22 Health Benefits of Aloe Vera

There are a number of different healthy foods and products that you can keep in your cupboard if you want to be prepare for a large range of different problems. Garlic for instance can do everything from killing off infections to giving you a cognitive boost, while coconut oil is not only great for your energy levels but also for shaving and moisturising.

Aloe vera is just one more product along these lines that has a surprising number of benefits both when ingested and when applied topically to the skin. In this post, we’re going to dive into 21 different benefits of this amazing substance.

So just what is aloe vera anyway? Aloe vera is also known as medicinal aloe, as well as lily of the desert, burn plant and elephant’s gall. This is a plant that comes from the genus ‘aloe’ and it is thought that its original use as a medicinal substance dates back over 6,000 years to Sudan. However, it has also been historically used everywhere from India, to Japan to Egypt.

As with many of these traditional remedies though, science has now been able to back-up many of the purported health benefits. We now know that this popular panacea is able to lower cholesterol, improve heart health, reduce joint pain and even increase the lifespan.

The best part? Aloe vera can easily be grown indoors and outdoors and that means you can create your own never-ending supply.

With that all out of the way, let’s dive and see exactly what the benefits of aloe vera are…

1.  Amino Acids

Aloe vera is an excellent source of amino acids, in fact it contains 18 different amino acids, all of which provide different benefits.

Amino acids are of course the building blocks of proteins and protein meanwhile is of course what the human body is made out of. Ever heard the expression: ‘you are what you eat’? Well that is truer than most people realize. When you eat protein, this is literally broken down and then recombined in order to create muscle tissue, bone, connective tissue and more. Amino acids also serve important different functions elsewhere: being used to create digestive enzymes for example, as well as neurotransmitters to improve your mood and cognitive function.