Plant Research Term Project, Part 4: Scientific and Medical Evidence

Professor: Van Corva

Physical Science 002

Chosen Herb: Basil

10/01/2017

Word Count:1510

As we all know, there are countless of plants in the world. They are all unique as the chemical compounds that they have are different. Some of them are very useful to people, and some of them are just waste of time for people. However, as we know, basil is definitely one of the most useful and beneficial plants to people in the world. Basil is not only useful in general cooking for Italian cuisine, Asian cuisine and so on, but it also takes a significant role in treatment to many diseases. Such as headache, Fever, Cold, and other many serious disease. However, how did the plant basil can help people in the treatment of disease and what contributed to curing people? The chemical components might be one of the answers. There are so many chemical components in all kinds of basil. Every different kind of basil might have different components, and these mixtures of different components are making huge sacrifices to many different treatment of disease.

According to Chemical composition and antimicrobial activity of Basil, basil mainly contains methyl eugenol and methyl chavicol as the chemical compounds. It stated that basil was helpful against Gram-positive, Gram-negative bacteria, and it has the ability of bactericidal. Furthermore, basil can mainly divided into four groups based on their chemical content. They are French, which is Ocimum basilicum, exotic, methyl cinnamate, and eugenol. Different kind of basil might have different smells since it has different portion of essential oils that made it together. For example, sweet basil has a strong clove scent because it is from the chemical component eugenol in the body of basil. In addition, lemon basil and lime basil has a citrus scent due to the fact that they both have a high portion of citral and limonene. Another example would be African blue basil. It has a highly camphor smell due to its component of camphene and camphor. Additionally, Anise basil, which also known as Licorice basil, has anethole, which made it smell like licorice. There are still so many more chemicals that make up the smell of basil, and it mainly depends on the proportion of chemicals that they have. Such as Linalyl acetate ,fenchyl acetate,trans-ocimene, terpineol, citronellol, myrcene, and eugenol.

Basil is a kind of spices plant and contains estragole but just very few proportion, and basil was once suspected to cause cancer because of estragole that basil has. In 1981, the report of JECFA about organization doubt that it has carcinogenicity, which could lead people to have cancer. This report is based on a experiment using mouses. However, after a long time period of researching and experiment, biologist declared that estragole is not affecting people’s bodies and has no other unhealthy reactions to people. Therefore, there are no countries required nor regulated to not using basil in cooking food or making other herbs. Basil is now a well-known safety food material, and it is widely used in spices, drinking, and food.

The holy basil, which is also known as Tulsi, was an indigenous plant that were first found in India. Due to its huge curing ability, it was almost used in every single family in India. It is not only has a favorable scent, but it also rumours to have an ability of longevity. Everyone do not want to die and live for a longer time period, so Tulsi was very popular in India due to its longevity. Tulsi has hundreds of benefit compounds, and it has a strong ability of anti-oxidation, antiviral, compassive capacity, and enhance immunity. According to a daily newspaper, every four cup of fresh basil, it contains 1% of calcium, potassium, magnesium, folic acid; 31% of vitamin K; 6% of vitamin A; 2% of vitamin A.

Clinical experiment has proved that basil of the ability of anti-oxidation, anti-viral and many other useful and healthy treatment. For example, Preventing mosquito bites would be one of the result from clinical experiment of basil. It is very effective to prevent mosquito bites. If we put a basil in particular area, then in this surrounding area would have no mosquito. I actually tried this method and this is very useful. I remember that last week, my house were having many mosquitoes. It was very annoying to see so many mosquitoes. And then I tried this method putting some alive basil in my house. After a while, mosquitoes were obviously disappearing. This is one of the most effective methods to get rid of mosquitoes because the properties of anti mosquitoes that basil has. Whenever you feel you have trouble with mosquitoes, just use the basil and this is a very powerful weapon to kill mosquitoes. However, if you were bitten by mosquitoes unfortunately, please do not worry and calm down because I am going to show you a very helpful method to cure it. We can broke some basil into powder and we can put these powder to the wound. The wound would be curing in a very effective way. In addition ,in some natural cure, it is proved by some biologist that the juice of basil could successfully to cure ringworm and many other skin disease. In thailand, there was clinical experiment showed that the ability of antibacterial that basil had could effectively cure hemorrhoids and prevent the germ from growing. Additionally, the place under humid climate might experiencing fever and cold a lot due to its climate. However basil could help these people who are living in humid climate area. A cup of basil could be helpful in the treatment of fever, cold and many other humid climate disease. Basil has the chemical component that could prevent fever and cold.

Basil was also a magical herb for the people who want to quit smoking. Basil has a strong ability of anti stress. This kind of properties that basil had could help people to calm down when they are facing a serious situation like smoking. It helps people to relax themselves when they are trying to smoke, and calm the feeling of desiring to smoke down. By the way, if you, or your friends are having troubles with quitting smoking, I would highly recommended you to use basil as the herb cure to help you out with quitting smoking. This is a very useful method to quit smoking because basil could really help people to relax their feeling of desiring to smoke when they want to smoke. Additionally, there was a clinical experiment concluded that facial stream with dry basil leaf could helpfully to reduce headache. The stream with dried basil leaf contains the chemical component to reduce the pain from headache and relaxing your head. Basil also protect and prevent heart disease because it lowers cholesterol in the blood pressure. I did try this method whenever I feel like headache, and this is a very useful method to relax your head when you have a headache because basil stream could lower your blood pressure. Moreover, basil could help to regulate our stomach. Basil was one of the best herb cure for diarrhea and throwing up. It is considered as clever to bring some basil in your backpack when you are trying to travel oversea or to far place because you might be very comfortable with the water and food in the place that you are traveling for. Basil could help you out if you are diarrhea and throwing.

To sum it up, there are numerous clinical experiment and life example of basil to cure disease. It is extremely helpful to use basil as herb cure to some disease, but we have to understand well and do research or ask a professional doctor about which kind of basil should we used to cure a particular disease because there are hundreds of different basil in the world and they might have different chemical components. However, one thing that we do need to pay attention about using herb cure. We have to know which particular herb to use for a disease and learn about if they are effective in curing such a disease. If we put a wrong basil to cure an unrelated disease, its result would be serious. It might cause you to have worse situation and it is wasting your time and effort. We do not want to waste our time to some unuseful herb to treat people’s treatment. We might know that basil is ordinary plant because it does not have a very good looking like lavender, rose, and many other plant, but basil is definitely considered as one of the most useful and helpful plant in the world due to its contribution to people’s general cooking like Italian cuisine, Vietnamese cuisine, and Chinese cuisine and its contribution to herb cure. The position of basil for human is definitely not just a plant, but it also is a close to human due to the sacrifice that basil contributed to us.

References

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4264302/