Island Scene Online www.islandscene.com

By Sophia V. Schweitzer | Posted: April 3, 2002

Wow! A potion that might cure arthritis, cancer and diabetes,
reduce stress and high blood pressure, foil germs, and baffle
fleas? A natural remedy that could transform your life?
Absolutely, promise testimonials on Web sites and in brochures.
All the excitement is about noni, a plant used in Polynesia for
thousands of years as a remedy for various ailments. Now, from
Tahiti to Hawai'i, noni trees are being stripped naked of fruit, bark
and leaves to make teas, tonics, pills and juices.

Yet, there is no conclusive evidence to support the medicinal
benefits attributed to noni. So what's going on? A lot. Savvy
marketers are building their empires on some surprising and
promising facts.

The Voyaging Plant

Noni, also known as Indian mulberry or morinda citrifolia, is an
evergreen tree, 9 to 18 feet tall. It came to the Hawaiian Islands
with the first Polynesian voyagers, and was one of 24 plants
intended to provide basic needs such as food, medicine and
tools. You may have seen it in drier lowlands or at the edge of
forests, with its shiny, dark-green leaves and its warty, pallid
yellow fruit that, when ripe, smells positively foul.

The Hawaiian people used every part of the noni tree. The inner
bark of the roots and trunk rendered red and yellow dyes for kapa
cloth. The fruit, leaves and bark also served as food in times of
famine. Made into a poultice, noni was used for healing deep
cuts, broken bones, blemishes and boils, according to Beatrice
Krauss, the late renowned Hawai'i ethnobotanist. Extracts were
used to treat a variety of ailments, including urinary disorders,
diabetes and arthritis. A tea brewed from noni leaves served as
a tonic. Today, many local people still use noni to make teas,
salves and saps.

Enter Modern Science

Native cultures observe, sometimes for generations, to learn the
medicinal properties of plants. Noni was and is useful in
Polynesian cultures, and modern scientists have noticed. If it
works for them, it can work for us, they reason. They've been
discovering that plants such as noni can yield essential bioactive
chemicals that can lead to better medicine. The leaves of
foxglove plants, for example, are used in drugs to treat heart
failure. Little periwinkle held secrets that, unveiled, led to new
anti-cancer drugs. Breakthroughs like these have contributed to
the development of 25 percent to 50 percent of the prescription
drugs in our country. It's no wonder that scientists in Hawai'i
have been interested in the Islands' own noni.

In the mid-1990s, a team led by Annie Hirazumi, in research for
her Ph.D. thesis at the University of Hawai'i, found that noni
extract benefited mice that became sick after being injected with
a specific type of lung cancer cells. Inflicted mice usually die
within six weeks of receiving the transplanted cells. But 40
percent of the mice given noni extract recovered, and the rest
died at a much slower pace.

So is noni a cure for cancer? We don't know yet, says Dr.
Yoshitsugi Hokama, a pathology professor at the University of
Hawai'i and a researcher in the mice experiments. Though
Hirazumi isolated a chemical in noni that activated the immune
system, the experiment was performed in a controlled
environment, Hokama explains. "The only conclusion you can
possibly draw from what we did is that it appeared that noni may
stimulate the immune system in mice, and this may have helped
them, indirectly, in fighting a particular type of cancer."
Hokama was careful not to overstate the findings. Unfortunately,
marketers were not: They picked up the news and ran. They
found ways to make noni palatable and touted it for its
health-promoting effects.

Sold as a food supplement, noni isn't regulated like drugs are.
According to the American Cancer Society, some alternative
therapies are pushing noni as a treatment for cancer, and
Americans are listening. We tend to trust all things whole and
natural. But natural doesn't mean it's always good for you.
Gobble the pretty purple flowers of foxglove and you could poison
yourself. Noni, as far as we know, isn't harmful. But as noni's
popularity grows, one small question has become a giant
concern: If noni acts as a medicine, is it possible that it can
become toxic like any other medicine? Is too much dangerous?

New Developments

More research is desperately needed to truly understand noni.
That is the goal behind the research team of Dr. Katalin Csiszar,
associate professor of cell biology at the Pacific Biomedical
Research Center at the University of Hawai'i. By researching
noni's chemical composition and characteristics, they hope to
define active compounds and biological activities that will guide
its use.

Dr. Brian Issell, medical professor and director of the Clinical
Sciences Program at the Cancer Research Center at UH, is part
of the team. "So far, we have discovered that there really are
chemicals in noni that slow down the growth of certain tumor
cells in dishes, over and above noni's possible effect on the
immune system," he says. "A lot of work still needs to be done,
but this might really contribute to improving the treatment of
cancer."

The National Institutes of Health agrees. Often hesitant to fund
expensive botanical research, it awarded the team a $340,000
grant last July to start a noni study with cancer patients. The
study is the first with human participants. And these participants,
Issell adds, were not responding to standard treatments.
He and his colleagues will examine whether chemicals in noni
indeed fight cancer cells. "In the trial, we'll establish the right
dose of noni so the body absorbs an optimum level of noni's
chemicals, and we want to find out if and when a dosage may
become harmful. Then we look for evidence of shrinkage in the
tumor."

The researchers use the whole fruit, which is freeze-dried and in
capsule form. "If all goes well with the phase one study," Issell
says, "we'll apply to do phase two studies, which will focus on
noni's effect on particular cancers. We also hope that by then we
have some idea about what the active chemicals might be."

What's Next?

The study may have far-reaching consequences. At best is a
potential new medicine to fight cancer. At the very least, it will
offer guidance in trips to the health food store. We'll know if noni
is beneficial and in what quantities. Who knows? There may be
a lot of power packed in this unpretentious little fruit.

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