The Environment Report

MANILA, Philippines—We propagate lemongrass in our gardens. We don’t consider it a weed, but a blessing and a wonderful gift from Mother Nature. My friends and I love to drink lemongrass tea because of its distinct lemony taste, which becomes more flavorful when mixed with ginger, citrus (dalandan or kalamansi) or pineapple juice.

Our appreciation for this wild and heat-tolerant plant grew by leaps and bounds recently, after reading information sent to us by a friend. Here are excerpts from an article written by Allison Kaplan Sommer on the anticancer benefits of lemongrass:

“At first, Benny Zabidov, an Israeli agriculturist, couldn’t understand why many cancer patients were showing up on his doorstep, asking for fresh lemongrass. It turned out that their doctors had sent them. ‘They had been told to drink eight glasses of hot water with fresh lemongrass on days when they went for radiation and chemotherapy treatment,’ Zabidov said.”

Researchers

Researchers at Ben Gurion University discovered last year that the lemony aroma in herbs like lemongrass kills cancer cells in vitro while leaving healthy cells unharmed. Citral is the key component that gives the aroma and taste in herbal plants such as lemongrass, melissa and verbena. It causes cancer cells to “commit suicide in a mechanism called programmed cell death.” A drink that contains as little as one gram of lemongrass has enough citral to prompt cancer cells to “commit suicide” in the test tube.

The investigators checked the effect of citral on cancer by adding it to both cancerous and normal cells grown in a petri dish. The quantity added in the concentrate was equivalent to the amount contained in a cup of regular tea, using one gram of lemon herbs in hot water. Citral killed the cancerous cells, but the normal cells remained unharmed.

Lemongrass is readily available and easy to grow. If you have no place to plant it, you can buy packaged tea under the Carica brand. In any case, it’s a wonderful thirst-quencher and health booster!