Cloves: Antioxidants, Dental Uses and History

Cloves. Number one of the hundred richest polyphenol foods ever ranked. Fifteen thousand milligrams in every hundred grams. Gram for gram, that's nine times dark chocolate, twenty-seven times blueberries, and a hundred and fifty times red wine. And once, they were priced like it.

Nearly two thousand years ago, records say Han dynasty officials held a clove in their mouths before speaking to the emperor, the original breath mint.

In 1438, a pound of cloves in Oxford cost a master carpenter eight days' wages. That buzz on your tongue when you bite one, that's eugenol, a compound that numbs.

It's why dentists reached for clove oil for toothache, and it's still in some dental cements today. And the numbers keep stacking up.

A study of over three thousand foods found cloves had the highest antioxidant content of the lot. In one dental trial, a homemade clove gel numbed gums noticeably better than a placebo.

In the lab, clove stops common food bacteria from growing.

And early lab research suggests eugenol may help calm inflammation. So maybe it's time to add cloves back to your spice rack.