What would happen if you chewed a clove every day for 30 days? This is something that a lot of my relatives have told me about recently, actually. I mean, I've been told this my whole life from a number of different people about the benefits of this tiny, sweet tasting spice that I use in cooking all the time.
But the benefits beyond just freshening your breath appear to be so far encompassing. I needed to do a deep dive in this. You may have heard this already, but some of these benefits include curing tooth pain and gum disease, but also improving oxidation, reducing inflammation and improving joint pain, improving digestion, relieving constipation, nausea, gut dysbiosis, improving one's tolerance of sugar by stimulating the pancreas.
A Potentially, this is an antidote better. It's even been suggested that it reduces ageing and it can protect against liver disease. There are so many potential benefits of this tiny, high antioxidant spice.
I had to do a dive into this. So why are so many people taking to cheering one two cloves a day on an empty stomach daily? This is what we're going to be talking about today.
So I'm not here to disprove any of what people have said about cloves. I just want to give my perspective on some of these claims. And I'm going to dive into the available research so you can take close, if you want to, any of the supplemental form or just chewing it like a lot of people do every single day.
If you wanted to experience some of these benefits, if there are benefits at all, and I'm going to give you my perspective on that. So you've probably come across cloves during the holidays. They used to start oranges.
For example, ground clove has added to desserts like Christmas cake, mince pies. It's usually paired with a ton of sugar, which I find quite funny considering there are potentially anti-diabetic effects now. But you know, you can also put it in a number of different recipes, like biryani broth, for example.
I put it in teas with hibiscus. So there are lots of different ways to enjoy this other than chewing it. But I feel that if you chew on a clove, you're probably going to be maximising the antioxidants that are found within the essential oils of the clove that we're going to go into as well.
You'll also find it in Blend. So garam masala, which is this is the one, if you're watching this on YouTube, this is a homemade one that we make is our secret garam masala actually gave the recipe in my first book and Chinese Five Spice as well. It's actually one of the dominant flavours in Chinese Five Spice.
But clove, if you've ever chewed on a clove when you might try chewing on a clove after listening to this podcast is a very, very strong flavour for such a small, tiny, powerful spice. So what actually are they? Cloves actually come from tropical Evergreen trees that are native to the Moluccas.
The Moluccas you probably haven't heard of is a chain of small islands in Indonesia, and these are actually small, unopened flower buds that are picked and then they are dried that yield these these clove buds. And that's how we use them in cooking there. They're dried and then the ground or they're just chewed on or just put into a tea like is basically that's how I use them Before I dive into the latest research or the most recent research, I think it's always really interesting to see how ancient medicinal knowledge around the world has respected certain plants.
And in this case, traditional medicines tend to see clove as having a very important role. And actually the earliest written evidence that we've seen around the use of cloves dates back to around 200 BCE during the Han dynasty of China. And it's actually said that the emperors caught within the Emperor's cool ministers were told to chew on clothes to sweeten their breath before even speaking to the emperor.
So before you even got to chat to the Emperor, you had to sweeten your breath, because I think that's kind of smart, because you can imagine an emperor. Everyone's trying to get into his business and, you know, if they've all got bad breath because no one's brushing their teeth back, then you probably want to sweeten their breath somehow. But so maybe using clove was just a practical way of ensuring that you weren't constantly dealing with bad breath the whole time.
But they're also used in various systems of traditional medicine to to treat digestive issues like nausea, vomiting, flatulence, and actually strengthening digestion as well. And as a weak anti-microbial spice, you can understand and why in certain parts of Tropical Asia, for example, that were used to treat microbial infections as far ranging as scabies, cholera, malaria and tuberculosis. So in the absence of powerful and evidence based antimicrobial agents and perhaps before even antibiotics were even discovered, you can understand why cloves may have been used in that context, because they do have quite strong antimicrobial actions when we look at them in lab lab studies, So what's enclosed that potentially give them the benefits?
So I want to dive into a bit of the chemistry of clothes because I feel that when you know a bit more about these chemical compounds within cloves, you understand their uses. Every spice tends to contain a mixture of different compounds with interesting properties and every ingredient, whether it's, you know, red wine or resveratrol or garlic and allicin tend to have like an all star ingredient. In the case of cloves, the all star ingredient is huge.
You know, it is the most famous compound that is most researched in cloves that spell EU g e, And also when we're doing research, we're not necessarily always putting in close, we're putting in the Latin name for clove, and we're also adding new Gino to our research, our literature reviews because that that will yield a lot more information in PubMed and other resource banks. And a single clove is made up of around 14 to 20% essential oil that gives that characteristic strong flavour and smell. And you is the main component of the essential oil present in cloves.
And when you extract the you oil from cloves, it accounts for anywhere between a 50% and up to 90% of the oil. So if you think about that, you've got a clove. If you're going to extract the oil, of which there are various methods, you can use a bit of alcohol to extract it or you can press it the various other methods.
But depending on the method, you can extract a huge amount of, you know, and that is the dominant chemical that you find in the oil, depending on the extraction process is always going to be, you know, It's important to know how many milligrams of you know are, are in a typical kilo, for example, because when we're looking at studies, which are mainly animal studies, that gives us an indication of how many cloves that equates to. So if you're chewing one or two a day, is that actually going to be giving you the same benefit that was demonstrated in a study and most of the studies, animal studies. So even that's quite hard, but it gives us a general idea of what clove contains.
There are other chemicals that cloves contain as well. They're actually very, very rich in phenolic acids. So these are galaxies.
For example, Cafe Egg, Ferulic Ellagic salicylic acids. They all have long and windy names. Those are important.
What is important is that similar chemical compounds are actually found in other very healthy ingredients, things like coffee, for example. They have a number of different phenolic acids. So already my spidey senses are tingling about the potential anti ageing anti-diabetic effects because what we know about coffee, which is rich in some of these phenolic acids, may be relevant to cloves as well, but we tend to consume a lot more coffee than we do cloves.
So again, take this with a pinch of salt. I think everything really here today is an exercise in judgement and how much we can glean from the available evidence, plus anecdotes that people have about clove and traditional medicines. Phenolic acids, just as an aside, are a subclass of plant polyphenols that are well documented for their health benefits, and they are of particular roles and antioxidant capacity.
They tend to have anti-microbial benefits. They also have anti-inflammatory properties as well. So again, some of the hearsay that you might be hearing about when it comes to cloves may be relevant because of these well-documented benefits of high phenolic acid containing foods.
Flavonoids is another well established plant chemical class so close do contain low concentrations of flavonoids, especially things like quercetin, camphor. All these, again have overall health promoting qualities, but we do consume close in much lower amounts. So again, it might be quite hard to determine whether those flavonoids are going to be having these miraculous effects or not.
Let's move on to some of the proposed benefits. So Let's go on to talk about these potential health benefits. Potential health benefits, number one, oral and dental health.
This is probably the most well established use of cloves. It's really well known that there was ancient use of clove and clove oil for toothache, cleaning teeth, and, yes, freshening the breath, as we've just heard about the emperors from China in particular, cloves is used as a local anaesthetic as well. It's actually called clover cane and it's used in oral ulceration and inflammation and is also added to toothpaste.
Just an aside about toothpaste and essential oils, we chatted to a functional dentist about the use of essential oils and toothpaste and you have to be very, very careful because a lot of these essential oils are dosed at a high level and high amounts of these essential oil toothpaste. They can be quite irritant to the gum. So you want to make sure that you're using a sensitive toothpaste and some of the essential oil based toothpaste, even though they are natural and they sound great and they don't have less and they don't have things like fluoride, some people have issues with it, it can be irritant to your gums.
And as someone who has got gum recessions, I'm very, very cautious about exactly what is in my toothpaste. I choose not to use an essential toothpaste, but it is very well established that clove and clove oil can have these dental benefits. So when we look at lab studies, there are some that show that clothes have analgesic activities.
That's a fancy word for pain relieving activity. And it's been reported since the 13th century for toothache and animal models. Clover significantly improved pain from heat sensation.
There was a dose of around 33 milligrams per kg, so quite a small dose. And cloves, there's around 14,000 milligrams regional per 100 grams. So, you know, if you're taking a single clove, you're probably going to be getting around that 1000 2000 mark.
So this could potentially be useful for pain relief as well. They also show antimicrobial activity like I've already talked about. So the ability to stop the growth of bacterial strains that are associated with dental infections.
And in one lab study published in 2011, the Archives of Oral Biology, they found that clove oil was effective against all tested oral bacteria. Now, it's quite easy to get excited about this. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's the most incredible antibiotic and everyone should be taking clove oil, but it's just interesting to note that it could be particularly useful for dental infections where it's very easy to deliver, said antimicrobial agent.
So chewing a clove could potentially prevent infections. This could be something that you take in a preventative manner. Do we see this effect in humans?
This is one of the things that I'm always very cautious about when and whenever we interpret any studies that we come across. There was one study that was published in the British Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons, and they examined the symptoms of around 270 patients who had a tooth extracted and they applied something that was conventionally used, something called chlorhexidine. So that's a strong antimicrobial that we usually pack wounds with, and we use it beyond dentistry.
We use it in medicine as well. And they compared that with a control and a huge rhino based paste. And they found that the usual base paste was more effective in reducing pain and reducing infections compared to CHLORHEXIDINE as well.
Onto the second potential benefits of cloves, reducing oxidative stress, reducing inflammation and reducing arthritic pain. This is a very common claim that I find. I find about from watching YouTube videos, listening to patients, and also family members as well.
Studies have shown spices and herbs like cloves are excellent sources of antioxidants because they have I have a high content of polyphenol and clove appears to be one of the richest sources of polyphenols out there regarding their antioxidant capacity because this is essentially what leads to reduced inflammation. The level of phenolic compounds found in clothes correlates with an amazing anti-inflammatory action and some research reports that clove buds were the spice that represented the highest antioxidant activity. So there's a scoring system called Orac.
There are a number of other ones as well. And when you look at the ranking of these Orac systems, you have clove right at the top and you have sumac, cinnamon, cinnamon that also contains, you know as well as other polyphenols as well dried herbs, oregano and turmeric. These are all below cloves.
A clove is really, really strong. And it sort of makes sense because when you taste clove, you put it in your mouth. It has a very strong, bitter sweet, very characteristic taste as well.
And that is essentially a signal to us of just how strong and just how potentially powerful this this spice is It was really interesting study looking at the highest contributors of antioxidants in different spice blends. And they looked at Chinese Five Spice and it took our masala and clove always comes right at the top. So it's really interesting to note that when you're using a spice blend, if you're doing a curry or you're doing some sort of stir fry and you're adding a little bit of spice blend like five spice in it, you're adding this really strong antioxidant to your food.
And that correlates when you look at larger studies, the amount of spices that we use that does correlate with better health outcomes. how do antioxidants actually work? You hear me talk about antioxidants quite a bit.
You hear a lot of other people online talking about the antioxidant benefits. So chemicals like, you know, with high antioxidant activity, these donate electrons to free radicals, and that transforms them into something more stable and less reactive, resulting in a sturdier antioxidant activity. So essentially, let's say you're eating some meat or some some burnt toast or something that introduces free radicals into your system.
It could just be walking around because we're all exposed to radiation every single day. What antioxidants do is essentially stabilises free radicals that are a natural part of living, breathing organisms. So the more antioxidants you have in your diet and doing things that reduce your oxidation essentially will.
Browning As you've probably heard Professor Lustig talk about on the podcast, before, antioxidants can mitigate the natural effect of ageing. So there is some evidence, there is some truth in the suggestion that a high antioxidant diet can result in less ageing. But it's hard to tease that out specifically from a study looking at chewing one or two cloves a day I personally think antioxidants are just the start of the story when it comes to the reasons why plant chemicals confer health benefits to us.
There is a wider story about signalling effects. The effect on your microbes, the effect on your immune system, the impact on your liver, and how that can accelerate detoxification detoxification mechanism. So I think antioxidants aren't the only character in this story.
I think it's a lot wider than that. But it is interesting to note that cloves are the highest antioxidant capacity. There was one study looking at supplementation of cloves or an element of cloves.
There's 70 adults that were given a clove Bud Polyphenol extract. This was called cloves. No, they didn't really think too much about the name there, but clove and all.
And this was given out at 250 milligrams per day dose. Now, it's important to note in this study, they didn't disclose the exact components of cloves. Now you can bet your bottom dollar is probably mostly regional, but it probably had a collection of other polyphenols that you tend to find in cloves as well.
And they looked at a number of different endpoints. So they looked at antioxidant enzymes, specifically glutathione levels. They also looked at lipids, they looked at blood pressure, they looked at glucose.
There's a whole bunch of other elements that they looked at. But it suggested that it did improve antioxidant status when looking at blood markers as well. So that was interesting.
But that study was funded and it only had 70 people on it. So it's very hard to determine whether this is generalisable to you watching or listening to this. I hope.
So to recap this whole section around oxidation inflammation lab studies 100% point to the potential benefits to reduce oxidative stress. There are a few limited and not very robust, and I'm giving that a lot of grace. They're not very robust human studies that show improved antioxidant status in people, but these were looking specifically at clove but extracts with not too much transparency over the exact constituents of that supplement in a real life context.
You know, the effects of whole cloves are still sort uncertain, and although they have a high amount of polyphenols per 100 grams, we tend to use a very small amount of them. So, you know, if you measure or weigh one or two cloves on your kitchen scales, you know, it probably won't even get to the ground level. So the amount of you should know that you're actually introducing, as well as all these other polyphenols into systemic circulation is probably going to be fairly low.
So my idea for you is experiment with close in cooking, try and add it as much as possible. It may have an interesting impact on arthritis and inflammation levels. It may increase antioxidant status in your blood and that's great.
But I can't as a doctor, I can't say that this is going to be an effective way of reducing arthritic pain and other inflammatory conditions and the pain that is associated with that by just sharing 1 to 2 a day, but it's likely going to be safe. So you might as well give it a try. Just a quick one.
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so the third health claim is around digestion and gut health. Our good friend. Gut health.
It comes up on every podcast episode. There are traditional uses of clove for digestion and digestive problems, such as nausea and abdominal pain, bloating. Let's look at lab studies because that's where we find most of the evidence for the claims.
That is to say that it actually works. In all animal studies, they found that, you know, supplementation improved the gut microbiota of mice fed with a high fat diet. Now, this is something that we already recognise in other human studies.
They they look at spices more generally rather than specifically looking at clove. And they found that adding more spices to people's diets improved the composition of their gut microbes. What is an improved composition of your gut microbes look like?
Well, it means that you got more favourable microbes that are generally regarded as beneficial. So bifidobacteria, lactobacilli. And we know that having a higher diversity of plants in general, that includes herbs, spices, beans, legumes, as well as all those different vegetables, those with and without prebiotics or different types of fibre.
That definitely has a beneficial effect on overall health and improves the function of your microbes and improves the metabolites and improves your glucose regulation. It does improve. Inflammation is during want to close a day going to have this miraculous effect on your gut?
Without a doubt it is going to be complimentary, but it is not going to be doing the heavy lifting of your diet. Your diet is going to be taking much, much more of the heavy lifting of that. So once you cloves, great is an addition, but it's not going to be the mainstay of what I would recommend as a treatment for that.
On the subject of liver protection, because this is something that comes up quite a bit as well. I was I remember vividly listening to a relative who is, you know, grabbing a clove after a meal and they were chewing and it was like, you know, this is liver detox, you know, it's going to improve my liver, etc. , etc.
. You know, after having a quite a heavy fatty g field meal, nothing wrong with ghee and appropriate amounts. But, I don't think it's going to completely negate the effect of a fatty meal, but there is some interesting studies looking at mice and fortunately they induce fatty liver in mice over 16 weeks and then they gave them a, you know, rich clove fraction and a dose of 80 milligrams per 100 grams.
So that is around 800 milligrams per kilogram. So that is the essentially the same dose of having if you're a 70 kilo man or woman around anywhere between 35 and 70 cloves a day. So that was quite a strong, concentrated, you know, rich clove fraction and treatment with this clove fraction in mice.
Again, I just want to heighten that. This is an animal studies. It's very hard to generalise and improved considerably the the cirrhosis of the liver.
So these mice were given liver cirrhosis. I won't go into detail how they did that. It disrupted the architecture of their liver.
They gave them this huge, you know, a rich fraction and it found remarkable improvements in the liver, blood markers, the liver. When they looked at it under under a microscope, they found that it improved. But it doesn't necessarily mean that chewing cloves is going to give this miraculous cure to liver disease and fatty liver or prevent liver cancers, cancers.
But it does speak to that pinch of truth in some of these claims. And I very much doubt people are going to be chewing on 30 of these every single day. You know, who knows?
There may be a benefit of taking a clove based supplement, but at those levels in the mice, for example, and the fact that it was done in mice and not humans, it's very, very hard to say. So again, my recap on that is take everything with a pinch of salt. I wanted to cloves may have some benefits, but it's not going to be it's not going to be the mainstay of of what actually leads to and yields the biggest impacts on your overall health and The fourth claim around cloves is that it can improve glucose metabolism.
Now there is a new wave of interest in looking at how our bodies respond to food and specifically looking at our responses to glucose. That's why you're seeing lots of companies that are very backed are pushing glucose monitors, continuous glucose monitors, also known as CGM arms. I think they're a fantastic behavioural tool.
I think it's giving people more insight into how their unique bodily reactions are occurring when they eat a plate of food. It's also a really, really good way of setting boundaries around what you enjoy and how much you choose to indulge. It definitely has some negative effects.
I think it can make people a bit fearful about a glucose spike and there are things other than what you put on your plate that can yield a massive glucose spike. It could be emotional stress, it could be lack of sleep, it could be exercise stress. When you're eating certain appears to have a negative effect on glucose spikes.
And there's also some scepticism around whether we should even be measuring glucose spikes and whether that's actually related to type two diabetes. I'm actually on the other side. I think big oscillations in your glucose spiking and dropping every day is going to be related to your risk of type two diabetes.
That aside, is there any evidence that cloves and chewing Clover Day can help with glucose metabolism? There is more evidence that clove extract may support glucose metabolism. There are preclinical studies in animal models, again that reported, you know, treatment, reduced glucose levels.
And there is another study that looked at, again, our favourite supplement from an Indian company that was looking at a supplement called Clover. No, they didn't think too much about the name Clover Knoll was reported to have a miraculous set of benefits at just 250 milligrams per day. It increased glutathione iron in your blood.
So glutathione is this master antioxidant that is released by your cells and reduce blood pressure and reduce cholesterol and improved glucose levels after eating, also known as postprandial glucose levels. You've heard me talk about that on a previous podcast looking at glucose hacks and glucose strategies, it's very easy to get excited about these results. But this was a very, very small trial.
Looking at 70 people, it's very hard to generalise these. It was funded by the Indian company that produced Clover and also, you know, you can't really trust it, but there are some small studies around this potential effect of cloves, which is really interesting to note, especially compared to other spices. So it's an area to watch is having one or two cloves after a meal or before a meal going to have this effect on lowering cloves, lowering glucose levels?
I would love to see a little study for fun that would get people to eat the same meal, eat the clove, and then without the clove the following day, do a trial where you cross over the intervention or the control, maybe even have a control with a different spice. Maybe put this in supplemental form. You just ground some cloves and then add it into a tablet and then have your meal.
It'd be really interesting to see that, but I can't see any evidence of it at the moment. There are some things that point in the general direction that it could have that effect, but nothing at this point to suggest that having a clove is going to have this effect on your glucose levels. I would love to say it would, but unfortunately I can't right now.
All right. So to recap our Spice saga, a lot of the research on cloves leans towards the lab and often using the oil extracts or supplements and makes it really tricky to draw a direct conclusion about chewing one or two cloves every single day. But the evidence does point towards potential benefits purely because it is so high in antioxidants and it is one of the highest containing compounds in Utah.
And unusual is an interesting chemical that is definitely one to watch. It does reduce inflammation and may help with oral health. There are some interesting studies looking at the antimicrobial effects of clove as well.
It has this unique ability to remove the biofilms of certain microbes that can be quite troublesome. So certain pathogenic bacteria that reside in your mouth and in your digestive tract are quite hard to remove because they attach to cell walls. So you can use antibiotics and that dampens them down.
But then they rear their ugly head because they're fixed into the wall, the fixed into your mouth. And that's why you have to use ever increasing amounts of antibiotics or combinations of antibiotics to get rid of them. And that can obviously lead to resistance to antibiotics.
Obviously, a lot of other unintended consequences of using high amounts of antibiotics and clove appears to have an antimicrobial action that removes the ability of these pathogenic bacteria to attach to cell walls. That's definitely something interesting to watch, but I haven't seen anything in the research, at least to suggest that it's having this effect that can improve gut dysbiosis. It definitely deserves a spot in your culinary repertoire.
There is another spice to add to your meals that has these potential benefits. It doesn't just add health benefits as beautiful flavour those extra polyphenols add so much flavour and a wealth of warmth and earthiness and sweetness, and you can use them in the knowledge that it may be beneficial for your health as well. They could be worth trying as a mouth freshener for oral health, but in moderation.
I mean, I wouldn't, you know, take a handful of these because a you probably, you know, overdo on the regional and it probably wouldn't be very good for you and you probably give yourself indigestion as well. so I'm actually going to try chewing a clove for a month and just see, you know, how I feel in my mouth afterwards, if there are any of these other benefits, if you have used clove, either essential oils or the clove buds themselves and had some benefits to arthritis or inflammation or maybe even to your gut, I'd love to know. Just let me know in the comments.
Safety wise, there are some caveats of using closed. Now. The World Health Organisation has set the acceptable daily amount of clove use every day to 2.
5 milligrams per kg of body weight. You'd have to use quite a bit of cloves to get to that amount, and cloves as food ingredient are likely. Absolutely okay, because the amounts are so, so small.
But the safety of clove oil and clove supplements is much less clear. So really, really be careful if you're going to be supplementing with these products because especially for children or if you're pregnant or your medications like insulin medication or blood thinners, because if it does have some of these effects, you'd want to make sure that you're not overdosing on other medications and it's not going to be leading to erroneous health issues as well. So just be really careful when using the essential oils and the supplements, because they're not regulated in the same way pharmaceuticals are.
So there could be a huge variation in the amount of, you know, and the amount of the other polyphenols, as well as all the other extra extracts that they might be putting into these supplements as well. Finally. How do I use cloves while I use cloves?
In a number of ways. So definitely to sweeten different sorts of foods. So lattes and desserts.
Making ground nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon and ginger. That as a spice blend is not only powerful from a polyphenol perspective, but it's also quite naturally sweetening as well. So adding that with Cal, maybe a tiny bit of sugar, you can use coconut sugar, you can use maple syrup, you can use regular sugar in a small, small amount.
That added to cacao as a hot drink is beautiful. You can use it in coffee lattes, for example. There's so many different ways in which you can use it in sweet foods and savoury foods.
Biryani is a definite we use this in our garden masala as well as in our brain as well. So when you add this to some oil that you're cooking on medium heat, it infuses that beautiful flavour of you. Janelle Now that you know that now you know the, the name of the chemical that gives it that pungency usual into the oil and that permeates through the rice dish as well.
But it goes really well with fish, meat and vegetables. There's a mixture of ways in which you can use this as well with the ground, nutmeg and paprika. A good combination of spices that I find that is a nice all rounder for fish meat is Chinese five spice.
And if you make it from scratch as well, you're going to be getting a lot more of those benefits. Because if you think about the surface area of your spices, these are going to be heightened when you ground it fresh. And if you increase that surface area, you're allowing more oxidation of the actual spice itself rather than protecting it by keeping it in seed form or in enclosed form and then grounding it fresh and then adding it to your food, you're going to get a lot more flavour and a lot more of those benefits because you're not degrading it by increasing that surface area and allowing it to be exposed to oxidation.
If you want to learn more about cloves and the research that we've done today, or if you want to point us to some of the studies that you find are useful, beneficial, we're specifically interested in human based studies. That's probably a much higher way. It is a much higher level of evidence than animal studies.
Let us know. We'd love to know and you can look at the studies that we've looked at on the doctor's kitchen dot com and down in the show notes as well. And I will see you here next time.
If you liked that episode, you will love the rest of the Doctors Kitchen podcast episodes, including this one I did with Dr Simon Mills talking about herbs, spices and what you should be eating every single day to reduce inflammation. You can check it out by clicking on the link.
