Aloe Vera Gel and Juice: One of the World's Most Popular Herbs for Good Reason

Since the time of Greek surgeon Dioscorides nearly 2,000 years ago right down to the present, aloe vera has been one of the world's most popular and useful healing herbs. The leaves of the plant exude a bitter sap that is one of the world's most popular laxatives. The stems of the plant can be cut to bleed a mucilaginous gel that hundreds of millions of people use to treat cuts, scrapes, minor burns, and skin infections. 

It's hard to imagine herbal medicine without aloe vera because of its many applications. Uses of aloe vera include:

• Accelerating the healing of wounds to the skin and to the corneas.
• Making the skin more permeable to antibiotics when used in the form of an aloe vera cream.
• Treatment of genital herpes, human papillomavirus (genital warts), psoriasis, and seborrheic dermatitis (cradle cap).
• Helping type 2 diabetics control their blood sugar levels with an aloe vera diet (serving steamed aloe vera as an additional vegetable).
• Stimulating initial weight loss by relieving constipation in aloe vera juice weight loss programs.
• Aloe vera chewing gum for relieving dry mouth caused by various health conditions, as well as peptic ulcers.
• Treating injury to the lining of the stomach caused by excessive consumption of Aspirin, idomethacin,and other NSAIDs.
• Making mouthwashes to relieve the oral irritation caused by radiation treatment for cancer.
• Making toothpastes to prevent plaque and to sooth gingivitis.
• Killing the Helicobacter pylori bacteria that are involved in most cases of peptic and duodenal ulcers.
• Treating canker sores (especially as a lozenge combining aloe with myrrh).
• Helping the lungs remodel tissues damaged by cigarette smoke.
• Lowering LDL cholesterol in type 2 diabetics.
• Protecting the liver from damage in chronic alcoholism.
• Helping prediabetics and early type 2 diabetics lose body fat and body weight.
• Relieving pain and accelerating healing of anal fissures.
• Removing biofilm ("sticky" bacteria) from teeth and gums.
• Treatment of some kinds of tumors (aloe juice and honey taken orally). It's important to note that aloe is not a cure for cancer, but aloe and honey seem to complement other conventional treatments.

Aloe vera gel doesn't help with absolutely everything. It's not helpful for preventing sunburn. The gel is more effective when it is harvested from drought-stressed plants. During drought, the aloe plant makes a different kind of natural sugar that more effectively stimulates the immune system. Bitters won't work unless there are probiotic bacteria in your colon to transform their laxative anthroquinones into an active form. Aloe bitters aren't very useful for constipation when you are on antibiotics.

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There are essentially no aloe vera juice side effects, but there are significant side effects for overuse of aloe vera bitters, the dried sap of the herb most commonly used as a laxative. Taking too much of an aloe vera laxative can result in dependency, as the anthroquinones in the sap stimulate the muscles that push fecal matter out and relax the muscles that hold fecal matter in. If you take aloe vera bitters for more than three weeks at a time, these muscles will need some kind of stimulant laxative to perform properly.

Using aloe vera bitters as a laxative for more than six weeks at a time, however, often results in hypokalemia, low potassium levels. This can cause severe fatigue, flaccid muscles, and even heart failure and death in the most extreme cases. The solution is just to use the product as directed.

Many Aloe Vera Products Lack a Crucial Ingredient: Aloe Vera

The first thing everyone needs to know about getting the greatest benefits from aloe vera is to choose the right form of the herb for the condition with which you are concerned.

• Aloe vera gel is applied directly to the skin to treat cuts, scrapes, minor burns, warts, cold sores, and herpes outbreaks. The gel is the sap inside the plant. It is rich in the plant chemical acemannan.
• Aloe vera bitters are the dried sap collected from the bottom of the leaf. They are used primarily to treat constipation, irritable bowel syndrome with diarrhea predominating (IBS-D), and ulcerative colitis. They are taken in pill or capsule form. They are rich in anthroquinones.

• Aloe vera juice is squeezed from the whole leaf of the plant. Before it is processed, it contains both acemannan and anthroquinones. Sometimes it is decolorized to remove the yellow latex of the leaf. This makes it less laxative, but even the decolorized juice can cause loose bowels.
• Aloe vera spears are a vegetable, although they are primarily eaten in the Middle East and South Asia. They have beneficial effects in type 2 diabetes, much like the Mexican cactus nopal.

If you are looking for aloe vera gel capsules to be taken internally, maybe to relieve irritation in your digestive tract, you need to make sure that you are getting the gel extract, not the leaf extract. Some products like Carlson Aloe Vera Gel are actually extracted from the whole leaf, not just the gel. That isn't to say the product is worthless, but it won't have the optimal effect. Look for a product that is labeled as a gel extract and mentions acemannan on the label. Puritan's Pride reliably provides the gel extract.

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Aloe vera juice is not supposed to be a laxative. Commercial aloe vera juices should have the laxative chemicals aloin and emodin removed, leaving the soothing acemannan behind. Some products, unfortunately, leave out the acemannan (so there's no soothing) but leave in the aloin and emodin (so you spend a lot of time racing to the bathroom). Lily of the Desert Aloe Vera Juice provides the right plant chemicals in a drinkable juice at a low price; Herbalife aloe vera juice is also reliable but costs about ten times as much.

Aloe latex is a potent laxative. It's in the same class as frangula and cascara sagrada, the latter product also known as the "brown bomb." Don't take aloe latex pills unless you want to relieve constipation dramatically, and be aware that they can cause severe cramps that are relieved by bowel movement. Aloe ferox is more potently laxative than Aloe vera.  In North America and the UK, Nature's Way and Solgar are reliable brands.

Tender aloe vera leaves can be served as a vegetable. Make sure you don't cook the yellow sap (it smells something like body odor) and or the green lining of the leaf (it's potently laxative), then dice and poach them and serve over yogurt. An instructional video for preparing aloe is linked below.