Moringa: The Miracle Tree

There is a saying that goes like this:  The best things in life come free.  Because they are free and most of the time, abundant, these things are taken for granted.  A perfect example is the moringa oleifera or malunggay in the Filipino language.

Moringa tree, leaves and pods.  Photos from Wikipedia

According to Wikipedia, moringa oleifera is one of the 13 species of the Moringaceae family.  It is the most widely cultivated and is native to the Philippines.  Malunggay grows well in tropical countries like the Philippines and can't tolerate frost and freeze.

Before reports on the nutritional values of the malunggay became known, it was popularly used as a mere fence material and as a vegetable.  It is primarily as a fence that Filipinos plant it.  Aside from serving as a fence, the malunggay's young leaves, flowers and pods are used as a vegetable.  The young leaves are either added to tinola, a chicken soup dish that is popular viand for lactating mothers or cooked with stingray and coconut milk for that delicious Bicol delicacy kinunot.  Besides those two uses, no other use is known.

Recent studies however, showed that the malunggay has other properties and as such has been regarded as a miracle tree.  It was found that it is anti-diabetic, anti-hypertensive, anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial, anti-viral, anti-parasitic, anti-tumor and anti-aging. The Philippine Bureau of Plant Industry said that Weight per weight, the calcium of the leaves is equivalent to four glasses of milk, the Vitamin C content of 7 oranges, potassium of three bananas, three times the iron of spinach, four times the Vitamin A in carrot and twice the protein in milk.  These recent discoveries put the moringa in a different light that a lot of products came up.  Now you can have a cool guayabano-flavored moringa drink to quench your thirst, have an aromatic massage using moringa oil or moringa tea to cap your day.  Others take moringa in either capsule, powdered or tablet forms for their daily dose of supplements.

Aside from its superior nutritional value, moringa oil extracted from the seed is being touted as a possible source of biodiesel. It is preferred to jathropa because it takes only a year to two years for the seeds to mature compared to three to five years of jathropa.  Moringa is environment friendly as all parts of the plant are used while the waste from the extraction of jathropa oil poses an environmental hazard.

For you, the ordinary Filipino, you can start propagating moringa or malunggay in your backyard so as to be within reach to its nutritional values.  Plant one to two meters long limb cuttings during the rainy months of June to August.  It starts to bear pods before it turns a year old and the yield increases two years after it had been planted.  If you have sufficient capital, you can start farming on a grand basis or intercrop it for those who have existing farms.  Who knows you might be the first moringa magnate of the country, sought after by pharmaceutical giants worldwide.