Moringa: History and Traditional Use

Table of Contents

1. Origins, Botany and a Tangle of Names
2. The Ancient "Oil of Ben": Egypt, Greece and a Different Moringa
3. Shigru: What the Ayurvedic and Siddha Traditions Recorded
4. Drumstick and Malunggay: The Tree in the Kitchen
5. How the Tree Travelled: Goa, Africa, the Islands and the Americas
6. Clear Water from a Seed: Sudan, Samia Al Azharia Jahn and the Cationic Protein
7. From Pterygospermin to Moringin: The Laboratory Chapter
8. The "Miracle Tree": Development Agencies and the Numbers
9. What the Modern Trials Actually Show
10. Moringa Today
11. Key Research Papers
12. Connections
13. Featured Videos

Origins, Botany and a Tangle of Names

Moringa oleifera is the best-known member of a small and unusual plant family, the Moringaceae, which contains a single genus of thirteen species scattered across the dry tropics of Africa, Arabia, Madagascar and South Asia. Several of its relatives are bottle-trunked desert trees; M. oleifera is the slender, fast-growing one, and the only species people carried around the world. Botanists place its home in the sub-Himalayan foothills of north-western India and adjoining Pakistan and Nepal. Its truly wild range is uncertain — it has been planted and self-seeded for so long that natural and escaped populations are hard to tell apart — but the north-west Indian lowlands are the consensus answer.

The names tell the story of who used it. The genus name comes from the Dravidian languages of South India: Tamil murungai, Malayalam muringa, a word usually explained as "twisted pod". Portuguese traders met the tree on the Malabar and Goan coasts and carried the word into European botany, sometimes as moxingo (from Konkani), more often as moringa. In Sanskrit it is shigru or shobhanjana, from which Hindi sahjan (also sahijan or saijan) descends. English has three names for three parts of the plant: drumstick tree for the long, ribbed pods; horseradish tree for the pungent root, which British residents in India grated as a substitute for horseradish; and ben oil tree for the clear, stable seed oil, a name inherited from an older Mediterranean trade.

Formal botany caught up in the eighteenth century. Linnaeus listed the tree in 1753 as Guilandina moringa; Jean-Baptiste Lamarck gave it its present name, Moringa oleifera ("oil-bearing"), in the Encyclopédie méthodique in 1785. Gaertner's Moringa pterygosperma ("winged seed") of 1791 is a superfluous later name, but it lingered in Indian pharmacology into the 1950s, which is why the tree's first isolated antibiotic was called pterygospermin.

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The Ancient "Oil of Ben": Egypt, Greece and a Different Moringa

The oldest written history attached to the name "moringa" does not, strictly, belong to the Indian tree. Egypt and the Red Sea hills have their own native species, Moringa peregrina, whose range runs from Sudan and the Horn of Africa up through the Sinai and Arabia to Syria. Its large, whitish seed — the "behen nut" — yields 30–40 percent of a nearly odourless oil with a remarkable property: it resists going rancid, and so it will hold a delicate floral scent for years. That single quality made it the base oil of the ancient perfume trade.

Egyptologists identify the tree the Egyptians called baq with a moringa and read its oil as a funerary, cosmetic and medicinal staple through pharaonic history; M. peregrina seed has been recovered from Egyptian sites including the Red Sea port of Berenike. In the fourth century BCE the Greek botanist Theophrastus, in his treatise On Odours, ranked the oil of balanos as the least viscous and by far the most suitable of all oils for making perfume, ahead of olive and almond oil. The most celebrated scent of the ancient world, the Mendesian perfume made in the Nile Delta and exported to Rome, was built on balanos oil with myrrh and resin. Four centuries later Dioscorides described the balanos myrepsike, the "perfumers' acorn", whose crushed kernels "produce a liquid which is used instead of oil to prepare precious ointments".

Two honest caveats. First, some scholars argue that balanos in the Greek recipes could mean the desert date, Balanites aegyptiaca, rather than a moringa; the moringa reading is the majority view, not a settled fact. Second, whichever tree the Greeks meant, it was not Moringa oleifera, which does not grow wild west of India. When medieval and early-modern Europeans later met the Indian tree, they simply folded it into the familiar "ben" — a confusion that the tree's English name still carries. Arab physicians of the Middle Ages wrote of behen oil, and it remained a perfume base for centuries.

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Shigru: What the Ayurvedic and Siddha Traditions Recorded

On the Indian subcontinent the tree's documented medical history begins with the classical Sanskrit compendia. Shigru appears in both the Charaka Samhita and the Sushruta Samhita, the two foundational texts of Ayurveda, whose surviving forms are conventionally dated to the centuries around the start of the common era (the dating of these texts is genuinely uncertain, and we do not pretend otherwise). Charaka places shigru in several of his functional groups of drugs, among them the shirovirechana plants used to clear the head through the nose, the krimighna or worm-expelling drugs, and the plants that promote sweating; Sushruta lists it in the varunadi group and likewise among the head-clearing drugs. The tree also turns up outside medicine: the Arthashastra, the ancient treatise on statecraft, lists shigru among spices, so it was already a kitchen commodity.

In the language of the classical texts, shigru is katu and tikta (pungent and bitter) in taste and ushna (hot) in potency, and is held to pacify kapha and vata, two of the three doshas — the constitutional principles Ayurveda used to explain health and disease. Traditional indications include poor digestion and abdominal pain, swelling, abscesses and glandular lumps, disorders of the spleen, worms, and — for the seed — the eyes. These are the categories of a traditional system, recorded here as history, not as evidence; the doshas are a framework, not a mechanism.

One popular claim deserves a warning. Promotional literature, and some review articles, repeat that "Ayurveda says moringa prevents 300 diseases". We could not trace that sentence to any classical text; read it as a modern slogan, not an ancient one.

Further south, in the Tamil-speaking country, the tree belongs to the Siddha tradition as murungai. Siddha texts and modern Siddha practice list drumstick leaves among the foods and herbs recommended for paandu or veluppu noi, the pallor-disease that maps roughly onto anaemia, alongside general advice to eat more dark green leaves. In the south the leaf was medicine and vegetable at once.

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Drumstick and Malunggay: The Tree in the Kitchen

Long before anyone measured its vitamins, moringa was simply food. Food historians reading the Sangam anthologies — the classical Tamil literature of roughly the third century BCE to the third century CE — list drumstick among the vegetables of the age, beside brinjal, gourds and pumpkin. Whether or not every identification is secure, the tree was a fixture of South Indian gardens by the medieval period. The immature pod, cut into finger lengths and simmered until the flesh can be scraped from the fibrous skin, is the murungakkai of Tamil Nadu and the defining vegetable of many versions of sambar, the lentil-and-tamarind stew of the south; it goes equally into dal and into the coconut and fish curries of the coasts. The tender leaves, murungai keerai, are stir-fried with lentils or coconut as an everyday green — and it is this leaf, not the pod, that would later become the "superfood".

The tree crossed the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea long ago. In the Philippines it is malunggay, one of the most common backyard trees in the islands and the classic green added at the last minute to tinola, a ginger-chicken broth, and to fish soups and mung-bean stew. Filipino grandmothers have long pressed malunggay soup on nursing mothers to bring in the milk — a tradition that, as we will see, became the subject of the first controlled trials on the plant in the year 2000. Across tropical Africa the leaves are cooked like other pot-herbs — in sauces over grain in the Sahel, in Ethiopian and Sudanese dishes, and increasingly as a dried powder stirred into porridge.

One rule was understood by everyone who grew the tree. The parts eaten daily were the leaf, the pod and the flower; the root and its bark, used sparingly as a sharp condiment and in medicine, were treated with respect, and modern analyses show why: they concentrate the plant's alkaloids and isothiocyanates. Leaf as food, root as medicine to be handled carefully — it is the same division modern safety reviews draw today.

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How the Tree Travelled: Goa, Africa, the Islands and the Americas

Moringa's spread is a story of ordinary people carrying a useful cutting rather than of any famous voyage, and the record is correspondingly patchy. Portuguese ships reached India in 1498 and held Goa from 1510; there and on the Malabar coast Europeans learned the tree and its Malayalam name, and the sixteenth-century Portuguese network is the likeliest first vector into East Africa and the Atlantic islands. The tree was carried to the Mascarene islands — Mauritius and Réunion — by Tamil migrants, and there it is still called mouroungue, straight from Tamil murungai. In Africa the picture is layered: an older presence along the Indian Ocean littoral and up the Nile valley (where, as the next section shows, its seeds had a life of their own), and a later nineteenth-century reintroduction of Indian stock through British colonial gardens, where it was often planted as an ornamental or a hedge before its food value was rediscovered.

The Americas got the tree by at least two routes, and historians disagree about which came first. One account has it crossing the Pacific from the Philippines on the Manila–Acapulco galleons, which would make the moringa of Mexico a descendant of Filipino malunggay rather than of the Indian tree directly; another places its arrival in the nineteenth century, when it was already being planted through the Caribbean and Central America. Both may be true of different places. By the early twentieth century it was established from Mexico through the Caribbean to northern South America, and today it grows in every tropical country that will have it — a range built by gardeners, not by nature.

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Clear Water from a Seed: Sudan, Samia Al Azharia Jahn and the Cationic Protein

The most remarkable traditional use of moringa was practised not in India but along the Nile. Village women in rural Sudan had long clarified the muddy water of the river by crushing moringa seeds, stirring the powder into a jar of turbid water and letting it stand: the clay settled within an hour or two, leaving clear water to pour off. The knowledge was domestic, passed between women, and unknown to engineers.

It was documented and tested by Samia Al Azharia Jahn, a scientist working for the German technical-cooperation agency GTZ, whose programme began in 1980 at the Soba forestry research station near Khartoum and ran through the decade. Her team confirmed in the laboratory what the women already knew: suspensions of moringa seed powder could bring tropical surface waters of low, medium and high turbidity down to tap-water clarity within one to two hours, and because bacteria travel attached to the settling particles, the clarification carried with it a 98–99 percent removal of indicator bacteria. Jahn's 1988 paper in the Journal of the American Water Works Association, "Using Moringa Seeds as Coagulants in Developing Countries", put the practice in front of the engineering profession and remains the founding reference of the field. She was careful about its limits: seed coagulation clarifies and greatly reduces, but does not sterilise.

What in the seed was doing the work? Two groups answered in the same year. In February 1995 Anselme Ndabigengesere and colleagues in Québec, writing in Water Research, showed that the active agents were small cationic proteins — positively charged proteins of roughly 13 kilodaltons — working by charge neutralisation: clay particles carry a negative charge and repel one another, and the protein neutralises and bridges them so they clump and sink. Two months later Ursula Gassenschmidt and colleagues in Karlsruhe reported in Biochimica et Biophysica Acta the isolation and characterisation of a flocculating protein from M. oleifera seed. The mechanism is, in short, the one alum uses in a municipal treatment works, achieved by a protein a tree makes for free — which is why the Sudanese women's jar of muddy water now sits at the head of a scientific literature.

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From Pterygospermin to Moringin: The Laboratory Chapter

The scientific study of moringa began where the traditional caution had pointed: at the root. In the early 1950s a group at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore — B. R. Das, P. A. Kurup and P. L. Narasimha Rao — set out to find why extracts of the drumstick root killed bacteria. They isolated a reddish-brown, highly active substance from the root and named it pterygospermin, after the plant's then-current name Moringa pterygosperma; their short report in Die Naturwissenschaften in 1954 and a series of papers in the Institute's own journal described its purification and its potency against staphylococci. Pterygospermin proved to be an unstable compound that breaks down into the pungent molecules chemists call isothiocyanates, the family that gives horseradish its bite — a chemical footnote to the "horseradish tree" name.

The seeds were opened up next. In 1981 Udo Eilert and colleagues in Germany, publishing in Planta Medica, identified the antibiotic principle of the seeds of M. oleifera and its African relative M. stenopetala as a sugar-bearing isothiocyanate, 4-(α-L-rhamnosyloxy)benzyl isothiocyanate. This compound — now usually called moringin — is unusual: in most mustard-family plants the isothiocyanates are volatile and fleeting, but the attached rhamnose sugar makes moringin comparatively stable. It is formed when the leaf or seed is crushed and an enzyme, myrosinase, acts on a stored precursor, the glucosinolate glucomoringin; and it is the compound most often invoked today to explain the anti-inflammatory activity of moringa extracts in the laboratory. Alongside it sit the leaf's more ordinary constituents: the flavonols quercetin and kaempferol, chlorogenic and other phenolic acids, carotenoids and minerals.

The seed oil has its own small history. The fatty acid behenic acid, first described from ben oil in the nineteenth century, took its name from the nut. Because the oil is slow to oxidise it was valued wherever a lubricant had to stay thin and clean for years: it is reported as a watchmakers' oil in the nineteenth century, one mid-twentieth-century account describes Egyptian Bedouin still supplying Cairo with behen seed for watch oil, and the perfume houses of Grasse are reported to have used it to capture flower scents until solvents displaced it. Those reports rest on secondary sources, and we present them as such.

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The "Miracle Tree": Development Agencies and the Numbers

Moringa's third life began in the 1990s, for a good reason. Field workers in the Sahel noticed what Indian villagers had always known: a tree that grew several metres in its first year, survived drought and bad soil, and put out protein-rich leaves through the dry season when nothing else was green. For agencies fighting child malnutrition it was an obvious home-garden crop.

The person most associated with that promotion was Lowell J. Fuglie, who ran the West Africa regional office of Church World Service (CWS) in Dakar, Senegal. In 1999 CWS published his training manual The Miracle Tree: Moringa oleifera, Natural Nutrition for the Tropics, drawing on a CWS pilot project that used dried leaf powder in the diets of malnourished children and nursing mothers in south-western Senegal. In 2001 an expanded 172-page volume, The Miracle Tree: The Multiple Attributes of Moringa, edited by Fuglie and co-published by CWS and the Netherlands-based Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), collected chapters on the tree's agronomy, nutrition, water treatment and other uses. The American charity Trees for Life and the agricultural network ECHO carried the message further, and by the mid-2000s "the miracle tree" had moved from an aid-project title to a marketing label.

It was also the source of the numbers everyone has since seen. The comparison table — "seven times the vitamin C of oranges, four times the calcium of milk, four times the vitamin A of carrots, three times the potassium of bananas, twice the protein of yoghurt" — was assembled, as Trees for Life itself documents, from two sources: the fresh-leaf figures in the Indian government's standard food-composition tables (Nutritive Value of Indian Foods, Gopalan and colleagues, 1971, revised 1989) and dried-leaf figures reproduced in Fuglie's 2001 manual. The figures were not invented; the trouble is how they were compared. The moringa side of the table is dried powder, with roughly three-quarters of its weight removed as water; the orange, milk, carrot and banana are weighed fresh. Dry anything and its nutrients per gram soar — raisins against grapes.

What do careful measurements say? The most cited modern analyses come from Alessandro Leone's group at the University of Milan, who in 2015 both reviewed the literature and analysed dried leaf grown in three places — Chad, the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria and Haiti. Per 100 grams of dry leaf they found protein of 20.8 to 31.5 g, calcium of 1,839 to 2,743 mg, iron of 11.9 to 41.7 mg, magnesium of 490 to 562 mg and beta-carotene of 10.0 to 28.5 mg, with total polyphenols of 2.5 to 3.6 g and a phytate content of 2.6 to 3.0 g. The same group's review gives fresh-leaf vitamin C of around 220 mg per 100 g, falling to anywhere between 19 and 140 mg per 100 g after drying. Three lessons sit in those numbers. The leaf is genuinely nutrient-dense. The figures vary two- to three-fold with where the tree was grown, so any single "moringa contains X" is a snapshot. And the dose matters: a teaspoon or two of powder is two to six grams, so the calcium in a spoonful is on the order of a tenth of a glass of milk, and the iron, sitting beside phytate that hinders its absorption, is modest. As a cheap, drought-proof green in a poor region, moringa is exactly as valuable as the agencies said. As a "multivitamin in a spoon" for a well-fed consumer, it is a leafy green, and a good one.

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What the Modern Trials Actually Show

Human trials of moringa are recent, small and uneven. The earliest, from India in the 1990s and 2000s, were pilot experiments: people with type 2 diabetes given a meal with and without moringa leaf; a group given eight grams of dried leaf a day for forty days; a trial of sixty patients over ninety days in which post-meal glucose and HbA1c fell. They were encouraging, and also unblinded, short, and too small to rule out chance.

Systematic reviews have since tried to add them up. A 2020 review in Nutrients of animal and human studies concluded that the animal evidence for better glucose control was consistent but the human evidence was thin and of low quality. The most rigorous assessment to date, a 2025 meta-analysis in Nutrients restricted to randomised controlled trials and graded for certainty, pooled nine trials with about 650 participants and found no statistically significant effect of moringa supplementation on fasting glucose, HbA1c, triglycerides, total cholesterol, LDL or HDL, and only a small, fragile reduction in diastolic blood pressure that disappeared in sensitivity analysis. Every outcome was rated very-low certainty because the trials were few, heterogeneous and methodologically weak. The authors' conclusion is the fair one: current evidence does not support consistent cardiometabolic benefits in adults. That is not proof of no effect; it is proof that the question has not yet been properly asked.

The lactation story is the most interesting, because it runs straight from tradition to trial. Following the Filipino custom of feeding malunggay to nursing mothers, a double-blind randomised trial of 68 mothers of preterm infants in Manila in 2000 — the Estrella trial — reported higher milk volumes over three days in the group given leaf capsules, and a second Philippine trial of 82 mothers followed in 2005. A 2025 systematic review in Foods gathered eight studies from the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand, about 370 women in all, and found increases in expressed milk volume and, in the one study that measured it, in prolactin. But only three of the eight were double-blind randomised trials, the interventions lasted three days to a month, doses ranged from 250 to 800 mg a day, and the authors themselves call the evidence limited. A plausible, traditionally rooted effect that still awaits a large, properly blinded trial.

Safety has followed the same traditional dividing line. A 2015 review of the safety and efficacy literature in Phytotherapy Research found the leaf, as food and as extract, well tolerated in animal and human studies at ordinary doses, with the root and bark the parts of concern. Regulators, however, ask a different question — not "has anyone been harmed?" but "has safety been demonstrated to modern standards?" — and in late 2025 Food Standards Australia New Zealand rejected an application (A1294) to permit moringa leaf, immature pods and seed oil as a novel food, concluding that the available evidence was not sufficient to confirm safety, citing toxicology studies that did not follow international guidelines, reports of liver, kidney and reproductive effects at high doses in animals, and unresolved genotoxicity findings. A food eaten daily for two thousand years thus finds itself, in one jurisdiction, unable to prove it is food — a paradox that says as much about the gap between traditional and regulatory evidence as about the tree.

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Moringa Today

Three lives, and all three are still running. In South India and the Philippines the tree is what it always was: a backyard vegetable with no need of a slogan. Across the Sahel and East Africa it is a serious food-security crop, planted for the reasons Lowell Fuglie set out in 1999, and its seed still clarifies village water. And in the wealthy world it is a green powder in a foil pouch, sold on a comparison table that was never meant to be read the way it is read.

The honest position, which is also the historically literate one, is not hard to hold. Moringa leaf is a nutrient-dense green with a distinctive and genuinely interesting chemistry, a long and coherent tradition of use as food and as household medicine, one traditional application — water clarification — that modern science has fully vindicated and explained down to the molecule, one — milk supply — that has early trial support, and a set of metabolic claims that the best current trials do not confirm. The root is not the leaf. And the tree's most important property, from the Himalayan foothills to the Sahel, was never a vitamin count: it grew where little else would, and fed people when they needed it.

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Key Research Papers

The list covers the modern reviews of moringa's botany, ethnobotany and composition, the historical chemistry landmarks (the 1954 pterygospermin report and the 1981 identification of the seed isothiocyanate), the founding papers of moringa water treatment, and the most rigorous recent syntheses of the human trials. Historical primary texts (the Charaka and Sushruta Samhitas, Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Fuglie's manuals) are named in the article, not cited here.

1. Leone A, Spada A, Battezzati A, Schiraldi A, Aristil J, Bertoli S (2015). Cultivation, Genetic, Ethnopharmacology, Phytochemistry and Pharmacology of Moringa oleifera Leaves: An Overview. International Journal of Molecular Sciences. — doi:10.3390/ijms160612791
2. Leone A, Fiorillo G, Criscuoli F, et al. (2015). Nutritional Characterization and Phenolic Profiling of Moringa oleifera Leaves Grown in Chad, Sahrawi Refugee Camps, and Haiti. International Journal of Molecular Sciences. — doi:10.3390/ijms160818923
3. Stohs SJ, Hartman MJ (2015). Review of the Safety and Efficacy of Moringa oleifera. Phytotherapy Research. — doi:10.1002/ptr.5325
4. Das BR, Kurup PA, Narasimha Rao PL (1954). Antibiotic principle from Moringa pterygosperma. Die Naturwissenschaften. — doi:10.1007/BF00634183
5. Eilert U, Wolters B, Nahrstedt A (1981). The Antibiotic Principle of Seeds of Moringa oleifera and Moringa stenopetala. Planta Medica. — doi:10.1055/s-2007-971546
6. Jahn SAA (1988). Using Moringa Seeds as Coagulants in Developing Countries. Journal AWWA. — doi:10.1002/j.1551-8833.1988.tb03052.x
7. Ndabigengesere A, Narasiah KS, Talbot BG (1995). Active agents and mechanism of coagulation of turbid waters using Moringa oleifera. Water Research. — doi:10.1016/0043-1354(94)00161-Y
8. Gassenschmidt U, Jany KD, Tauscher B, Niebergall H (1995). Isolation and characterization of a flocculating protein from Moringa oleifera Lam. Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) - General Subjects. — doi:10.1016/0304-4165(94)00176-X
9. Crișan D, Gavrilaș L, Păltinean R, Frumuzachi O, Mocan A, Crișan G (2025). Effects of Moringa oleifera Lam. Supplementation on Cardiometabolic Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials with GRADE Assessment. Nutrients. — PubMed PMID: 41305552
10. Ammar M, Russo GL, Altamimi A, Altamimi M, Sabbah M, Al-Asmar A, Di Monaco R (2025). Moringa oleifera Supplementation as a Natural Galactagogue: A Systematic Review on Its Role in Supporting Milk Volume and Prolactin Levels. Foods. — PubMed PMID: 40724308

PubMed Topic Searches

1. PubMed: Moringa ethnobotany and traditional use
2. PubMed: Moringa history of pharmacology
3. PubMed: Moringa seed coagulant and water treatment
4. PubMed: Moringa randomised controlled trials

External Authoritative Resources

• International Plant Names Index (Kew) — Moringa oleifera Lam., Encyclopédie méthodique 1: 398 (1785)
• FAO — Traditional water clarification with Moringa seed in Sudan (Jahn / GTZ programme)
• Food Standards Australia New Zealand — Application A1294, Moringa oleifera as a novel food (rejected, 2025)
• ECHO — Fuglie LJ, The Miracle Tree: Moringa oleifera, Natural Nutrition for the Tropics (training manual)

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