Research has found that consuming homemade soups can help fight against malaria, this is because soup recipes have anti-malarial properties present in them. “Malaria kills more than 400,000 people per year and infects more than 200 million; research was conducted in London in which the school children tested their family soup broths for activity against the malaria parasite, for a study which was published in the Journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.
Several of the soup broths, collected from traditional family recipes that originated around the world, showed activity against the malaria parasite called Plasmodium falciparum, either by curbing its growth or preventing it from maturing. The soup recipes had been passed down through the generations for the treatment of fever. The researchers had 56 soups available for testing.
The team incubated filtered soup extracts for 72 hours with different P. falciparum cultures to see if the soups would stop the growth of the parasites, and according to the study five of the broths were able to curb the growth of the parasite in its disease-causing stage by more than 50 percent. The other four other broths were more than 50 percent effective at blocking the ability of the parasites to mature to a form that infects mosquitoes, potentially blocking the process of transmission.
One of the professors Mr. Baum said: “It’s really interesting to find potential routes for future drug development in something like your grandmother’s soup. In all honesty, the true strength of the study, however, was engaging children in the idea of what’s the difference between a natural remedy and a real medicine – the answer is evidence! The children understood that soups could really become a drug if you test them the right way.”
