CRC Handbook of Medicinal Spices

334 Pages·2002·6.47 MB·English

by  James A. Duke

FREEDOM PALESTINE
http://arab2000.forumpro.fr
FREEDOM PALESTINE
http://arab2000.forumpro.fr
FREEDOM PALESTINE
http://arab2000.forumpro.fr
FREEDOM PALESTINE
CRC HANDBOOK OF
Medicinal
Spices
James A. Duke
with
Mary Jo Bogenschutz-Godwin
Judi duCellier
Peggy-Ann K. Duke –
“Illustrator”
CRC PR ESS
Boca Raton London New York Washington, D.C.
http://arab2000.forumpro.fr
FREEDOM PALESTINE
Peggy-Ann K. Duke has the copyright to all black and white line illustrations.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
CRC handbook of medicinal spices / James A. Duke … [et al.].
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8493-1279-5 (alk. paper)
1. Materia medica, Vegetable--Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Spices--Therapeutic
use--Handbooks, manuals, etc. 3. Herbs--Therapeutic use--Handbooks, manuals, etc. I.
Duke, James A., 1929-
RS164 .C826 2002
615′.321--dc21 2002067412
This book contains information obtained from authentic and highly regarded sources. Reprinted material is quoted with
permission, and sources are indicated. A wide variety of references are listed. Reasonable efforts have been made to publish
reliable data and information, but the author and the publisher cannot assume responsibility for the validity of all materials
or for the consequences of their use.
Neither this book nor any part may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher.
The consent of CRC Press LLC does not extend to copying for general distribution, for promotion, for creating new works,
or for resale. Specific permission must be obtained in writing from CRC Press LLC for such copying.
Direct all inquiries to CRC Press LLC, 2000 N.W. Corporate Blvd., Boca Raton, Florida 33431.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation, without intent to infringe.
Visit the CRC Press Web site at www.crcpress.com
© 2003 by CRC Press LLC
No claim to original U.S. Government works
International Standard Book Number 0-8493-1279-5
Library of Congress Card Number 2002067412
Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
Printed on acid-free paper
http://arab2000.forumpro.fr
©2003 CRC Press LLC
FREEDOM PALESTINE
Acknowledgments
Perhaps it is unusual to acknowledge one's coauthors in a new book, but I sure wish to acknowledge
mine for their patience and perseverance with this new book. To Mary Jo Bogenschutz-Godwin
for tidying up my most untidy first drafts, and for querying our database, after updating the database
at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), working with my former USDA colleagues
Jimmie Mowder, Ed Bird (deceased), and Quinn Sinnott. I am of course indebted to the USDA for
maintaining the database these many years and to Dr. Alan Stoner for facilitating this. Readers of
the book will realize the importance of the USDA database in shaping some of our new concepts
and even for suggesting new indications for old spices. To Judi duCellier who, for more than 25
years, has quietly, and without complaining, struggled not only with my illegible handwritten notes,
complete incompetence at the computer, quick reprioritizations, and now terminal dyslexia (double
meaning intended), and produced useful documents that I mold into first drafts. To Peggy-Ann K.
Duke, botanist and co-compiler, for closer to five decades, to whom both the world and I are
indebted for her talented art, learned as a botanist while sharing with me the wonders of botany at
the University of North Carolina, under out great teachers, alphabetically, Drs. J. E. Adams, C. R.
Bell, J. N. Couch (who swore I could not be both a botanist and a musician; my music proves him
right), Victor Greulach, A. E. Radford, and H. R. Totten, who kept us interested in botany. That
interest is still today reflected, in the seven plus decades of Peggy's and my lives, in my Green
Farmacy Garden in Maryland and the ReNuPeRu Garden in Peru which I started nearly a decade
ago. It now functions fine without me, thanks to Pamela Bucur de Arevalo and the wonderful
workers at the Explorama Lodges of Amazon Peru, where Peggy and I shared the turning of the
New Millennium. Coincidentally, we may be leading a course there at the ReNuPeRu garden next
year, teaching Latin Americans how to better grow and process some herbs, medicinal plants and
spices covered in this book. As I have struggled with this book, I have had the marvelous luck to
have acquired a new director for my Green Farmacy Garden, phytopathologist Holly Shull Vogel.
In a sense, she keeps the Green Farmacy Garden alive through unfailing labors, too often all her
own. She shares my vision of teaching America about the best and safest medicines, like some of
the spices in this book. Illustrations for the onion, frankencense, cassia, cinnamon and cassia, garlic,
bayleaf, and myrtle are used with the permission of Duke, J., Medicinal Plants of the Bible, Trado-
Medic Books, Buffalo, New York, 1983. All other illustrations in this book are courtesy of Peggy-
Ann K. Duke. Our thanks to those patient people at CRC who tolerated our frequent changes of
direction, especially Barbara Norwitz, Sara Kreisman, and Joette Lynch. And to you, the reader,
and your health, may the spices of life prolong and enhance the quality of your lives, saving you
from what is believed to be America's biggest killer, Adverse Drug Reactions (ADR's) according
to The Journal of the American Medical Association, May 1, 2002.
James A. Duke
http://arab2000.forumpro.fr
©2003 CRC Press LLC
FREEDOM PALESTINE
The Author
James A. “Jim” Duke, Ph.D., is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina,
where he received his Ph.D. in Botany. He then moved on to postdoctoral activities at Washington
University and the Missouri Botanical Gardens in St. Louis, Missouri, where he assumed professor
and curator duties, respectively. He retired from the United States Department of Agriculture
(USDA) in 1995 after a 35-year career there and elsewhere as an economic botanist. After retiring,
he was appointed Senior Scientific Consultant to Nature’s Herbs (A Twin Labs subsidiary), and to
an online company, ALLHERB.COM. He currently teaches a master’s degree course in botanical
healing at the Tai Sophia Institute in Columbia, Maryland.
Dr. Duke spends time exploring the ecology and culture of the Amazonian Rain Forest and sits
on the board of directors and advisory councils of numerous organizations involved in plant
medicine and the rainforest. He is updating several of his published books and refining his online
database, http://www.ars-grin.gov/duke/, still maintained at the USDA. He is also expanding his
private educational Green Farmacy Garden at his residence in Fulton, Maryland.
http://arab2000.forumpro.fr
©2003 CRC Press LLC
FREEDOM PALESTINE
Contents
Introduction
Abbreviations
Catalog of Spices (A to Z)
Reference Abbreviations
References
http://arab2000.forumpro.fr
©2003 CRC Press LLC
FREEDOM PALESTINE
Introduction
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 Oldways in Spain the
following year (Duke, 1991, 1992). Spices are important medicines that have withstood the empir-
ical tests of millennia. New books 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. Overgeneralizing, 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 overgeneralizing, 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 book 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), Orig-
anum 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 Handbook of Medicinal
http://arab2000.forumpro.fr
©2003 CRC Press LLC
FREEDOM PALESTINE
Herbs (Duke et al., 2002). Many of them are also covered in my books on Medicinal Plants of the
Bible (Duke, 1983, 1999), Culinary Herbs (Duke, 1985), and Living Liqueurs (Duke, 1987).
Under indications, I list most published iindications 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 abbre-
viations (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 (http://www.ars-grin.gov/duke/). Many of these are detailed para-
graphically in Duke and duCellier (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 book, 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.”
http://arab2000.forumpro.fr
©2003 CRC Press LLC