By Jacob Schor, N.D.
I'm going to plant rosemary in my garden today. A small pot of rosemarianus officinalis that I bought at City Floral. I've been fascinated by this plant over the last few weeks looking at its potential medicinal applications at the same time savoring its use as a seasoning.
My interest was triggered a few months back by a short abstract I read about cancer cells becoming resistant to chemotherapy. Researchers treated breast cancer cells that had become resistant to all the major chemotherapy drugs with a rosemary extract and were able to reverse the resistance. The rosemary stimulated a change in cell chemistry that made the cells suck the chemotherapy drugs inside themselves concentrating the drugs where we most want them. The cancer cells became sensitive to treatment again.
This is the sort of information that has some clear implications for use. Yet it is also the sort of article that rarely makes it into the news or into medicine. Unless science is about a patented drug owned by a company employing publicists and sales reps, there are no press conferences, no press releases, no articles sent to the media, no funding for clinical trials. But enough soapboxing.
Anothre article that caught my attention was May's issue of "Food Chemistry and Toxicology." It had an article on reducing cancer risk from cooked meat, another pet interest of mine (see the April issue The Greater Park Hill News,). It provided two interesting tidbits. As I had written about in April, mixing vitamin E into ground beef reduces cancer causing chemicals formed during cooking by about 70%. What is new is that adding the vitamin E directly onto the surface of the meat rather than mixing it in, produced the same effect. Translated into English we're talking about the recipe for a cancer protecting barbecue sauce. The same study also looked at the effect of adding rosemary to the meat. Rosemary didn't work as well as pure vitamin E but did the formation of cancer causing chemicals by 44%.
This was enough for me to take notice. Rosemary isn't what I'd call a celebrity herb. No one is touting it as a replacement for Prosac, or as a memory enhancer, a weight loss aid, or a cure for insomnia. Even in health food stores it is relegated to the bulk herbs used for cooking. It has a long history of use for mundane conditions mostly as a hair rinse for dandruff. Yet as I've read the literature, I've become fascinated.
In the meantime, I'm planting rosemary in my garden today. It loves our sunny Colorado climate. There's nothing better to season lamb with than fresh rosemary, lemon and garlic.
Two new recipes to try.
Rosemary-Mint Sauce For Lamb Or Salmon
1/2 cup dry red wine
1 Tb vinegar
1 Tb Lemon juice plus the rind from the half a lemon that it took to get the juice
1/4 cup minced mint
2 Tb fresh rosemary leaves
2 Tb honey
one clove garlic
simmer ingredients for 5 minutes, refrigerate and use as a barbecue sauce.
Tandoore Barbecue Sauce:
one teaspoon each of ginger, cumin, coriander, paprika, turmeric, salt, and
(caution) cayenne.
1/2 cup yogurt
2 Tb lemon juice
400 iu Vitamin E
Combine the dry ingredients. Add yogurt, lemon juice and squeeze the vitamin
E out of a capsule. Mix thoroughly and coat skinless chicken and allow to
marinate overnight.
Jacob Schor, N.D. majored in Food Science and Product Development as an undergraduate at Cornell University, and received his doctorate in Naturopathic Medicine at National College in Portland, Oregon in 1991. He served as President of the Colorado Association of Naturopathic Physicians from 1992-1999 and maintains a private practice at the Denver Naturopathic Clinic.