Dr Rupy: A lot of relatives have told me in the past about chewing cloves every day. It is part of a habit for many people and a traditional cure for toothache, gum disease and many other ailments, depending on who you speak to. The benefits can potentially extend to the digestive system, general inflammation benefits and even longevity. So here at the Doctor's Kitchen, we decided to do a deep dive into this wonderfully strong spice that we often use in recipes such as broths, stews and of course, biryani, one of my personal favourites. So here are a few things that you need to know. It is a potent spice that is at the very least contributing to more polyphenols and diversity on your plate. The chemicals found in cloves are particularly interesting. Number two, it is actually linked to many beneficial properties, especially antioxidant benefits, anti-inflammatory benefits. It is a recognised antimicrobial, so it does have antibacterial effects, antifungal effects, and it is an analgesic. It is a pain reliever, and actually when you chew on a clove, you can feel the numbing effect almost immediately. But the human trials for all those potential properties are lacking. And the final thing is that whilst whole cloves are generally considered safe, clove oil or supplements need to be used with caution. I'm really excited to share with you our research that we've done here internally at the Doctor's Kitchen. You can watch this podcast on YouTube and also download the Doctor's Kitchen app for free, where we use cloves quite a bit. If you're really interested in these kind of deep dives into ingredients and specific things that tend to be seasonal as well, you will absolutely love our newsletter that goes out every Sunday called Seasonal Sundays. Every week we do a deep dive into a seasonal ingredient. We teach you how to cook with it, we teach you about the benefits of the ingredient in question, including human trials as well as animal studies, and we also talk about the historical use of these wonderful ingredients that we are so privileged to have the ability to use and buy every single week. Also, if you are enjoying these episodes, any episode that we do on the Doctor's Kitchen, you can support us completely for free by just hitting the notification bell or following the show on whatever podcast player you're using, whether it's Apple or Spotify or Google. A completely no-cost way of supporting us is just by getting notified every time we put out an episode. And we do so much research behind every single episode, particularly the solo episodes, but also with our guests as well that we really, really do hope you are enjoying.
Dr Rupy: 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, so potentially this is an anti-diabetic. 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 chewing one to two cloves a day on an empty stomach daily? This is what we're going to be talking about today. 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 cloves if you want to, in either 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're used to stud oranges, for example. Ground clove is 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 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 blends, so garam masala, which is this is the one if you're watching this on YouTube. This is a homemade one that we make as our secret garam masala. I 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, 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 clove buds. And that's how we use them in cooking. They're dried and then they're ground or they're just chewed on or just put into a tea like 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 emperor's court, within the emperor's court, ministers were told to chew on cloves 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 with cloves. I think that's kind of smart because you can imagine the 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 were also used in various systems of traditional medicine to treat digestive issues like nausea, vomiting, flatulence and actually strengthening digestion as well. And as a weak antimicrobial spice, you can understand why in certain parts of tropical Asia, for example, they 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 studies. So what's in cloves that potentially give them these benefits? So I want to dive into a bit of the chemistry of cloves 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 and resveratrol or garlic and allicin, they tend to have like an all-star ingredient. In the case of cloves, the all-star ingredient is eugenol. It is the most famous compound that is most researched in in cloves. It's spelled E U G E N O L. So when we're doing research, we're not necessarily always putting in cloves, we're putting in the Latin name for clove and we're also adding eugenol 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 eugenol is the main component of the essential oil present in cloves. And when you extract the eugenol from cloves, it accounts for anywhere between 50% and up to 90% of the oil. So if you think about that, you've got a clove, and 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. There are various other methods. But depending on the method, you can extract a huge amount of eugenol and that is the dominant chemical that you find in the oil, depending on the extraction process. It's always going to be eugenol. If we're thinking about the actual milligrams found within a single clove, it's quite hard to, you've got to do a little bit of math because it's quite hard to find, you know, a standard size of clove. If you get a bag of cloves, for example, you've got some small ones, some big ones, depending on where they're grown, they can be different sizes. So per 100 grams of fresh cloves, there is anywhere between 10,000 and 15,000 milligrams of eugenol in 100 grams of the clove. So in a single clove, that means you you may be getting anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000 milligrams of eugenol. It's important to know how many milligrams of eugenol are in a typical clove, 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 are animal studies, so even that's quite hard, but it gives us a general idea of what a clove contains. There are other chemicals that cloves contain as well. They're actually very, very rich in phenolic acids. So these are gallic acids, for example, caffeic, ferulic, ellagic, salicylic acids. They all have long and windy names. Those aren't important. What is important is that similar chemical compounds are actually found in other really 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 judgment 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 have particular roles in antioxidant capacity, they tend to have antimicrobial 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 cloves do contain low concentrations of flavonoids, especially things like quercetin, kaempferol. These again have overall health-promoting qualities, but we do consume cloves 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 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, clove oil is used as a local anaesthetic as well. It's actually called clovocaine, and it's used in oral ulceration and inflammation, and it's also added to toothpaste. Just an aside about toothpaste and essential oils, we've chatted to a functional dentist about the use of essential oils in toothpaste, and you have to be very, very careful because a lot of these essential oils are dosed at a quite a high level, and at high amounts of these essential oil toothpastes, 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 toothpastes, even though they are natural and they sound great and they don't have SLS and they don't have things like fluoride that 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 oil 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 cloves have analgesic activity. So that's a fancy word for pain-relieving activity. And it's been reported since the 13th century for toothache. In animal models, clove oil significantly improved pain from heat sensation. There was a dose of around 33 milligrams per kilogram, so a quite a small dose. In cloves, there's around 14,000 milligrams of eugenol per 100 grams. So, you know, if you're taking a single clove, you're probably going to be getting around that 1,000, 2,000 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 that 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 on a clove could potentially prevent oral 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 I'm always very cautious about when 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 eugenol-based paste. And they found that the eugenol-based paste was more effective in reducing pain and reducing infections compared to chlorhexidine as well. There's another study published in an Indian journal of periodontology, and they found that compared with another essential oil mouth rinse, clove-based mouth rinses performed better when looking at indices that specifically examine gingival inflammation and plaque buildup. So again, not really much to write home about in terms of what they compared it to, but it is interesting nonetheless that it does kind of work. There is some lab evidence suggesting that clove essential oil has the potential to reduce pain in your mouth, reduce inflammation in your mouth and bacteria. It can help with dental health specifically. We also know that good dental health and dental hygiene is associated with lower incidence of cardiovascular disease and overall mortality. So there are some tentative links there with good dental health and good overall health. However, human evidence is lacking and most notably based on eugenol extracts. So we don't really know how this translates into whole cloves, but you know, thinking of the toxicity levels of chewing on a whole clove a day, I think it's pretty low and you may find some benefits. And it is a good breath freshener. So for dental-based issues, I would say it's pretty promising. On to the second potential benefits of cloves, reducing oxidative stress, reducing inflammation and reducing arthritic pain. This is a very common claim that I find about from watching YouTube videos, listening to patients and also family members as well. Studies have shown that spices and herbs like cloves are excellent sources of antioxidants because they have a high content of polyphenols. And clove appears to be one of the richest sources of polyphenols out there. And regarding their antioxidant capacity, because this is essentially what leads to reduced inflammation, the level of phenolic compounds found in cloves 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 eugenol as well as other polyphenols as well, dried herbs like oregano and turmeric. These are all below cloves. So clove is really, really strong. And it 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 spice is. There's a really interesting study looking at the highest contributors of antioxidants in different spice blends. And they looked at Chinese five-spice and they looked at garam 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 does correlate when you look at larger studies, the amount of spices that we use, that does correlate with better health outcomes. So 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 eugenol 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 stabilize those free radicals that are a natural part of living, breathing organisms. So the more antioxidants you have in your diet and and doing things that reduce your oxidation, essentially we're all 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 mechanisms. So I think antioxidants aren't the only character in the story. I think it's a lot wider than that, but it is interesting to note that cloves are the highest in antioxidant capacity. There was one study looking at supplementation of cloves or an element of cloves. There were 70 adults that were given a clove bud polyphenol extract. This was called clovenol. They didn't really think too much about the name there, but clovenol and and this was given out at 250 milligram per day dose. Now, it's important to note in this study, they didn't disclose the exact components of clovenol. You can bet your bottom dollar, it was probably mostly eugenol, 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 was 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 that was interesting, but that study was funded and it only had 70 people in it. So it's very hard to determine whether this is generalizable to you watching or listening to this at home. 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 here, not very robust human studies that show improved antioxidant status in people, but these were looking specifically at clove bud 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 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 gram level. So the amount of eugenol that you're actually introducing, as well as all those other polyphenols, into systemic circulation is probably going to be fairly low. So my idea for you is experiment with cloves 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 chewing one to two a day. But it's likely going to be safe, so you might as well give it a try.
Dr Rupy: 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 the lab studies because that's where we find most of the evidence for the claims. That isn't to say that it actually works or not. And in animal studies, they found that eugenol supplementation improved the gut microbiota of mice fed with a high-fat diet. Now, this is something that we already recognize 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 improves the composition of their gut microbes. What is an improved composition of your gut microbe look like? Well, it means that you've got more favorable 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, all different types of fiber, that definitely has a beneficial effect on overall health. It improves the function of your microbes, it improves the metabolites, it improves your glucose regulation, it does improve inflammation. Is chewing one to two cloves a day going to have this miraculous effect on your gut? Without a doubt, it is going to be complementary, 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 one to two cloves, great as 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 I was I remember vividly listening to a relative who was, you know, grabbing a clove after a meal, and they were chewing on it. It was like, you know, this is a liver detox, you know, it's going to improve my liver, etc, etc. You know, after having a quite a heavy, fatty, ghee-filled meal. Nothing wrong with ghee in appropriate amounts, but I don't think it's going to completely negate the effects of a fatty meal. But there is some interesting studies looking at mice, unfortunately. They induced fatty liver in mice over 16 weeks, and then they gave them a eugenol-rich clove fraction at 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 there was quite a strong, concentrated eugenol-rich clove fraction. And treatment with this clove fraction in mice, again, I just want to heighten that this is an animal study, so it's very hard to generalize. It improved considerably the cirrhosis of their 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 eugenol rich fraction, and it found remarkable improvements in their liver blood markers, their liver when they looked at it 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. 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 in humans, it's very, very hard to say. So again, my recap on that is take everything with a pinch of salt, one to two 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 well-being. 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 VC-backed pushing glucose monitors, continuous glucose monitors, also known as CGMs. I think they're a fantastic behavioral 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 certainly appears to have a negative effect on glucose spikes. And there's also some skepticism 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 troughing every day is going to be related to your risk of type two diabetes. That aside, is there any evidence that cloves and chewing a clove a day can help with glucose metabolism? There is some more evidence that a clove bud extract may support glucose metabolism. There are preclinical studies in animal models again that reported eugenol treatment reduced glucose levels. And there is another study that looked at again our favorite supplement from an Indian company that was looking at a supplement called clovenol. They didn't think too much about the name, but clovenol was reported to have a miraculous set of benefits at just 250 milligrams per day. It increased glutathione in your blood. So glutathione is this master antioxidant that is released by your cells. It reduced blood pressure, it reduced cholesterol, it 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 generalize these. It was funded by the Indian company that produced clovenol. So, 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 know, 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, on lowering glucose levels? I would love to see a little study for fun that, you know, 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 would 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'd 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. It 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 the highest containing compounds in eugenol. And eugenol is an interesting chemical that is definitely one to watch. It does reduce inflammation, it may help with oral health. There are some interesting studies looking at the antimicrobial effect 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 it dampens them down, but then they rear their ugly head because they've they've fixed into the gut wall, they're fixed into your 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, it adds 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. And it 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'd probably, you know, overdo it on the eugenol and it probably wouldn't be very good for you. And B, you'd 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 cloves. Now, the World Health Organization have set the acceptable daily amount of clove use every day to 2.5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. You'd have to use quite a bit of cloves to get to that amount. And cloves as a 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 you're on certain 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 eugenol 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. If you want to learn more about these, I've put all the links to all the clove research that we've done in below. You can check them out on the website as well at the doctorskitchen.com. Finally, how do I use cloves? Well, I use cloves in a number of ways. So definitely to sweeten different sorts of food. So in lattes, in desserts, making ground nutmeg, clove, 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 cacao, 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. In savoury foods, biryani is a definite. We use this in our garam masala as well as in our biryani as well. So when you add this to some oil that you're cooking on medium heat, it infuses that beautiful flavour of eugenol. Now that you know the now you know the name of the chemical that gives it that pungency, eugenol into the oil and that permeates through the rice dish as well. But it goes really well with fish and meat and vegetables. There's a mixture of ways in which you can use this as well with ground nutmeg and paprika. A good combination of spices that I find that is a nice all-rounder for fish and 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 clove 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 other studies that you find are useful, beneficial, we're specifically interested in human-based studies. That's probably a much higher, 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 doctorskitchen.com and down in the show notes as well. And I'll see you here next time.
Dr Rupy: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Doctor's Kitchen podcast. Remember, you can support the pod by rating on Apple, follow along by hitting the subscribe button on Spotify, and you can catch all of our podcasts on YouTube if you enjoy seeing our smiley faces. Review show notes on the doctorskitchen.com website and sign up to our free weekly newsletters where we do deep dives into ingredients, the latest nutrition news, and of course, lots of recipes by subscribing to the Eat, Listen, Read newsletter by going to the doctorskitchen.com/newsletter. And if you're looking to take your health further, why not download the Doctor's Kitchen app for free from the App Store. I will see you here next time.
