Holy Basil: What Does (And Doesn’t) It Do?

First, a quick clarification:

• Ocimum sanctum is the botanical name given to what in English we call holy basil, and is what we will be discussing today. It’s also called “tulsi“, so if you see that name around, it is the same plant.
• Ocimum basilicum is the botanical name given to culinary basil, the kind you will find in your local supermarket. This one looks similar, but it has a different taste (culinary basil is sweeter) and a different phytochemical profile, and is certainly not the same plant.

We have touched on holy basil before, in our article:

Herbs For Evidence-Based Health & Healing

…where we listed that it helps boost immunity, per:

Double-blinded randomized controlled trial for immunomodulatory effects of Tulsi (Ocimum sanctum Linn.) leaf extract on healthy volunteers

It’s popularly also consumed in the hopes of getting many other benefits, including:

• Calming effects on the mood (anti-stress)
• Accelerated wound-healing
• Anticancer activity

So, does it actually do those things?

Against stress

We literally couldn’t find anything. It’s often listed as being adaptogenic (reduces stress) in the preamble part of a given paper’s abstract, but we could find no study in any reputable journal that actually tested its effects against stress, and any citations for the claim just link to other papers that also include it in the preamble—and while “no original research” is a fine policy for, say, Wikipedia, it’s not a great policy when it comes to actual research science.

So… It might! There’s also no research (that we could find) showing that it doesn’t work. But one cannot claim something works on the basis of “we haven’t proved it doesn’t”.

For wound healing

Possibly! We found one (1) paper with a small (n=29) sample, and the results were promising, but that sample size of 29 was divided between three groups: a placebo control, holy basil, and another herb (which latter worked less well). So the resultant groups were tiny, arguably to the point of statistical insignificance. However, taking the study at face value and ignoring the small sample size, the results were very promising, as the holy basil group enjoyed a recovery in 4 weeks, rather than the 5 weeks recovery time of the control group:

Herbal remedies for mandibular fracture healing

An extra limitation that’s worth noting, though, is that healing bone is not necessarily the same as healing other injuries in all ways, so the same results might not be replicated in, say, organ or tissue injuries.

Against cancer

This time, there’s lots of evidence! Its mechanism of action appears to be severalfold:

• Anti-inflammatory
• Antioxidant
• Antitumor
• Chemopreventive

Because of the abundance of evidence (including specifically against skin cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, and more), we could list studies all day here, but instead we’ll just link this one really good research review that has a handy navigation menu on the right, where you can see how it works in each of the stated ways.

Here’s the paper:

An Update on the Therapeutic Anticancer Potential of Ocimum sanctum L.: “Elixir of Life”

Want to try some?

We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎

Enjoy!