Noni Juice

Where noni came from

Noni juice is thought to have been drunk in Hawaii, The Cooks, Tahiti and other Pacific islands for at least 500 years.

Noni juice researchers think it came into these islands from India and South East Asia. How it spread through the Pacific region is not at all clear, although some experts feel travelers and settlers from the Marquesas Islands brought noni juice to the islands.

But what is clear, is that from ancient times noni and noni juice was widely used in the Pacific region. In fact, because of its value and popularity, noni was cultivated in plantations and home gardens.

Noni in ancient times

The early Polynesians (like their descendants) drank noni juice and used noni for food, for dying cloth and as a medicine and healing plant. The scientific literature is full of hundred of references to a popularity of noni and noni juice among many ancient societies in the tropical regions of the world.

Noni juice in ancient India

With the origin of noni thought to be India, we are not surprised to find that ancient Indians used M. Citrifolia for its healing properties. Indeed, the medical people of India eventually said almost all parts of the noni plant could heal. The root was used as a cathartic and febrifuge (fever-reducing) agent. Juice from noni leaves, rubbed externally over affected parts in gout patients, relieved pain, the medical doctors claimed. And they used noni leaves were used as a tonic, febrifuge, and healer of wounds and ulcers for healing. Noni fruit and juice was taken to heal spongy gums, throat complaints, dysentery, leucorrhea (which is unusual menstrual bleeding) and sapraemia (poisoning of the blood by bacterial putrefaction).

Noni juice on the Pacific atolls

In early Fijian society noni fruit was eaten raw or cooked. In Niue the people regularly ate noni, and Filipinos made a jam from noni juice (in fact they are said to have especially valued the taste of fermented noni.

Noni juice in Australia, SE Asia and Africa

Australian aborigines were known to be very fond of noni juice and noni. In Burma, raw noni was cooked in curry, the ripe noni fruit was eaten with a pinch of salt, and noni seeds were roasted and enjoyed. were consumed raw with salt.

Noni juice and noni fruit was used in Nigeria to treat fever, malaria, yellow fever, jaundice and dysentery.

Other uses of noni in ancient medicine lore

In still other places, over-ripe noni was recommended to induce vomiting (as an emmenagogue) and some doctors used noni juice to help painful urination (dysuria) and noni fruit for diabetes. And it was recommended internally for swollen spleen, liver diseases, coughs and a slightly laxative preparation.

The early Polynesians sailed from South East Asia into the wide ocean that was to become their home carrying plants. This huge migration took place around 2000 years ago. And on every new canoe came the plants the settlers would need for food and medicine.

Noni was one. In fact, some accounts relate that of the dozen most common medicinal plants they carried, noni was the second in popularity! No wonder noni juice distributors today report booming interest in noni juice.

Ancient uses of noni juice

Noni juice and other products of the noni plant were used as herbal remedies to treat a range of common diseases and to maintain good health among the new settlers and their communities. The Polynesians used all of the noni plant, particulary for medicine and for dying their cloth.

There are records of noni roots, stems, bark, leaves, flowers, and noni fruit used in a suite of 40 known herbal medicines. As well, noni roots were used to make a yellow-red dye used on tapa cloth and mats.

Noni juice in myth

Noni juice also features in Polynesian folk stories. Their hero’s and heroines ate noni and drank noni juice to survive famine.

For example, the story of Kamapua’a, the pig god, who loved Pele, the volcano goddess, features noni juice. He mocked Pele with a song, “I have spied the woman gathering noni/scratching noni/beating noni.” This verse is thought to be a referrence to Pele’s eyes becoming red. She became so anoyed that she launched into battle with him.

A Tongan story tells of the god Maui being brought back to life after noni leaves were placed on him.

Noni carried in migrations

A thousand years ago Hawai’i Loa lead his tribe to the island group that eventually took his hame. On that great migration he carried the things his people would require to settle in the new islands. It is said he took 27 specific plants, the so-called ‘canoe plants’. Fourteen were for food. They included coconut, breadfruit and taro. The rest were for wood, tapa cloth and healing. Of the carefully chosen healing plants one was noni la’au. And noni la’au has been part of tradtional Hawai’ian healing resources since.

Noni juice and Captain Cook

The extrodinary British naval Pacific explorer and seaman, Captain James Cook, sailed to Tahiti in the late 1700s and found noni juice was drunk and the noni fruit was eaten there.

Other Western records of noni juice

A book published in London in 1866 recorded that the Morinda citrifolia fruit was eaten in Fiji.

Later publications describe the use of this fruit as a food throughout the Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia, Australia, and India.

In Roratonga noni juice and the noni fruit was often used by the Cook Islanders. Australian Aborigines were seen to be fond of the nonit. In Samoa, noni juice and noni fruit was often used.

Modern researchers interested in noni juice

In more recent times, in 1943, Morinda citrifolia was clasdified as edible in a technical manual of edible and poisonous plants of the Pacific Islands.

It is apparent from the regional medical histories, recent Western studies, and anecdotal reports from leading noni juice distributors that Polynesian peoples asserted a significant health benefit from noni juice and the noni plant. We are becomieng aware that the medical knowledge of these ocena-bound people was complex and often effective. For this reason, modern scientific and medical researchers are studying the plants they first pioneered the use of.

Not a secret to people who drank noni juice!

Noni juice has been taken for health for centuries. Did the early people in the tropical regions of the world, where noni grows, know what they were doing when they put their trust in noni juice?

The answer has got to be ‘Yes!’

There are definite health benefits, as both ancient noni juice drinkers and modern noni juice distributors will testify. And in both the Pacific and South East Asia parents have been passing on the knowledge of these benefits to their children generation after generation. Since time immemorial, they have shown them how to use noni juice and other noni plant products cure illness and protect health.

The difficulty of telling the world about noni juice

But for historical and technological reasons this knowledge of noni juice stayed in the tropics. Western peoples were unable to confidentally travel into the tropics, and the Pacific in particular, until quite recent times. And the island hopping mentality and techniques that saw the spread of peoples from Asia into the Pacific were not suitable for exploring the rest of the world.

So for several thousand years noni juice remained unknown to the West.

How the noni juice “secret” got out

But with the opening up of Asia and the Pacific, and 20th century Western research interests changing and developing, ethnobotanists began studying ‘primitive’ healers and their use of noni juice and noni fruit.

War even played a part. During World War II the US military studied the usability and benefits of noni juice and the noni plant and recommended using noni in their Pacific Handbook for Survival

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Noni juice is a natural food and health product, as leading noni juice distributors will tell you. And one of the many that have formed the basis of effective folk medicine used for thousands of years in every culture the world has ever known.

Noni juice gets increasing interest from science and modern medicine

In the last several decades, scientists and medical researchers have shown increasing interest in traditional, natural health products, like noni juice, as they recognize the health values of many of these remedies.

In this they follow in the footsteps of the Father of Medicine, the Greek Hippocrates, who lived over 2000 years ago and directed, “Let food be your medicine and let medicine be your food!” Today we might say it a slightly different way, “You are what you eat.” Something noni juice drinkers will certainly know!

Folk remedies in the ancient world

The folk medicines of early societies and cultures, (which knew about noni juice, incidentally), came from the urgent need people have always had to beat illness and sickness, and rise from under natural disasters and accidents.

Since we are talking here about noni juice, you may be interested also in the fascinating history of another natural health drink: tea.

Origins of tea

Western researchers think tea was first used in the high Pamir mountain range, between India and China, some 5000 years ago. And further East from there, along the Himalayas in lofty Tibet, you can still find tea trees over 1000 years old and more than 100 feet high.

Asians widely believed tea was a good medicine for preventing and treating a range of diseases, and was often related to longevity.

But tea is referred to in some of the earliest health literature of ancient China. According to a Chinese Zen Buddhist legend, which seems to date back as early as 600 years after Christ, the Bodhiharma keep himself awake one day by cutting off his eyelashes. A miracle occurred as the hairs landed on the ground: they grew up as tea plants. Ever since, tea has been used to fend off sleep and clear the soul. In fact you may probably used it yourself for exactly this reason!

Noni juice, and other natural health products: how were they discovered?

Consequently, many Chinese believe tea comes from China and was used as an antidote for poisonous herbs by Emperor Shen-Nong, who had a fascination with herbs and regularly tested new herbs in his search for new medicine. The Chinese believe this research was the beginning of herbal medicine.

But a very similar story is found in the ancient stories of Polynesia. There, these legends say, medicine men hunted for plants that had specific properties for relieving or curing diseases and maintaining good health. Among their many medicinal plant discoveries was the noni fruit, Morinda citrifolia.

Where-ever the hunt for natural remedies and health foods came from, noni juice has blessed countless generations of people throughout the regions where it has grown and spread. Today’s noni juice distributors stand in a long, proud tradition of noni juice distribution.

Noni is one of about 80 species of the family Rubaiceae.
Noni trees have rather large leaves and tiny white flowers that bloom at different times of the year. They sprout from the noni fruit, and look strange until you become used to them. But eventually the noni flowers become a bumpy, pitted noni fruit several inches long.When it has ripened, the yellow skin of the noni fruit becomes clearer, almost translucent, and now ceases to be ‘attractive to the eye’. In fact it develops a definite, offensive odor. It smells

many large numbers of brown seeds that have small air sacs inside. So the seeds can float on water, and it is believed that this why the noni plant spread. This, and also the carrying of noni by early migrations across the Pacific to make sure supplies of noni juice would be established in new islands.

Noni can grow to about 20 feet, so there is some work involved in getting the fruits for the noni juice!
Noni, Morinda citrifolia, grows well in rich vulkanic soils mainly in the South Pacific region but also in some asion areas.
The humble-looking noni fruit is deceptive.

Put aside all the recent hype surrounding this wonder health fruit. There are real, proven health benefits from taking noni juice, especially if it was sourced in the South Pacific.

This is verified by scientific study and anecdotal evidence. Over 90 percent of the people who drink noni juice for a period of time report health benefits.

South Pacific soils best for NONI

Scientists have discovered why South Pacific noni is especially effective for health. It is because this noni contains more than 150 vitamins, minerals and enzymes, many of which have been removed from the normal Western food chain by chemicals, sprays and over cropping.

Plants do not make these minerals, vitamins and enzymes. They can’t. Rather they extract them from the soil.

Volcanic soils have the world’s highest concentrations of these vitamins, minerals and enzymes, and of these the volcanic islands and atolls of the South Pacific have the richest soil of all.

The soils of Asia, and of Central and South America, are not the same. And in fact noni from those regions is significantly different from the South Pacific noni — inferior, actually — with far fewer health benefits.

South Pacific NONI superior

The repeated use of land by large-scale commercial growers has removed numerous important trace minerals and vitamins from farm soils used to grow today’s food.

Growers normally only replenish the soil with products that will enhance the growth and appearance of their crops. They virtually never consider the nutritional content of their produce. Today’s farmers are driven by profits.

Health facts

Question Why do fruit and vegetables from your garden, or your neighbour’s, taste so much better the supermarket?
Answer Because the vitamins, minerals and enzymes in your locally grown produce makes a dramatic difference.

Question Why are there no worms in fruit today? When we were kids, we would cut out the “worm bits” and eat the rest?
Answer Because supermarket fruit is usually so permeated with chemicals that no worm can survive.

Question: Why do most people get a boost just by drinking noni juice for a while?
Answer: Because suddenly their bodies are receiving the correct nutrients for good health and respond accordingly.

For more information go to our website at http://www.noninz.com