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If you love cooking with herbs, rejoice to know that there might be some additional benefits to your herb-tastic meals!
Elvira Gonzalez de Mejia, PhD, of the Division of Nutritional Sciences and Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was struggling with two huge problems: about eight percent of Americans have Type 2 diabetes, yet very few can afford medicine to regulate the disease, and others struggle with how to make healthier lifestyle choices. This disease cost the United States 175 billion dollars in 2012 alone.
de Mejia and her team knew something needed to change, and wanted to find a way to treat diabetes in a less costly, more accessible way.
According to Yahoo! Health, "After learning that some herbs can help reduce the levels of glucose – the main element that is measured and controlled by diabetics – in the blood, they tested different herbs to see if any of them could interfere with a diabetes-related enzyme in the same way that one common diabetes drug does."
Turns out rosemary and oregano showed all the signs that they could do just that, whether they were dried or fresh. "There is a need to identify natural compounds that can aid in the management of this disease," the authors wrote in the introduction to their study they published in a paper in the Agricultural & Food Chemistry journal in June.
Don't jump for joy and run to the grocer just yet, though: these are simply preliminary results that could lead to something huge.
“We need to test interaction studies with the current drugs to make sure there will not be an antagonistic effect and, on the other hand, may be a synergistic effect,” de Mejia told Yahoo! Health about the study. She added that she wanted to test the herb compounds on people instead of simply in a lab. “We need clinical studies to demonstrate a dose-response of the products.”
What do you think about this new study? Let us know what you think in the comments!
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