animal or assay experiments. A hint; not real human proof! Nothing clinical yet! I score (2) here if the aqueous extract, ethanolic extract, or decoction or tea derived from the plant has been shown to have the activity or to support the indication in clinical trials. Commission E (KOM) and Tramil Commission (TRA) approvals were automatically scored (2) also, as they represented consensus opinions of distinguished panels. The rare (3) scoring for efficacy means that there are clinical trials showing that the plant itself (not just an extract or phytochemical derived therefrom) has the indication or activities. The solitary (f) in many of the citations means that it is unsupported folk medicine, or I have not seen the science to back it up. The three-letter abbreviations are useful short citations of the references consulted in arriving at these numbers. I have by no means cited every source here. But unlike KOM and hopefully better than PDR for Herbal Medicines, ed. 1 and 2 (PHR and PH2), I indicate at least one source for every indication and activity I report. Commission E (Blumenthal et al., 1998) did not list sources.
And after much soul searching, I have decided to spare our readers the long list of all the phytochemicals reported from each of these spices. These are available for your purview on the USDA phytochemical database. Many of these are detailed para-graphically in and (1993). Instead, I have pulled forward for you some of the major compounds that may underlie many of the reported activities of these species. These data, too, are available on our USDA website, where I also list the source of each data entry. Another new feature is the addition of our Multiple Activity queries, not yet available on the USDA database. With the able assistance of Sue Mustalish, R.N., and Leigh Broadhurst, Ph.D. and certified nutritionist, I have accumulated many of the activities that might contribute to the alleviation, correction and/or prevention of an ailment. The computer then searches for phytochemicals reported from that spice that have the desired activities. As you will see, this shows that the spice is a menu of biologically active compounds that might help the malady. I suspect the body is skillful at sifting through those phytochemicals with which your genes have co-evolved for so many millions of years. This does not prove that the spice will help; it just proves that the spice contains phytochemicals, often by the dozens, that have been shown to have useful activities.
In this topic, I focus on the medicinal application of spices. If you need to know more about quality specifications and the like, I suggest you consult Purseglove et al. (1981) or Tainter and Grenis (1993). I feel a bit stronger about the medicinal potential of spices than did Purseglove, who said, “Spices are no longer as important medicines as they were in the past, but some have minor uses in modern pharmacopoeias, of which probably the most important is Capsicum.”
(Capsicum shows up in proprietary preparations from A to Z, Axsain to Zostrix, JAD.) As a matter of fact, I agree with Purseglove that the spices did suffer a decline in both medicinal importance and relative value. But I predict that such spices as capsicum, cinnamon, garlic, ginger, onion, and turmeric will assume relatively more medicinal importance again, as the economic costs and knowledge of the side-effects of prescription pharmaceuticals increase. You see, each spice contains thousands of useful phytochemicals. Pharmaceuticals usually contain only one or two.
I actually believe that many educated Americans, after reading this topic, may sometimes head to the spice chest for minor ailments instead of the medicine chest. When one considers that 80% of the world cannot afford our pharmaceuticals, I’ll speculate that already more humans use spices as medicines than use prescription pharmaceuticals. I’ll even put the spices up against the pharmaceuticals, the garlic against the statins for high cholesterol, the ginger against antacids for ulcer and even for morning sickness (they don’t have an approved pharmaceutical), capsaicin vs. Acyclovir for shingles, and turmeric vs. Vioxx for arthritis and vs. Cognex for Alzheimer’s.
I could start my spice story ~500 years ago when Columbus discovered America, or 50,000-60,000 years ago, when humans were learning that wrapping their food in leaves kept the ashes off, retained the juices, and sometimes improved the flavor, or even tenderized tough meat; or ca. 5000 years ago, when garlic and onion were contributing to Egypt’s pyramids, ginger joining early Chinese medicine chests, pepper penetrating Ayurvedic medicine chests, and sesame spicing Assyrian wines. Babylonians, ca. 2700 b.p. (before present), were familiar with cardamom, coriander, garlic, saffron, thyme, and turmeric. Assyrians, ca. 2650 B.P., were familiar with anise, cardamom, coriander, cumin, dill, garlic, myrrh, poppy, saffron, sesame, thyme, and turmeric. Around 2400 b.p., the father of medicine, Hippocrates, said “let food be your medicine, medicine your food.” Already, he was familiar with cinnamon, coriander, marjoram, mint, saffron, and thyme. In those days, spices were as important for medicine, embalming, preserving food, and masking bad odors, as they were for more mundane culinary matters. Now, in the new millennium, I may be reverting to the Hippocratean corollary: let food be your medicine. Many Americans are a bit alarmed by Journal of the American Medical Association statistics (JAMA p. 2891, 1987) that the “prevalence of fatal drug reactions has been estimated at 0.01% for surgical in-patients and 0.1% for medical in-patients.” That indicates that at least 1 in 1000 patients in a hospital will die of iatrogenic causes. With medicine getting more and more expensive and impersonal, and high iatrogenic death rates as quoted from JAMA, people are actually afraid of their doctors and/or health plans. I’ve been with the same health plan for nearly two decades. On visits to my neurosurgeon, my charts and magnetic resonance imagery (MRI) were lost, so that I wasted an afternoon. On one visit to the GP, I saw the erroneous comment that I was on the contraceptive pill. When one GP prescribed a sulfa drug for sinusitis, he had to ask me if I was allergic to sulfa. This should already be in his computer, as should my blood type. He could produce neither. Having been with a plan that long, I find it disgraceful that they can’t tell me instead of asking me. That’s why I’m inclined to listen to news that garlic might cure sinusitis, rhinitis, even meningitis. And that’s why all this renewed interest in spices and foods as pharmaceuticals, an aversive reversion to Hippocrates. So spices are working their way back into the medicine chest, with many good reasons, economic, gustatory, and salutory.
