Most of us know lemongrass as the citrus green that we use when flavoring our delicious Asian dishes, yet lemongrass benefits far exceed its use as a pungent herb.
Consider lemongrass to be the next great super food, with its properties including pain relief, body detoxing, skin toner and an anti-inflammatory. In fact, the long list of lemongrass benefits makes it an absolute must-buy for your next shopping trip.
Here are just a few of the ways lemongrass improves your general health and well-being:
1. Ease of Digestive Issues
Conditions like irritable bowel syndrome are embarrassing and painful for those who suffer from them. Especially when you’re on the go. If you are suffering digestive discomfort, lemongrass may help reduce your symptoms due to its anti-diarrheal properties.
Whereby using lemongrass, you may be able to slow down the effects of diarrhea and reduce your stomach pains.
2. Kills Bacteria
In a study conducted in 2012, it was found that lemongrass benefits include anti-bacterial properties. The study showed that lemongrass helped stop the spread of a staph infection. This is thought to be thanks to the limonene and citral that is contained within lemongrass, creating a useful antimicrobial medicine.
When used on infections such as athlete’s foot or ringworm, it should help to stop the growth and spread. You can even use it in the prevention of infection, by rubbing into your skin or ingesting. This is particularly useful if someone in your household has a contagious infection.
3. Improves Skin
As well as being anti-bacterial, it has also been found that lemongrass benefits include the reduction in skin irritation. A natural toner, lemongrass helps heal and strengthen your skin. This means that it can be a very effective addition to your daily skin routine.
By adding a few drops onto your face, head and hair, not only will the lemongrass improve your skin tone, but it can also relax you and help to relieve headaches. It can even help strengthen hair and improve hair loss and thickness.
4. Use as a Possible Painkiller
As noted above, lemongrass benefits include relieving headaches, but can lemongrass be used as a general painkiller too? One study, which looked at people with the highly painful chronic condition of rheumatoid arthritis, thinks so.
Here it was found that when given topical lemongrass oil, sufferers found their pain gradually reduced over 30 days. It’s believed that the citral in lemongrass works as an anti-inflammatory, making it a useful pain killer.
Although there is no true research to prove its use as a painkiller, people have found lemongrass benefits muscle cramps, period pain, and chronic pains. In the past, lemongrass was actually known as fever grass and when made into a type of tea, it would help bring a person’s temperature down.
5. A Natural Way to Detox Your Body
As well as fighting infections on our skin, the lemongrass benefits extend to our internal organs too, allowing us to detox our bodies and improve our immune system. Lemongrass is a natural diuretic, this means it can flush out your kidneys, liver, and bladder of harmful toxins.
It’s also been discovered that lemongrass can fight the common fungal infection, candida albicans. Also known as thrush, this can cause painful itching and burn internally. This often requires medication to help fight it.
Lemongrass has been found to help prevent this infection from taking hold. So, if you suffer from thrush on a regular basis, you may benefit from lemongrass oil.
How to Use Lemongrass Effectively
Aromatically
If you like to use an oil vaporizer or diffuser, this can be an easy way to use your lemongrass oil. To boost your lemongrass benefits, mix your oil with others such as basil, black pepper or tea tree.
Topically
To use your oil topically – that is, straight onto your skin – you should look to dilute your lemongrass essential oil with another carrier such as coconut oil. You should do it in a 1:1 ration. Ηowever, if you have sensitive skin, you may want to add little drops at a time.
Test your lemongrass oil on the skin behind your ear. This patch test helps to ensure your skin won’t have an allergic reaction. If your skin agrees with the oil, you can then use on your face and neck to get the lemongrass benefits of a more even skin tone and reduced acne.
Internally
When you wish to use lemongrass to reduce fever or detox your body, you’re going to need to ingest it. However, you need to do it carefully and make sure you ingest only high-quality, 100 percent therapeutic grade oils. To get the best of lemongrass benefits, add a few drops of the oil under your tongue for a couple of minutes every day.
If you don’t like the idea of ingesting oil directly, you can also reap the lemongrass benefits by drinking lemongrass tea or adding a few drops to your food.
Lemongrass has a wide range of benefits, all of which help our bodies to heal and improve. Consider this to be the super food of the future – forget an apple a day, to keep the doctor away you should be having a few drops of lemongrass a day!
